FAMILY

STICKER PRICE

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I did not have my camera with me so I cannot post a photo of the orange-juice orange Mustang we saw this morning at Costco. The sticker price is a tad over $44k, but I could save $4k buying it from Costco. I laugh about this because the color is one of my husband’s favorite (bright) car colors, and because somehow we managed to raise a son who likes muscle cars. Yes, it’s true. He bikes or busses or walks to work and doesn’t own a car, but if he had one it would be a Mustang GT. Or something like it.

April I have committed this year to CampNaNo again, a daily writing tracker. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November involves a commitment to 50k words in 30 days. I’ve done it three times. The “Camp” in April works differently and allows writers to determine how many pages or words or hours or minutes of time they want to commit to.

I dithered and pledged something easy. I pledged to write 10,000 words. I expect to exceed that, and so far have 2900 words. But here’s the thing: What do I really want to work on? So far I have taken fragments of story ideas and worked on those. Do I work on one of the novels? fantasy and SF? flash nonfiction? poetry for National Poetry Month?

Good questions.

So far, as I said, flash fiction:

“And Another Thing” realist fiction about a drunk in his bar confronting another drunk, and it’s funny. It’s been a long time since I wrote funny.

“Final Words from the Master” is a first contact fantasy about the end of a seriously unfortunate landing on what might be Earth by kinder and more intuitive people than ourselves.

“The Way They Disappeared” about a young girl who causes an attacking hand to, well, disappear.

“Rapunzel” is realist fiction about a girl scooping ice cream in a tourist-town, and it makes her ears cold—actually no idea where this will go. Also funny.

What I think I most want to work on is a novel that no one wants. My goal was to show the hard work of recovery from overwhelming grief, but that grief-inducing scene remains the highlight and I kept pushing it earlier and earlier into the novel in order to focus more on what happens afterward. Every time I tried to reveal that event late in the narrative, I got chewed, even when I left foreshadowing hints big as pink elephants. And with that scene near the beginning, the rest of the story apparently feels like a letdown. There must be a way to fix this, but I do not seem to be a good enough writer to figure out how. Still. I might try again.

Maybe create a short story to try out a different structure? What if the grieving mother imagines other ways her life might have gone? What if grief is her best option? That’s cheery.

Or I could work on another manuscript entirely. I have a novel that won publication and prizes for the first chapter. Maybe that one?

Or flash.

Stay tuned for daily updates and maybe a shared story along the way.

HORSES and FOSAMAX

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A few of my horses in the foreground. My mother’s and aunt’s dolls in the background.

There’s a connection. Wait for it.

I was crazy for horses as a child. I begged for horse figurines for my birthday, read every horse book in the juvenile section of our local library before I hit adolescence and loved the smell of horse manure. “Can’t I have a pony?” Not in suburbia. I read a British book on stable management intended for adults. I correctly predicted the winner of the Kentucky Derby five years in a row.

In high school, my mother finally granted my dearest childhood wish and gave me weekly riding lessons for a few months. I was terrible. I’ve been bit, kicked, and thrown twice. The worst was the bite’s deep bruise. My last time on a horse my dismount was an embarrassment.

Even all that is not enough to ruin my passion. I still love horses, but I could never afford to keep them.

Instead, for a few decades I showed sighthounds (Afghan Hounds) and ran them in field trials through the American Sighthound Field Association (ASFA) and as one of the original people involved in founding the Canadian Sighthound Field Association (CSFA). I served on Boards. I chaired events, I designed logos, I edited newsletters.

At shows, I sometimes saw medication in tack boxes and overheard conversations about the use of various what-now-would-be-called “performance enhancing” drugs. One Afghan breeder willingly told me she had to medicate her foundation stud because otherwise he was too fearful to show. I witnessed a dog from California bite the judge who went on to give him Best of Breed—that dog is now described in almost worshipful tones by people who never actually saw him in person. In addition to problems with temperament, I knew the dirty laundry about rare eye and hip and thyroid diseases. I ran eye clinics. I read the research. I was careful breeding, and mostly didn’t.

The American Kennel Club has never been quick to address breed problems, trusting the breeders who register puppies to police themselves. (No surprise that judges were always Mrs. or Miss, no Ms. allowed when I was active.) Using drugs on show dogs was absolutely forbidden, but no one was checking. So I began to wonder about how drug abuse in show dogs might be better managed?

I cold-called the Secretary of the Oregon Racing Commission, which at that time regulated dog racing in my state as well as horse racing. This would have been in the 1980s. I had rehearsed my line: “Hello, my name is Jan Priddy, and I am writing an article about drug use in show dogs and would like to know how the state Racing Commission handles drug use in track Greyhounds.” It was a good thing I knew that line because I would repeat it several times.

The Secretary’s secretary was the first to ask, “Who are you? And who are you writing for?”

I repeated my lines, “My name is Jan Priddy, and I am writing an article about drug use in show dogs and would like to know how the state Racing Commission handles drug use in track Greyhounds” and added: “I am free-lancing.”

Almost instantly I was put on to the Secretary, who naturally asked me who I was and who I was writing for?

“My name is Jan Priddy, and I am writing an article about drug use in show dogs and would like to know how the state Racing Commission handles drug use in track Greyhounds.”

“I don’t have time to talk to you,” he said in an irritated tone. He asked me to tell him again who I was. So I did. Again.

And then curiosity got the better of him. “What are they using on show dogs?”

I named what drugs I had seen, including the one I still remember: “bute” (a steroid).

“I don’t have time to talk to you,” he said again, and then: “Why would they do that? Is there any money in showing dogs?”

“Not really. Not at all. It’s an expensive hobby, but there’s ego at stake.”

“I don’t have time to talk to you.” He said it four times, and I said my line four times, and then we talked for almost an hour while he told me how the Racing Commission monitored drug use on racing Greyhounds. He told me the drugs they could test for and the ones they hoped to be able to test for by the following racing season. He told me the drug they tolerated, even though they could test for it, because if they outlawed that drug, trainers would use another drug they could not test for. “And that one is really bad, harder on the dogs. But we once we can test for that, we’ll outlaw both.” He was optimistic about getting ahead of the curve and outlawing medication entirely in racing Greyhounds.

Win and place were tested in every single race. About once a day and without warning, every single dog in a race was tested. Once a month, on an unannounced day, all of the dogs on site—retired dogs, non-Greyhound pets, and Greyhound puppies as well as dogs currently racing, every single dog at the track—were tested. If there was any drug detected, the owner and trainer and all their dogs were banned. The wrath of god came down upon them, and I was talking to god.

By the end of our conversation, god was quite pleasant, I had learned more than I knew there was to know, including the name of the lab that did State blood testing. He offered, at any time, the use of that lab at his cost to test show dogs. I knew that was never going to happen, but I shared his optimism about a drug-free future for racing Greyhounds.

Step forward 35 or so years. I never completed writing my article, I no longer show Afghan Hounds, there is no Greyhound racing in Oregon, and 22 Thoroughbred racehorses died in the last few months in California at the track. No one wants to admit that drugging racehorses is a major contributing factor. (My friendly god was wrong to be optimistic.)

A French racehorse trainer has been arguing for a reasonable approach to drugging racehorses for a long time. Here’s a statement from over a decade ago:

“Anyone who has read any of my comments to posts or my articles will know that I believe eliminating all race-day medication and the use of steroids would be the biggest, most effective first step. Steroids bulk up a young horse’s muscles to a level that the skeleton cannot support. In France, the trainer of a horse that tests positive for steroids will lose his or her license — permanently. A ban on race-day medication of any type seems painfully obvious. If a horse needs medication, it is not fit to run. That principle governs the rules of racing in all of Europe, most of Asia and Dubai. The United States, Canada, Saudi Arabia and some South American countries allow a panoply of race-day medications from anti-inflammatory drugs, which mask pain, to lasix, the diuretic drug that some believe controls bleeding in the lungs of a racehorse.”—Gina Rarick, 2008

More recently she blames the recent racehorse deaths on a number of factors including track surface but there is still the way Americans drug our horses. Yesterday she mentioned steroids, including bute, but also this:

“Breeders need to get the highest price possible for a yearling, so in addition to corrective surgery to fix defective legs, they use steroids to add bulk and sheen, and bisphosphonates to stabilize the bone structure. But these bisphosphonates also limit new bone growth, impairing the young horse’s ability to adapt to the stresses of training and racing.”

“Once the horse has fetched that high price, there is huge pressure on American trainers to get it racing as soon as possible to cover the costs of the purchase and training fees. That means the young racehorse is treated with endless rounds of so-called therapeutic medications: phenylbutazone, known as bute, to help with the aches and pain; clenbuterol to keep the lungs clear (plus there’s that added steroidlike side effect, which keeps them eating and keeps the weight on); and the diuretic Lasix every time before fast workouts and races, ostensibly to prevent bleeding in the lungs. There is little science that says Lasix actually does that job, but quite a lot of science identifying Lasix as a performance-enhancing drug.”—2019

The danger of bisphosphonates is what caught my eye. I wondered how long horse people have been aware that the drug may suppress healing. The result is that micro-fractures or cracks in a bone don’t heal, and if too much minor damage piles up, even a minor bump can result in a disastrous fracture for an animal weighing well over a thousand pounds traveling over 55 mph. The horse breaks a leg and is put down on the spot.

[I remember when the great filly Ruffian bumped into the starting gate and after she took a misstep on the backstretch, broke a leg and was put down the same day. According to Wikipedia: “Medications such as corticosteroids for inflammation and pain management came into common use. However, while helping the horses in the short term, the increased use of medications at the track had a downside, as many more horses were raced while injured. The average number of starts per year steadily declined, though this may also be attributable to economic factors.” I was watching that race when it happened, and mostly stopped watching horseraces after Ruffian was killed.]

Here’s the leap: bisphosphonates are used to treat osteoporosis in human beings, hundreds of millions of human beings have taken this drug. It does increase bone density and studies show that reduces hip fractures. But maybe bisphosphonates are not without drawbacks. A Harvard study in 2006-2008 found that the use of bisphosphonates such as Fosamax used to build bone, might result in fracture from even a slight bump. “The researchers concluded that long-term Fosamax use is a significant risk factor for low-energy fractures of the femur.” Studies conclude, as the French horse-trainer mentions, that bisphosphonates build bone quickly but are not without their down side.

My mother was on Fosamax for a very long time, far longer than the 7 years in the Harvard study. During the years she was on that medication she broke several bones including her arm and both hips, each hip requiring replacement. She did not recover from the second hip fracture. The surgeon shattered her pelvis while trying to repair it. (I shamelessly eavesdropped on the surgeon’s conversation with Mom’s GP. He said he could not understand why her bones were so brittle.)

I have always been a milk-drinker, but I stopped cold after my second bone scan showed terrible score, and then my scores actually improved a year later after I lowered calcium in my diet? They improved again after a year on Fosamax with calcium and D, but none of this means much of anything because each scan showing deterioration or improvement was done on a different machine and bone scan machines are not normalized one against another. Each one does its own readings and has its own standards. Any decent medical advice website will warn you to be sure you are always scanned on the same machine. Even my “second opinion” emphasized that. My local hospital keeps replacing its machines and scores from one machine cannot be compared to scores from another.

And, yeah, how dumb is that? If the scans were reliable, wouldn’t they each find the same reading? But, no, they do not.

So after my most recent scan, I checked back to see what machine had been used each time. When the letter came from my GP expressing optimism that the therapy was improving my bone since my scan numbers had shown improvement, I posted her right back that the new numbers were pretty much meaningless since they came from yet another new machine.

I went off Fosamax in January after a little more than 2 years on the medication. I feel better, maybe. But maybe that’s because I am more careful about water and calcium and vitamin D? Maybe in a year or so, I will go back on the drug? I can’t be sure it’s helped me. Maybe it has, but my bone scans have each time been conducted by a different technician on a different machine, and then, each time reviewed by a different radiologist, I have little confidence and no trust. I tried at the beginning to get a second opinion about my bones before starting treatment, but all I got was a second opinion telling me Fosamax is great, not a second opinion willing to even glance at my medical records or family history. Seriously, he joked about inter-hospital rivalry, refused to look at my records, and mostly got his notes wrong.

If the doctor is making medical decisions about my health based purely on averages and not considering me as a person? I would rather have that new computerized diagnostician. And the physical literal hand-holding (which I experienced only once at another hospital)? Some local doctors all went to a seminar to learn how to pretend to care. It doesn’t mean that are better at their job. It doesn’t mean much at all, though it feels sincere.

Some doctors really do care. There is still at least one local who has not retired, but he is not in family practice anymore. None of the good ones are, it seems.

Once they find a treatment and procedure that insurance will pay for, it’s hard to let go. Statistics suggest Fosamax helps, so it must be okay. And “talk to your doctor” isn’t always an option. (My doctor prefers to lecture rather than listen to anything I might say.) Fosamax is cheap but there are far more expensive substitutes doctors keep urging me to try, just as there were for the drug my husband was on after his one blood clot. I have even less faith in options that have not been in use for decades.

I walk 45 minutes each day. I watch my diet and drink my water and rest and get my sleep and do what I can to stay healthy. I am not as prone to falling as my mother, but I have fallen without breaking a bone, and I am not having another bone scan or taking Fosamax the rest of this year. If the French trainer is correct, there will be another rash of deaths of racehorses on an American racecourse all too soon. I hope to learn from their bad experience.

THIS IS HOW OLD I AM

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The original logo.

I remember when there was only one Starbucks across the street from the Public Market and it also sold chocolate from Belgium and spices in little baggies as if cumin were something that could get you high and maybe it did.

I remember when Nordstrom only sold shoes.

I remember when the Smith Tower was enormous, instead of a dwarfish little icon fading from Seattle’s skyline.

I remember when it was free to visit the Woodland Park Zoo and the Seattle Art Museum was on Capital Hill and a walk along the waterfront smelled cold and thick with creosote and import stores sold seamen’s chests and incense cedar screens carved with a thousand gods.

I remember before we went to war with Vietnam and it was still Viet Nam before the American War.

I remember Jack Kennedy’s funeral and the balcony where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior was shot.

I remember long, slow evenings in suburbia.

I remember my father’s gold wedding band, thick around his finger, and holding his index finger as we walked, stretching my stride to match his. 

I remember the small chest in the living room with two shallow drawers at the top holding broken tools and orange index cards, a fountain pen needing ink, dental floss and model airplane glue, keys to doors and boxes the family no longer owned, ticket stubs, a pocket knife, and a miniature chess set in a folding wooden case. 

I remember my mother’s hands crimping piecrust and mashing potaoes in a white glass bowl, meatloaf and tomato soup with toasted cheese sandwiches and tuna noodle casseroles and green peas barely warmed from the freezer. 

I remember the gingham dog and calico cat salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen window sill, the clock that creaked as it marked the passing seconds, bread kept in a drawer, the junk drawer with mucilage and four brown pennies and a bent spoon, a red capped shaker with cinnamon, and the toaster that always burned the toast. 

I remember rain on the roof and the softball through the front window in an exploding star. 

I remember my brother’s cap pistols and the bright smell of burnt powder, roadway scars in the back garden for Matchbox trucks and sedans, and the juniper bush six feet across, a spiral of prickly green. 

I remember our dog Roo circling and circling to carve her space on the carpet and my mother’s slip-covered chair in the living room revealing a warm depression when we came home from the store. 

I remember the reading lamp over my bed with butterfly wings embedded in the fiberglass shade, and a bright line of light under my door and hushed voices in the living room, the blush of dawn sunlight above the neighbor’s house, condensation on the glass, and the clutter of school papers and lists of horse names marking a landscape on my desk. 

I remember scum in the corner of the bathtub, mold on the wall of my closet, the sound of the furnace coming on at night in winter because it was especially cold, the plastic cups we used for KoolAide in the summer, and the crisp pale fungus that grew between the boards of the picnic table. 

I remember cracks in the driveway. 

I remember the hollow creak of the mailbox door, splitting open an orange with my thumb, sunflower seeds in their shells, card games, bare oak floors, the World War Two surplus search lights scraping across the sky in the summer, and moths beating against porch lights all up and down the block.

I remember.

I remember how it was. The Bad Word scratched into the stop sign post. Women fired for failing to wear stockings even in the back room. The man on the block who stripped his kids’ shirts and beat them with a strap. The bullies up the street who made it dangerous to walk that way. The open gutters and frost throwing the soil up into sparkling shards. Empty lots gone to tall grass. Cows grazing in a field. Climbing trees. The shack in the woods mouldering back into the past. Tree stumps broad as foreign cars. Foreign cars so rare their drivers stop to compare notes.

I remember laughing with my brother and my children as infants. I remember what youth was like. I remember songs from their first notes and cranberry sauce from cans and the color of my mother’s eyes.

It was everything and it’s every bit gone, and if someone told me I could start over and have all that back again, I would not stop crying.

How old does that make me? If I think I could not bear to have it all again? If I can barely contain all that has happened since?

If that is how old I am, I do not want to start again.

 

DESIRE & PANIC

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The author had my attention from the hilarious introduction to his memoir, Between Panic and Desire. I recognize the world he describes. Unlike his parents, my father never left; it was my grandparents who all divorced, some remarrying, some not. But while he was not yet 6 years old during the Bay of Pigs, I was already 8. I remember. My parents were fierce supporters of JFK, and Boeing Field was just down the road. However, living on the West coast, in the suburbs of Seattle, my life was never at risk during those tense days. The bombs could not reach so far. The eventual fallout, WW3, escalating tensions? I recognized those risks even as a child.

Fifty years ago, shortly before midnight on 16 April 1961, a group of some 1,500 Cuban exiles trained and financed by the CIA launched an ill-fated invasion of Cuba from the sea in the Bay of Pigs.—BBC

Dinty W. Moore recalls the period of our shared youth and I recall all the events he does—the international crises and threats, Squeaky Fromme, the assassinations, the same presidents, the same falling Towers. All the events that haunt his childhood memories. He yearns for his absent father, and goes looking everywhere for a replacement.

Moore was about 12 when Fromme joined the Manson “family”; I was not quite 15. I had to look that up because I never found her the least bit interesting. I remember Martin Luther King Jr.’s death as vividly as JFK’s. The balcony. The black horse, my mother explained, was “spirited because our president was spirited.” I never considered any of the presidents to be father figures, and I got over southern accents with LBJ. Happily, I met the person I would marry (whom I also mistakenly assumed on first sight was otherwise connected) at the age of 16, so I was spared Dinty Moore’s years of lonely drug abuse. My husband was not a user. However, Dinty Moore and I did not experience the 60s in the same way. My memory has a great deal more music and fewer cars. Many of my friends died. Peace marches. Feminism. Later, the AIDs epidemic. Identification as a visual artist. A long period of yearning for a country life. Moore had other concerns. I still do not consider that our failure to develop a strategic response to terrorism might have been a serious oversight. I wanted then to address the cause: ongoing imperialism. The corroding root.

When Dinty W. Moore lost his father, I was worrying about the world population explosion. By junior high school, my best friend was African American. Perhaps this is because I lived on the other side of the continent. I still do. I met the Dinty Moore in 2002, while attending a novel writing workshop with Bret Lott in Milledgeville, Georgia. He and Bret sat on a wide porch smoking cigars in the dark. (Perhaps only Brett smoked—I could be wrong about that.) Dinty will not remember me. I was the one typing on my laptop about twenty feet away, the Mac logo glowing.

While I was in Georgia that week, my mother drove the few blocks to her local Post Office and found she could not get out of the car. She drove home, crawled into her house, and called for help. My husband called me in Georgia on a landline and had to leave a message. I borrowed a phone to call him back. I wanted to fly home immediately, but this was the start of Memorial Day weekend and there were no flights available. The workshop organizers made no effort to help. Still, I got home on Monday, in time to sit in the waiting room while Mom had back surgery. Her surgeon promised immediate improvement. There was none.

This did not go well, I realize now, because she’d already been taking Fosamax for years and that bone-building medication actually interferes with the healing of bone. There was research suggesting that even then, but no one considered it for my mother. She was eventually placed on a deadly combination of opioids and benzodiazepines, failed to drink enough water, and was mostly housebound or hospitalized for the remaining five years of her life. Many, many trips to the ER. Broken bones. Slow healing. Pain. There is probably a way to make this a funny story, but I do not have the gift Moore does.

I have quit teaching, but the third essay in this collection, “Double Vision”, has a masterful structure, and I immediately and inevitably considered how I would use it as a model for student essays. There is no self-pity but considerable humor concerning his diplopia. He nails the short form. Well, what would I expect?

The award-winning memoir is elegant in structure and voice. These are very funny stories, a masterful and unique memoir of absent fathers, drug abuse, and eventual insight. Now I shall have to find a copy of The Accidental Buddhist.

GREEN SPACE

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Sometimes the tide reveals the remains of a long-lost forest. This log in the foreground is waterlogged, usually buried under sand and rock, and probably hundreds of years old.

My husband and I made two simultaneous and life-changing decisions in 1979. We would move to my family’s property in my home state of Oregon, and we would begin a family. We had been living just a few blocks from the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and often spent time in the wild Lower Woodland area east of the zoo. Gary had worked in the zoo ands recently returned to college for a masters degree in education. He planned to teach elementary school. But the illness of his father threw his family into chaos and too much of the emotional burden seemed to fall on him. His sisters called most evenings, his youngest brother is mentally ill and his older brother, in California, did not make the trip north for the funeral when their father died.

Our new home in Oregon offered the ocean, the broad beach, and a forest behind our backs. Both Gary and I had grown up playing in wild places. It felt right that our children would have that same opportunity. Recent research suggests our choices were fortunate for the future mental health of our sons.

Urban residence is associated with a higher risk of some psychiatric disorders, but the underlying drivers remain unknown. There is increasing evidence that the level of exposure to natural environments impacts mental health, but few large-scale epidemiological studies have assessed the general existence and importance of such associations. Here, we investigate the prospective association between green space and mental health in the Danish population. Green space presence was assessed at the individual level using high-resolution satellite data to calculate the normalized difference vegetation index within a 210 × 210 m square around each person’s place of residence (∼1 million people) from birth to the age of 10. We show that high levels of green space presence during childhood are associated with lower risk of a wide spectrum of psychiatric disorders later in life. Risk for subsequent mental illness for those who lived with the lowest level of green space during childhood was up to 55% higher across various disorders compared with those who lived with the highest level of green space. The association remained even after adjusting for urbanization, socioeconomic factors, parental history of mental illness, and parental age. Stronger association of cumulative green space presence during childhood compared with single-year green space presence suggests that presence throughout childhood is important. Our results show that green space during childhood is associated with better mental health, supporting efforts to better integrate natural environments into urban planning and childhood life.—from the recently U.S.-published Danish study: “Residential Green Space in Childhood Is Associated with Lower Risk of Psychiatric Disorders from Adolescence into Adulthood” by Kristine Engemann, Carsten Bøcker Pedersen, Lars Arge, Constantinos Tsirogiannis, Preben Bo Mortensen, and Jens-Christian Svenning, published in PNAS

Both Gary and I thrived in a generation that allowed children to run free. We ran and walked and biked sometimes for miles. We followed trails in woods or scanned the desert, climbed trees or rocky cliffs, swam in local ponds and sloughs, and experimented with all sorts of dangerous stunts.

It is a wonder we are alive. Perhaps.

Or maybe these early childhood opportunities are the reason we are alive. No one should fall for the fallacy that various threats to childhood are something new. There were bullies in my childhood. I nearly drowned in tiny Echo Lake. Gary and his friends stretched a rope across a road in the absurd attempt to catch a truck. I climbed so high into a tree in the cow pasture that the top flopped over, leaving me upside down and close to a hundred feet in the air.

Yet, here we are.

A man up the street used to strip his children and beast them with a strap. The hunting dogs kept in a pen in the back yard of the house across the street were widely viewed as dangerous. The adult son of the owner of those dogs was in prison. The pastor living in a brand new house behind our back yard famously piled up old furniture in the empty lot, poured lighter fluid over it, set it alight, and drove away with his family. This was 60 years ago. I know children have always been at risk both from experience with my peers throughout school and from reading.

My experience also suggests that hovering over children encourages their misbehavior and fears. I built a fort in our yard when the boys were little, a distraction from the beach, which was not a safe place to play when they were very small. The threat of a sneaker wave was very real and I did not allow them out on the sand without being there myself. On the other hand, I found that my sons would hang off their new fort in the most dangerous manner while I watched. I realized they assumed I would protect them from harm. This was true even when they walked along the railing eight feet from the ground and while I was not close enough to catch them. They seemed to have some magical faith in rescue.

If I went into the house and watched from behind the blinds where they could not see me, they stopped hanging upside down and balancing on railings. It took me a while to figure this out. Maybe it isn’t always true.

Whenever our children were doing something they shouldn’t, the best response was distraction. Gary was especially good at this. Are they throwing the little plastic animals? Gary will have them lining up all the plastic pigs. They want our attention, but pointing that out is not useful. Young children want our attention, not to hear about the psychology of their needs.

As a grandmother now, I mostly keep my observations to myself unless I am asked. (I am not usually asked.) I wish my grandchildren had a wild wood in their front yard, but their parents take them often to play in parks. I wish my sons had studied behavior modification and educational theory that urges only positive reinforcement and redirecting attention rather than relying on threats. But they do pretty well without my help.

I suppose most people do.

 

CARE-GIVER

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It was Billie’s 90th birthday party and we drove over 200 miles each way to attend. I have known her since 1969, but Gary has known her longer and she remembers him with great fondness. Back when I met her, Billie’s hair was a curly mass of mostly-gray tied into pigtails. She was the picture of the Hippie mama, beautiful in that particular Billie-manner, and uniformly kind and wise, and full of fun.

Gary sat down next to her yesterday and she said, “Gary, you’re not a kid any more.”

Long ago she told me a story about a chair that has stayed with me. This would have been in the early 70s that I heard the story. She wanted a beautiful wooden rocking chair she saw in an antique store. She could not afford it, she said, on her teacher’s salary. So she calculated what smoking cigarettes cost her each month and gave up smoking. She put the chair on layaway and paid it off from her nonsmoking funds. Her children, who are mostly younger than me, had never heard that story but were delighted. “It sounds just like her!”

These days Billie is frail and her hearing is poor, aided somewhat in one ear (her left) by a hearing aid. While I sat on the ottoman next to her, trying to be loud without actually shouting, she leaned to me. “Is that a baby over there?”

“Yes,” I said. Across the room a beautiful women held a sleeping child. It was her granddaughter holding Billie’s great grandson, 17 month old Enzo.

“I would like to have that baby. If I kept him for a couple of years, do you think they’d notice?” She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. She was teasing me. Yeah, that’s Billie.

She still lives in the same house where I first got to know her. On her shelves are some of my favorite novels. She has Smiley’s Moo (the black book on the second shelf down behind her toward the right) and Carol Shield’s Unless (my favorite of Shields’s novels on a cart a few feet away) and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. She has some of the same poetry and Norton anthologies I love. There are books and photos and works of art all over, a wedding certificate from over 150 years ago. It is a well-lived home. She is greatly loved.

During the week, she has some sort of professional care. On weekends, some member of her family stays over. Her children and grandchildren take turns. This way she can stay in her home and manage quite well.

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My “Gaga,” my mom’s mother, managed to stay in her home until shortly before her death. My grandmother’s second husband, Papa, brought her coffee each morning before leaving for work. Later, as her health failed, he carried her up and down the stairs until he could no longer manage even her slight weight. Then he cared for her in the living room, carrying her only as far as the bathroom. They were in their seventies by then.

We had cared for my mom for years before it occurred to me to ask my mother if she or her sister had ever provided respite for her step-father.

No, she never had. She seemed surprised at the question.

 

Yesterday we left Edmonds, Washington after staying only a short time at the party. We generally avoid driving in the dark but we arrived home in the recent dark, tired, too tired to eat. Gary had a beer and brought me tea with brandy in it. I don’t usually drink whiskey but it warmed me and made me thoughtful all at once. That rocking chair was still right there in Billie’s living room where it belonged.

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My friends Toni and Billie on Billie’s birthday.

My husband’s Billie Playlist (with links to the videos—he says you have to watch the videos): 

You might cry along with that first one, but you’ll end in a great mood.

CREATURE OF HABIT

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A baker’s dozen of koi at the Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon.

“Good dog.” These days we pet any dog that comes near us on the beach. They all like to be told they are good dogs. Even the slightly dangerous ones, the ones that growl or charge, if they gave us a chance, would get a good rub on the occiput and be told they are good dogs.

Our aged goldfish died when we fed it tainted fishfood from China. You might not recall that scandal. That was years ago now. Our last cat and the dog are gone now and we have not had the heart to risk another, though for many years we had five or six sharing our home.

I went to a commercial website the other day, just to get my koi fix. Now their ads show up each day in my Facebook feed. I looked at goldfish too. I imagined refilling the enormous Chinese pot where we having kept goldfish in the past. Koi need running water so they have never been in the program. Still, I miss having fish. I miss having pets—no dog no cat in our house, cluttering up our furniture. No dog to swipe the slice of cheese off the table. No need to be careful of doors open or closed, food left out, getting home in time to walk the dog.

Why would we miss that?

Yet, we do.

EDITING & BREAD

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This first challah is light and tender, soft, finer grained than this photo shows. I used some bread flour (“strong flour”) and no whole wheat, but I think I miss the wheat flavor.

I suppose this means I should complete my editing before posting.

On 8 February 2019, I found I had 100 followers. That makes my day. Seriously. This is true especially because I wrote about common-sense self care as part of countering depression. Every time I have tried to post anywhere about depression, I’ve been attacked. People who were friends and generally seemed to like me, went off on my comments have apologized for using language in response to my post. “You don’t know anything about depression . . .”

The thing is, I do know about depression. I am not as self-assured as some people seem to assume. I know depression. I won’t describe details here, but I have been depressed and I have a strong thread of serious depression and anxiety disorders in my family. Maybe I cover it better than most? Maybe I was told I should smile about a thousand times when I was six and I acted on that suggestion.

In any event, I am not writing a memoir, but a blog. I am not telling the story of my childhood here today. I write about myself too often as it is.

Most often I write as often in direct response to something in the news as to anything happening in my life. Friday I played Scrabble with a friend and in the afternoon I had challah rising. I used to make a huge braided loaf each week, but it’s been decades since I did that. Most of my life has passed with only occasional loaves cooling on the counter.

Baking bread each week was one of the things I swore to do now that I am mostly retired. And challah—in a dead tie with brioche for best bread in the world. (For now we can set aside cinnamon buns and panettoni, which are sweet breads rather than bread loaves.)

So the bread was in its first rise. I’d have taken a nap if it hadn’t needed to be punched down and shaped in about 10 minutes. I recall three rises (or proofing a sponge and then proofing twice, which is the same thing) before shaping, but fingers crossed. That first attempt on Friday would have only two rises, one in the bowl and the second as a braided loaf. Most of the kneading was done with a dough hook by my electric mixer.

I first learned to make bread from my mother who had a recipe for four loaves, lost now. [There was a typo here. I noticed it and fixed it five minutes after I posted. sigh] Though she never enjoyed cooking or baking, her loaves were marvelous. In college, I made whole wheat bread in a very large crockery bowl, stirring by hand with a wooden spoon (I broke a spoon one time) until I turned it out onto a board to knead. I quite liked kneading; it reminded me of wedging clay and as a Ceramic Arts major I had a lot of experience wedging clay.

My first job in Oregon was in the old Cannon Beach Bakery, which baked the “Haystack Loaf” in a brick oven, one of the last remaining fired brick ovens in the state and gone now. Harrison’s Bakery in Seaside, with its marvelous “Beach Bread” is gone too.

My old recipe for challah is also long gone. There were 7 cups of flour and 6-8 eggs and butter and honey and cardamom, as best I can recall. It made an enormous loaf, almost too big for my tiny apartment oven. I wish I had my old recipe, the one I used in college 45 years ago. I thought it came from the Tassajara Bread Book, the source of my ordinary whole wheat recipe, but I’ve looked and there is no recipe for challah. Challah is not supposed to have lemon peel, but I recall I put it in anyway and I will today too. None of the recipes I found online were quite right in other ways—not enough eggs, sugar instead of or in addition to honey, and oil rather than butter—so I used my best guess, and when I make bread again today, I will make any necessary adjustments. I used oil the first time.

“Like thousands of cooks of my generation, I have in my kitchen an ancient volume of The Tassajara Bread Book, its cover gritty with flour, its spine cracked from use, its pages stained with molasses, and dog-eared with decades of perusal. It is the book that taught me how to make bread and its simple wisdom has been present in every loaf I have baked. I will recommend it with enthusiasm to a new generation of cooks.” —Steve Raichlen, author of The Barbeque Bible

That’s the book. Sometimes, back in college, I made a loaf in two layers, a three-strand on top of a six, but I generally made a 4-strand braid, and that is what I did on Friday. It had a rest and second rise while I was writing this. When I took a break from writing, I preheated the oven, mixed an egg yolk and honey wash, brushed it, scattered sesame seeds, and baked for however long it took. Recipes I found recommended temperatures from 325° to 425° and times from 20 minutes to the better part of an hour. I aimed for someplace in the middle, and 25 minutes in a 350° oven seems to have done the trick. Maybe I was writing in between baking bread and not the other way around?

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The first rise was in a bowl, the loaf shaped and allowed to rise again. Here is my 4-strand braided loaf ready for baking.

I have a couple of dozen blog posts drafts saved that I will never finish. I begin posts and never go back to them. But after I’ve posted, I do always go back. I correct typos, add a link or another photo. Sometimes I correct information or even add an entirely new paragraph. With so many people reading (I hope), it’s about time I corrected typos before posting, don’t you think?

There is a second baking scheduled today after our walk, and I want to celebrate. Over a hundred people have chosen to receive my posts. That is worth celebrating. It also reminds me of that bad habit I need to change. I write fast and post, and almost immediately people receive my blog post as an email. I am grateful when they “like” my post because that gives me a sense of the success of what I have written.

Finding those “likes” on my posts is something like my husband asking for a third and fourth slice of bread, fresh out of the oven. Except I get to see him smile.

the SHOULDs

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These vacationers should not stand on the beach during an incoming tide in mid-winter. Note the recent foam in the rocks to their right. I watched this family until they picked up their children and went back inside. (Yes, they briefly put them down on the rocks.)

I have worried about my weight since I was 13 years old and weighed 117 pounds. All my girlfriends felt, as I did, that we should lose weight. I was thin. I did not understand that. I still receive the message that I should lose weight. More often I am told I should not worry about my weight.

I should smile more.

I should not make a fuss.

I should get more rest.

I should see my doctor about that.

I should trust the process to play out.

I should say less, not everything I know.

I should not let things bother me.

I should not allow unkind people to get under my skin.

Unkind people bother me. This is especially true when I am afraid the unkind person is me.

I should wear colors.

I should dye my hair.

I should put on some lipstick.

I should not take things too seriously.

I should not care about people I do not even know.

I should use the trash I find on the beach to make art.

I should read this book, or another book, or watch a video, or attend this event.

I should stay safe.

I should. I should. I should.

It was my mother who was forever after me to put on lipstick. The “you-shoulds” began early in my life and they never seem to stop. My husband and I pick up trash on the beach most mornings. Most people ignore us. None offer to help. Instead they describe seeing “art” made from beach trash. “You should see what this guy made with beach litter!” They think I should do that.

There are times when I feel completely at a loss for what I should do. Should I revise this manuscript again? Should I do more research about that one? Should I abandon the goal of publication and save myself enormous disappointment? Should I?  Should I finish the warp on my loom and warp a new one? Will I ever reread most of my books? Should I let most of those books go?

Should I sell my family home and move someplace safer? Where is that safety?

These days I find I appreciate the marvelous diversity of lives. The couple who work and perhaps raise a family, perhaps pay off a mortgage, take a vacation to Hawaii just once, and slip silently into death without making leaving behind much more than a few fond memories. Should they have done something differently? The couple who spent their lives striving toward wealth and then discover late on that it doesn’t make their lives meaningful, or perhaps they fail to achieve that understanding. Have they wasted talent? The couple who sacrifice and demand sacrifice from others in pursuit of artistic, cultural, social, or personal goals. Was their sacrifice worthwhile? Was the sacrifice of others worthwhile? Which couple would I rather have for parents?

For more than two weeks I was ill. I am only just now feeling healthy. I coughed a bit last night and woke, but no meds, no coughing today so far, no body aches, no fever is a week. I missed my beach walks, I stayed in the house most days. I could not read for more than a few minutes at a time. I could write only in tiny fits and starts. I ate most of two bags of honey-dijon chips—not the individual serving size. I deliberately forced myself to eat three full meals a day but managed to lose two pounds during the week. I responded promptly to student emails, but I have not been able to score their essays—the necessary sustained energy is still beyond me.

My sense of obligation never entirely leaves me. I know plenty of people, even many teachers, who are able to turn off their concern long enough to get healthy. I wish I could. I should be able to do that. But like a lot of other “shoulds” I can not turn them off.

I should score my students’ papers by Wednesday.

I should eat healthy and not worry.

I should get off my computer.

I am 66, walk most every day, and today I weigh 145 pounds.

I should lose weight.

BLAME THE CHILI VERDE

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This is not chili verde, but half-eaten pot of Sunday Soup, made differently each week from vegetable stock and veggies + some combination of legumes, rice, or potatoes. recipes below

Early on, in the ’90s, when I said I didn’t eat meat, people would offer me chicken, and I would have to point out, Isn’t chicken meat? What about duck? they would ask. Turkey? Rabbit? I started calling myself a “vegetarian” because trying to explain what I ate led to a lot of confusion. And a lot of questions. And then more questions. Why? But why? And eventual irritation on both sides.

Let’s Cook It Right and cookbooks. I read a great many books on nutrition when I was in college. Some of my friends were vegan for religious reasons, and we all cooked. I came to terms with butter (I’d been raised on margarine) and sugars and avoided pseudo-foods. I cooked a many bad meals and followed any number of recipes, and Gary gamely ate most everything I set before him. He claims today that he became a vegetarian because I stopped feeding him meat.

We eat wild seafood sometimes and dairy and eggs. We are not vegan. I am not ready to give up dairy and honey and eggs. I have been told I am “Full of s–t” for claiming I am vegetarian. Most vegetarians agree. Today, I can call myself a pescatarian and people know what I mean, but in 1990 that was expecting too much. The term was not then in common use. None of these terms were familiar 30 years ago. Properly speaking, we are ovo-lacto-pescatarians. Even today, using that term in most company, non-vegetarian company, stirs up trouble.

Instead, I labeled myself vegetarian, and mostly for moral reasons. I had always loved eating meat, but after close exposure to feed lots and the flavor difference between grass fed and feed lot beef; way too many horror stories about slaughterhouses and animal diseases from a friend working in the vet school in Fort Collins, Colorado; recognition of the damage done all over the world to habitat, global warming, indigenous populations, and so forth by raising mammals for Americans to eat; ; more stories about how we raise farm animals in this country, the genuinely horrific conditions in which pigs and chickens are often raised; and a family that is painfully sentimental about animals and horrified by cruelty to animals; I decided it was wrong to eat what I would not kill. Why cry over the injured animal in a film and then eat a hamburger? I could not do both. I loved eating lamb, roast beef and stew, and pork shoulder in my chili verde, but I stopped by choice because I believed it was wrong for me to do.

These days, I still eat fish and shellfish on occasion because I would be willing to kill them in order to put them on my table. This is not to say that I did not cry when I caught a bullhead as a child, my dad clubbed it, and then threw it back in the water. I did not cry for the trout on another occasion. But also, I was not the one that killed either fish. And I eat eggs and dairy. I can be particular about sourcing both, but dairy, in particular, disturbs me. I need to give up cheese. I know this. Butter too. The dairy industry . . .

In the 70s, didn’t I give up on table grapes for years because of the farmworkers’ strike? Haven’t I given up other foods for health and moral reasons?

Processed meats is unhealthy. I loved bacon, but gave it up even thought I love that salty goodness. Ham was the easier pork product to abandon. I do not understand why people want pot bellied pigs as pets and get weepy reading Charlotte’s Web but will eat pork. Isn’t there an inconsistency there? If describing beef as “dead animal flesh” is offensive, it is also accurate.

There is the reality that meat from a supermarket is not what my grandmother would have been eating from off the farm, and a long ways from what my ancestors a hundred, much less a few thousand years ago were eating. The meat we eat is genetically different from what our ancestors ate, and it is born, fed, and raised differently. The flesh found in a supermarket packet is chemically, nutritionally quite different.

It is this sort of thinking that made me determined, more than 30 years ago, to stop.

It was the chili verde that held me up the longest. I needed several years to figure out how to feed my family and myself food that was delicious and also contained nothing with a face. My chili verde had to be as wonderful even without meat. I use no recipe, but an approximation exists in my personal cookbook:

chili verde

1970s • makes two or more quarts • serves 6-12

I used to make this according to the recipe from the Denver Ladies Society which called for pork shoulder browned first in oil and then the rest of the ingredients (no onions or beans!). I learned how after visiting Colorado for the first time in the mid 70s. I tried beef and finally accepted that it was best made with pork shoulder (bone in and then removed from the pot and the meat picked off and returned to the other ingredients. This chili was so good, it had the final hold on me as an eater of meat. The recipe here is almost nothing like the original in terms of ingredients, though I promise it’s as delicious as the original version from years ago.

1 large onion, chopped

1 T. garlic, crushed

2-3 lbs. roasted or fresh cut up tomatoes or 2 large cans tomatoes 

1/4 t. cinnamon

1 T. ground cumin

1 T. ground chili or more to taste (ground chipotle is best)

1 t. salt, or more (the recipe called for 1 T., but  I use smoked salt)

1 lb. fire roasted, seeded, and chopped poblano or 2 large cans diced green chilies

3 c. cooked black beans

chopped red or green bell pepper

Sauté onions in 1 T. of oil till transparent. Add garlic for a minute longer. 

Add remaining ingredients and simmer altogether for at least 45-60 minutes. May simmer for hours and additional ingredients such as zucchini or bell pepper may be added later; it is better the next day.

*optional: usually I begin by cooking 1 c. of dried black beans in water or stock to cover or add 2 or 3 drained cans of black beans and a grain such as corn or rice. You may substitute fresh tomatoes, add chopped cilantro, chopped zucchini, green onions, fresh chili peppers, etc. For a heartier meal (and a complete protein) add a pound of frozen or fresh corn kernels right at the end, or 1/2 c. raw rice and simmer 45 minutes or longer before the end of cooking. NOTE: beans do not cook well in an acidic liquid, so if you want to cook the beans with the rest of the ingredients (which I do from time to time), add the tomatoes and chilis only after the beans are tender. 

Serve hot with cilantro on top, nonfat sour cream or a stick of cheese stuck into the middle, and hot rice or chips on the side. Or serve with or over the rice or spooned over crushed tortilla chips for tortilla soup with cheddar cheese grated on top.

green chili dip: add equal parts grated cheddar cheese to completed chili and heat gently. I made this once for a party and three quarts were gone in the time it took me to greet more people at the door. This also makes a wonderful, if rich, meal.

The Sunday Soup, such as shown at top, is easier and more variable. Begin with onions and garlic, add stock and rice or lentils or potatoes and other root vegetables. I add fresh herbs such as thyme or dried such as a curry powder mix or chili, simmer 20 minutes (or start brown or wild rice sooner to cook). Then add whatever other vegetables I have—zucchini, fennel, fresh beans or tomatoes, mushrooms, etc. Cook just till tender, then serve with something fresh on top: cilantro, parsley, basil, a grating of cheese.

All vegetable trimmings go into a freezer container, which becomes stock for the soup the next week. I made this every Sunday for years when I was working 60-70 hours a week, because it fed us for three or more days and other than chopping the vegetables, it was easy to make while I scored papers.