May all sentien…

May all sentient beings be released from suffering.

May all sentient beings be well.

May all sentient beings be peaceful and at ease.

May all sentient beings be happy.

Real Toast and Dip

ABOUT TOAST

When I was a kid, well even when I was a young woman, toast was crispy. It had crunch.  You took the toast out of the not-a-designer toaster, put it on a plate, put something good on it and it crunched when you bit down on it. Maybe you dunked a little of it into some egg or your coffee.  But, prior to dunking it, it crunched.  TOAST NO LONGER CRUNCHES. It does not crunch at home fro my super-expensive “vintage,” four-slice, four-settings, dial-a-color toaster.  It does not crunch at IHOP or Denny’s or any of my breakfast haunts.  See the picture on this blog?  That’s what toast USED to look like back a few years.  Toast left crumbs.  Toast did not–dagnabit!– wiggle and flop.  Now it does both.  If you dunk it, it falls to pieces.  Toast has become weak, spineless.  This distresses me.  It makes me sad every morning when I have toast.  Even if I set the toaster to it’s darkest, it gets dark, but not crispy.  It’s been a bad surprise for me for some 30 years.  WTF?  I think there is a very good possibility that man and womankind began to go downhill in a number of serious ways when toast quit being crispy.  Am I right?

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ABOUT DIP
NO ONE and I mean no one makes good old onion dip anymore.  You know the kind:  You take some onion soup and put it some sour cream and then let it sit awhile in the fridge and VOILA!  Onion dip.  At the gatherings I’ve been to in the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve had these dips:Chica Comfort Dip (no idea what this was, but I wrote it down)
Roasted Red Pepper Dip
Yellow, lumpy Dip
Warm Artichoke and Bacon Dip
Hot Tuna Dip (I skipped tasting this one.  It smelled funny.)
Some kind of purple dip
Red Eye Scallion Dip Rouille (no clue what this was)
Curried White Bean Dip (tasted just like cold white beans)
Blue Dip with yellow chunks in it
Artichoke Tomato Dip (this one tasted ok, but looked like a car accident)
Chipotle Salsa Dip
Chipotle Guacamole Dip
Curry Dip
Peppercorn Ranch Dip
Salmon Dip
Slow Cooker Ground Beef Dip
Spinach Dip
Strawberry and Peach Salsa Dip
Crab Dip

In each case, I searched the tables for some onion dip to go on my potato chips.  I had trouble finding potato chips at first.  There were dark blue crackers, and bright yellow crackers, and green crackers,and some pink chips and, purple chips.  Finally, hidden off in corners, I found some real potato chips. I carried those hard-earned chips through party after party, searching for onion dip.  Never did find any. I made do with some of the others, but my spirit was broken.  I have since offered to bring the dip and generally the host or hostess says, “That would be lovely.  Bring anything but onion dip.”  Sigh…

Attendait de légumes

Every holiday dinner I’ve ever been to,
every pot luck supper, someone brings a string bean casserole.  I hate string beans, quite literally hate them. When I tell this to people, there is always a hiss of indrawn breath of disbelief.  ”Oh well,” someone says, “you haven’t tasted my bacon and string bean recipe.”  Or, another will say brightly, “Just wait until you taste my Aunt Cathy’s pearl onion and string bean dish.  You’ll love it.”  No, I tell them, I’m certain I will not.  I hate string beans.  It’s to no avail.  No one believes me and some kind soul will put them on plate declaring that just a taste will make all the difference. It has never made a difference.

Here’s the thing:  String beans are a truly ugly shade of green, especially cooked.  They aren’t especially pretty raw either.  They taste funny. They taste like big thick weeds from an overgrown vacant field. They sort of get ground up in your teeth instead being chewed.  The pearl onions and the bacon are fine on their own but they do NOTHING for the string bean. At 68, I point and laugh and children being made to eat their string beans.  I don’t have to anymore and I’m a better person for it.

On to peas.  Peas are horrible surprise.  They pop in your mouth like a blueberry, but taste like Ajax cleanser.  Peas are a mean thing to do to your taste buds.  Again, there is nothing that can be done to remedy the taste of peas.  No matter how talented the chef, the color of pea soup is ghastly, the taste follows suit.  I think it’s clever when folks can balance peas on a knife.  I think it’s even cleverer if they can get the peas onto someone else’s plate, just not my plate.

Lastly, I must point out the horrors of lima beans. Lima beans turn gray when you cook them.  GRAY for godssakes!  GRAY FOOD!  No, not for me. Often, cooks put in bits of pink ham with lima beans.  Then you’re eating something that looks like a 1950′s teenage wedding tuxedo.  The taste is somewhere between unwashed gym socks and pencil erasers.  The smell is…well..something decent people were not meant to smell.

Enough about that.  Now, potato chips and onion dip or tortilla chips and guacamole–THERE’S a meal!

Damn this economy and I am not talking about money.

Damn an economy that separates friends!

It is a warm, cerulean-sky day today here in Palm Springs.  It is a day that I would have
knocked on my best friend’s/neighbor’s door and said, “Let’s go have Bloody Marys and a lunch that is not healthy and talk about everything that matters in words that must be said.”

The economy has taken that from me.  My best friend had to move away because there are no jobs here to sustain her.  She had to move a bazillion miles away to a big city where I don’t have the money to go visitng.

Instead of a Bloody Mary and a scrumptious, unhealthy lunch, I had coffee and a bun and watched other “best friends” laugh and frown and drop their voices to a whisper to gossip or tell tales.  It felt lonely.  Having a “best” woman friend is a must to women in this world.  It’s part and parcel of keeping emotionally and physically and mentally stable.  I don’t know where that leaves me.

At any rate, I miss you, Meg.  Wish I had you here and your big city had a feather; we’d both be tickled.

My Mother, Mary Reisz

My mother passed away in 1991.

She was beautiful, graceful, sweet, complicated, patient and, though
she never finished high school, she was an artist in more areas than I can count.  I think she would have liked to spend her life off somewhere in a studio, painting, sculpting, building furniture, sewing.  Instead, she took care of me and my father.  I was not an easy child: homely, gawky,clumsy, horribly nearsighted, painfully shy, stuttering, allergic to everything, nervous, crybaby, unsocial, bookish.  I was unable to paint, build, sew ANYTHING without disastrous results.  But, she worked with what she had and what she had was me.

When I grew up, married and had children, she became the quintessential
grandmother.  ”Nana”  to my children was the giver of all things good (even
if they were declared “off limits” by me), all things fun, all things loving and
and caring.  She sewed beautiful things for them–fashionable, wonderful
clothes for school, for special events, Halloween costumes and Easter outfits
and when arthritis wouldn’t let her sew much, she bought beautiful things. My
kids adored her.

She told me once that I must be careful not to spoil my children–a thing she
and my father did to those same children with glee and forethought.  When
she saw that I had married a mean and abusive man, she invited the kids
to spend countless weekends, vacations, evenings with her and my father
to get them out of the house.  She knew I wouldn’t leave my husband, but
she, once again, worked with what she had and what she had was beautiful
grandchildren whom she protected the best way she knew how.

When I confessed to her that I didn’t know how to be a parent, that I was worried that I was failing my kids, she said,  ”Oh Honey, EVERYONE fails their kids.  You aren’t as bad as I was and I’ve been better than my mom was.  She failed me, I KNOW I failed you, but here we are and we’re mostly ok.”  And, for the most part, we were mostly  ”OK.”

As I grew older, divorced, and learned to meet the world on my own, I was not
the daughter to my mother that I ought to have been.  I did not give her the pleasure of my company as often as I should have.  I did not gift her with lovely things as she did me and my children.  I wish so much I could go back and change that.  I miss her terribly now and love her more than I did when she was alive.  That happens, you know.  You think you care for someone as much as you could and find, when they are gone, that, you love them even more.  I talk to her every night and ask her forgiveness.

I am crying while I write this.  Regret is an awful thing.  If your mother is still alive, be certain that you are making memories, not regrets.  Hug her, flatter her a bit, gift her with anything you can manage–especially your time, call her/visit her and fill her in on your thoughts and your comings and goings.

I wish I had done so.  I love you, Mom.  Happy Mother’s Day.

The Apron

When I was in Junior High School, I took “Home Economics.”  We were taught the basics of cooking and sewing.  In my sewing class, I made an apron.  I did not work awfully hard on it, just did what I needed to do to get by and finish the damn thing.  I took it home when the school year was finished.

My mother, an artist on a thousand levels (sewing, sculpture, painting, upholstery, pottery, etc) looked at it and said, “You’ll need to make this over again.”

I teared up, ran to my room, and sulked for an hour or so.  Soon she came in with
the apron.  She had undone the sewing–the apron was in pieces.

“Come into the sewing room and we’ll do this over again,” she said.

I said I don’t want to do it again.  I hate sewing.

“I can see that,” she said.  ”You don’t have to ever sew anything again if you don’t want to, but you’ll make this one and only thing over again and this time we’ll do it right.”

And I did.  She helped me and I redid the sloppy, half-hearted work I thought I was done with and, when it was done, it looked pretty good. In fact, it looked very good.

My mother smiled and nodded at the apron and at me.  ”It’s good,” she said.  We ironed it and my mother hung it over the hook near the stove.  She put it on to make dinner that night and many nights after that.  It was worth wearing.

I’ve never developed a love for sewing.  But, I have developed a desire to do whatever it is I am doing with some pride.  Dislike doesn’t cancel out the personal pride factor.  It was a good lesson.

Forever Marilyn

May 14, 2012

Today in my town, the “Forever Marilyn” statue is being put up in the “town square.”  She is the largest knick-knack I’ve ever seen and she is gorgeous!

Twenty or so people watched the pieces of Marilyn go up.  They took pictures and made small talk.

The working men signaled this way and that way and up and down.  It was near 100 degrees, but no one cared–it was, after all, MARILYN.  I took pictures too.  I wished my legs would look that good blown up to 26 feet high.

Next to me stood a short, blonde woman.  She wore lots of jewelry– Native American jewelry.  She wasn’t taking pictures.  She said, “The Kennedys
killed her you know.”

I said Really?

The man standing next to her said, “I thought Robert Kennedy did it because
Marilyn knew too much.”

The lady smiled, “Doesn’t matter, all those Kennedys were killers.  All of them.

Anne Coulter knows all about it.”

I said Really?

She said, “Oh yeah.  Those Clintons too.  All of them liars and killers.  You should read her book.”

The man next to us said, “Read whose book?”

The lady said, ”Anne Coulter’s book.  It’s all in there about the Kennedys and the Clintons and how they lied and killed everybody.  Anne Coulter knows all about it.”   She turned to me,

“That Hilary, she’s a lesbian.

I said, Really?

“Oh yeah,” she said, “It’s all in the book.  You should read it.”

I nodded, hoping to show that I might actually do that.  She walked off.

The man standing next to me moved away to tell another person how he always
thought Robert Kennedy killed Marilyn.

The guys in the hard hats got Marilyn’s legs up and were fastening them to where she will stand for the next year.  It was almost 101 degrees outside.

I left and came home to write it all down.