What Keeps Us Up at Night

Like turning down the wrong hallway in a bad dream, I opened a book that tossed me right back into my sophomore year.

Joan Bauer's Peeled follows an eager reporter at the high school newspaper who investigates the threatening signs that appear at the town's haunted house. Our girl reporter wants to get the story before the town newspaper breaks it, yet no one takes her seriously.  (Honey, it's because you write for the high school paper.)

The town's claim to fame is growing apples.

I'm not sure how this story ended up on my list, because I get my book hints from sneering hipsters. Every title takes years to work itself up to the top of my list and, by then, I simply have no idea where I ran on to it.

I can't speak for the rest of Peeled, but from what I read, the author missed no chances to toss in an apple pun, or an apple place name.  In any case, I need to get this thing back to the library post-haste, where it can be found by some young, eager reader who will appreciate it more than I did.

In its place, I picked up Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder.

The fist you're looking at is painted like the flag of Burundi, one of the least fortunate countries in the world.  It's right next door to Rwanda, if that tells you anything.


In Strength, a young man named Deogratias arrives in New York City from war-torn Burundi and begins to make a living delivering groceries. If I had met him, I would have mistaken him for a lowly cowherder, completely missing the fact that he once attended medical school. Not only that, but an emaciated cowherder whose pants can barely hang on to his sunken hips.

People who knew Burundi wondered how he managed to make it out of that hellish country. All I will say is that story includes a lot of fleeing the by the dark of night and a lot of stepping over dead bodies. As you might guess, Deogratias hates to go to sleep. The nightmares that wake him up--oh my!

How does one make sense of so much evil in the world? people ask. "But look at all the good," Deogratias tells them.  Look at all the small miracles that helped him along the way--the remarkable woman at the Burundi/Rwanda border whose cool stealth saved him from getting herded into yet another massacre, or the former nun in New York who placed call after call until she secured him a place to live and a chance to resume his education.

Kidder reigns as the master of nonfiction. If I were you, I would not miss some of his other highly engaging books, such as Hometown and House.  Everybody has a story and Kidder is the man who hangs out and takes notes until he can discern the central drama of his subjects' lives.

Now, just in case your own life takes a bad turn, you might want to pick up 100-Day Pantry by Jan Jackson and try a few of her ideas.

Jackson offers up 100 recipes that can be cooked with shelf-stable foods.  You can cook the everyday versions--using fresh onions, celery and peppers.  If you like one dish, stock up on the canned and dehydrated ingredients, then thumb your nose at ice storms, unemployment and whatever else bolts you awake at night.  Go at it full tilt, stocking up for each recipe and you have--ta-da!--a 100-day pantry full of potential comfort food. 

Every few weeks, I've slipped some of Jackson's dishes right under the noses of my handy subjects who may or may not suspect what I'm up to.   So far, the score is 3 yeps and 1 nope.  This one was surprisingly good:

MANY-VEGGIE BEEF STEW
(everyday version)

2 (12-oz.) cans roast beef with gravy
1 (15 oz.) can green beans
1 (15 oz.) can corn
1 (15 oz.) can peas
2 (15 oz.) cans carrots
2 (15 oz.) cans diced potatoes
1 (10 oz.) can tomato soup
1 (10 oz.) can cream of celery soup
1 (10 oz.) can cream of mushroom soup
1 onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
1 TB Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp.salt
1/2 tsp. pepper

Do not drain cans. Mix all ingredients together in pot and heat through.  (My goodness, what laborious cooking this is!)  Makes 12 servings @ 190 calories each.

Consult Jackson's book on ingredient substitutions for the emergency version.


Photo Credits

Down the Bloodline

We finish Bryan Burrough's Big Rich with tales of the great oilmen's posterity. As you might guess, the children of the rich can range anywhere from responsible and handsome fellows who grow the business and get invited to join the best clubs in Dallas, to cocaine-snorting ne'er-do-wells who own great football teams and attend cheerleader tryouts for all the wrong reasons.

My own brush with oil heirs was my first job out of college. Some library I had never heard of offered me a job.  They were attached to Southern Methodist University, but they weren't the main library where students crammed for finals, or where you hunted down a novel, took it home and stayed up all night with it.

No, this was a Special Collections library.  In Special Collections, the books never leave the building.  Professors, writers, researchers come to these temples of knowledge and scribble notes from the books therein, filling up on material for their own books.   Burrough himself probably sat in a few of these research libraries.

"Special" means the library concentrates on a narrow band of knowledge, say Great Lakes history, or history of labor unions.  My library at SMU had its beginnings as the personal collection of Mr.D., an oilman I had never heard of in my life, and his pet subject was Western Americana.

As a side note, all his books about the settling of the West, the water issues of the West, ad infinitum, would not be complete without including some of the big players in the region which means the Mormons. We dusted and tended a good deal of shelf space given over Joseph Smith and everything that came after him.  And deep in the temperature-controlled vault, where they kept the really valuable stuff, we stored original editions of the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants, which we were never to handle without first donning cotton gloves.

Anyway, the original collection was in Mr. D's home.  He willed it to the university upon his death. Perhaps it was was Mr. D's money that built the building, too. Now, my job was just a job, but walking into that building, entering a vast hall of fossilized limestone and walking up the forty or so steps to the hushed confines of library-ness, left me awestruck every day.

Mr. D was such an obscure oilman that I never expected to run across him in Burrough's book.  But there he was on page 152, playing a walk-on role. In the postwar years, Texas was the king of oil the world over. Then rumors popped up about the Mideast and what just might lie under all that desert sand.  A top Roosevelt aide chose Mr. D to cross the world and camp out with the Bedouins. His top-secret mission: investigate the rumors; see if American companies could get a piece of the action.

Evidently, he survived the mission.

But back to his library. Mr. D's son, Mr. D the Second, also added his hobby collection: railroad history.  In addition to books, we kept file drawers of his train pictures.  To my eye, each one was indistinguishable from the next. But train buffs the world over knew that if they wanted really good stuff, we were the library to track down.

Then there was Mr. D the Third.  He was still a young man when I worked there, a student at library school. His contribution was to come in every so often and sort train pictures.  One day, he hinted that when he finished library school, he would no longer be willing to work gratis. I'll never know if Mr. D the Third achieved this professional status. All I know is that he was in his fifth year of study, and library school is only two years long.

So, as far as the D bloodline was concerned, they landed somewhere between solid billionaire status and losing it all to cocaine and cheerleaders.

And we will now celebrate the end of oilman stories with a nice bit of:

PORK & BEEF BARBECUE

Finding the Next Best Thing

I wish I had kept count of the miles I have walked this summer.  We have got to be talking over five hundred.  

And oh, the things I see!  The neighborhoods I want to move into! I used to suffer from house envy, but now I've calmed down to mere neighborhood envy. 

Then again, if I picked up and moved, I would have to give up something I love, something I have never had before and will never find again--the view out my kitchen window:

It is all curved lines, and people-watching.  I can see the main boulevard through the neighborhood.  I can see the walking paths, and everybody strolling, biking or hauling their children in little red wagons.  

Up until Thursday, this wonderful view was marred by a window like this:

That middle bar sat right at eye level.  I either had to stretch or slouch to look out on all the backyard beauty.

But, all fixed now.  New window.  Thank you, Mr. Nesquik.

Of course, if I had a bathtub full of money like the folks Bryan Burrough writes about in Big Rich, I could keep the view from my kitchen window and add, oh, seven more kitchen windows, hopping from one to the other in my fleet of private planes.

In other words, I have advanced from the chapters where the tycoons discover the oil, to the part where they figure how to spend all the moola.

When we lived in Texas, my husband once sat on a plane and listened to a woman from Lubbock, "just flyin' to Dallas to get mah hair done."

With that kind of money, you don't have to choose whether to buy yourself a ranch in Montana or in Mexico.  Just buy both.   

Of course, when you move up into this league, you acquire a whole new set of problems.  One of Burrough's chapters begins with this gem somebody overheard one day in Houston: "It's been a hard day all around.  First, my wife's pet kangaroo has to go and get poisoned, and then somebody stole my midget butler's stepladder."

Back in this heyday, oilmen liked to own a few airplanes but didn't much care about buying yachts.  What cruises they took, they complained about all the wine, preferring, instead, more bourbon, more "barbecue, greens and black-eyed peas." 

Little wonder old money looked on and called these people "Texicanus vulgaris."  But who cared what old money thought?  Texans just went on throwing parties where champagne flowed out of miniature oil derricks.

In my Dallas days, I was the ward organist, just like now, and I had no car.  I had to walk to the church every Saturday, which meant meandering through Highland Park and University Park, two millionaire enclave cities surrounded by Dallas itself.  Oh, the pink marble mansions!  The broad circular driveways!  The magnolia trees and azalea bushes, everything professionally tended!  The gleaming Mercedes, Beemers and Porsches!

I could've taken dozens of different routes through this wonderland, and I aimed to try them all, no matter now hot those Texas afternoons got.  I mean, I was already hooked on walking before I arrived, but the Park Cities were like smoking walker crack. 


My walks these days are probably about finding the next best thing to Highland Park.  Pockets of loveliness abound out there.  I see beautifully terraced backyards, perfect for entertaining all one's friends.  And I covet.  I see streets where everybody can walk to the library, the grocery store and the ice cream parlor.  And I covet.  I see houses convened around darling little parks with pretty benches and paths.  And I covet.

But if I traded what I have for what I don't, there goes my perfect kitchen window, with its inimitable view.

So that's where I'll be, inside my kitchen, looking out.

Oh, and cooking things.  This week, we get:

TURKEY 'N SWISS CALZONES

One reviewer said the filling was a little bland, and I agree.  She suggested using a sharper cheese.  I thought about adding more salt to the dough.

We'll Buy More Sunday Clothes

The sound of Sunday morning around my childhood home was filing-metal sound of Mom's spoon in the saucepan, stirring the jello until the ice cubes melted.  

By dinner time, a meatloaf showed up on the table, paired with some Rice-A-Roni, some peas, and that jello, and she considered her duty fulfilled.    

But Sundays require dessert, no? 

Mama didn't trouble herself with a lot of cooking experiments when it came to family meals.   (Which doesn't meant she wasn't adventurous.  There was her cake-decorating phase, her wedding-mint phase, her sugar-Easter-eggs phase, her goose-eggs-with-birds-and-bunnies-tableau-inside phase.)  But sometimes, you don't need much to keep your sweet tooth sweet.  A little of this:

topped with a spoonful of this:

And everybody's happy.

In my case, make it Cool Whip.  Unlike my mom, I don't have cows and a steady supply of cream just begging to be eaten up.

You can put your whipped creamy stuff on: 

APPLESAUCE CAKE

Or, put it on:

JELL-O CHOCOLATE PUDDING CAKE

1 pkg. (4-serving size) jello chocolate instant pudding and pie filling mix
1 pkg. (2-layer size) chocolate cake mix
4 eggs
1 cup water
1/4 cup oil

Blend all ingredients in large mixer bowl; then beat 2 minutes at medium speed. Bake in greased and floured 10-inch tube pan at 350' for 55 to 60 minutes, or until cake springs back when lightly pressed. Cool in pan 15 minutes; remove from pan. Sprinkle with confectioners sugar (1 TB).  Makes 16 servings at 225 calories each.  Not counting what you put on top of it all.

You don't suppose there's some unwitting theme here between Cool Whip and the book I'm about to hawk to you, a book about finding oil?  According to OrganicAuthority, "You don't even want to know what's in Cool Whip!"  Eat enough of its ingredients, they say, and you could end up with autism, prostate cancer (if you have a prostate), and lab rat tumors.

Their solution?  "The real stuff:   Homemade Vegan Whipped Cream."

Now, that's something I don't want to know about.

But yes, I'm reading Bryan Burrough's Big Rich and loving the tales of the four Texas men who struck oil bigtime.

There was the Sunday that the future tycoon felt sure his well would come in, so he, the wife and the little kids trooped out to the salt dome, still in their church clothes.  The drillers drilled.  They struck.  And they all danced as the black goo gushed toward the sky and rained back down on them.  What the heck?  We're rich!  We'll buy more Sunday clothes!

Then there are the boom towns, where maybe 5,000 people scratch at the earth to grow a little cotton.  Then somebody finds the oil and the population swells up to 50,000, with prospectors, gamblers, prostitutes (Burrough always mentions the prostitutes) tripping all over each other.  Naturally, there are not enough houses to put them in.  There are not enough hotel rooms. There are not enough tents.  Some people end up renting barber chairs for the night.

I haven't gotten far in Big Rich, but if the rest of the book is as good as these first chapters, floors just might not get mopped this week.  Dinners might not get cooked.  Towels may not get folded.   Bills may not get paid.

Oh, wait, I'd better not skip the bills.  Just because I'm reading about people with no money cares doesn't mean I'm one of them. 

Doing It Fine On Our Own, Thanks

I need to park myself on a couch and just read, because when I get up and actually do things, disaster ensues.

Last week, my household was assigned to work on the church cleaning crew.  I think the kitchen looked pretty good after I worked it over.  With a sigh of satisfaction, I carried a sloshing bucket of mop water to the janitor closet to rinse it out in the low sink there.

Why can't the water simply come out the spigot?  Why did they have to attach an elephant-trunk-sized hose to the thing?

Most especially, how did that hose slip out of my hands? 

Suffice it to say that, by the time by hands found the spigot handle (blind-lady style) and turned it the right way, the closet ceiling was raining and I was standing in enough water to do a batch of laundry.

On the bright side, maybe they won't ask me to clean again.

I went out for a sunny afternoon walk a few days later.  A few wood slats lay across a sidewalk and I gracefully stepped over them.  What I failed to see was the line strung across the sidewalk right behind the wood.  Before I knew it, I was scraping the sidewalk with my knees, my arms, my chin.

Oh, the bruises.  My star bruise is bigger than a burger bun.

Oh, the aches. I was shopping in Wal-Mart a day later, moaning softly as I clung to my walker  shopping cart.  Somewhere between grabbing a box of Brillo pads and hunting for the Life Cereal, I remembered:  I have big drugs at home.  I believe I'm entitled to them today. 

So God need not threaten me with any destroying angels.  He can just step out of the way and let me destroy myself.

That's why I should shut myself in a safe place and catch up on my reading.  My attention is divided these days.  Sometimes I reach for a real book; in this case, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables.    This is the last time I plan to afflict myself with Hawthorne.  If your reading education is as thin as mine, I'll just tell you it's about a once-prominent family now petered out.

And sometimes I reach for my Kindle, where I'm working through Robert Reilly's Making Gay OK, in which he reasons that normalizing homosexuality is quite possibly about excusing all sexual misbehaviors.   Everybody take a deep breath now and remember that there is a wide difference between throwing bricks through your gay neighbor's window (not OK) and calmly explaining why you think marriage licenses should say "Bride and Groom" instead of "Party A and Party B" (very OK).  Everybody take that deep breath because I've been feeling a lot of Down-with-Conservatives hate lately.  To quote Charles Krauthammer, a favorite columnist, "What’s at play is sheer ideological prejudice — and the enforcement of the new totalitarian norm that declares, unilaterally, certain issues to be closed."

Now, you'd think an accident-prone lady like me would be wise to stay out of the kitchen.  But I can't help myself.  And I did manage to cook Seasoned Potato Cubes without ruining the skillet, nicking off a finger, tripping over a cat or choking on the final product.   I'd pat myself on the back, but I'm too sore for that.

I Want This Man's Job

I have surely missed my calling.  I want to be Hank Steuver and write books like his Off Ramp.

When he hires on at the evening newspaper in Albuquerque, all the exalted beats are  already taken--the crime beat, the schools beat, the "drunk Indians" beat.  So they give him the leftovers.  He's free to write whatever strikes his fancy.

He wanders into the odd corners of life and writes stories on storage units, or adult night at the skating rink.  Or the fate of bowling. Did you know that professional bowling tried, at one time, to be taken seriously as a sport?  When you think of bowlers, what sort of body comes to mind?  Not exactly athletic-looking, is it?  

Or how about the chapter on funerals?  Steuver rides along with the Austin, Texas, fellow who set up a funeral home in a strip mall.  His rock-bottom prices drive the competitors batty. The nerve!  Caskets made in Mexico?  With door hinges!  Where's the respect for the dead?  

Where's the respect indeed?  As Steuver tells it, there are "enough dead people every year in Texas to support 570 funeral homes."  Yet, 1300 manage to stay in business.  How do they do it?  Rampant gouging, no doubt.  (But this is a particular soap box of mine, from which I will now step down.)   

What Steuver finds is that we are basically stuck with ourselves.  But we forget about it by reading about other people's stuckness.  Or by tracking them down, reporter's notebook in hand, camera slung over the shoulder, and writing down their stories.  So, how many gifts do you expect at your wedding?  What makes you shop at Target instead of K-Mart?  What's behind the door of that storage unit?  Christmas decorations?  Broken vacuums?  And, "Who knew that a sixty-five-year-old man could figure skate (on roller skates) and look like a beer-gutted swan on a lake of neon?" 

Yes, I think I could love covering the off-beat like Steuver's.   It has to be better than the crime beat, the schools beat, even the drunk Indians beat. 

Finally, all those grown-up skaters go to Trudy's afterwards for margaritas.  If I could trust myself to stay upright on a pair of skates, I would use up my roller-drome calories by treating myself to:

Peanut Butter Cashew Sundaes 

My Quirks are My Gift to the World

Aaaaand, we are snowbound again,  at least so far as church is concerned.  The bishop also postponed Fast Sunday.  What a wise move.  Who wants to starve without meetings to distract you?  Who wants to be housebound with famished children and  a grouchy spouse? 

Then again, I can't imagine his wife being grouchy.  

But me?  I don't take hunger well.  And as soon as I read the word "postpone" in my Facebook feed, I rushed downstairs and celebrated my reprieve with a tuna sandwich, some Doritos and a couple chocolate chip cookies.   

I must still be in starvation mode, 'cause I'm dreaming of foods.  What I'd like to find before me right now is some:  

Italian Cheese Bread

This week's book, which I have not quite finished, celebrates quirks.

Are you the happy owner of a Roget's Thesaurus? (No, that is not this week's book.)  Oh, good, me too!

I always imagined it had been created by an army of wordsmiths, toiling away deep in some British library.

But no, there was a real Peter Mark Roget.  As chronicled in Joshua Kendall's The Man Who Made Lists, Roget lived through a rocky, unsettled childhood.  Peter was a mere tot when his father died of tuberculosis.  Peter's mother didn't cope well with widowhood. Or rather, she coped by moving the family two or three times a year and by hovering insufferably over the boy. Case in point:  When Roget went off to medical school, Mama made him promise not to touch the sick people.

Peter coped by making lists.  "As a boy, Roget was compelled to crank out his word lists. Without this outlet, he may well have lapsed into the madness that gripped numerous family members."  His notebook "represented his discovery as a boy of eight what was to be his calling.  He had stumbled upon an all-encompassing intellectual pursuit: classifying the world." 

By adulthood, he suspected that his lists might be useful to the public, helping them communicate their ideas with more precision.  By the time he finally refined his lists into a real book and offered it for sale, the world grabbed it up.  Poets, novelists, scientists, letter-writers and students found, in Roget's Thesaurus, a tool that opened their minds like a flower.

I have felt that mind-opening.   In the classic editions of Roget, all his synonyms fall within 1,000 categories.   If you think you're trying to say something about "stealing" but "rob, purloin, pilfer and filch" don't quite nail the idea, your eye might wander over to the facing page, where it sees stealing's sister idea, "taking."  You realize that--Aha!--you really meant "snatch."

Modern editions of Roget, not to mention online thesauri, rob you of this fine-tuning experience.  They arrange the word concepts dictionary-style and, for all the speed which you can track down mere words, it's just not the same.

Places like the grocery store have already figured this out.  Really, can you imagine wandering down an aisle stocked with paper towels, peanut butter and pepperoni?   Pushing your cart one aisle over and finding the marshmallows, mangoes and magazines?  Isn't there something about seeing all the Mexican food together that spurs ideas?   I like the flour tortillas, but what about trying the spinach this time?  I don't know about the taco sauce.  Maybe some queso dip would hit the spot. 

Kendall's book trudges through some dry chapters.  I had almost concluded that Roget, in spite of his great gift to mankind, might not be worth more than a long newspaper article.  But then this fussy, reclusive man got caught in War.  And Love. 

At the very least, The Man Who Made Lists may make you feel better about your own quirks. 

Those Crazy Dreamers

I used to have a powerful People Magazine habit.  I kicked it, much to the relief of my husband. But I remember what I liked best about it--story after story of people who clung to their crazy dreams.  Much to the consternation of all who knew and loved them, they threw their all into making jewelry, or raising ostriches, or singing in backwater bars in Texas.  And their dreams worked out.

So how about an entire book about somebody's dream?

In Outcasts United  by Warren St. John, Luma Mufleh grows up in a prosperous family in Jordan.  She can expect a good education, a good marriage, a few Mercedes in her driveway. But she just wants to go to the United States.  She's not sure what she wants to do there.  She ends up in an Atlanta suburb, coaching a girls' soccer team.

On a grocery run to a store that carries some of her favorite middle-eastern foods,  she makes a U-turn in an apartment parking lot and finds a group of barefoot boys playing soccer "with the sweaty mixture of passion, joy, and camaraderie" that she remembers from her own country.  As she learns more about these boys, her dream takes shape.

They come from Bosnia, Liberia, Afghanistan, the Sudan and other war-torn countries.  After fleeing murder and plunder, after living in refugee camps and applying for asylum, they find themselves settled in some dilapidated apartments in Clarkston, Georgia.

Clarkston, a peaceful town at the end of the commuter train line, isn't sure what has hit them, but they mostly don't like it.

At any rate, Luma forms a few soccer teams and begins coaching the boys. Clarkston's mayor refuses to let them practice on the greenest fields in town, relegating them a rutted, glass-strewn patch of dirt behind one of the town's worst elementary schools.  And the boys themselves present no small challenge.  "After the trauma of war and relocation, many refugee kids had severe psychological and behavioral problems."

Outcasts is a fascinating look at political asylum, a growing phenomenon in American life.  It is also an account of a woman who gives her all on the soccer field, as well as her car if they need rides, her wallet if they need groceries and her time, if their parents needs help filling out endless forms in a strange language.

I could never be Luma Mufleh.   For one thing, the woman has no time to cook, even something as quick as:  

French Toast Sandwiches 

This is your first installment of french toast sandwiches.  I tasted something similar and quite heavenly at the Frango Cafe in Chicago's downtown Macy's.  I intend to reproduce it at home and share it with you, so wish me luck and keep your griddle ready. 

  

Checking Out the Below-Stairs Crowd

You may have read Virginia Woolf, the feminist writer famous for her essay, “A Room of One’s Own.”  According to Wikipedia, Woolf “invented a fictional character, Judith, ‘Shakespeare’s sister,’ to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare’s gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that would have been closed to women.” 

Woolf was born into the British upper classes, all of whom employed a fleet of servants to clean out their fireplaces, run their baths, empty their chamber pots and, of course, cook breakfast, lunch and dinner.  For Woolf, they also made handy characters in her books, not that Woolf portrayed them with lives, families or memories outside of their duties.  

Alison Light’s Mrs. Woolf and the Servants seeks to remedy this oversight.  Light’s grandmother “went into service” as a young girl and expressed nothing but resentment for the experience. But that’s what England expected of its working class girls, especially its orphans. 

 

Light decided to honor her grandmother by fleshing out Woolf’s servants, hunting down where they came from, how they spent their off-hours (when they got any), how they got passed around among Woolf’s friends and family.  I found the story of Lottie particularly engaging.  

Sometimes Light’s history bogs down with a parade of unfamiliar names.  She assumes readers know Woolf’s writings, as well as how she committed suicide.   But what Light wants to tell us about Woolf is that, for all her ideals about women having some education and leisure to create art, it never occurred to her that the women dusting in the parlor below would get neither.  And she couldn’t do without the women in the parlor below. 

Not many pages into the book, I had flashbacks of my mother and my Young Women teachers praising homemaking’s advantages.  “You can set your own hours.  You’re working for yourself.”     I thought I was hearing, Your husband has to put up with annoying office mates and crushing deadlines.  Aren’t you glad that your days will be far more blissful?   But when you’re sweeping the floor you swept last week as well as the week before, and other people are inventing Hubble telescopes and waffle fries, don’t you think, Nice sell job, Mother/MIA Maid teacher?  

Ah, but in my day, I don’t think she was comparing homemaking to working at the factory or the office.  Light’s book makes me think she was comparing sweeping one’s own floors to scrubbing the mistress’s front hall.  After all, my own mom worked a couple domestic-help gigs in her college years, not to mention getting sent off to help an aunt or two after the arrival of a new baby. That Mom would prefer keeping her own house over keeping someone else's is not hard to guess.   

Light says we’ve gotten more democratized.   If you can afford household help, it sure isn’t the below-stairs live-in staff.  More likely, it’s the Merry Maids who swoop in once a week with their cleaning caddies.  

As for myself, the kitchen floor and the bathroom grout await my attention.  And if I expect Lemon Chicken Tacos  to show up on the dinner table, I’d better be cutting up those chicken cubes myself. 

Your Relatives are Crazier than Mine

Let's talk relatives.

Mine are pioneer stock.  Life's hardships--Relief Society callings, cow milkings and keeping journals that will inspire posterity to good works--have turned them into an even-keeled, responsible, self-effacing lot.  There is hope, however; our rising generation includes a couple jailbirds.

You might think I have nothing to regret, surrounded by people so nice and normal that we can clear out and sell the family house without a single dramatic outburst.  But I once read Florence King's Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, laughed myself silly and, upon closing the book, regretted that we had no crazies in the family line.  Why couldn't Mother throw a fit about a ruined hat once in a while? 

Miss King had her aunt Evelyn, who once believed that her womb had fallen out.  Southern women, King explained, nurse a preoccupation with their wombs, part of their frail-and-delicate act.  Southerners, she further explained, are pre-Copernican.  Copernicus, you will recall, is the guy that told us the sun does not revolve around the earth, but the earth around the sun.  So Southerners, as pre-Copernicans, do their best to make the world revolve around them.  Thus, all their vapors and their Aunt Evelyns.

You can skip the chapter on their sex lives, if that isn't your tall glass of ice tea, and there will still be plenty of Southern craziness to keep you entertained.

As for Southern food, in all my years of subscribing to Taste of Home, I noticed that all the recipes submitted by readers from Tennessee, Georgia and the like contained Cool Whip or pudding, or cooked in the "icebox" or on the grill.  Must be too hot to turn on an oven down there. 

Here's a dessert that shouldn't make you wilt in the kitchen:

Layered Banana Pineapple Dessert

Your Beautiful City

The Tabernacle Choir visited us on Friday.

They arrived in town a day early, which left them a few spare hours to visit "your beautiful city."  Now this could just be a load of flattery; audiences eat that kind of thing up.  How easy is it to say "your beautiful city" and "your wonderful museums"?  You could talk that way about any city (except East St. Louis and Camden, New Jersey) while holing up in your hotel room and eating from the vending machines.

So I just want to pin them down on this.  Which museums and monuments did they see?  Which neighborhoods did they wander?   

But they're right.  Even without hills or a stunning body of water, we look pretty good.  And we are a shocking green this year, which is a few shades more brilliant than the ordinary Midwestern green.  For sure it's a whole lot more picturesque than, say, Point of the Mountain, or the lonely wastes between Snowville and Burley. 

And let me just counter-flatter those choir members and say, "Your Western landscape abounds in dramatic vistas and your sprawling city is eminently walkable."

There.  I guess we're even now.

Let's all be glad none of us have to put up with the landscape Jonathan Raban writes about in The Bad Lands.   The British Raban visited the eastern end of Montana where the prairie is wide and featureless.   He found prairie grass, miles of it, rolling off into the horizon. 

He tackled the question, Why did people come here? The railroads turn up as the culprit.  As they laid their lines westward, they needed markets to justify their existence.  Using weather facts from a few especially wet years, they published leaflets full of glowing promises, luring the land-hungry to the homesteading life.   As it turned out, the climate was not really that wet.  If the settlers crops didn't fail, then they went crazy from all the prairie grass which, thanks to its vastness and monotony, made humans feel lost.  

Funny thing:  check a map of neighboring North Dakota (we all remember what maps are, don't we?) and all the little what-for towns are spaced at uncannily even intervals, like somebody planned it that way.  Just to, I don't know, fill up their railroad trains with water, maybe?  Oh, and unload a few orders from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.  

A few homesteaders made it work.  But a whole lot didn't, adding sad little ruined houses to the landscape, their doors flapping in the wind.

But not to leave you on a total downer, some people find ways to be happy on their lonely homesteads.  All the Taste of Home recipes I share with you come from real people who live in real towns.  We have some lady in Wyoming to thank for:

Chocolate Mint Layer Cake 

I made it today and it looked just like the picture.  

A hahahahahah!  OK, it didn't.  My problem was that very melty chocolate frosting.  When I spread it on the sides of the cake, the whipped-cream filling, um, got involved.  These little accidents have never stopped us before from enjoying chocolate lusciousness, but I still look longingly at the picture and wonder how many cakes it took until they achieved such bake-shop perfection.  

Would You Like Whipped Cream With That?

It's been a wild week.  I'm resting up some sore body parts.

And I'm bored.

At least I had the foresight to visit the library and bring home an armful of  books.

When I'm not too whacked-out on drugs for the sore body parts, I actually read them.

Having finished How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill has me wanting to work for the one-on-every-corner coffee giant.  (Don't worry.  I'll get over this wish, as soon as I open the next book.  I can just imagine me messing up everybody's coffee order.  I can, however, mix you a stiff chocolate milk.) 

Gill was a WASP-y boy, born on the Upper East Side of New York and schooled at Yale.  These privileged beginnings ushered him directly into a top advertising agency.  His career thrived.  His family life suffered.  Eventually, all his professional wisdom and experience meant nothing in a world where youth and vigor reigned.  He made a few other mistakes along the way and boom, he was out of the agency and out of his comfy Connecticut home.

"I had been placed on an upward escalator reserved for those few affluent, properly educated, well spoken and well dressed peers who would never stop ascending.  I had not voluntarily gotten of that easy escalator . . . I had been pushed and then stumbled farther down.  . . . and no one seemed to have been able to help me or even really notice my great distress and basic needs."

But one day, he sat at a Starbucks table, drinking a latte, and a young manager offered him a job.  And he was just desperate enough to take it.

Did he like it?  Could he handle the pressure of serving the public, of remembering the differences between an Iced Venti Americano (light on the ice) and a Decaf Grande Skim Two Pump No Whip Mocha?  And how did it feel when friends from his former life came in to the store at 93rd and Broadway and found him behind the counter, wearing an apron instead of a business suit?

I think you will like finding all that out for yourself.

Meanwhile, thaw out the chicken breasts, fire up the grill and whip up the heavenly sauce for:

Grilled Basil Chicken and Tomatoes

This is Why We Live Here

We cleaned the tile grout and the window sills and all the other parts of the house we never get to. We ran around town picking up the flowers and the wedding cake and the pans big enough to hold all the food, plus an extra fridge to hold all the giant pans. We shopped for the perfect grapes and strawberries and mixed up a fragrant chicken salad, then we stayed up a little late to make the bar cookies that go with the special soup for the pre-party lunch.

But beyond keeping track of everything that needed to be done, it really didn't feel like work.

When it all came together, we saw the people that we love best, people that we have known a long time, and a few people that are new in our lives but that we expect to know forever. I'm a non-hugger, but I just kept hugging this weekend.

I miss some places I have lived, their skyscrapers and their curvy hills. I'll go back and see them any chance I can get. But I moved here for the people, and I'm riding on that warm, full feeling I get when we come together and catch up.

It didn't hurt that the grass was a brilliant green, that the trees dressed themselves up in white and magenta blossoms.

I don't know how many times I said this to myself this week, but I'll say it again: I'm glad I live here.

If you are not so fortunate, you may comfort yourself with this soup: 

Chicken Tortilla Soup

As for the reading pile, I'm making progress on And There Was Light, by Jacques Lusseyran, (but understandably, given the kind of week I've had, have not finished it yet) and I'm bumping it up to "recommended" status.

He's deep into the French Resistance. What does a Resistance movement do, anyway? you ask. Well, they spread information by stealthily printing and distributing newspapers. They give safe passage to shot-down fliers. And there is no Resistance unless multiple peoples in multiple places are moved upon to act and, in miraculous ways, they find and assist each other.

Which seems to be what the universe is trying to teach me: Join in. Lend your time, means and talents. Let others lend you theirs.

Go Home, Young Man

I once had an English professor who wrote a book on postmodern trends in fiction in which he proclaimed that many of us find the open road, and its escape from our hometowns, appealing. But ultimately, we have to re-embrace our past. We may be happier far away but, especially if we are writers, we have to return or we choke off the headwaters that feed us.

Plainly, I have resisted this notion of his. But then, my hometown lacks the spicy, Wild West past of his native Dodge City, Kansas.

However, the professor took his own advice. Succumbing to nostalgia about the dusty landscape from which he came, he has now published his memoir, Dragging Wyatt Earp.

Author Robert Rebein grew up as one of seven closely-packed boys in a Catholic family. His father was one of those handy sorts who had a hard time resisting major renovation projects on the house. He drew plans for new kitchens, or bricking the exterior, on some handy envelope and, before long, had the family camping in the basement, eating chicken noodle soup on rice for days on end.

For years, the father owned an auto salvage yard, providing a richly imaginative playground for the young Rob, not to mention a cast of hired help that limped and swore and came in late after sleeping one off.

Later, Dad Rebein sold the salvage yard and bought a ranch.

In Rebein's classes, he occasionally mentioned his Kansas-ranch past. I always wondered if his family regarded him as a fiddlehead who writes useless stuff, we have no idea what, and goes nutty for poetry. But when Rebein describes the chores he mastered, everything from repairing the sprinkler system to pouring concrete to herding cattle, I gotta admit, his family probably respects him, whatever they think of his profession.

His life-journey from fenced fields to bookshelf-lined professor's office reminds me of Black Earth and Ivory Tower, a book of essays written by former farm kids who ended up teaching at universities. Each essay muses on the tyranny of the agricultural life and the wide gulf between the parents who met its demands and the children for whom it holds no future.

For those I know in Kansas (and their book-clubbing friends) Rebein will appear at the Leawood Barnes & Noble on Wednesday, April 10th, at 7 p.m.

Since you'll be busy reading Rebein's absorbing recollections, you may look up sometime around dinner and panic over what to fix your crew. If you froze last week's Chicken Starter, you'll be well on your way to a meal of:

Tex-Mex Chicken Pasta

Official Misinformation

I don't suppose you want to gaze at pictures of the burning twin towers. One sickening run-through (with endless repeats for the next week or two) might have been plenty for you. But one day, I was at the library trying to get useful things done and my eye kept wandering over to a book on the shelf, 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. "The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers." It's a subject tantalizing enough to keep you from getting useful things done at the library, I tell ya.

I don't know about you, but my curiosity about what happened to everybody that day has not spent itself.

Even the ones that survived had no idea what happened. Something went boom. The building swayed. Smoke blew in through the vents. That it was a commercial airliner -- well, how inconceivable is that?

Some had a bad feeling, found the nearest stairway and got out. Some were trapped above the impact zone, spending that 102 minutes calling the fire department, relatives, anybody who could help. Some started down the stairs, then their supervisors told them to go back to their desks and wait for evacuation instructions. And they believed what they were told.

That's the scariest part of this story. We live in a highly interdependent society. We can't possibly know what we're doing all the time. So we turn to the experts. But when the unthinkable happens, how much do the experts really know?

Sure, they tell you there's a flotation device under your airplane seat, but is that thing really going to do you any good? If we land on water, aren't we all toast anyway? (And soggy toast at that!)

Sure, we're all storing our pictures and documents in the cloud now, but what if the elves who maintain that cloud somehow lose track of it? If a simple laptop can crash, how much more can go wrong with a satellite?

Makes me hope that any trouble I get into isn't groundbreakingly new. May the trains I ride and the germs I swallow all be known quantities so that when the experts tell me what to do, it's not the equivalent of curing cancer with leeches.

I'm striking quite a cheery note tonight, am I not?

Why don't I just recommend a strange little dish that I didn't expect to like? It features cabbage, the frumpiest crop on this planet. The only thing weirder would be kale, but kale has somehow gotten itself some hipster glasses and a fedora hat, and now it hangs out in coffeehouses and independent bookstores. Poor old cabbage is still the vegetable of oppressed peoples.

I just happen to like it, especially this mildly pepper-y version.

Pork Cabbage Saute

Placenta Lady

Childbirth was not such a bad thing. It was dramatic enough that I was the center of attention for a few hours. Then when things got really bad, events sped along and finished up, and somebody offered me a hearty breakfast afterward.

I understand, of course, that your mileage may vary.

It gets even better on the spectator end, because your party troops along to the hospital knowing something exciting is going to happen that day (or the next). You get to cheer the mother on, and shout out when you see the baby's head. You get to run out of the room after the baby's born and call everybody you know, then run back in and watch the little guy look around the room, taking it all in. You get to watch big brother and little infant face off for the first time.

So I can imagine why Peggy Vincent fell in love with delivering babies. In her memoir, Baby Catcher, she takes us along as she runs out of the house, sometimes in her flannel nighty, sometimes deep in Bay Area fog, and attends to her patients right in their homes. Vincent's births are scenes of siblings with their elbows on the bed, watching raptly, of women swaying, moaning or singing away the pain (whatever works), and of kittens playing with her shoelaces while she waits out a particularly long labor. Sometimes she takes a tea break. Sometimes she calls an ambulance, riding along as she holds the emerging baby's head in just a little longer.

This being Berkeley, she considers buying some Birkenstocks, just to fit in with the other midwives. But Vincent's face is as round and wholesome as the 4-H fair's prize squash judge.

Her husband accommodated her crazy schedule. Her children took it in stride when she came to school and showed placentas to the middle-school sex ed class. And Vincent herself rode the waves of a career she was passionate about, logging each of the 2,000+ births in her little book and flooding with memories every time she read her patients' names.

If it were me doing all that midwifing, I would would want somebody to whip up some Bacon 'n Egg Wraps  as soon as the baby lay safely in the mother's arms. I guess everybody's hungry when all the drama concludes.

Bash, Ram and Destroy

Oh, you thought we were cheering for That Other Football Game?

Sorry. I'm digging further down in the pile of fame by reading H. G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights.
Bissinger spent a year in Odessa, Texas, following the fortunes of the Permian Panthers, a team that grips the passion of its hometown so thoroughly that one fan, who had to miss a game because of his heart bypass surgery, refused his post-operation painkillers. After frequent phoned-in updates from his son-in-law, he finally consented to the drugs once he knew the game was secure.

A few of you may be far ahead of me in your Friday Night Lights fandom. Maybe you've watched the TV show. I hope to catch up with you (thank you Netflix).

But anyway, the hero boys of Permian High School all hope to be the boys in That Other Football Game. But first they need to round up scholarship offers from some big state college. And before that, there is the Friday night pressure to perform, which makes some of them vomit, or tape up that broken ankle and play anyway. There is the psyching up, the readiness to bash, ram and destroy the opponents, especially if they happen to come from Midland's Lee High School. Oh, yeah, and there's something about keeping grades up too. The author catches the team's biggest star in one of his classes, hard at it over a worksheet on the 95 uses for a microwave.

The Permian Panthers attracted 20,000 fans to their weekly games. Odessians lived for Friday nights, sadly because there was nothing else to live for. Odessa sits far out on a sandy plain. There is absolutely nothing to look at. There is oil to drill but, at the time Bissinger wrote his book (1988), Odessa's high times were over. Yards full of oil rigs sat idle. Bankruptcy and foreclosure ran high. If I were stuck in all that bleakness, I too would show up at the stadium every Friday night and stuff myself with nachos.

An especially poignant chapter checked in with Permian's yesteryear stars. "So, what was it like to be a prince all senior year and then adjust to real life?" Hint: It's a sad thing to peak early in life.
A few cow patties. Football boys ready to bash, ram and destroy don't talk like ministers.

And as for your recipe, how about what I call the Sunday Nap Meal? Throw it together, then crawl under the electric blanket and snooze. Wake up, slide the enchiladas in the oven, and catch up on Facebook while they bake.

Cheddar Beef Enchiladas

Creamy Corn

Long Time 'Til You Kiss a Girl

At Benjamin Nugent's 13th birthday party, he invited all the friends with whom he had bonded over sci-fi, Dungeons & Dragons, and computers. They sang the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme as the cake appeared, and told each other nerdy jokes.

What must his parents have thought? Perhaps they were simply glad that he had friends. But still . . .

"Do you tell him to ditch his friends because as long as he's one of them, he may not kiss a girl for a very long time? Or do you tell him to stick with them? Do you let him figure it out on his own even though you feel pretty certain he understands neither the nature of the dilemma nor what is at stake?"

Nugent, now a recovering nerd (if such a thing is possible), combs through literature and looks up a few of his old buddies to form a once-and-for-all definition of what a nerd is. In American Nerd: A Story of My People, he finds them in books as disparate as Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice. He hangs out at their weekend events, where they gather to discuss frames-per-second in their favorite sci-fi flick, or where they dress up in tights and chain mail and play out the heroic fantasies in their heads.

Even the Mormons show up when one of his skinny grade-school friend's mother finds the missionaries. Thank you, former-hippie mom, for making us all look like nutters.

After reading Nugent, you will definitely be able to spot a nerd. But then, you probably already can.

Frequent cow patties.

As for your recipe, maybe we should pay tribute to what nerds eat. But here at Bye-Bye Nesquik, it is beneath our standards to instruct you to order pizza, or to stuff yourself with Coke and Doritos. If you're going to eat the junky stuff, at least put some effort into it. The recipe below shouldn't overtax you:

Cocoa Munch Mix