What about Major Major?

Today we kiss 2011 goodbye, which I will do without regret.  I can't come up with any enthusiasm for taking a look at the year in review.  In my life, the biggest event of 2011 was my retirement, and I think I've beat the hell out of that subject enough.

So, let's talk about General George C. Marshall (12/31/1880 - 10/16/1959), whose birthday is today.  This guy was the Army Chief of Staff during World War II and later Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.  He is widely considered one of the brightest, ablest military men ever.

The thing for which I remember him fondly was his promotion in 1944.  Roosevelt wanted to elevate him, among other army generals, for setting us on the road to victory, but Marshall was already at the ceiling as a  four-star General.  The United States had never had a rank higher than that before.  Other countries with equivalent ranks did have one higher, the rank of field marshal.

But George Marshall did not want to be known as Field Marshal Marshall, so somebody decided to resurrect General of the Army for a five-star general.  (During the Civil War, that designation went with a rank of four stars, held only by Union Generals Grant, Sherman and Sheridan.)

There have only been four other Generals of the Army:  Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Arnold, and Omar Bradley.

I personally would have loved for him to be called Field Marshal Marshall, and I bet Joseph Heller would too. 

Happy new year, everyone.

That's how you get that way

On the way to the store yesterday, I heard something on the radio for orchestra and extremely bombastic piano that sounded like a Rhapsody in Blue knock-off, and as it came to a noisy conclusion, I was thinking that it was a rather poor imitation of Gershwin.  Then the announcer said it was Gershwin -- Rhapsody No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra. Oh, well, nice try, George.  I don't think I had ever heard that piece before, probably because it isn't famous enough, and it's not famous because it isn't very good.

There are levels of fame for works of music.  At one end are real esoteric things famous among music scholars (like L'homme Arme masses) and on the other you have the Top 40 Smash Hits of Classical Music, stuff that even my Aunt Blanche knows -- Scheherazade, Beethoven's Fifth, the Hallelujah Chorus, Peer Gynt Suite, things like that.

Those pieces well known to almost everybody got famous because they are very good, although I admit that there was a time when I sometimes tended to dismiss them as beneath the attention of a serious music scholar.  Actually, Scheherazade was one of those to which I gave little attention or credit until the university orchestra, of which I was a member, performed it.  During rehearsals, while I hung out in the percussion section waiting for it to be my turn to bang on something, I had an opportunity to listen, really listen, to it and its parts, and I gained a serious appreciation of it.

So I learned a lesson.  And did it make me change my ways and stop being a music snob?  Of course not.  (Remember my story about going to Barnes & Noble to buy a CD of Johann Herrmann Schein?)

Questions

I frequently find myself pondering questions to which I can find no good answer.  For instance:

Why is the mascot of the Lansing Lugnuts (minor league) baseball team a bolt?

Why does tea go from too hot to drink to cold?

Why does the most famous version of "Dueling Banjos" feature one banjo dueling with a guitar?

And here's one that came to mind this afternoon as I was driving home from the store:  Why do people insist on driving their cars when I'm driving mine?  Why can't they get the hell off the streets and out of my way?

Anybody who can shed light on any of these, feel free.

Post-Holiday Post

I have neglected the blog the last few days, but I've been pretty busy the last week what with Christmas and its attending requirements and distractions, which included company from out of town.  As I look back over the weekend, I feel like all I did was cook, and I must say that some of my culinary efforts were rather disappointing.

From watching too much of Anne Burrell's cooking show, I over-salted the water in which I boiled the potatoes, and the resulting potato salad was so salty as to be basically inedible.  One of our guests liked it a lot, however, so I sent all the rest of it home with him.

I decided to try Paula Deen's crock-pot macaroni and cheese.  Our crock-pot must be hotter than hers because after 60 minutes on low (one-third of the required time) it was about to burn.  And the eggs Paula said no southern mac and cheese dish was complete without actually curdled.  It tasted all right, but it looked mighty ugly.

I did have one gastronomic triumph by way of a tomato-cucumber salad that I more or less made up, and I was told the cherry pie was very good, even though I had to use frozen instead of fresh cherries.

It was my partner who had made the original request for potato salad and, therefore, felt cheated out of being able to eat on the left-overs, so yesterday I made another batch of potato salad just for her, which we had with our supper last night.  It should come as no surprise to anybody that it needs more salt.

An Overnight Guest

The garage door got left open yesterday.  I suddenly remembered it about 10:15 last night and went to shut it.  As soon as I hit the button and the door began to move, something came flying out of the far corner of the garage.  Scared the livin' daylights out of me.  After circumnavigating the garage twice, it came to rest on top of a tall shelf, and I was able to see it was a female cardinal.

I stopped and started the door a dozen times, which got her flying, but she always flew around near the ceiling, too high to get out the door.  My partner came to help, clapping her hands and woo-hooing to get the bird to move, and I waved a broom around when she was in flight, hoping to shoo her out the door, but she was always too high.

We tried closing the big door and opening the man-door that opens into the back yard, but she never went near that one.  We finally gave up, shutting the doors and wishing her a good night.

This morning I went to see how our house guest had fared.  When I opened the big garage door, she took off flying high again, but now she was bouncing her head repeatedly on the ceiling, which I took as a clear sign of desperation.  It was starting to get light out, so I just left the door open and turned off the lights in the garage, hoping she'd be able to see where the outdoors was.  When I went back to check ten minutes later, she had made her escape.

Bless her little heart.

Ralph. In Memoriam.

After posting yesterday's bit about left turns, my thoughts ran in the other direction, and I thought about hanging a Ralph, and that made me think of Linda Eisenstarck with whom I was very good friends when we were in high school.

One time when a bunch of us were somewhere, somebody told this joke:  A traveling salesman, driving in unfamiliar territory, stops at a gas station in a small town.  While the attendant is filling his tank, the salesman says to him, "Where am I?"  The gas-jockey says, "This is Queersville."  The salesman says, "That's a strange name for a town.  Why do they call it Queersville?"  The attendant says, "I don't know.  Let me ask my wife," whereupon he turns and calls out, "Hey, Ralph!  Why do they call this town Queersville?"

Okay, I know, I know, but to dumb teenagers in the early 60's, it was funny.  As a matter of fact, Linda Eisenstarck laughed so hard at that joke that we thought she would never recover.  Thereafter, any time you wanted to get Linda to laugh, all you had to do was say, "Hey, Ralph!" and she would crack up.  After a while we started calling her Ralph, and that nickname stuck with her for the rest of our school days.

A couple years ago, Linda Eisenstarck (whose name isn't Eisenstarck any more) got a hold of me via Facebook.  We emailed back and forth for a while, and on two occasions I mentioned something about how we used to call her Ralph.  Not once did she even acknowledge my having brought it up.

I could show her where in my senior yearbook she signed her name "Linda Ralph," but I suppose it is sometimes best to let sleeping memories lie. 

Hang Louie

If you are in the left-turn-only lane, do you have to put on your turn signal?  Doesn't everybody realize you're going to turn left?  Otherwise, why would you be in the left-turn-only lane?

When I was younger but no less a smartass, I would put on my right turn signal when I was in the left-turn lane, just for fun.  Just one of those things that makes me so damn cute.

It's in the mail

I went to the post office today to mail a couple things, and while I was there a woman made three trips from her car to bring in three large packages -- picture a 24-roll package of toilet paper.  Each one was covered in Christmas wrapping paper and had ribbons around them tied in an elaborate bow on top.  The name and address of the recipient was taped on the top also, just south of the bow.

The clerk said to her, "Are you going to ship these like this?"  The woman said, "Sure, I don't care if the bows get squished."

Squished?  The bows and ribbon and that flimsy Christmas paper will be torn off of them before they get halfway there.  I've seen how the post office handles packages.

A long time ago I worked at a place that had a huge, empty warehouse.  At Christmas time they leased this space to the post office for sorting packages.  Two guys took the packages off a truck and threw them into (or, more precisely, in the direction of) one of a couple dozen big canvas bins.  They frequently missed, especially with the bins farthest away from them, of course.  Another postal worker walked around picking the packages up off the floor and throwing or dropping them, if they were lucky, into the correct bin.  Sometimes one of the guys would shout, "Hey, Bill -- this one says fragile," and Bill would make an attempt to catch that one as it came flying through the air.

Those bows don't stand a chance.

Chef, Football, and Postage Stamps

While watching The Next Iron Chef on the Food network last week, it came to me suddenly that Chef Beau MacMillan looks a lot like Buzz Lightyear.  Don't you think?

He was eliminated last week, so he won't be the next Iron Chef, and neither will Anne Burrell, who got the hook last night.  She is the particular favorite of my partner, so there was a little bit of sadness at our house.

I was already sad because the Bears lost to Denver in OT, but I am taking the rest of this season's results philosophically since their quarterback and now their star running back are both injured.

I needed to put $1.48 on an envelope today (which I know because I weighed it on my handy USPS-issued postal scale), so I got out my glassine envelope of postage stamps to see what I could come up with.  I had a $1 stamp and a 44-cent stamp, and a 4-center, which would have done admirably, but why use three stamps when twelve would do just as well?  The cents-worth I stuck on there were 44, 24, 17, 17, 10, 10, 10, 5, 5, 4, 1, and 1.  I believe the result is much more aesthetically pleasing.

I also believe I am believed to be something of a nut case, but as long as I'm having fun, who cares?

Truth in Advertising

Pizza Hut has a television commercial in which a bunch of people are eating a bunch of pizzas, and the voice-over guy says, "Any pizza, any size, any crust, any toppings -- for only $10!"  Then a disclaimer appears at the bottom of the screen that says, among other things, "Additional charge for stuffed crust."

Didn't the guy just get done saying "any crust"?  Huh?  Didn't he?

What if you were blind and could only hear the commercial?  You would call them up and say you wanted a 45" pizza with 18 toppings and stuffed crust, and they would say, okay, that comes to $54.78.

And you would say, no, it's supposed to be $10.

And they would say, no, there's an additional charge for stuffed crust.

And then you would say, but the television commercial says any pizza, any size, any crust, any toppings is ten bucks.

And then they would say, but it also says in the disclaimer that stuffed crust is extra.

And you would say, what disclaimer?

And they would say, the one that's right there on the screen in plain sight -- what're you, blind?

Let It Snow

I came across a reference this morning to that old axiom that no two snowflakes are exactly alike.

That's horsebleep.

How would anybody know that?  Who has had a chance to see, catalogue, and compare every snowflake that has ever fallen on the planet Earth?

The number of snowflakes that will fall on Michigan this winter alone will be something like a gazillion to the gazillionth power, and you cannot tell me that among them there won't be at least one that is a dead ringer for some other flake that has fallen somewhere on this planet in the last, say, 10 million years.

I mean, really.

Another one of those days in history

Today is Grandma Knez's birthday.  She was born Otilie Tekla Melka in 1889 in a small town called Černice in what is now the Czech Republic.  She was 4 foot 10 and very round, probably because she enjoyed her own cooking and baking -- and so did everybody else.  When I think of her, I generally see her in her kitchen, a large crockery bowl on her hip, beating its contents vigorously with a wooden spoon.

It is also St. Nicholas Eve today, December 6 being the feast day of the 4th-Century Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, who is the patron saint of, among others, sailors, archers, merchants, and children, and who becomes Santa Claus in our culture.  When I was young, we hung stockings on St. Nicholas Eve, a tradition my grandparents brought with them from the old country.  Candy and toys were good, coal and potatoes were bad.  (When coal was getting harder to come by, my mother decided a raw potato conveyed the same message.)  To emphasize her belief that no child was ever completely good, there was always at least one piece of coal or one potato in our stockings along with the treats.

And as if that were not enough, it was on this date in 1933 that Prohibition was repealed.  Now there's something to celebrate.

It is good to obey the rules

I see that today is the birthday of Austrian composer Anton Webern (born in Vienna in 1883).  He studied with Arnold Schoenberg and became a leading proponent of twelve-tone serial music, but he also extended serialization to include other musical elements, such as rhythm and dynamics.

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Webern.  I believe a paper I wrote about him is what got me accepted into Michigan State's doctoral program in music theory.  Actually, it wasn't so much about him but about his String Trio, Op. 20, which I analyzed to within an inch of its life.  It's a fascinating piece from an analytical standpoint, but it isn't very pretty to listen to.  Most of Webern's music isn't pretty to listen to, actually, but he holds an important place in 20th-Century music.

What is really fascinating about Webern is his untimely end.  He was living in Salzburg during the Allied occupation of Austria following the end of World War II.  One evening in September, 1945, Webern, in violation of a curfew, went out onto his front porch to smoke a cigar.  A passing patrol of American soldiers saw the flame from the match and shot him to death.

A matter of perspective

This morning while perusing the list of people born on December 1, I noted that among them are Mary Martin (12/1/1913 - 11/3/1990) and Cyril Ritchard (12/1/1897 - 12/18/1977).  I find that interesting because she was Peter Pan to his Captain Hook in the musical adaptation of Peter Pan that opened on Broadway in October of 1954 and ran for 152 performances until February, 1955.

In March of 1955, an anthology series called "Producers' Showcase," which NBC used to showcase its color programming, broadcast a 90-minute version of the Broadway hit.  Mary flew around on wires, and Cyril was as evil as he could be.  I remember watching it, live and in black-and-white (because we didn't have a color TV).  I was eight and a half years old at the time, and I thought it was marvelous.

The show was so well received that it was repeated, live, in 1957 and again in 1960.  Video tape had been invented by then, and in 1973, NBC decided to show that last performance again.  They made a big deal out of it, hyping it for weeks.  A friend of mine made a small party out of it, inviting me and a couple other twenty-somethings to watch it at her house and share in the collective nostalgia.  Before the show came on, we assembled drinks and snacks and entertained each other with our memories of the original event.

Finally it was time for the show to start.  With giddy anticipation we all settled down in front of the tube.  After watching about ten minutes of what we unanimously declared to be the hokiest thing we'd ever seen, we turned it off and spent the rest of the evening playing pinochle.

Check Your Facts

I once worked with a young woman who -- for a reason I will never understand -- believed that her best bet for impressing people was to acquaint them with an appalling medical history.  She happily discussed a veritable medical journal's worth of diseases, conditions, syndromes, and complaints she had suffered, all of which were exaggerated if not completely fictitious. 

She was too young to have been in the hospital that many months that many times; and a little better medical knowledge might have given some credence to her claims.  She told me, for instance, that she used to have to wear very thick eyeglasses to correct very bad astigmatism but that it went away by itself.  She also said her sinuses were so bad, she had to have them removed.

The small company we worked for was slowly going bankrupt, and while the owners were out trying to sell the product, she and I were sometimes the only ones in the office.  At those times, she concocted attacks and episodes and spells she hoped would get her out of work.  I don't know why she bothered.  It was nothing to me, since I was not her boss.

One day she pretended to faint.  I heard her hit the floor, but I just ignored it.  Eventually she began to moan softly, which I also ignored, but finally, not wanting to waste a good fall, she called out (very weakly, of course), and I was forced to go into her cube where she appeared to be just coming to.  I looked down at her and said something real compassionate, like, "What the hell's your problem?"

My favorite, though, was the time she thought she had not only figured out a way to get around being late for work, but also how to get the rest of the day off.

We both started at 8:00 o'clock, but on this morning she finally came hobbling into the office at 8:30, bravely bearing up under the horrific pain of some significant injury she had sustained.  She had slipped on ice, she said, and lain in the parking lot for over 30 minutes before she mustered the strength to drag herself into the building. 

I believed she had fallen (her knee was scraped, her stocking torn), but I knew it hadn't occurred more than five minutes before.  She counted on me being on time, as I usually was, but that morning I was late coming to work.  If she had been in the parking lot when I arrived at 8:25, I'd have seen her. 

I didn't call her out on that lie because I had a better idea.  She was convinced she had dislocated her spine, or some such nonsense, and thought she should just go on home.  I, however, insisted that such a serious injury required immediate medical attention, whereupon I called an ambulance, which came and took her away.

And I spent the rest of that day grinning to myself.

Done for now

So, one holiday down.  And traditional it was -- turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, cranberries, pumpkin pie.  I had leftovers for lunch again today.  I might be just about burned out on that too, although there's still plenty left.

There was plenty of football too.  I will probably never surpass, nor even equal, my personal record of having watched nine football games over Thanksgiving weekend in 1976.  But I saw the ones I wanted to see and parts of various others that were interesting.  The Bears lost.  Michigan State won.  The Lions also lost, which is too bad.  I don't care about the Lions, but I wish somebody would beat Green Bay already.

And speaking of America's national pastime (Frank DeFord says it has overtaken baseball), I am tired of hearing football commentators say that a forward pass is "almost intercepted" just because the defensive player who is covering the intended receiver gets a finger on the ball or has it bounce off his shoulder pad or his head.  When the defender has the ball in his hands and drops it, then it is almost intercepted.

Gearing up for the next bunch of holiday events now.  And football games.  I'm tired already.

Anybody have change for a twenty?

A friend just sent me seven coins she brought home from a trip to Hong Kong, which I was glad to get and add to my little collection of oddball coins.

The problem was, I couldn't identify five of them.  There are handy, helpful sites all over the Internet that I use to identify coins, but I couldn't even figure out what denomination these were.  After broadening my search, I discovered they were not from Hong Kong at all but from Japan.

I love researching foreign coins, but sometimes I find one that stumps me.  A few years ago someone gave me a coin she said was from Greece.  I looked up Greek coins and couldn't find one like it, then on closer examination I decided the writing on it was not Greek at all but Cyrillic.

With that determined, I started looking at Russian coins, but that got me nowhere too.  Finally,  I got the bright idea to transliterate the words on the coin.  I found a chart online that showed the Cyrillic alphabet with the Roman equivalent for each letter.

On the reverse of the coin was "20" and then the word СТОТИНКИ.  Just taking each equivalent letter, this came out to be STOTINKI.  I thought to myself, this can't be right -- nobody has money called stotinki.

Well, you know what?  Bulgaria does.  Their unit of currency is the lev, divided into 100 stotinki, which is actually plural -- one is a stotinka.

In American dollars, 20 stotinki is about 14 cents.  Oh, well.  Its real value is that it is my first and only coin from Bulgaria.

A Sunday Birthday

My mother, Elizabeth Anna Weatherford, was born 90 years ago today in Hillsboro, Illinois.  Last year on this date I presented the newspaper announcement of her birth.  That does not seem like a year ago.  Tempus is definitely fugiting.

November 20, 1921, was a Sunday.  She also died on a Sunday (August 15, 1971).  Last month when I was writing about my father's birthday, I checked to see what day of the week October 13 was in 1912, and it was a Sunday too, and he also died on a Sunday (January 22, 1978).

How freaky is it that both my parents were born and died on Sunday?

If this runs in the family, I should be extremely careful on Fridays.

Stop n Shop

Once again this year I am doing my Christmas shopping online.  It's just a matter of pointing and clicking, and I've got a lot of it done already.  It lacks the interpersonal experience of going to the store where you can touch and feel and heft and poke things to see what they really are about.  But it certainly is easier.

When I was a kid, my mother and aunt and I always made one very special Christmas shopping trip to downtown Chicago, which required a bus and an elevated train to reach.  It was usually within close range of Christmas, so it was cold and often snowy, and the Loop was in full festive decoration, and the stores were busy, the sidewalks crowded.  We would hit all the big department stores -- Wieboldt's and Carson's and The Fair -- and no trip was complete without a visit to Marshall Field's to see the famous Christmas tree that was four -- or was it five? -- stories tall.

During one such shopping trip just about in the middle of the 1950's, we were in Field's taking the elevator up to the seventh floor where the ladies' lounge was.  It stopped along the way and one woman got on.  Unlike every other woman in the elevator and in the store and in the Loop, she was wearing slacks.  Even I at age nine or ten noticed it, since shopping (or  just being) downtown in Chicago was a dress-up affair.  She got off on the next floor, and the second the doors had closed behind her, a woman turned to her companion and said with disdain, "Hmmp!  I wonder what suburb she's from."

We were from the suburbs too by then, but luckily we knew how to behave.

I wonder what that women would think of me sitting in my jammies pointing and clicking my way to Christmas shopping success.

But he didn't come to dinner after all

I was flipping channels earlier and came across "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," the 1967 film that is probably considered a classic if for no other reason than it was the last of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn flicks, and, in fact, Tracy's last film.  It was a bit touchy in its day, all about inter-racial marriage, or the prospect thereof, between Katharine Houghton -- Hepburn's niece, who never did much else in the movies -- and Sidney Poitier, who did.  Good movie, though, with a great cast, including Cecil Kellaway as a lovable teddy bear.  Beah Richards as Poitier's mother is especially wonderful, but she always is.

I remember when my parents came home from having gone to see the movie, which I had already seen.  We talked about it -- the Tracy- Hepburn end-of-an-era thing, how old and near-death Spencer Tracy looked.  But with regard  to the social and familial implications of the story, I said to my mother, "So, how would you feel about it if I brought home a young man I wanted to marry who was black?"

She ruminated on that for about three seconds and then said, "Well, if he looks like Sidney Poitier, that'll be all right."

Da Bears and Binny's

Bears games are not on television in mid-Michigan very often, unless it's a Sunday- or Monday-night telecast or they are playing Detroit.  Yesterday they did play the Lions in Chicago, so I got to see that one.  It was a good game, which da Bears won handily (37-13) and in which Devin Hester set an all-time NFL record for the most punts returned for touchdowns (12). 

My mother had a good friend named Ruth who was a big Bears fan.  Football teams can black out telecasts of home games in the local market if they aren't sold out, and back in the 1960's and 70's that happened quite a bit to the Bears.  But that didn't stop Ruth.  On those Sundays, she and her husband and mother and brother Hank and his wife would all pile into the car and drive northwest toward Rockford to a motel that was the required 75 miles from Chicago.  They rented a room for the afternoon and watched the game on the TV there.

When I can't see the Bears on television, I listen to the games on WBBM radio from Chicago, which I can stream on my computer.  It's not the same, of course, but at least I know what's going on when it's going on. 

A fringe benefit of the radio show from Chicago is the homey little ads they read.  My favorite is the one for a liquor store called Binny's Beverage Depot, which always ends with, "If you can't find it at Binny's Beverage Depot, it's probably not worth drinkin'."

A-men, brother.

11-11-11

Nobody could expect me to let today's date go by without comment.  I have been noticing and pointing out to others such funky dates ever since 5-5-55.

But today's date has a unique double-digit-ness that makes it way cooler than 10-10-10 was or 12-12-12 is going to be.

It is not only in dates that I've always appreciated ones and/or elevens.  For many years -- probably ever since I owned my first digital clock -- whenever I notice the time is 11:11, I always say out loud, "One one one one."  I'm not sure why I do that.  Possibly I just like ones.  Maybe because I was born on 11-1.  Or maybe because I myself am so singular.

So, this morning -- at eleven minutes after eleven o'clock, I should say, "One one one one one one one one one one."  I don't think I will, actually, but I will try to mark the time by pausing at that hour to remember all who have served our country in war and in peace, especially all those men and women who are still in harm's way today and whom I would like to see come home in one piece very soon.

How about Frosty Chicken?

Remember Cold Duck?  Maybe not, if you're under 40.  It was all the rage in the early 1970's.  The best-known brand was Andre, made by Gallo, and I have just discovered, by calling my favorite wine merchant, that it is still available at $5.89 a bottle.  This stuff is right up there with Mad Dog 20/20.

The story is that in Bavaria long ago they mixed red wine with left-over champagne, so as not to waste it, and called this concoction Kaltes Ende (German for "cold end"), which somebody later punned into Kaltes Ente, which means "cold duck."  Some dude in Detroit started marketing the stuff in America in 1939.  Apparently it is still made by mixing sparkling wine with red wine.  As far as I can remember, it tastes rather like carbonated cough medicine.

I got to thinking about this yesterday when I saw a Paula Deen show on which she roasted a duck.  It reminded me of the time my mother was in the hospital, long about 1971 it would have been.  One evening when I went to visit her, she told me she had overheard the strangest conversation between two nurses who were standing in the hallway just outside her room.  They were talking about some get-together they were going to that night, and one of them said, "I'm going to bring Cold Duck."  The second nurse said, "Oh, that's great!  I love Cold Duck!"

My mother wrinkled up her nose and said, "Why would they want to have cold duck?  I don't even like duck hot."

Miller's Wedding

I was planning to attend the wedding of a college friend named Sue Miller, whom we never called anything but Miller.  It was February of 1970, I believe, in the small town of Columbus, Wisconsin.  It was about a three-hour drive from where I lived near Chicago, and I decided to drive up the day of the wedding, a Saturday.  Miller's parents had generously invited me, among a number of other out-of-town guests, to spend Saturday night at their house.

I was dressed for the occasion in my powder-blue imported Italian knit suit.  I wore black pumps with three-inch heels and carried a black satin envelope bag that was barely big enough to hold my wallet and a pack of cigarettes.  Having nothing elegant enough of my own to go with this outfit, I borrowed my mother's champagne-colored Borgana coat with the shawl-collar-wrap-around front.  Its wide, rolled-up sleeves were three-quarter length, so long, cream-colored gloves finished me off.

The wedding was at 2:00, and I got to Columbus about noon.  I drove around the little town a while, not finding the church, and finally pulled into the parking lot of a little cafe along the main highway.  I think it might actually have had a sign that said "EAT."

I went in and took a booth.  Two booths away was a quartet of teenagers, the only other patrons in the place.  A phlegmatic young woman took my order for a grilled cheese sandwich, and while it was being prepared, I availed myself of the restroom.  When my lunch arrived, I asked the young waitress if she could direct me to St. Jerome's Church.

"That's a Catholic church," she said, eyeing me suspiciously.  I replied that I knew that, and then she said, "There's a wedding there today," as if warning me to stay away.  I wanted to ask her where the hell she thought I was going in my powder-blue imported Italian knit suit and my mother's champagne-colored Borgana coat, and long, cream-colored gloves with my black envelope bag.  But I resisted and simply asked her again if she knew where the church was.  She replied, "I know where it is, but I can't tell you how to get there."

Just then one of the young people in the other booth called out, "Do you want to go to St. Jerome's?"  Why the hell do you think I was asking about it? I wanted to say, but I resisted, and I was given the following directions.  "Go that way," he said, pointing out the window, "and turn right at the first street.  Then go to the four corners, turn left, and keep going until you get to the big white house where Smith's used to live, then turn right.  You'll see it."

Of course, I wanted to say, How the hell am I supposed to know where the Smith's used to live? but I didn't.  I thanked him, finished my sandwich, and left.  I found the church, and the rest went off without any hitches that I remember, at least until the next day.

After the reception I had followed several cars to the Millers' house.  It was dark, and I had absolutely no idea where I was going.  In the morning, I found my way down to the kitchen where Mrs. Miller was making a huge, wonderful breakfast for everyone.  She asked me what I'd like to drink, and I said, "Do you have milk?"

"Do I have milk?" she repeated, as if she'd never heard anything so stupid.  "Honey, you're on a dairy farm." 

Obviously I have fond memories of that trip, especially the moment when I bid farewell to the Millers and their guests.  I had taken a change of clothes, of course, but I had forgotten to bring a jacket, so I walked out to my car with as much dignity as I could muster wearing jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, and my mother's champagne-colored Borgana coat.

Pulchritude in November

It is a dreary day.  It is dark and rainy and windy and cold and, well, November.

There is a poem by Robert Frost called "My November Guest" that keeps coming to me.  In it he personifies sorrow (specifically, in fact, his own, for he calls her "my sorrow") as a woman who sees remarkable beauty in "these dark days of autumn rain."  She thinks he doesn't appreciate what she sees, but he confides in us that he has long known "The love of bare November days / Before the coming of the snow" but hasn't admitted it to her because he likes to hear her praise "The desolate, deserted trees, / The faded earth, the heavy sky." 

I have always liked that poem very much, but when I look outside today I am having a hard time seeing anything as beautiful as he claims to have seen.  Of course, he had his sorrow with him, so perhaps I am just not sad enough today.  A couple more days of this kind of weather, however, and I should be so depressed that the view out my window will appear to be the single most gorgeous thing I've ever seen in my life.

Tony's Cat

I used to know a guy named Tony.  An actor, was Tony, when he could get parts in local theater; a community arts coordinator the rest of the time.

Tony had a gorgeous cat, a big, long-haired Persian or Angora or similar breed, with very long, luxurious white fur, smallish ears, and blue eyes.  Like many white-haired, blue-eyed cats, it was deaf.  The first time I saw this cat, I was stunned at how regal and elegant it looked.  I asked what its name was, and Tony told me the cat was called Larry.

I said that was a horrible name for such a spectacular cat.  Tony said he hadn't named the cat, the people he got the cat from had.  I suggested he change its name to something mysterious and Oriental, but Tony said no, he was sure it was too late -- the cat was used to its name.

To which I replied, "He's DEAF!!  He's never heard his name."

Tony remained unconvinced.  Larry didn't seem to notice we were talking about him.

That's just wrong, and on my birthday too

Just as I predicted, today is my birthday.  I was born on Friday, November 1, 1946, at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois.  I arrived at 11:45 a.m., just in time for lunch.

The hospital bill, which has been kept all these years in The Box (see October 20 posting), lists all charges for the delivery as well as care for mother and baby for six and a half days, and it shows the total amount due of $88.30.

Have healthcare costs gone completely insane?  Yes.  There is something real wrong here.   Okay, it was 65 years ago, so to put it in perspective, I ran it through an inflation calculator available online from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  That hospital stay would cost $1,027 today.

Is there today a hospital where you can have a baby for which the bill will be just over a thousand dollars?  I don't think so.  Besides that, where can you even find a hospital that will let mother and baby stay a week?

It makes that 88 bucks seem like quite a bargain.  I'd like to think I was worth every cent.

Tricking and Treating

I talked last year about how I hate Halloween, and about this being the anniversary (59 years now) of the day I got my first pair of glasses, and about all those Halloween-motif birthday parties I had.  So I won't go over all that old ground again.  But I still don't like Halloween.

We were not bothered by any trick-or-treaters tonight, even though we were home this evening for the first time in a long time. Usually we go out to avoid it all. But, since our porch light wasn't on, nobody came. I like it when the rules are followed. 

I am now focusing on my birthday tomorrow.  I am anxious to see if 65 is everything it's cracked up to be.  I'll let you know.

I think the Cubs lost that game

A very long time ago when I was in graduate school, a friend of mine named Deb was trying to fix me up with a friend of her husband's, a fellow named Mike.  This was back in the days when I didn't know then what I know now, so I didn't discourage her, but when there never seemed to be an opportunity for us to meet, I didn't regret it either.

Nevertheless, once Mike moved into the apartment next to mine, it seemed inevitable, and Deb hounded him about coming over to meet me.  Finally, he did.  He stopped by one afternoon and found me watching a Cubs game on television.  I invited him in, and we sat there and chatted while we watched the game, which provided good conversational fodder -- he said something about how amazing it was that the Cubs had acquired Bill Buckner, and I said that if his knees weren't so bad, the Dodgers would have kept him -- that sort of thing.  It was very pleasant and innocuous.

A few days later Deb told me Mike had mentioned his visit with me.  She said to him, "So, what do you think?" to which he replied, "She sure knows her baseball!"

So much for feminine allure.

Things that go yuck in the night

I was baking this afternoon, having a hell of a time with a recipe that was supposed to make cake batter and made wallpaper paste instead.  I got it going eventually, and while batches of mini cupcakes were baking a dozen at a time, I busied myself cleaning up as I went.  The whole exercise was so laborious that with only half the batter used, I simply up and quit, throwing the rest out.  Then I sat down to rest for 90 minutes.

Just now I went back to the kitchen to continue cleaning up, and I was faced with a sinkful of dirty pans and utensils idling in cold dishwater.  God, there is nothing I hate more than putting my hands into cold, greasy dishwater.  Yuck.

Something I have long known about myself is that I can deal with just about any icky thing as long as I don't have to touch it with my bare hands.  I can handle animal by-products, science experiments found in the back of the refrigerator -- in short, any of the gloppy messy stuff that one comes across in the ordinary course of one's existence.

My partner keeps a pair of Playtex dishwashing-type gloves in the under-sink cabinet.  So why didn't I just put them on?

Quite an undertaking

When my mother died (40 years ago) my father and I went to the funeral home to finalize the arrangements she had already made for herself, which called for one evening of what they now call visitation, and that was all.  "Private" cremation was to follow the next day, which only the funeral home staff would deal with.

We were required to pick out a casket.  Even the half-way decent looking ones were expensive, and since it was only going to be used one night for the wake and then burned, my father asked if we could just rent one.  The man said no -- it was against state health laws, because, after all, the person might have had a disease or something.

To which my father replied, "The next guy layin' in it wouldn't care much, would he?"

Nevertheless, we bought a casket.

A number of years later I got to thinking about having no muss or fuss when I die, so I called a local funeral home to inquire about possibilities.  I found that the exact thing I want is known in the trade as "immediate cremation" -- no wake, no funeral, no nothing, they just take the body away and burn it.  Remembering the bit about the casket, I asked, "Can you get a pine box for a coffin, or something cheap like that?"

The woman I was talking to said, "Yes, there is an inexpensive corrugated model that can be used."

"Oh, wow!" I cried.  "A cardboard box!  How cool is that?"

Although I couldn't see her, I could tell the woman on the other end of the line was sitting up very straight in her chair and stiffening her upper lip as she said in a very dignified tone, "It is a corrugated casket."

Yeah, yeah -- call it want you want.  I want to go out in a cardboard box.

P.S.  On the instruction sheet for the arrangements, my mother had checked the box for organ music at the wake, but there was a hand-written note in the margin that said, "Do not play 'In the Garden,' or I will get up and walk out."  She meant it too.

Just Between Everybody

Remember the mouse and the box?  Some teacher used it to illustrate prepositions, showing what the mouse could do -- he could go in the box, or on the box, or before the box, or over the box, or around the box, and a whole bunch more.

The mouse can also be between two boxes.  What the mouse cannot do is be between three or four boxes.  It is not possible.  He can be among three or four or more boxes, but not between them.  He can only be between two things.

And yet at least 10 times a day I hear people saying that someone will divide something between four people, is standing between three trees, or is having to decide between five things.  Can't be done.  The word to use is among.

I know that languages evolve constantly and that changes are inevitable.  I'm just trying to hold off the worst of it as long as I can.

U Pick

A friend of mine has frequently mentioned two elderly aunts of hers. They are twins, named Verna and Vera, and are apparently very much alike. 

One evening when several of us were out to dinner, my friend began, "Did I tell you what my Aunt Verna did last week?" 

Another friend interrupted her, saying, "Now, wait -- which one is Verna?  Is she the one who's crazy, or the one who eats paper?"

Yes.

Where's the Colgate Invisible Gardol Shield when you need it?

There's a TV commercial that talks about doggie dentures, and it's too bad it's a joke, because my tiny dog, now 10 (or 70 in human years) is having trouble with her tiny teeth.  She has trouble chewing the dry kibble, and for the last couple weeks she has been eating only once every 36 hours.  I haven't switched to wet dog food because it always gives her the runs.  Her system might adapt after a while, but I'm not up to a week or two of doggie diarrhea until it does.

The solution, then, was to soften her food by adding something, but what?  Water?  Boring.  Canned dog food?  Maybe, but I don't happen to have any just now, and my dog is not eating.  So -- I went with something I do have on hand and that I know she loves:  potted meat.

Just a teaspoon of it, mixed with her 1/4 cup of kibble, and she ate it up.  But after about three days of that I got to worrying about the fat content of the potted meat -- might be too much for every meal.  So I yesterday I moistened her dry food with diluted peanut butter.  Also worked like a charm.  This morning I was wondering what else I could try when I opened the pantry door and saw a jar of Heinz beef gravy.  I've just fixed up her dish of kibble in gravy, and my tiny dog is chowing it down so fast and with such enthusiasm that she is snorting like a pig.

We are going to have to work on her table -- uh, floor manners.

The Box (Part 2)

When I was a kid, my mother purchased a file box in which she intended to keep important papers.  I remember it because she always made such a big deal out of it.  It was made of medium-gauge metal, a sort of mottled maroon color, large enough to hold letter-size file folders upright, four inches worth of them.  It had a lock and a thin metal handle on its lid.  Although not fireproof, its metal-ness gave a sense of security. 

Mother referred to it always as ... "The Box."  When she said it, you knew those letters were capitalized.  If a birth certificate was needed, or a car title, or last year's income tax return, or an insurance policy, she would say, "Look in The Box."

After she died, my father took charge of The Box.  When he died, The Box came to me.  I have added to its contents things like death certificates and passports and wills and every one of my report cards from Kindergarten through graduate school.  I have discarded many things over the years, too -- old income tax returns and papers dealing with cars or dwellings or money matters that are no longer part of my life.

One thing that has been in The Box as long as I can remember is a small file wallet that contains my father's World War II draft notice (with the medical rejection on the back dated June 8, 1942), a copy of his birth certificate (issued March 22, 1943), and a Valentine card he sent to my mother.  According to the back of the colorful card ("To a Sweetheart of a Wife, Happy Valentine's!"), it cost 25 cents.  The two-cent stamp on the envelope is upside down, and it is postmarked February 11, 1944, thirteen days after they were married. 

That little collection will always stay with The Box.

The Box (Part 1)

When I was about 11 years old, I got my mother a recipe box for Christmas. I’m not sure how I got the idea, but I knew exactly what I wanted: a metal file box to hold three-by-five index cards.

Most such boxes in those days were a dark army green, but at our local Ben Franklin five-and-dime I found the perfect one -- red plaid with white trim. In addition, I was able to get a packet of dividers with food categories already printed on the tabs, along with a pack of blank cards to make the package complete.

My mother loved it and used that recipe box for the rest of her life. I still have it, of course. The outside is a bit yellowed, but it is not dented or rusted, and the lid's hinge still works smoothly. Most of the tabs on the dividers are dog-eared.  One card has a bit of cake batter on it, a couple show splashes of liquid, and one is splattered with grease.

A few of the cards were provided by others, but most of them are in my mother's own hand, or typed by her (I recognize the type face of that old Remington portable). She put a notation in the upper right corner of every card indicating the source of the recipe:  a person's name, a product, a newspaper.  On several, the notation in the upper right corner is "My Own," underlined.

I keep my recipes in Word documents in a file called “Cookbook” on my computer. I copied all the recipes from her file box into my computer documents long ago, but I still can't bring myself to get rid of that box or its contents. I probably never will.

Another date in history

Today's date rang a faint bell with me, and I looked it up.  It is a date from my family tree, the birthday of my maternal grandmother, Blanche Alberta Hefley, born in 1899 in Hillsboro, Illinois.  She married Ralph Bayless Weatherford -- ran off and eloped with him, as a matter of fact -- on November 1, 1920.  She died on November 6, 1985.

I never liked the old lady myself.  I've been trying to think of one fun incident, one nice memory, one endearing thing she might have done or said that I could relate about her, and I can't.  She was selfish and greedy and bossy and treated my mother badly.  She was so avaricious that she verged on being a hoarder, saving anything she might get more use from.  That extended to her kitchen also.  We called her refrigerator The Ptomaine Box.

It is revealing that my mild-mannered father -- who never called people names, thought it was boorish to say bad things about anybody, and considered it especially unchivalrous to malign a woman -- referred to her as "that old battle axe."

I'd say there is no point celebrating.

A couple questions about today's game

Michigan State 28, Michigan 14 -- yeah, that game.

Question 1:  How does a football player take a punch at another player and not get thrown out of the game?

Question 2:  What injury do you expect to inflict by throwing a punch with your bare fist at the head of a guy wearing a football helmet with a face mask?  To him, I mean -- I already know what could happen to your hand.

I enjoyed the game, though.  Go Green.

On This Date in 1912

My father, Albert James Knez, was born 99 years ago today, in Chicago.  The name on his birth certificate is Vojtěch Václav Kněz.  Vojtěch is always Anglicized as Albert and Václav as James, based on the names given to corresponding saints.

Although he preferred to be called Al, a lot of his friends and family called him Alfie when he was young.  Because of that, my mother had assumed that his name was Alfred.  She said she didn't learn otherwise until the minister said, "Do you, Albert, take this woman..." and she said, "Albert? Who's Albert?"

No -- I don't think that's exactly how it happened either, but it's a fun story that she liked to tell.

Happy birthday, Alfie.

Wednesday

I used to always look forward to checking the New York Times on Wednesdays because that's the day they print the week's new recipes in the "Dining and Wine" section.  But they have been going downhill, and lately they have gotten a lot worse.  Here's a sample from today:

Mixed Bean and Winter Squash Stew with Fresh Basil
Roasted Beets With Chiles, Ginger, Yogurt and Indian Spices
Bulgur and Kale Casserole with Yogurt Topping

Are you kidding me?  These sound like dishes the contestants on Chopped would come up with from the items in their mystery baskets.

What's wrong with pot roast?  How about a recipe for really good lasagna?  And it's not just that newspaper.  All the magazines and web sites where I have found recipes over the years seem to be trying to outdo each other with outrageous recipes calling for combinations of weird things I wouldn't eat separately, much less mixed together. 
 
Well, here's what I'm going to whip up for supper tonight:  corn-cob-and-wheat-germ-crusted turtle dove brains in eggplant and grape jelly sauce on a bed of pencil shavings and Siberian lettuce with banana and tunafish vinaigrette.
 
I mean, really.
 
 

Nomenclature Befitting

In April of 1994, my partner and I took a weekend jaunt to Toronto.  On Saturday night we went to the Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner, and the place was packed.  Every piece of furniture, antique or otherwise, in their lobby was occupied, and even room to stand wasn't plentiful.  I noticed a lot of people had drinks, which seemed to me a good way to pass the time, so I made my way to the bar to fetch us each a cocktail.

After a time we found seats, and settled down to wait.  My partner nudged me with an elbow and discreetly indicated a man and woman sitting directly opposite.  He was sitting in the seat of a large hall tree, and she was sitting on its wide arm.  I had already noticed them.  I think everybody had already noticed them.  They were furious with each other.  They both sat still, not talking, not looking around, not even lifting their glasses to their lips, just sitting completely immobile and staring straight ahead with looks of barely suppressed rage on their faces.  It must have been one hell of a row they had on the way to the restaurant.

We found the situation amusing, of course, but not nearly as funny as when those two got up in response to the hostess calling, "Smiley -- party of two."

Absolutely True

This is another story that involves a joke, although this joke is a tad raunchy. I hope I have presented it in a way that does not offend. It goes like this:

A young man was so in love with his girlfriend Wendy that he had her name tattooed on his, um … you know -- private part. When this part was, well -- relaxed -- all you could see was the W and the Y, but he thought that was fine since Wendy was the only one who should ever see it when it was … um, shall we say … expanded to the point where one could see her whole name.

They went to Jamaica for a vacation, and while there they visited a nude beach. The young man saw a Jamaican life guard at the beach who had a W and a Y tattooed on his … that same part … also, and he pointed to his own and then to the life guard’s, and said, ‘Hey! Look at us! Do you have a girlfriend named Wendy too?”

To which the lifeguard replied (supply your own Jamaican accent here), “No -- mine says, ‘Welcome to Jamaica, mon, have a nice day!’”

Okay, that’s the joke. Several years ago my partner and I were planning a trip to Jamaica, and we kept telling that joke -- or at least its punch line -- to each other. Whenever we got to talking about our impending trip, one or the other of us would say, “Welcome to Jamaica, mon, have a nice day!” If one of us said “Welcome to Jamaica, Mon!” the other would chime in on “Have a nice day!” This went on for a couple months. We couldn’t seem to stop ourselves.

So, there we were on the beach at Negril. A Jamaican native came walking along the beach to where we were vegetating under an almond tree, and the woman we were staying with introduced this dude to us as Mr. Black, although he called himself The Beach Master. He asked us if it was our first trip to Jamaica, and we admitted that it was. He said, “Well, let me say -- welcome to Jamaica, mon!” To which we both immediately replied in unison, “Have a nice day!”

His eyes lit up and he grinned from ear to ear and said “Ah! You know Wendy!”

I guess everybody in Jamaica does.

Thou shalt not witness false bears

I'm going to tell a joke.  It's an old joke, and a local joke, so I'll have to provide some background.  It was inspired by one of my high school teachers, a dude named Richard Gavigan who taught history and also coached football.  He was famous for three things:  his temper, his almost completely bald head, and his pop quizzes.  I had him for world history my sophomore year, so I know all about those.

At least once a week, Coach Gavigan would throw a pop quiz.  On those days, as soon as the bell rang for class to start, he would stand up in front of the room and say, "Take out a piece of paper and a pencil and number from one to ten.  We're gonna have a little quiz."

He would then read us ten questions, and for each one we were to write T or F.  Always true-or-false questions, always ten of them, and always with the same instructions.  It never varied.  "Take out a piece of paper and a pencil and number from one to ten.  Were gonna have a little quiz."

And that inspired this joke, which we all thought was hilarious, at least the first time we heard it, and which I think must have been passed down from one class of students to the next at Palatine High School for all the decades that Coach Gavigan taught there.  It goes like this:

What did God say to Moses on Mt. Sinai?  "Take out a tablet and a chisel and number from one to ten.  We're gonna have a little quiz."

Food of the Dog

When I was in the first grade, there was a get-together for some reason at the house of one of my classmates.  It was a girl, and she lived near the school, and there were a lot of kids from our class there, but I don't remember anything more about it or why I was there.  Maybe it was a birthday party or something.  It's all very hazy, except for one magical moment.

They had a dog.  Some of us kids were in the kitchen and the dog's food somehow came to our attention, and some kid dared me to eat the dog food.  And I did.  It was dry kibble, very small pieces.  I reached into the bag and came out with one or two little morsels which I popped into my mouth, bit down on, and swallowed.  It was very much like Grape Nuts cereal.  I have no recollection what it tasted like, although I don't remember that it tasted bad.

The kid who dared me was unimpressed, and some other kid predicted, in the sage and authoritative tone that only a six-year-old can achieve, that I was going to turn into a dog.  I knew that was ridiculous, but I did suddenly suspect something bad might happen, that I might get sick or something.  I was in a panic about it for a day or so, although I never said a word about it to anyone.

As it turns out, I did not turn into a dog.

Fear Part II

In yesterday's episode I was talking about things I'm afraid of, having presented four possibilities of which three were true.

We’ve already established that the correct answer is not No. 3 since the idea of ingesting aluminum foil causes me to hyperventilate.

What about heights? Yes, I am acrophobic, but it has more to do with falling from a high place than being in a high place.  If I feel like I could fall, a chair is too high for me.

Moving right along, I am also psychotic about slipping in the bathtub. This might be an off-shoot of the fear of falling I seem to have just diagnosed.

But -- and this is what started this whole discussion in the first place -- I have finally had a dream come true.  Over the weekend we had a safety bar installed in our bathroom that I can hang on to when stepping into or out of the tub.  It's one of those heavy-duty things like they put in hotel bathrooms and handicap toilet stalls. 

So, by process of elimination it can be deduced that the correct answer to the question is No. 1.  Spiders don't bother me.

We are nothing to fear but itself

Facebook had this thing once where you could make up a quiz about yourself for your friends to take, to see how well they know you.  I did one, and most people did pretty well.  Almost everybody, however, got one question wrong, which went something like this:

Jan is pathologically afraid of all these things except:

1.  Spiders
2.  Heights
3.  Eating aluminum foil
4.  Slipping in the bathtub/shower

Except for my beloved partner, everybody chose No. 3, probably because it sounds so absurd.  But really, it's true.  I am deathly afraid of ingesting aluminum foil. 

When they bring me a baked (or, really, steamed) potato wrapped in foil in a restaurant, I am diligent in removing every trace of the aluminum and making sure there is none anywhere on, in or near my plate.  If they have cut the potato down the middle with the foil still on it, I must then also perform a microscopic inspection to be certain there are no metallic particles embedded in the potato pulp before I will venture to eat any of it.

When I was a kid, you see, my uncle's sister-in-law swallowed a little piece of aluminum foil.  It tore up her insides and resulted in septicemia that about killed her.  And I have been scared spitless of having it happen to me ever since.

As to my other fears, I think I will leave that for tomorrow.

We must trust crust

If you can believe what you see in all those period dramas from the BBC, the Brits, especially the Victorians, always cut the crust off the bread for sandwiches, especially those delicate little cucumber ones they serve with tea.  Trimming the bread crust makes the sandwiches more elegant, of course, but I wonder if they really did that because they didn't have plastic bags to keep the bread in.  The bread pretty much sat around in the larder, and the crust probably got very hard.

In fact, now that I think back on the kind of paper wrappers bread came in when I was a kid, not to mention the bread boxes we kept it in that were hardly air-tight, I wonder why we didn't cut off the crusts too.  My mother would have considered it a waste, I'm sure.

When it came to Grandma's wonderful Bohemian bread dumplings, however, my mother dutifully cut the crust off the bread just like Grandma's recipe said.  I asked Grandma why she did that, if the crusts would hurt anything, and she said no, it was just because of the dark color of the crusts.  She was into monochrome dumplings.  My mother discarded the crusts, but Grandma always put them out in the yard for the birds.

When I make those dumplings I throw the leftover crust out.  The one time I put it out in the yard for the birds, the dogs at it.

I had toast this morning, that's what brought all this on.  I was trying to find a way to get butter all the way to the edge so the crust wasn't so dry.  I finally gave up.

But it also reminds me of the story my partner told about her uncle, who hated bread crust.  When he was a kid, he would hide it under the rim of his dinner plate which, when removed, left a perfect ring of bread crusts on the table.

And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

I have received a gift which is blue.  I told the giver that blue is my favorite color, but she questioned that. Really, or are you just saying that?

Well, you know what?  I once wondered that same thing myself, many years ago.  I wondered if I said my favorite color was blue just out of habit.  After all, there are other colors I like.  And then one day about 27 or 28 years ago (who needs to be precise?) I experienced an illuminating chromatic epiphany.

Near the door of my tiny apartment there was a tiny closet with a folding door.  I was sitting on my couch on the other side of the room watching a Cubs game on my tiny television.  My eyes wandered to the closet, the door of which was open, and for the first time, I actually noted and mentally catalogued what I saw.

Hanging in the closet were my dark blue pea coat, a navy blue hooded sweatshirt, a navy blue nylon jacket, a gray coaches jacket with dark blue sleeves, a soft blue cotton jacket, and a bright blue raincoat.

What's my favorite color?  Let me think ...

Fall has fell

It is now fall, which can be a wondrous and delightful time of the year, even though the days are getting shorter and the temperatures are getting lower, and it won't be long now, the way time flies, that it will be that really awful, dreadful, horrible, miserable time of year.  I can't bring myself to say its name.

However, there are moments of autumnal bliss.  One of them occurred last Friday, as a matter of fact.  I was out running errands -- post office, bank, pharmacy, Secretary of State, grocery store.  I was feeling great physically and mentally too, having accomplished all my tasks.  It was sunny and 73 degrees, and I was enjoying that too, thinking how lucky I am, what a great life I have.  I drove home with the windows down, doing a little ditty-bop bounce, humming a tune.

I was simply overcome with happiness and contentment.  Fairly bubbling over with it, I was.

And then I remembered how many times I've heard of people who have days like this where one minute they're exclaiming over their feelings of happiness and well-being and the next minute they drop dead.

That took a little of the joy out of it.

Now, not then

A long time ago -- long about 1980, it was, because I remember where I was living at the time -- I had a startling moment while replacing the plastic bag in my kitchen garbage pail.  Holding the bag by the top, I gave it a mighty sweeping shake of the sort one gives plastic bags in order to open them up by inflating.  It opened with a great whoosh, followed by a large pop.  I had blown the bottom out of the bag.

For the longest time afterwards (like the better part of a decade) I was much gentler when inflating plastic garbage bags to avoid blowing the bottom out, until at last it occurred to me that if the bottom of the bag was going to come apart, wouldn't I rather it did it when empty instead of when I was pulling it out of the garbage pail and it was full of old spaghetti and coffee grounds and egg shells?

Of course, I would.  So now whenever I swhoosh a bag, I do it with gusto because, yes, I would rather know the defects of the bag immediately, and besides, the bags I use now don't have a seam at the bottom, so they won't break there anyway.

But I can't put in a new plastic bag in the kitchen garbage can without thinking about the one that blew out on me 31 years ago, and since I just now took the garbage out and replaced the bag, I was thinking about it again.

If you've ever wondered where fugitive thoughts come from ... now you know.

Like It Was Yesterday

What with Alzheimer's looming in my future, I find it hard to take when I can't remember things.  Mostly it's names -- of people, things, places -- that I can't remember, although it usually comes to me eventually.

Memory is an odd thing.  People do remember things wrong sometimes and have memories they believe are genuine when they aren't.  It puts me in mind of a time several of us had gone to play racquetball.  We were sitting around in the locker room waiting for it to be time to claim the courts we had reserved.  One young woman named Janice, who was quite a bit younger than I, was idly bouncing a racquetball against a row of lockers, which was making a racket (so to speak) and which I found annoying.  I finally turned my head to look at her and said in a perfectly normal tone of voice, "Janice."  She stopped.

Later that week I ran into her and a group of her friends.  She introduced me as the one who had yelled at her for bouncing the ball in the locker room.  I denied having raised my voice, but she reported that I had said, "Damn it, Janice!  Quit doing that!"  I protested again, but she insisted that is what I had said, even though all I had said was her name.  Evidently her memory of it had been distorted by her emotional reaction to the rebuke.

At least, that's how I remember it.

The things I hear that they say

Heard on WKAR (NPR) this morning:  "Jennifer Granholm has written a new book."  Well, I should hope so.  Who would want her to write an old book?

I read in Time magazine that all-time Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings, who is a Mormon, thinks that the best of the Mormon candidates right now is this dude Huntsman or Hunter or Huntclub or whatever his name is, but he (Jennings) is for Obama.

Which reminds me that my Aunt Blanche has her own name for the President.  One of her most endearing locutions came last May when we were talking on the phone and she said, "Did you hear Obomba got that Aladdin guy?"

I myself have said absolutely nothing amusing all day long.  Pity.

Okay, back at it

Been on vacation, in case anybody missed me.  Got to spend a few days at a casino hotel in a big luxurious suite with a wet bar and a jacuzzi and terrycloth bathrobes.  But it's not every day you mark 25 years with the love of your life, so it was perfectly appropriate.

Unlike last year's vacation, I didn't break any bones this time.  But I did watch both the men's and the women's U.S. Open finals while we were there, and tennis will always be associated in my mind with fractures.

In the summer of 1959, when I was 13, my mother signed me up to take tennis lessons at the municipal park.  She was always on the lookout for activities to occupy my idle summers, but I am sure that she also saw it as an opportunity to channel my athletic enthusiasm into a sport she considered acceptably ladylike.

I remember my folks driving me to a Mages sporting goods store in Chicago where they bought me a Spaulding racket, a can of balls, and a press.  Tennis rackets were wood in those days, and you had to sandwich the head between two wooden trapezoids with wing nuts when not in use to keep it from warping. 

Tennis balls were white then. They came vacuum-packed in tall tin cans that opened with a key just like a coffee can.  When first opened, they hissed and whooshed like a coffee can too, except tennis balls don't smell as bad.

For a long time I had a helluva a time finding anybody to play tennis with, but after the tennis craze of the late 60's, I found more players.  The last time I played was on June 1, 1978.  I lost my balance going after a little drop shot.  I was afraid I was going to fall and scrape my knees, so I reached out and grabbed onto the top of the net, but the angle was freaky, and the result was a multiple fracture of my right arm.

But my knees were completely unscathed.

Something else that runs in the family

My great-great-grandmother Lucinda Clark was born in Kentucky in 1845.  Her family relocated to Illinois when she was about 11 years old.  She married a dude named Andrew Theodore Hefley, and they had a bunch of children.  She died in 1934 at the age of 88 in the state mental hospital in Jacksonville, to which she had been committed five years before, suffering from what they used to call senile dementia.

Her granddaughter Blanche Alberta Hefley, who was my grandmother, suffered basically the same fate.  She spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home drifting further and further off into La-La-Land until she finally died in 1985 at the age of 86.  The last time I visited her there, one of the nurses said that they weren't sure where her mind had taken her, but wherever she was, she must have been having fun because she laughed all the time.

So, it looks like my grandmother Blanche and her grandmother Lucinda both had what we would now call Alzheimer's Disease.  It also seems to be skipping a generation, in which case -- I'm next.  Crap.

Translation Not Required

My grandfather, Vojtěch Kněz, came to America with his mother and four siblings in 1903 when he was 13 years old. His father, Matěj Kněz, had come ahead the year before.

I once said to my grandfather, “What’s the name of the town you came from in the old country?” He replied, “Sand.” I thought that was kind of a funky name for a town anywhere, especially in Czechoslovakia (as it was then), but if the man said he was from Sand, he was from Sand.

He had been dead 15 years by the time I started climbing the family tree, and for 25 years I kept looking at maps of Bohemia, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and (after 1993) the Czech Republic trying to find a town called Sand. No such luck. I finally posted a query on a genealogy message board about it, and I was informed that there was no town named Sand but that there was a town called Písek. Can anybody guess what the word písek means in Bohemian? Right -- sand.

Thanks, Gramps.

One of my best bright ideas

One night last week my partner, who is currently avoiding red meat, was in the mood for a burger and, knowing there was a box of veggie burgers in the freezer, asked me to prepare one for her.  I was happy to oblige, but I wanted the real thing for myself, so I thawed out some ground chuck I had in the freezer. Since I only wanted one hamburger, what was I to do with the rest of that pound and a half of meat?

Well, I decided to make six patties and grill them all on the George Foreman, but I only grilled one to medium doneness -- the other five I left on only for three minutes so that they were rare. When cool, I stuck them in individual plastic bags and threw them in the freezer.

As you probably know, warming up leftover hamburger patties in the microwave turns them into hockey pucks, but these didn't turn out that way because they weren't well done to start with. For lunch yesterday I nuked one of those frozen patties for 60 seconds, and it came out hot and juicy and pink in the middle and tasted like it had just been freshly grilled.

Am I pleased with myself, you ask.  Yes.

Change of Subject

On a personal note -- I realize there has been a paucity of postings here the last week or so, and that's because both my partner and my dog have been ill.  Being general caregiver has taken a lot of my energy, physical, mental, and emotional.  I plan to have my loved ones healthy again very soon, and then I'll get right back to writing about ... whatever.

Googling May Cure Boredom

Last week I got an email message from a woman named Gail whom I'd never heard of.  She had been sitting at her computer and must have been bored, she said, because on a whim she Googled the name of her great-grandmother, Ludmila Pinkas.  Gail knew nothing about her except her name and so was completely blown away to find there was information about Ludmila out on the Internet, including a relatively comprehensive family tree.  My name and email address were attached to it because Ludmila Pinkas was my great-grandmother too.

So my second cousin Gail and I have been corresponding back and forth.  I have supplied her with additional information about her grandmother, who was the sister of my grandmother.  And she has cleared up some confusion I had about her grandfather.

During the first 25 years of my genealogical searchings, the shortest branches on my family tree were on my father's Bohemian side.  I knew the names of my father's parents, and I knew his maternal grandparents' names, and that was it.  Then in 2004 I was able to engage the services of an amateur researcher in the Czech Republic (who charged a dirt-cheap $5 an hour, compared with professional genealogists who get between $50 and $400 an hour).  Now I have the names and dates of my Bohemian ancestors going back five and six generations.

And so does Cousin Gail. 

You can't take it with you

This was a day for standing in lines.  There was a long line at the bank and a short but slow line at the farm stand where I stopped to get corn and a medium line at the pharmacy pick-up window.

I got two refills, and since I don't usually run out of these two at the same time, when the clerk rang up the cost at $85, I was slightly startled.  But, I'm required to have these -- they are heart-attack-survivor drugs.

Still, I am a senior citizen on social security, the famous fixed income, and I was thinking how much I would rather spend the 85 bucks on something else.  But then I realized I couldn't spend it on anything if I was dead, so I shut up.

The Help

The hired girl came today.  She is 13 years old and comes once a week for an hour to do our bidding, mostly to fetch and carry.  We pay her $20 whether she stays the full hour or not.  Some weeks we have less for her to do.

She gathers trash from all over the house, hauls the baskets of clean laundry up from the basement, distributes toilet paper to both bathrooms, helps change beds.  Sometimes we straighten up a cabinet or break down cardboard boxes in the garage.  She's willing to do anything, so sometimes I give her a pair of scissors and have her cut off that plastic that holds soda bottles together.  Stuff like that. 

Having a hired girl makes me feel a little bit like a 19th-century farm wife. Of course, if that were the case, she'd live in and be at my beck and call 24/7.  She would be an orphan, of course, and Irish, and probably real stupid.  I would be able to abuse her verbally and even beat her when I thought she deserved it or whenever I was just in a mood to take my discontent out on somebody else.  And if I were a 19th-century farm wife, I'm sure my level of discontent would be enough to kill her.

Just the other month

I was just reading something I wrote the other day which contained the phrase, "the other day."  That's one of those English idioms that is generally understood although it doesn't make a lot of sense.  But that's pretty much what an idiom is, I guess.

Taken literally -- not advisable with idioms but something I absolutely love to do anyway -- that would mean there are actually only four available days:  yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the other day.  Well, no -- I'm wrong.  We do also have the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.

So, when exactly was the other day?

There are some lively debates on the Internet about it.  It appears to be universally agreed that the other day was a recent day, but there are those who wish actually to assign a specific number of days to it, three days being particularly popular among them.

That could work according to our collection of available days -- yesterday is one day ago, and the day before yesterday is two days ago, so the other day could be three days ago.  But what about four or five days ago?  And if we get to six days ago, we are treading dangerously close to last week.

I begin to wonder if there is an etymological link between idiom and idiot.

This could be catching

On NPR this morning, I heard about a concept called "psychological contagion," which I find rather fascinating.  What that is, basically, is our way of thinking that things which have come into contact with each other become connected; in fact, even ineluctably linked.

An example they used was the way you might feel about your grandmother's ring and an exact copy of it.  Most people would like grandmother's ring better simply because she had actually worn it.  That explains why the round blue glass dish I bought at an antique store, which is exactly the same as one my mother used to have, doesn't mean as much to me as the square blue glass dish of hers that I still have.

The story in which they brought this concept up was actually about people's aversion to drinking water that has been recycled from sewage.  People cannot separate the two ideas, even though, as one researcher pointed out, all water has been pooped in by something or somebody at one time or another.

But I understand it.  There were times when I'd be standing at the drinking fountain at work filling my water bottle, and I would hear a toilet flush in one of the nearby restrooms.  No matter how the logical and intellectual side of my brain told me to ignore it, somewhere down deep there was a squeamish little shiver. 

B, L and HGT for supper

Yes, summer is here.

We welcomed it with sweet corn from the farm stand, and tonight we'll be saying hello to BLTs made with our own home-grown Ts.  Tomorrow or the next day the pickled horseshoe baloney I'm about to make will be ready to eat.

My mother would put together a meal of sweet corn, pickled horseshoe baloney, and sliced tomatoes several times a summer, especially on days when she deemed it too hot to cook.  Those suppers were generally consumed on the picnic table in the back yard in the shade of the big, beautiful sugar maple tree.

My father built that picnic table and its two benches out of two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and what seemed like several hundred bolts.  Very sturdy it was, but there was the problem of his having painted it white.  After the first attempted use of it on a sunny summer afternoon, it got repainted gray.  Good thinking, Dad.

Maybe there's hope yet

I just did something I rarely do.  I made good use of free time.

Someone I used to know was so spontaneous that if she had a free hour, she'd go to the beach.  Who goes to the beach when they only have an hour to spare?  Well, she did.  I always wished I could be like that.  Today I almost was.

I have an appointment today at 1:00.  I must leave by 12:30 to get there on time.

At 11:45 I was showered and dressed and all ready to go.  Normally I would have spent the next 45 minutes reading a book or playing stupid computer games, waiting for it to be time to go.  Instead, I washed the dishes, which took about 15 minutes.  I even had time left over to write this.

Maybe spontaneity will become a permanent part of me yet.

Garbage Day

Household refuse removal occurs on Wednesdays in our town.  The individuals who are responsible for removing said refuse are known to me collectively or individually as "the garbage," as in, "The garbage comes today."

I mean no disrespect to the persons who earn an honest living in refuse removal, those gentlemen who dump the items from my 40-gallon bin into the back of their truck and then drop my 40-gallon bin halfway between the street and the public sidewalk right in the middle of the driveway where it blocks entrance thereto and requires any person who wishes to drive a car into said driveway to stop in the street, alight from their vehicle and move the offending bin to one side, all the while enduring curses and honked horns as other motorists wait impatiently or, worse, do not wait but recklessly flirt with potential fatalities by attempting to go around the obstructing automobile in the face of on-coming traffic.

Maybe The Garbage isn't such a bad way to refer to those guys after all.

N E I (the opposite of T M I)

I just opened a package of frozen fish fillets (ocean perch) which is going to be our supper tonight.  I am thawing them out even as I write.

There was a small notch at the edge of the plastic bag they came in with a notation to "Tear here."  I believe if you go back in time and blogs you will find my thoughts on the prospect of somebody inventing a package that says "To open tear here" that would actually open if I tore there.  I had to use scissors on this one.

Each fillet comes wrapped in its own plastic, so I dumped the lot into a sink full of cold water.  Before tossing the outer "tear here" bag, I thought I'd check the back to see if there was any useful information.  It says in order to thaw the fish more quickly than over night in the refrigerator (which never thaws anything over night), I was to submerge them in cold water.  Ha!  Way ahead of 'em on that one.

I also found the following:

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS:  Cook from frozen or thawed. 
Remove all packaging.  Grease or cooking spray the pan, or aluminum foil if grilling.  Season as desired.  Cook until fish flakes easily with a fork.

Cook from frozen or thawed?  Who writes this stuff?

Remove all packaging?  You mean, don't cook the plastic?  And when did "cooking spray" become a verb?  If you put the fish on aluminum foil on the grill, you are not grilling, you are frying.  And I think the final message should be changed to "Cook until it's done."  That would finish it off nicely.

Okay, I did finally notice a tiny box underneath this paragraph that says

Preheat 425F
Frozen: 13 minutes
Thawed:  9-11 minutes

So, they do give you enough to go on after all, assuming you are adequately perceptive. 

But why would it take exactly 13 minutes if the fish is frozen, but if it's thawed, the cooking time could vary by as much as two minutes?  Huh?  Answer me that.

There will be squished baby yellow potatoes to go with, though.  Yum.

Pick me! Pick me!

I guess there are people who always knew what they wanted to be when they grew up and then they became whatever it was.  I never thought I'd end up doing what I ended up doing.

When I was about three I wanted to become a pin boy in a bowling alley, which I thought was a way cool thing to be.  By the time I might have been old enough to be considered for such a position, however, they had invented the automatic pin spotter which made pin boys obsolete.

Other ambitions I recall were to become a fireman, a teacher, a soldier, a scientist, or a concert pianist.  But I was really inspired by the ten o'clock news on WBBM-TV (channel 2) in Chicago.  When it first started in the mid-1950's it was fifteen minutes, but they later expanded it to half an hour.  It featured Fahey Flynn reading the news and P. J. Hoff with the weather.

This guy was not a weatherman.  This was way before it occurred to television stations how authoritative it would make them look if they had a trained meteorologist do the weather.  Some stations had a weather girl (isn't that how Oprah got her start?) and WBBM had P. J. Hoff, who was a cartoonist.  He drew happy suns and angry clouds and giant raindrops on a big paper weather map with what looked like a Magic Marker with a one-inch tip.

When it was time to report the current conditions, they would show a drawing of a man in an office sitting behind a big desk looking out the window.  He was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk and his hands behind his head.  Hoff called this dude the "Vice President in Charge of Looking Out the Window."

If ever there was a job I aspired to, it was that.

Is it too late for flash cards?

When I was in the fourth grade I was supposed to memorize the multiplication tables, but I never bothered.  Some I know pretty good, some I can come up with if I think about it hard enough, and some are a lost cause -- fours, sixes, sevens, and eights are especially hard for me.

I get around it by adding things up.  For example, if I need to multiply 7 x 6, I would multiply 7 times 3 (21) and add 21 to 21 to get 42.

The other day I was figuring how many tablespoons there are in a pound of butter.  There are 8 tablespoons per stick, and 4 sticks.  I couldn't remember how much 8 x 4 is, but I do know 8 x 8 is 64, and half of 8 is 4, so 8 x 4 would be half of 64, which is 32.  Did you get that?

Nines are easy -- you just multiply by ten and subtract, as in 6 x 9:  6 times 10 is 60, so 6 times 9 would be 60 minus 6, or 54.

The really nasty bugaboo is 8 x 6.  I was taught, back there in the fourth grade, that 8 x 6 (or, conversely, 6 x 8) is equal to the number of stars in the flag.  So 6 x 8 must be 50.  Somehow that never seems to turn out exactly right.

SAT it is

When I passed Reese Farm yesterday afternoon on my way to the grocery store, I noticed their big sign near the road had an additional notice affixed in one corner.  It was hand-lettered on a square of cardboard.  All it said was SAT.  That was all it had to say.  Everybody knew what it meant.  It meant that Saturday was the day we've been waiting for, the day Reese's first planting of sweet corn would be ripe and ready to harvest.

I got there at eleven o'clock this morning, and they were doing a business -- cars streaming in and out, people carrying away plastic grocery bags bulging with corn.  It was all white corn today, the woman told me.  I bought a dozen.  I actually expected a baker's dozen, but when I got home I found there were fourteen ears in the bag.  A Reese's dozen.

We had corn for supper tonight.  Sweet corn, that is, and was it ever. 

Summer is finally here.

25% was plenty

I have a large collection of recipes I've copied from various places but haven't tried yet.  I keep them in Word documents on my hard drive.  This morning I was looking through them, hoping for ideas for this weekend's meals, plus what I might need to pick up at the grocery store when I go this afternoon.

A recipe for Bread Fritters caught my eye.  Don't know where I got it.  It's simple enough:  4 eggs, 6 tablespoons of bread crumbs, and 4 tablespoons each of grated Parmesan and grated Cheddar.  Might make a nice little side, maybe with something rolled up inside it.  I decided to test it out for my breakfast, but on a smaller scale.  I made it using only one egg and cutting the other ingredients proportionately.

I whipped it up in a measuring cup (using my new old-fashioned hand-crank egg beater), poured the batter it made into hot olive oil in a small skillet, and fried it up.  It made a nice looking pancake that was soft inside and never did get very crispy outside, which is what I was hoping.  What it tasted like was -- well, if you put some scrambled eggs and a piece of toast in the blender, that's the taste you would get.

Delete.

Plain Southern Speak

I believe I mentioned that I have developed a tendency to talk to myself, which I attribute to being home alone all day with nobody to talk to (except my tiny dog).  Well, it's getting worse.

This morning a website I visited asked me to take a survey, which I was happy to do.  I love surveys.  However, not only did I read every question and every possible response out loud, I did it with an outrageous southern accent that made me sound like a cross between Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Paula Deen.

I cannot explain it.

So, I'll move on.  What I really meant to write about today is an offering I saw on a restaurant menu last week.  In the breakfast section they listed all the omelets they are willing to make, telling what items each one contains, but there was also something called a "Plain Omelet" for which no description is given.  I've seen that a number of times on various restaurants' menus, but I never gave it any serious thought until now.

And the thought I'm giving it is:  What the hell is a plain omelet?  Wouldn't that just be scrambled eggs folded over on itself?

I wish you could hear me say "plain omelet" in my Earnhardt/Deen voice.  My tiny dog can hear me, and she's laughing her ass off.

Glory Breathe, It Exists Deceased

A category on "Jeopardy" one night last week was all about words that contain words that are synonyms. For example, the word dead can be found inside deceased (DecEAseD). Two others they had on the show were exists / is and male / masculine. I don't remember the other two, nor do I recall exactly what they called the category.

According to what I can find on the Internet, these are known as "kangaroo words," because, like the marsupial, they carry baby versions of themselves. (Isn't that sweet?) There are plenty of such words listed on various websites. Some of them are a stretch as regards their supposed synonymous-ness, as breathe and be, and some are just plain cheesy like artistry and art.

It took me three days, but I finally came up with one of my own -- rain can be found inside precipitation.

I'm so proud.

A heavy price to pay for the environment

Plastic grocery bags have myriad uses, and I have put them to several -- lining small trash cans, wrapping up food scraps, carrying things back and forth, and so on.  Our household always seemed to acquire more plastic grocery bags than we put to good use, however, and while I am not willing to say what I did with the excess, I will say now that I have finally begun to think that the least I can do is not collect so many.

I have, therefore, splurged 99 cents each to acquire the reusable totes sold in grocery stores.  I have about half a dozen now from Kroger, Meijer, Wal-Mart and even one from Trader Joe's, so as not to show favor to any particular store. 

So far, so good, but there are some significant disadvantages to the use of such bags.  In addition to the challenge of remembering to take the damn things into the store, when filled by eager baggers, the reusable bags can only be carried by Olympic-champion weight lifters.

I see more reusable bags and plaintive cries of "Please, not so full!" in my future.

Say What?

I caught myself saying "Let us have lettuce" yesterday.  My mother used to say that.  I have no idea why.  I don't recall her ever saying it with regard to a meal or food of any sort.

Why she said it is not so perplexing a question as why I said it yesterday, out loud, when there was no one to hear me, except for my tiny dog who, I am sure, did not give a damn.

As I recall, I was on the verge of doing something that required going out into the garage, and I was saying to myself something like, "Let us go to the garage," but I changed my mind suddenly and decided to do something else first, and so I said instead, "Let us ... have lettuce."

The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that being a retired senior citizen on social security, I am home alone all day, unlike the days when I went to my place of employment which was peopled with co-workers with whom I could converse.  Now I have no one to talk to for hours on end, save my tiny dog, but, as already established, she doesn't give a damn.

So, I talk to myself.  And obviously I say really stupid things.