Oh, Ashley!

On this date 75 years ago, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind was published. 

It took me years of trying to read GWTW.  When I was in high school, at any given time at least two girls I knew would be reading it, and everyone said, "Oh, you can't put it down!"  Well, I didn't have any trouble putting it down. I started it several times, and it bored me senseless.

But then when I was 20 years old, I was bed-ridden for about a month.  I had read everything in the house, and the only thing left was that book.  So I slugged through it, and by the time I got to Chapter 7, I couldn't put it down.  I have probably read it 25 or 30 times since -- I used to read it every spring.

I think that if I knew Scarlett O'Hara personally, I would not like her at all.  We cheer for her because she is strong and brave and determined, but she really isn't very nice.

Yes, he is

On the way home from the grocery store yesterday, I was behind a five- or six-year-old Tahoe with XLSHAFT on its license plate.  The driver was a man (of course), and I wondered what moron in the Secretary of State's office let that one get through.  Don't they have rules about that?

At the next stop light, I pulled up next to him, rolled down my window, and waved to get his attention.  He rolled down his window too, and I said, "Lemme see it!"  He just sort of stared, so I said, "I want to see your extra-large shaft!  I'll bet it's really no bigger than your brain, which is minuscule!"

He flipped me the bird, and I shouted, "You're a pig!"  Just then the light turned green, and Molly Malibu and I left him eating our dust.

Okay, okay -- I made that up.  Well, I was behind a Tahoe with XLSHAFT on its license plate, but everything after "Don't they have rules about that?" is just a fantasy with which I entertained myself on the way home.

But he is a pig.

Oh Em Gee!

It was ten days ago that I had the butcher trim and truss a 2.45-lb. beef tenderloin for me.  I had intended it for last Saturday night's supper, but when the time came, I lost my nerve and stuck it in the freezer.  I had never made any kind of roast before, and I couldn't bear the thought of ruining a piece of meat that cost me $44.08. 

As usual, however, my loved one was able to put it in perspective for me by pointing out that $44 is just a few hands at the blackjack table.  So I built up my courage and determination all week, found instructions at foodnetwork.com, and on Friday I took it out of the freezer.  By yesterday it was thawed, and I was ready.

I seasoned it generously all over with Kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper, seared it on all sides in vegetable oil and butter in a medium-hot skillet, and finished it in a 400-degree oven.  When its insides reached 130 degrees, I took it out, tented it loosely with aluminum foil, and let it rest 15 minutes.  Meanwhile, I assembled the baked potatoes and green beans, and made a jus out of the yummy stuff on the bottom of the skillet.

Then I sliced the meat and served it, and we ate it.  It was perfectly medium-rare, tender, juicy, flavorful and completely beyond anything I can even think up words to say about it.  My partner, who loves meat more than life itself, claims it was the best beef she ever ate.  The fact that we frequently closed our eyes and moaned while chewing indicates the level of pleasure that chunk of beef provided.

Not only did I roast a beef tenderloin, I finally made good use of that $175 All-Clad skillet I couldn't live without and had never used for anything except Rice-A-Roni.  But all that's changed now.  I'm all grown up in the kitchen.

Mighty but Smelly (or mighty smelly)

I see that today is the 100th birthday of Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1911-1956), considered by many the greatest woman athlete of the 20th Century.  She played championship basketball, won two gold and one silver medals in track in the 1932 Olympics, and dominated the young LPGA, which she pretty much invented.  I read her autobiography when I was in high school, and the outstanding fact I remember from it is that she, like many athletes, was extremely superstitious.  She was one of these who, during a win streak, wouldn't change her socks.

I was never a superstitious athlete myself, although there was an unusual interlude in my golfing life when I got hung up about the color of tee I was using.  It all started when I found a bright purple tee on the first teeing ground one evening while playing with the company golf league.  I decided to use it, and I had an excellent round.  I continued to use that tee, believing it was responsible for every good shot I hit (while not blaming it for the bad ones) until a couple weeks later when I broke it.  After that I used a different color of tee for each tee shot until I hit a really good one, and then I used that color of tee exclusively, at least until its magic wore off.

After a couple months I finally decided that was real stupid, but the only way I could rid myself of the notion was to rid myself of all the colored tees I owned.  I bought a bag of tees that were no color at all, just plain, unpainted wood, which solved the problem.

And I have remained superstition-free ever since, which is a very good thing. A blackjack dealer at the Little River Casino told me he believed it was bad luck to be superstitious, and I think he might be right.

Wish I could do it that way

When I think about Grandma Knez baking, I see her in her kitchen, working at the kitchen table.  Every ingredient was assembled and ready for whatever treat she was making that day -- maybe bukda or bábovka or koláčky or my favorite, rohlíčky.  She mixed them all up in a large crockery bowl, beating them with a wooden spoon. 

She had an eight-cup flour sifter that sat in an aluminum pie plate when not in use.  For each addition, she scooped flour out of the bag and into the sifter right over the mixing bowl.  She never turned its little crank.  Instead, she banged it lightly against the heel of her other hand.  Every time she set the sifter back in its pie plate, some flour fell through.  Eventually she'd pick up the pie plate and dump its flour into the bowl too. 

Grandma never measured the flour.  She just knew. 

Solstice Solace

One time I was trying to cheer up a co-worker who seemed down by pointing out, "Tomorrow's Friday!"  She replied morosely, "That just makes it closer to Monday."  I remember thinking she needed some serious professional help.

However -- today is one of those days I hate to see come, and why?  Because the days will now be getting shorter.  Never mind that it's going to be summer, temperatures in general will be warmer, and there won't be any snow for several months.  The summer solstice to me means the long, slow slide to winter.  And winter depresses me.

So, I guess I'm just as nuts as that woman I thought was excessively pessimistic.

Speaking of which, I used to know somebody who insisted that there was no difference between an optimist and a pessimist because they were both being unrealistic.  Uh-huh.

Leaving a lasting impression

I was just reading an article on AARP's web site in which a woman claims that people who are old enough to join AARP are too old to use certain words any more.  "Panties" was one, and "cool," and "dude."  I really don't have anything to say about her notion, it was just that one of the words she thinks should be expunged from the senior adult's vocabulary was "tinkle."

And that reminded me of the time many long years ago that I babysat my brother's kids for a weekend.  My toddler niece was just about ready to graduate toilet training at the time, and while I had no trouble getting her on the toilet, I couldn't get her to do anything once there.  I finally got it working by challenging her ability to make "tinkle sounds," as in, "I'll bet you can't make tinkle sounds!"

Well, she could, and she did.  It sounds positively idiotic now, of course, but it was the best I could do, never having taken kiddie psych or anything.

But the real fun came the next weekend, when her parents were having a party.  Somebody went into the guest bathroom off the front hallway, toddler niece went to listen at the door, and -- yup, you guessed it -- followed the poor woman back into the living room and announced to everyone, "She made tinkle sounds!"

Glad I wasn't invited to that one.

If Google has a necktie where the L should be, that means it's ...

When I was a kid I asked my dad why there was a Mother's Day and a Father's Day but there was no Children's Day.  He said, with just a touch of umbrage, "Every day is Children's Day." 

But for me, every day is Father's Day because, although he's been dead over 30 years, I don't think a day goes by that I don't think about (and sometimes blog about) something my father did or said.

This morning, for example, while I buttered a piece of toast, I thought about how he didn't like and wouldn't eat toast.  He said it was just a quick way to make old bread.

It's toast

I love grilled cheese sandwiches.  That might actually be my very favorite thing to eat.  I like the classic American cheese on white bread very much, but I am also extremely fond of Cheddar on rye.

There are lots of ways to make grilled cheese sandwiches.  I make mine in a skillet, like most people do. My mother called her version "toasted cheese" because she put them under the broiler. I've known people to fry them in melted butter rather than butter the bread.  There is a movie in which Johnny Depp grills a cheese sandwich with an iron, and I saw something once about a guy who used a blow torch.

Somebody I used to know several decades ago told me that she made a toasted cheese sandwich with toast -- literally -- by pressing a slice of cheese between two pieces of toast right out of the toaster so that the hot bread melted the cheese. I must have looked skeptical, because I remember her asking me, "Haven't you ever done that?"

No.  At least, not until today.  And I will not be doing it again.

In a Jiffy

Lately I've been wanting to make myself a little cake, the kind I have always made with Jiffy yellow cake mix and Jiffy chocolate frosting mix.  But Kroger didn't have either of those, and Meijer and WalMart had the cake mix but not the frosting.

I've also had another, unrelated culinary desire lurking in the back of my mind.  I want to try my hand at making a very fine beef roast, something I've never done.  I didn't see anything on the meat counters at those stores that appealed to me either.

So today I trekked on down to East Lansing to give Goodrich's a try.  It's just about the last independent, family-owned grocery store left around here, and when I lived near there and shopped there all the time, it seemed to me they always had everything.  And, sure enough, I found all the Jiffy mixes I could ever want, and I also had a talk with the butcher, who cut and trimmed up for me the roast of my dreams.

When I checked out, I chuckled when I saw the five items I was going to purchase moving down the conveyor toward the cashier:  four boxes of Jiffy mix at 79 cents each, and a 2-1/2 pound tenderloin that cost $44.08.

Would it have seemed less incongruous if I had splurged on cake mix by Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines?

Flag Day

One week shy of 10 years ago today, a sturdy 20-foot telescoping pole was installed in the middle of our front yard.  From that pole flies a 3-foot by 5-foot flag.  It is made of nylon and has sewn stripes and embroidered stars.  It is a relatively new flag, hoisted a month or so ago to replace the tattered one that had endured all our harsh winter.

Having a flag pole in front of my house from which to fly my country's flag was always one of my fondest wishes, and upon buying our current property, that wish came true. 

And yet there are some days, like today, when I wish it weren't there.  I would like to be able to mark holidays by making an overt gesture of displaying a flag, probably on a short pole jutting out from the front of the house.  A permanent flag on a pole robs me of that opportunity.

But, by writing about it, at least, I am marking this Flag Day, the anniversary of the date in 1777 on which the Continental Congress adopted the flag with the thirteen stripes and thirteen stars as our national emblem.  A good day to renew our pledge of allegiance to that flag and to the republic for which it stands.

Uncover, if you please

Saturday while lunching at Olga's, I observed a family of three enter the place -- dad, mom, and son about 13 years old.  As soon as he was inside, the young man removed his cap.  I haven't seen anything that polite in a long time, especially from one so young.

It annoys me exceedingly to see men wearing their hats or caps in indoor public places.  It is a symptom of the general incivility our society suffers from and so many of us complain of.  I believe it can be blamed on the trend toward more and more informality over the last several decades.  Formal courtesy, however superficial, at least requires one to notice and consider others.

Changing the subject now...

Last night on the Food Network a cook was beating about a dozen eggs in a large bowl, and Guy Fieri, watching him do it, referred to the eggs as "liquid chicken."  It kind of went past me at the time, but just now when I thought about it, I actually laughed out loud.  (I was going to say I cracked myself up, but the allusion to eggs forbade it.)

Well, a delayed laugh is a good laugh.  Old Chinese saying.

Be there directly

We have to figure out a way to get people to stop saying they are "direct descendants" of somebody.  You either are descended from somebody or you're not.  There's no direct about it.  If you can figure out how to be an in-direct descendant, let me know.

I've been climbing the family tree again, as you can probably tell.  We already knew that Edward I and Eleanor of Castile are my 21st-great-grandparents, and also the 21st-great-grandparents of Her Majesty the Queen, making her my 22nd cousin.  BUT -- I have recently found new information indicating that I have a line that goes back to another ancestor of the Queen, namely John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster.  He is the great-great-grandson of Edward I, so that moves us up three generations, making QEII my 19th cousin.  How about that.

I always picture John of Gaunt as being really skinny. 

And I think Queen Anne must have been bow-legged -- I mean, just picture the legs on a Queen Anne table.  Holy cow.  Of course, I know what caused it.  She had at least 18 pregnancies, all but three of which ended in miscarriage or stillbirth.  That poor woman could not make a healthy baby.  The three who lived longer than a day all died before they were 18 months old. 

Maybe owning some Queen Anne furniture makes you her indirect descendant.

So I'm taking it easy today

My father was a sickly kid.  By the time he was six years old he had contracted polio, which left one leg an inch and a half shorter than the other, rheumatic fever, which damaged his heart, and another disease that almost killed him, something people don't get any more like scarlet fever or typhoid, or one of those.  The doctors told his mother that his heart was so bad, he would probably not live past his teens.

He lived to be 65 years old.  I attribute that to his having a tremendous will to live and, as an adjunct to that, he always took very good care of himself, getting regular medical checkups and following the advice of his doctors.

His sister Mae, three years his senior, liked to tell the story of his having been sent to the store for milk when he was about eleven or twelve years old.  He was gone a long time and she was getting impatient.  Finally she went outside and looked down the street to see if he was coming.  She saw him in the next block sitting in the middle of the sidewalk with the bottle of milk beside him.  After what seemed to her a long time, he finally got up, picked up the milk bottle, and trudged on home.

As soon as he was within earshot, she lit into him, asking him what he thought he was doing dawdling along when she was so anxious to have the milk, to which he calmly replied, "The doctor said if I get tired, I should rest.  I was tired -- so I rested."

There is a lesson in that for all of us, I think.

UPS and downs

If we get a package in the mail that our carrier Karla can't stuff into our mailbox at the end of the driveway, she will bring it up to the door and set it on our little concrete stoop. She will then ring the doorbell but not wait for anyone to answer. The FedEx driver does exactly the same thing with packages he delivers.

The UPS guy, on the other hand, does not ring or knock, which in this case is rather odd. I think he would definitely want to alert someone inside the house to the delivery since he is evidently very worried about security. I can tell he is uncomfortable just leaving packages by our door because he always hides them. Under the welcome mat.

This has been going on for years, so he obviously thinks his little trick is fooling everybody. Now, I suppose some people might dismiss a six-inch lump under the mat as a giant ant hill or the result of rodent activity, but nothing spells there's-no-package-on-this-porch like a large cardboard box wearing a welcome mat.

Do they teach this in UPS driver school?

Somebody's getting rich, and it isn't me

Gasoline prices were very high recently, as much as $4.30* around here for regular unleaded, but they were dropping steadily for the last week or so.  Yesterday morning at about 7:45 a.m., I stopped at a gas station up the road and filled my tank with regular unleaded for $3.73 per gallon.  At about 6:00 p.m. last evening I drove past that same gas station which was now wanting $4.20 for a gallon of the same gasoline.

What stupendous thing happened in those 12 hours that allowed them to jack the price up almost 50 cents?  And although somebody actually tried to explain this to me once, I still don't understand why the price I pay isn't dependent on the price the dealer paid for the gasoline when he bought it and the big truck poured it into his tanks.

When Richard Nixon froze gas prices in 1973, I was buying my gasoline at a station near my house for 35 cents a gallon.  Adjusted for inflation, that would be $1.77 in today's dollars, which is a far cry from $4.20.  They even pumped it for you then.

Oh, my -- big memory instant replay:  the view from the backseat when dad pulled into a service station, rolled down the window, and said to the attendant, "Fill 'er up on ethyl." 

_______________________
*I have never understood that 9/10ths of cent thing and am rounding up to the nearest whole cent in this discussion.

Is this part of the problem?

The NPR news program All Things Considered ran a piece last evening about the struggling Detroit Public Schools and the possibility of turning 40 of them into charter schools.  They talked about the challenges, who's for it, who's against it, and why, but what got my attention were the words of one teacher, recorded on tape.

I was in the car when I heard this story, but later at home I listened to it three times last night at npr.org to make sure I had heard right, and I had.  What she said was:

"I am not givin' up on DPS, I don't care what nobody says."

I hope she doesn't teach English.