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.