Poetry month again

There's a lot of really good poetry out there, if you like that kind of thing. But this is my blog, so I am going to publish my very own poetry, because I can. If you want good poems, go somewhere else. I'm choosing this one because my sister the mailman asked me for a copy of it and I had to type it out anyway. It's about our grandmother.

Sanka

I was allowed to have as much Sanka as a 5-year-old can drink, and I liked it better than my mother's coffee: a scary, thin, and bitter brew.

My grandmother always had Sanka, which required no angry-smelling electric percolator. Just a pyrex saucepan with a pouring spout, all clean and clear and filled with water over the blue gas flame until the bubbles broke the surface.

The dull brown granules of Sanka are at the bottoms of the two mugs I have chosen from the shelf. Sanka never sparkled, at least in those days, like the dark, nearly black crystals of, say, Folgers or some other brand.

My grandmother's then-steady hands would splash enough water into the mugs and we'd stir & stir & stir to dissolve the coffee. A few grains were inevitably left undissolved and bitter at the top after even the most vigorous stirring; you had to wait until they melted into dark oil slicks on the surface and then stir again.

We never spoke of this.

Then we'd add Coffeemate or Cremora, or sometimes plain old milk. Sugar for me, Sweet & Low for her. The whole procedure was very tidy and had much to recommend it in the way of ritual.

The drinking of the Sanka was accompanied by the watching of television, or the exchange of gossip among the older women present: my mother and a couple of aunts or sometimes the neighbor ladies from the highrise. My mother and my aunts drink Pepsi.

I always made sure I had toys or a book to read. The soap operas especially made me uneasy. My grandmother called them her Stories, and she gave them up every year during Lent. She never managed to get that monkey completely off her back. She always picked them up again after Easter, her penance done.

The lives of the people in her stories were at least as real to her as the lives of her children. She certainly had more information about them; her children couldn't be relied on to visit every day, and they were often impatient with her when they were there.

"Don't cry, mom," they'd say, and she'd cry anyway, Then she'd talk about her stories, she'd talk about people and places none of them had seen in 30, 40, 50 years.

She'd mourn, one by one, the deaths of
her husband,
her children,
her sweetheart,
her friends.
Deaths by emphysema,
by alcohol,
by cancer,
by time.

Maybe it's not technically a poem, but that's how it's labelled and filed. When I read it to my sister recently, it reminded me of another story about my grandmother, which she asked me to write down for her too. So here it is.

It's a story about Jell-O. And it's about some other things. It takes place in the hospital after my grandmother had had a series of small strokes. I went with her on a day when the occupational therapist was evaluating her Activities of Daily Living skills to see whether she could be allowed to return home. So they brought her into the kitchen area and asked her to make a box of Jell-O. They wanted I guess to assess her ability to follow instructions, and to see how she did with boiling water.

"Who wants any Jell-O?" my grandmother asked, quite sensibly. Although, quite honestly, as a mother of twelve grown children she was really pretty tired of cooking on demand.

"Nobody really wants it, ma'am," replied the nice young occupational therapist. "We just want to see how you do in the kitchen on your own."

"So you're going to throw it away?" my grandmother asks. "Won't anybody eat it?"

The therapist looks at me. I shrug. "The nurses will eat it," she says brightly. She's met a few little old ladies before and she thinks this will help.

"Can't the nurses make their own Jell-O?" my grandmother asks. The therapist has not previously encountered someone with my grandmother's disdain for working women who can't even cook for themselves, let alone their starving families.

"Just make the Jell-O, grandma," I say. "They'll let you go home sooner."

"What flavor?" she wants to know.

"Lemon," the therapist and I say together, reading it off the box on the counter.

So, feeling a little bit put-upon by these pathetic nurses who can't make their own damn Jell-O, my grandmother fills the teakettle, puts it over the flame, and then wheels her wheelchair over to the table. She pours the Jell-O into the bowl that the therapist has placed there. She gets a cup of cold water and puts a few ice cubes in it, which the therapist writes down in her chart.

"It jells faster if you use really cold water," she says to the therapist.

The teakettle whistles, and my grandmother picks it up with the hot pad and holds it over the bowl, ready to pour. The therapist looks alarmed.

"Wait, Mrs. S__! Aren't you going to measure it?"

My grandmother puts another hot pad on the table, places the teakettle on it carefully and gives the therapist a seriously hairy eyeball.

I know how much a cup is," she said. Witheringly, I guess you could say was how she said it. And then she calmly poured a cup of boiling water into the bowl, stirred it, and added the icewater.

Belated holiday cheer

I had a party this year for the December solstice. I didn't want to get a tree, so I decorated the tripod that has been sitting in the corner of my dining room since I moved into the new house:



I gotta say I think it looks pretty festive. Click on the picture to see how it looks in the dark. I don't know how I'll be able to stand taking it down. I might just have to leave it up all year.

All I did was buy two strands of tinsel from the dollar store, borrow a string of red lights from Julie (thanks!) and place the Blessed Virgin Mary shrine my sister the mailman brought back from a trip to Mexico (here's a close-up of the shrine). So if you're looking next year for ways to avoid getting a tree, go out now and buy some tinsel and lights while they're half off, and then if you can find them next year, just decorate something that would otherwise be in the way. Easy, cheap, and excellent laughs.

In which the universe demands latkes

I'm having a party next week to celebrate the December Solstice, and I'm a little stressed out about it. I'm a bit of a recluse, especially lately, but I would like my friends to meet my new love interest. And I like parties OK.

Normally the food I serve at a party is the least of my worries. I'm a pretty good cook, and I used to do it for a living, so cooking for a crowd is not that big a deal. But I'm out of practice. I don't want any last-minute failures or surprises, so I've been testing recipes, even the easy ones. Well, maybe not the sour cream-plus-french-onion-soup-mix dip recipe; that one's pretty much idiot-proof, as long as you mix it up ahead of time so that the soup mix dissolves properly in the sour cream. And make a lot. I don't know why everyone loves that stuff, but they do.

So I was cruising through the fridge to see what I had on hand and found, rather bizarrely, that I have nearly ten pounds of potatoes. Why? I don't know. I live alone. I must have purchased them. OK. Potatoes. Potato salad? Nah, I don't really like potato salad all that much, and there's always so much left over. Yuck. Latkes? No way. Total pain in the ass. Huge mess, smell of frying all over the house, and I'll be standing in the kitchen all night instead of actually enjoying my guests. Or, more to the point, instead of wandering about fretting about all the other details and making sure everyone has enough to drink and the dog doesn't eat the misteltoe and stuff.

So I'm thinking that there's this appetizer at this one restaurant I go to occasionally that's sort of similar to latkes only it's just grated potatoes, made into a loose, lacy (yes, fried) croquette-type thing topped with sour cream & caviar. Sort of like a latke, but simpler. And you could grate the potatoes in a food processor instead of by hand. Could I make these in the oven? Are they any good if they're sort of cold from sitting around on the table waiting for people to pick one up? Could I make them ahead of time and heat them up at the last minute?

No, no, and no. Cooked in the oven they totally fell apart; it was like a pile of teeny tiny french fries. Fried on the stove and left to cool off a while they tasted like those canned shoestring potatoes. Reheating them did not help; it made them taste like warmed-up canned shoestring potatoes, and all the sour cream in the world wouldn't have helped.

OK, so I'll mix in a little bit of egg and milk, embed them in sort of a matrix to hold them together. Better, but they need a little something extra, so I grated an onion and that was a little better. Some salt & pepper helped too. And a few snipped chives. I'd given up on the oven idea by then, so I was frying them in a mixture of half butter and half mild-tasting olive oil. The egg & milk mixture was a little too runny, so I added some matzoh meal and let it stand for a while.

The result? Delicious. Perfect vehicle for sour cream and chopped kalamata olives. I didn't happen to have caviar on hand, but I think I might like olives better anyway. I let some stand until they were cool and they were still yummy and crisp around the edges. So far, so good. Worth the pain in the ass factor, in my opinion.

But can they be reheated? Julie, bless her heart, said that she would be willing to stand outside with an electric frying pan and fry them up during the party if they can't. But I'd like for her to enjoy the party too, so I put half of them in the freezer and half in the fridge, and then I called my mother, told her what I'd done, and asked did she think I could reheat them. She's a caterer, after all, and if something can be done ahead of time she'll know how to do it right.

"No," she said. And then, "Well, maybe." She suggested spreading them out on a cookie sheet and putting them in a warm oven (maybe 250°F or so) for a pretty long time, like 45 minutes, but turning the heat up briefly at the end. And flip them every ten minutes or so. And make sure that your oven is heating evenly and one end of the pan isn't getting overcooked or burnt. Turn the cookie sheet around a couple times just in case.

So I got up the next morning and did as she said, although I did it in the toaster oven rather than the big oven because there were only like nine of them and they were tiny, a little bigger than bite-sized. It worked! Although I did have to sort of blot a little of the excess oil off of them with a paper towel. And after work I tried it with the ones that I'd frozen. That worked even better! Except I left them in a little too long and failed to turn the baking sheet and while the crispyness factor improved, the ones on the end were a bit overdone. But they were still pretty yummy, even when they'd cooled off.

And I'd eaten the last of the olives and there was no sour cream, so I put a bit of yogurt and some horseradish on one, and that was really good. Also some chow-chow, which is good on pretty much everything.

I was talking last night to my sister the mailman while they were in the oven and asked for her opinion on reheating them and we got into a long discussion about the JoJo Potatoes from Ted Cook's 19th Hole Barbecue and how to reheat those, should you have any left over. A bout of homesickness for Minneapolis ensued, but then she that suggested a sheet of parchment on the cookie sheet might help with the oiliness, and/or to layer them with paper towels when putting them in the fridge. Both good ideas, and I'm going to test them tonight. Also, I'm going to try undercooking them slightly, to see if that helps. And I'm going to add some grated apples too, because there's a five-pound bag of apples in the fridge.

I said I wasn't going to make latkes, but you know what? These are really just plain old latkes. Happy Hanukkah, yall.

Add this to the list of things I worry about

Squirrel bitings.

I worry sometimes about my sister the mailman: she could be attacked by a mean dog, or a mean customer, or a crazy person; she could be run over by a crazy person in a car; she could fall on the ice, or on someone's unshoveled sidewalk, or a broken stair railing could catch her bag and cause her to tip over into someone's shrubbery (that really happened); plus the back pain from carrying around all those stupid mail-order catalogs, the stress of mandatory overtime -- especially during the winter with the damn daylight savings time thing making it dark so freaking early. But it never even occurred to me to worry that she might get bit by a squirrel and have to get rabies shots.

Well, it happened to a letter carrier in Oil City, PA, last Monday and she had to go to the hospital and get treated for cuts and scratches inflicted by a squirrel that attacked her while delivering the mail. "We are not issuing a squirrel alert," said Steve Jolley, a USPS manager in Oil City, "but everyone is aware of the incident."

Fridge art + bonus catblogging

A couple of loose ends from the comments to the 5 weird things about me* post the other day:

Magpie, whom I've known in real life since before the 1st Gulf War, recalled that I had a cat who did a peculiar thing. I'm not sure how that makes me weird, but I do have photos of Anna with a paper bag on her head.

She'd really do this herself. You know how cats will crawl into an open paper bag if you leave it on the floor? Anna really loved smaller bags. Bags that fit on her head. She'd put them on her head and then walk around with them, sort of bumping into things repeatedly (and apparently on purpose).

The other cats in the house, who normally harrassed poor Anna mercilessly, gave her a wide berth when she had a bag on her head, sort of like they thought she might be somehow dangerous. In this picture, she had actually jumped up onto the mantel and picked up the ToyboatToyboatToyboat bag; I was afraid she'd fall down, so I lifted her off. You can click here to see her on the floor with a plain brown paper bag on her head.

My sister the mailman said that she thought it was strange that I used to keep a photo of Counselor Troi taped to the wall above the cats' dishes so they could watch her when they ate. I had to tell her that she was mistaken about that. For one thing, they ate in separate rooms. They did share a water dish though, and there was a picture above it. She's not totally nuts. The picture above their water dish was actually a postcard someone sent me with two cats who looked like Edie and Anna, and who were drinking water out of a bowl that was nearly identical to their water dish.

The photo of Deanna Troi was actually on the fridge, and it wasn't a picture of her, or even of the actress who played her, but rather it was a picture of my 25th birthday cake. A painter friend of mine used to make these fabulous cakes, and then get a bunch of white frosting, some food coloring, and a palette knife and mix all the colors herself and paint with the frosting on the cake from whatever photo you'd give her. Note the Star Fleet insignia (some made up, some from ST:TOS uniforms) on the cupcakes.

Yes, my friends and I were geeks when we were in our twenties. Somewhere there are photos of the Jean-Luc Picard cake that another friend got for her birthday the year after that cake. I'll post one if I can find it, if anyone is interested.

But speaking of stuff on my fridge: When I took down the DT cake photo this morning to bring it in and scan it, I noticed that some of the items next to it had been on my fridge since at least the early nineties. Which is kind of remarkable considering that I have moved house 13 times since 1990. Seriously. There are lots of magnets and old photos and postcards, and also some cartoons, which are torn and faded and yellow. I brought in a couple of them to scan, so that I can at least preserve them digitally. Quite a few of the cartoons have a dinosaur-extinction theme going, such as this one above from back when Dilbert was actually funny. Click here to embiggen and maybe it'll be more legible, depending on your monitor.

And this one is perhaps my all-time favorite cartoon, from Lynda Barry, one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. Click here to see all four of the panels in the strip; the whole file was just too big to post, and I couldn't make it any smaller without making it completely illegible.

The original is pretty illegible to begin with, even though I tweaked it and enhanced the contrast as much as I could. The date on it is 1996. The third panel is especially faded; here's the narration:

"Iguanadon told us the tar pits rocked. Me and Megalosaurus throught it wouldn't hurt to try it once. Next thing we knew we were hooked. We both got kicked out of our band. Iguanadon choked on his own vomit. The scene was getting ugly but we couldn't stop." And then the dialog between the two dinosaurs: Dino 1: "For godssakes! Iguanadon is dead and all you can think about is finding his stash!" Dino 2: It's around here somewhere."

I've always been fond of putting things on the fridge door. I used to collect headlines from tabloid newspapers (the Weekly Word News was my fave: More space aliens, less celebrity gossip) and arrange them on the fridge door.

The one pictured at left is my first solo apartment, sometime in the late 1980s. The cats on top are named Kolena and Martha. I'm not 100% sure which one is which, although I recall that the solid grey one on the right is the mom of the other one (also pictured below).

Those two cats were adorable, though. Unfortunately they only stayed with me for a few months to accommodate a long-term houseguest of their real mom. The poor houseguest was desperately allergic, but as soon as she went away, these two went back home.

Here's a picture of the younger one in a very popular spot: over the pilot light on the gas stove. That was the most wonderful stove I ever cooked anything on in my entire life. I wish I still had it.

I scanned some more of the fridge art, and some more very old pictures of cats that are no longer, in fact, alive. But I need to go do some other things right about now, so I'll save those for another post.

*I know I'm supposed to tag five more bloggers to complete the meme, but I don't do chain letters or anything like that, so if you want to list five weird things about yourself, please consider yourself tagged. You can post it on your own blog or put your list in the comments over on the original post. It is kind of fun to do.

Bill Clinton made my sister hot

My sister is a mailman. OK 'Letter Carrier' is I guess their official title but she says 'mailman' and I respect that. I respect deeply what mailmen do. I love getting mail. It's pretty fucking amazing if you think about it. And they work damn hard, and it's a pretty thankless job a lot of the time.

But yesterday she told me that she'd pretty much seen it all in the whacked-out customer department: "Nobody's ever tried to tell me I'm imagining the weather before," she said.

Like a lot of places, it's been insanely hot where she lives and works. Just take a minute to imagine what it's like walking around outside in 100-degree weather carrying 50 pounds of mail at a time for eight or ten hours. Not pretty. And she doesn't live in a place where 100-degree weather is usual, although it does happen from time to time.

So picture this: she's walking along her appointed rounds with her fifty-pound sack and sweating like crazy and trying to move as slowly as possible and still complete her route more or less on time. And as she approaches this nice, air-conditioned house -- to which she has been delivering the mail for years -- out pops this guy. She's never seen him before, and thinks maybe he's anticipating a package or expecting something exciting in the mail. He's walking very purposefully towards her

People do that kind of thing sometimes.

He appears to be a regular guy -- a republican and a little bit of a nutjob, she figures, based on what she's seen in his mail. But as soon as she's close enough to hear him, he starts going off about how global warming is a myth. How it was Bill Clinton who convinced "all you liberals" that temperatures were rising and didn't she know that it was this hot for the entire summer of 1933?

No "hi there," no "hot enough for ya?" lame-ass weather jokes, no greeting of any kind, just this tirade about how global warming is a made-up liberal fantasy -- an excuse to disguise liberals' efforts to take over the world and mess with (trample, even) the rights of individuals and their corporate overlords. OK, I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the idea.

Crazy stuff, but he was really worked up about it. Especially the Clinton-blaming part of it. And how on account of Clinton, everyone was going around believing it was actually hotter out than it was.

Or something.

More fun than counting to ten when you're mad

I took this picture several years ago at the May Day Parade in Minneapolis, which is a wonderful and life-affirming and commercial-free phenomenon that I absolutely love. It's the only parade that I've ever really liked. These words were scrawled on the sidewalk with a lot of other goofy stuff, and every time I walked by it I giggled. I've had this photo above my work space for a while, but I had to move it the other day and it's now the first thing I see when I walk in the door of my house. Right above the pic of my sister the mailman standing next to Al Franken at some kind of fund-raiser type event. She's blushing like a teenager. He's hotter than you'd think, she tells me. I'll take her word for it.

Anyway, I think it helps: "I will not freak unless froken to." Go ahead and try it if you need to.