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Mr. Bear

Warm thanks to my friend, fellow Kentucky native and author Georgia Green Stamper, for sharing this grandmother’s tale of deja vu and antics that repeat across generations.

Last week, I tagged along with my youngest daughter, Georgeann, to Cincinnati.  Her young children, Annelise and Hudson, made the jaunt from Lexington, Kentucky, with us. At five and almost three, they are now almost exactly the ages my two older daughters were when Georgeann was born. Strapped in the backseat in their state-of –the –art car carriers, with a movie playing on the DVD player and iPads loaded with games clutched in their hands, the children didn’t make a peep on the seventy-mile trip. Quite a contrast, I thought, to the long car trips of my young motherhood when I had only my imagination to keep the children entertained and separated in their minimally restrained seats.

But the moment we hit the six-lane traffic of I-75 – a stretch of city driving that puts me on edge – Annelise began to screech in a voice edged with panic. “Mr. Bear! Mr. Bear! Mr. Bear! Hudson is grabbing Mr. Bear!”

I turned around to investigate, and sure enough, there was Hudson with a big old grin on his face pulling as hard as he could on Mr. Bear’s head while Annelise held on to his body for dear life. Like a member of the family, Mr. Bear has been her near constant companion since she was an infant. Hudson is never allowed to touch Mr. Bear unless Annelise gives him permission for the occasional cuddle. (This is in no way a deprivation since their household has a few hundred stuffed animals tossed around. Okay, that’s an exaggeration but much of one.)

Déjà vu. Staring at my grandchildren pulling at opposite ends of Mr. Bear’s fragile body, I was transported back to 1977 on this same stretch of Interstate highway. Mother was with me then, sitting in the front passenger seat where I was now, and an infant Georgeann was cradled in her arms in those pre-safety seat days. I was at the wheel navigating unfamiliar urban traffic to pick up my husband at the Greater Cincinnati Airport.

My five-year-old daughter Shan was in the back seat with Bear, whom she never left at home.  A plump half-pillow, half-plaything, he was handmade from a cloth cut-out, a craft notion popular in that era. The girls’ other grandmother had found Bear’s blue front and back body image at a fabric store, then stuffed him into a rotund pillow, and sewn up his exterior edges.

My mother-in-law had made a similar stuffed animal for our middle daughter Becky when she came along, but Becky could not be persuaded that her brown Dog was as fine as Shan’s blue Bear. And so, as I-75 widened from two lanes into many lanes, and the lightening fast traffic converged and diverged from all directions, Becky, a few months shy of her third birthday, grabbed Shan’s Bear by the head.

A frantic tug of war broke out, punctuated with shrieks and sobs. Mother, holding the baby in the front seat, could do little to intervene in the battle. I, of course, couldn’t cross multiple lanes of traffic to pull onto a shoulder if our lives had depended on it.  My admonitions to “JUST STOP IT!” were ignored. (Where was Dr. Spock when you needed him?)

Tension was escalating in both the front and back seats of our car when suddenly the girls, in unison, let out a blood curdling scream. I nearly lunged into an eight-wheeler in an adjacent lane. What had happened? Had one of the back doors swung open despite being locked? Had someone fallen out of the car into the path of the trucks?

Bear’s decapitation is what had happened. His head was in Becky’s hands, his body in Shan’s, and his foam innards were flying all over the car like popcorn on steroids.  Bear had lost his mind –and I was not far behind him.

Then, as both girls sobbed inconsolably in the back seat, Mother began to laugh and laugh until tears ran down her face. “You might as well,” she said.

Mother’s laughter restored both Bear and me to sanity. Within a few days, we had him re-stuffed and his head reattached with heavy thread.  He soldiered on for many more years until his skin completely gave way to ravels and gaping holes. Then, we let him go to that special place in our hearts where we forever hold all of those we have loved.

Last week, my hand darted into the backseat in time to rescue Annelise’s Mr. Bear before his body gave way. But I heard my mother’s voice echo across the decades to remind both Georgeann and me to keep a sense of humor when dealing with the day-to-day challenges of parenting young children. You might as well laugh, she would say.

Certainly, it beats losing one’s head or one’s mind.

Copyright© Georgia Green Stamper

Excerpt from Butter in the Morning. Wind Publications. 2012.

(Available on Amazon.com)

Re-printed with Permission of the Author

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Antiques road show, family-style

For those targeted in the demographic as “mature” readers, there is a wealth of material everywhere you look these days replete with advice about disposing of your belongings, especially older items.

Perusing this advice is not recommended on a dark and dreary day.  Do the closet purging now, so your children don’t have to later, admonishes one so-called expert.  Get rid of everything that doesn’t bring you joy, preaches another.  (That one especially inspires a gag reflex.  Seriously?  My vacuum cleaner doesn’t bring me joy, but some things are just necessary.  And I’m not turning my house into a personal temple to my own rapture.  Spare me.)

And then there are the dire predictions about locating useful destinations for your objects, especially items from bygone days.  The problem is not what to purge, reads one article, but what to do with what you are shedding. No one wants your stuff, one writer declares—especially not your children—and particularly old dishes, glassware, and silver.  Even charities serving the needy may not accept such items, and readers are advised to research this carefully.   What to do?  Facebook marketplace?  eBay, where listings appear to linger for ages?

I suppose it is likely that some of our long-used family belongings could someday end up in such places.

But you’d have to catch them first.  That’s because many of our family pieces have logged more miles than the newly retired with the keys to a sparkling new RV.  As a tribe, we give our own special meaning to the phrase “antiques road show.”

Let’s begin with an old maple rocking chair, with elegantly curved arms, a wonderfully tilted back, and the long, deep rockers that make for a fine, fine rocking interlude.  That chair has at least 400 miles on it.  When wewere dispersing items after my father’s death, the rocker traveled home with me from Kentucky to Tennessee, and after I moved again a few years later to more limited space, it traveled back up the exact same road to a sunlit spot in my sister’s larger house.

These travels are not limited to comfortable furniture.  I recently came into possession of a dozen gleaming silver-plated water goblets, future use as yet undetermined, but gosh, they are eye-poppers.  If I think carefully about history and lineage (a dangerous thing in such situations), I believe mine is the fifth family home in in which they have resided.  It’s

best not to attempt a road mileage total on that one.

My longtime interior design consultant and dear friend once described my home design style as “inherited.”  And while that one got a roar of appreciation when I shared it in the fam, the pattern emerged decades ago for very practical reasons.  It’s not that my house is crammed with items representing some overburdening emotional obligations.  It began as much the opposite: Any furniture from family sources I liked and could use, as a young person starting out, was a piece I didn’t have to pay for.

Still, I freely admit our family treasures may offer some endearing, tangible connections to those who passed them on.  A few years back I was mesmerized by a fascinating book about Te Māori, the first U. S. exhibition of ancient art from the native Māori people of New Zealand. The opening of the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was preceded by elaborate tribal rituals symbolizing honor for and protection of the ancestral artists, who are believed by the Māori to spiritually inhabit the art they created.

My own treasured artifacts mostly weren’t made by our earlier generations, but I still enjoy thinking about what their spirits, if residing therein, could pass on to us. Could I replicate the hospitality at my own dinner parties that always illuminated my parents’ home by remembering to pull out my mother’s crystal wine glasses? If we keep that old rocker in the family circle, will we someday emulate with our younger members the long conversations I had with my dad when I sat in it, across from his favorite perch in their den, while we chatted?

In our defense, we are at least beginning to think and talk about “re-homing” some of these family items, as the term is currently used in reference to rescue animals, not necessarily a flawed analogy.  As the current trustee of two sets of fine china from two generations back, I was recently struck by the notion that two might be one too many.

I really need to make some more space in my cabinets, I lamented on the phone to my sister, and I don’t really want to start packing things away in storage boxes.  “I know, I’m the same,” she answered with a sigh.  “We aren’t moving anywhere, anytime soon, but I am starting to think about what I can begin to purge from this house, working toward when that time comes.”

There is a particular, unspoken code for these family chess moves, and I was careful to follow it:  I’m probably going to get rid of Mamama’s good china, I continued.  (Mamama being our maternal grandmother.) I just don’t use it or need it.  That is, of course, unless you want it.

Pause for here for a millisecond of dead air in the ether.  “Wait,” she pondered. “Which ones are those?”  Absorbing my description of the old ivory porcelain with the brightly flowered centers, she suddenly leapt the tracks on the strategic execution for starting-to-get-rid-of-stuff.  “Actually, I might take those.”  She had reasons, of course, but they elude memory at the moment, because she had a chess move of her own lurking.  “You might want these ones I have that were Snowy’s (our paternal grandmother).  They’re all-white, and they’re gorgeous.  You’d really like them. As a special bonus offer, I’ll throw in the cushioned, zippered containers I bought to keep them in and protect them from chipping.”

The absurdity of this exchange finally ignited a roar of laughter from both guilty parties, but even that burst of self-knowledge does not appear to be forestalling next steps.  More road show might be coming.  “I’ll send you a photo,” she said, “and if you want them, I’ll bring them when I come down to visit in a couple of weeks.  And I’ll take the others, if they are the ones I am remembering.”

On it goes.  On a recent weekend afternoon, a text from my daughter inquired what I was doing. I confessed to furiously polishing an ornate, silver-plated, Victorian-style tea and coffee set that belonged to a great aunt who died 40 years ago.  Even the hopeless optimist in me knows that charities have no use for such things these days, and a perusal of eBay showed too little value to be worth the trouble of the transaction.

What am I going to do with this thing?  I asked her, rhetorically.  “Maybe use the sugar bowl to store device cords,” she attempted, helpfully.  “And water your plants with the teapot?”

That’s my girl, I thought, a bright flicker of pride warming my heart and emboldening me to push forward another step.  I sent a photo of the silver water goblets, asking, “I don’t suppose you want any of these?  No obligation, no hurt feelings if you don’t.”

And it was the second half of her response that turned the flicker in my heart into a warm, enduring beam of hope for the next generation.  “Sure, I’ll take some.  Now, whose were those, again?”

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It’s Teen Time

When your birthdays push you past the half-century mark and beyond, there’s something the great P. G. Wodehouse would have called a stone-dead cert:  You have a long list of things that mark the increasing acceleration of time.  Candles on the cake, growth in the garden, waking up and finding it is Easter, when Christmas was just yesterday.  We’ve all got ‘em.

Yet none of those ubiquitous markers has smacked me on the old bean quite as powerfully as when, on a recent day, I looked into the light-blue eyes of my 12-year-old grandson.  And realized I was looking up.  Because, though we have checked and debated this metric multiple times in recent months, there is no longer any question. The ref has blown the whistle, and there is no need to examine the video. It is official. He is taller than I am.

If one pays the slightest attention to genetics, which I view as increasingly powerful, the older I get, this milestone should be no surprise.  Lanky, long-limbed Buddy, two months shy of his 13th birthday, is the child of a six-foot-plus father and a mom who has proudly towered over me since she was not much older than he is.  Still, there is something particularly poignant about this illustration of the fleeting passage of years.  Why is that, I wondered?

Maybe it’s apprehension about the official arrival of the teen years, and all that they routinely include.  I recently lamented to my daughter (his mom) about the marked recent signs of maturity in Buddy and his younger sister, two years behind him on the birthday calendar.  “I KNOW!” she wailed.  “They used to be babies!”  Indeed, I thought, remaining convinced that was only about two weeks ago.

Flags indicating the onset of Teendom in Buddy have been waving for several months now.  Not long ago at the dinner table, I watched while his mother’s husband swiftly and without comment swapped his slices of roast for hers, providing her with the cuts he knows she prefers. Wow, I commented in appreciation, that’s true love.

“Awwww,” Buddy moaned, “I want true love!  And I’m going to have wait so LONG!”  Maybe not, I thought to myself, remembering the 70-year romance of my parents, who met at 14.  You never know on that one, I said aloud.  He didn’t roll his eyes, but he probably considered it.

Then there’s the dreaded Maybe Syndrome, a highly effective tool for teens to wield against anyone who holds any degree of responsibility in their lives.  It’s a subtle, but effective, power-shifter.  There are days when anything you ask Buddy generates the same answer:  Maybe.  Want a sandwich?  Watch a movie?  Sauce on your ice cream?  Maybe maybe maybe maybe.  I recently took a cue from his younger sister, who is admirably sharpening her skills in fighting fire with fire.  He asked me after a recent meal about dessert, and before I could respond, she jumped in with strategic advice.  “Tell him maybe, Evie.  Tell him maybe.  That’s all he ever says, so say that.”

Across the dinner table on another recent evening, family chatter lagged for a moment.  Buddy stepped bravely into the breach to announce, apropos of nothing, “Guess what, Evie! I started wearing deodorant today!”

What’s a grandmother to say?  I blabbered the first thing that popped into the G-ma brain: Is it working?  What a rookie mistake.  His ever-vigilant sibling immediately seized the obvious comedic opening.  Leaning over from the chair next to her brother, she thrust her nose into his armpit, then issued her ruling:  “NO.”

So far, at least, in spite of all the fears around us in our tumultuous world, I’m not too worried about what the teen years will mean in life for Buddy.  He has a devoted, competent, no-nonsense mom, a very present father and stepfather, and many other adults who love him.  Still, looking down the road while looking up into his eyes raises other questions.  What’s my role now, with this boy I adore?  No more need to check his shoelaces or remind him to go to the bathroom or wonder if he remembers the safe way to slice an apple (well, I might still hover a bit on that last one), though he does maintain his propensity for getting lost.  He is much more likely to explain to me some complex scientific concept to me than the other way around. My role as second-team safety patrol and/or entertainment/information source is over, at least in its old form.

Another surprise brought this question to mind again recently.  I’m not sure if my reaction, which was clearly sought, was right or wrong.   A grandmother can only, with love, do her best in the moment.  The phone rang a couple of days ago with a FaceTime request, and when I hit accept, a shock awaited.  Buddy’s handsome face filled the screen, his shiny hair cropped to about a quarter-inch all over his head.

For months, maybe more than a year, our young man had grown out his hair until it reached below the top of his shoulders.  My hairdresser confirmed the predominance of this trend with young teen males, when I may have shared my dismay with a professional. Thick, wavy, and blonde, Buddy’s hair drew comments all around. In my circle, the reactions reeked of envy, especially from women of, shall we say, a certain age.  In recording this for history, I’ll leave out the details of my own view, which I may have failed to keep to myself in front of him.  Let’s just say I often missed a clearer view of his handsome face.

On the phone, on camera, my jaw dropped way below sea level.  What on earth?  What made you decide to do that?  And Teen Man gave voice.  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I was bored, I think.”

Well, my goodness, I stuttered.  You look very handsome.  Of course, you were handsome before, and you’re handsome now.

Under pressure, it was the best I could do.  It’s Teen Time.  More surprises are surely coming.

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Heat Exhaustion

A Labor Day weekend survey of the garden is a such a dreary exercise.

The petunias in the window box, big favorites of the hummingbirds and bees this summer, droop sadly in apparent surrender to the late-summer weather scourge. Their dry, twiggy stems are grumpily sprouting junior versions of their glorious purple trumpets from early summer. Patient daily watering does not appear to assuage their gloom or straighten their spines.

It has been generally miserable around here, as August in the South tends to be, when the old joke abbreviates the weather as HHH (hazy, hot, and humid). The plants are as irritable as the people as September arrives. The Gardener encountered a brief poem the other day that heralded September as the season of renewal. She briefly wonders where that poet resides but is pretty certain it ain’t around here.

A viney cherry tomato plant that hangs in a basket was a fun experiment this season for a warm sunny spot in the back of the house. The Gardener hung it on a pole and grinned at it all summer, thrilled at the candy-like flavor of its tiny red orbs. Then, as if the other maladies of August—storms, record heat, mold, and more amusements of that sort— were not sufficient to beat a Gardener into submission, the hornworms appeared. These vicious, naturally camouflaged attackers started at the top of the plant, working their way downward to shred the leaves and gobble the fruit. While the Gardener’s faithful back was turned, they transformed the proud green vines from robust to eligible for life support in an eye-popping 48 hours.

The first experience with hornworms was the stuff of nightmares. When poked, the sneaky, life-sucking little assassins rare up like a cobra and display tiny teeth. (No one could make this up. Seriously.) The Gardener was not proud of the satisfaction gained by ending Hornworm Reign of Terror with a sharp pair of garden shears for slaughter, but end it she did. Interestingly, Nature brooks no waste. The injured, half-bitten tiny tomatoes were hurled like Major League fastballs across the lawn toward the woods, more balm for the frustration. It was kind of fun to see the neighborhood flock of wild turkeys, strutting and clucking their grateful anticipation, descend on them like vultures on a roadside skunk. Can turkeys smell food? After watching these peaceful neighbors and their amusing habits for several seasons, the Gardener would not bet against it.

As the heat wave continues, even the stalwart herbs beg for relief. A new variety this year with a tiny, pointed leaf and tart, lemony flavor, the basil plant bushed out beautifully and faithfully did its thing in support of the quintessential summer tomato salad. As if on cue last week when we hit 99 degrees, the basil suddenly sprouted a cluster of flowers on the tips of the stems as thick as the wildflowers in the meadow beyond the house. The butterflies are enchanted by the little blossoms, and even the hummingbird is happily sucking away, but this sight holds no joy for the Gardener. She reads the message clearly: Basil is done for the summer.

Saddest of all—as pitiful in its decline as it was glorious at its peak– is the potted giant zinnia, nearly the size of a bush. This happy one brightened the porch all summer. The fat, fluffy blossoms of red, orange and yellow summoned the hummingbirds, who cheered the Gardener with daily visits outside the office window. Zinnias are a gardener’s safe harbor in the hot Southern summer. They are reliably heat tolerant and last so well in a vase when cut. But after this latest brutal siege, even a major morning dose of water doesn’t bolster the zinnia to stand up in the heat by mid-afternoon.

The Gardener knows just how it feels.

Yet there is no rest for those who cannot relinquish optimism when faced with these signs of pestilence, drought, and tragedy. The lifelong Gardener is either the most determined optimist you ever met, or an oblivious idiot, or somewhere combination of both (OOI). The owner of our best local garden center writes an informative weekly blog about our conditions and the opportunities they represent to us OOIs. “You can plant now!” He promises. “The nights are getting cooler! Plants will grow and thrive until the ground freezes solid. It’s not too late. There is plenty you can do.” (And to nudge that concept along, all plants are on sale, of course.)

Feeling the 90-plus degree sun on her sweaty neck as she surveys available bed space on the holiday, the Gardener is inclined to dispute this advice and write it off to blatant commercialism. She commences to poke around for evidence in support of surrender, and that she is right, and he is wrong (because why trust an expert?). Sure enough, dadgum it, here is the sight, on closer inspection, of small green sprouts emerging near the bases of the tired petunia vines. Poking a toe in exasperation at the black-spotted, rotting leaves where the Shasta daisies sprouted eagerly earlier in the summer, she can see fresh, green leaves popping up at the base of the rotted ones.

Maybe, just maybe it is too early to surrender, after all?

As the Gardener stands absorbing these little surprises, she begins to contemplate a quick run to the garden center, eternally alert to potential bargains and intent on scoring that alluring 15 percent off for just the right things to fill the open spaces in that bed. Why not listen to the experts, after all? If the poets consider it the season of renewal, who is the Gardener to argue? Lost in these fantasies, she looks down to see that a tiny butterfly, brilliant orange and black, has taken a brief rest on the toe of her garden sandals.

Surely, this is a sign. Sometimes the Gardener takes comfort in considering that her beloved late mother, her mentor as a Gardener, might be manifesting encouragement to her in the forms of the hummingbirds and butterflies. An OOI down to the marrow of her bones, she does not care if this sounds crazy. She heads inside in search of her car keys.

 

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One Brief Shining Moment

It was one of those golden moments, the kind that linger in memory, perhaps more powerful because it was utterly unexpected.

It began with one of those instincts you can’t suppress, because it is rooted deep in your bone marrow.  We were gathered around the dinner table, with pizza and birthday balloons and cupcakes waiting and a generally festive atmosphere.  My 12-year-old grandson, Buddy, commenced to tell a story involving his younger sister.

“Me and Sis were going to…” he began. I interrupted on autopilot with a correction that, in our family, goes back at least two generations.

“Sis and I,” I corrected, more pointedly than may have been charming at a birthday party.

“Wait, I mean..what?”  Buddy stammered, confused.  “Why does it have to be Sis and I?”

Before I could open my mouth, his mother raised one eyebrow and beamed a look at her progeny, as if warning off a hopeless punter loading up on a longshot at the race track.  “I advise you,” she recommended firmly, “not to get in an argument about grammar with your grandmother. You won’t win.”

And there it was.  I’m certain I felt a spotlight illuminating me from above like a soloist on Broadway, with the horns and percussion sounding TAH DAH!  Thus arrived the moment every parent longs for:  The stunning revelation that something they said, some time, even decades ago, actually penetrated.  And stuck.

My daughter was an excellent student, a creative spirit with writing skills far above average for her age, so I rarely reviewed or corrected her English homework. (I had better sense than to touch her math, where I was more harm than help.)  That did not prevent me, however, from doggedly correcting her verbal communication from the very early days, starting with the classic, historically festering misalignment of objective and subjective pronouns.  Me and Sis?  Nope.  Not happening.

My mom had ascended to her eternal reward by the time this little birthday grammar episode occurred, but she would have heartily approved.  She raised her four children with the same standards, weaving in the correct language—sometimes rather pointedly—around the dinner table and most places the transgressions occurred in the boisterous conversations of four very talkative siblings.  It was simply part of the molding of young souls, in her eyes, no different than insisting on clean hair and brushed teeth and responses of “yes, ma’am.”

What drove that habit?  Generational patterns, as with so many other things in families. She was raised the same way, the only child of an English teacher whose standards for appropriate and correct speech never wavered.  Mom also taught English, just for a couple of years in her twenties in the Philippine Islands when my Dad was stationed at Subic Bay Naval Base.  Only history knows if she dogged her students in similar fashion, but when her children began arriving over the next few years, the diligence already had firm root.

Fast forward to the present day, with me now an elder guardian of subject, object, and the like.  Will it end with my generation, in our family?  Can grammar and clear language survive the age of instantaneous communication? What really matters in the reign of thumb-typing, auto-correct, and shameless comments regurgitated in haste with no punctuation?  Should we cave in and rely on the digital editor and her glaring red lines under our errant phrases? Who cares, anymore, about actually knowing grammar?

A dwindling few of us still do, though it’s a lonely chair to occupy. My own compulsion to wave this flag is grounded in both family habit and professional training.  In my early career as a journalist, editors still cared. They did not take kindly to having to execute grammar corrections under deadline.  We had reference books and style guides at our disposal and were expected to be responsible for knowing what was correct. In current times, it’s a rare day there is not a misspelled word or glaring grammar error in headlines and news stories anywhere you can stand to look.  Will we ever be rescued from the ubiquitous blizzard of mis-used apostrophes (the Smith’s had a party) and absent hyphens (the sun dappled patio)?  I have a favorite t-shirt with this legend on the front:

Let’s eat, Grandma

Let’s eat Grandma

Commas save lives

The heart aches to notice how few people laugh when I wear it.

Still, as the young so often do, Buddy delivered a little glimmer of hope recently.  He was probably just looking to get his own back.  I was pinch-hitting as driver to his music lesson on a hot day, and he was wearing shorts.  I watched as he awkwardly maneuvered his long, lean legs and enormous feet into position as he climbed into the front seat of my car. The speed of his recent growth spurt is still a shock.

He caught me scanning the apparent mile between his hips and knees, and asked, “What are you looking at?”

Nothing, I mumbled, embarrassed to be caught staring.  It’s just that you, well, you have a lot of legs.

“No, I don’t,” his pre-teen self replied, with a sly side-eye.  “I only have two. If I had a lot of legs, I’d be an octopus, or one of those bugs.”

True!  I had to answer, caught crimson-handed and thinking, Touché.  Maybe, just maybe, there is hope for the correct sentence, after all.

 

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Wordle Woes

GROAN.

Is it a high-potential starting word in America’s favorite word game?  Three good consonants, two frequent vowels…a good opening volley this morning?

Or, is it the SOUND that erupted painfully from my throat, scaring the dog, when I busted my Wordle streak?  (AGAIN.)

If you are among the millions addicted to the word game that has gripped the nation, if you constantly update your strategy or sweat over your starting word, if you are on a text thread that shares scores every morning, then you know the real answer.  It’s both.

What’s that?  Not a Wordler?  We fanatics don’t JUDGE, of course, but I may quietly speculate what life is like under that rock.  I’ll even confess I started playing myself last year, after suffering the most acute case of fear-of-missing-out that ever struck.  What on earth were all these rows of blocks on Facebook, where the devoted shared their daily scores?  Why was everyone asking, “Did you get the word today?”  I was pretty much the only person I knew who wasn’t playing.  A good pal offered to COACH this beginner, and I dove in.  And was immediately hooked.

If you’ve had your eyes and ears open at all in the past year or two (this morning’s Wordle is daily puzzle No. 736) in the western world, you likely know this game offers you six chances to guess a five-letter word by the process of elimination of letters.  Sounds simple, right? You key in the letters for your GUESS and get instantaneous results. Green squares indicate correct letters in the right order, yellows are correct letters, out of order, and the remaining letters are eliminated.  You play it on your phone, and if you sign in, it tallies your running results, totalling how many tries it takes you and how many days in a row you get it right (the streak).

What could possibly go wrong?

Hold my beer.  Some of us find new ways to defeat ourselves at least once a week, if not more frequently.  Take note here of just a few ways a Wordler can blow it.  After 320 plays (hey!  Is there a Wordle anniversary gift for one year?), I recommend that you don’t:

  • Start playing when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. Awake, maybe, but brain still fuzzy, you’ll overlook blatant clues and annoy yourself so thoroughly you’ll soon be even more AWAKE, even more unlikely to recapture SLEEP, and get a crappy score.  A two-for-one nightmare.
  • Play the same starting word every single ding-dang day. There are those who SWEAR by this strategy—and hey, I know one who outscores me most days—but I can’t stick with that.  It left me totally BORED.
  • Select your first guess based on the mood of the day. I woke up the other morning still glowing from a wonderful gathering of loved ones the previous day, so I started with HAPPY.  The irony was unbearable; I busted the streak painfully, even with four of the five letters by the third guess.  Why did you WASTE an extra consonant, with those two P’s, asked a kind fellow-sufferer, who probably heard my GROAN miles away at his house.  I don’t know, because I was, well, you know, HAPPY, before I played this dadgum game?  Some have luck starting with the weather (CLOUD); he, on the other hand, often starts with terms inspired by the daily news.  On the historic day of our former president’s recent federal indictment, he started with CRIME and got the word in three tries.  Poetic justice?  You decide.
  • Forget that many words contain a letter that appears more than once. I made this mistake, oh, I dunno, 25 or 30 times before I finally caught on, being quick that way. Still, hope glimmers faintly on the horizon, proving that even the most bullheaded players may finally catch on.  Today’s word is RODEO, and I got it in four.
  • Play without your glasses because you are too lazy to get up and get them. Need I point out how much M looks like N when you are squinting, and so forth?

How could I miss TASTE? And the streak begins again at Zero.

Enough about ways we make it harder.  What about ethics?  (Gasp!  Must we apply moral standards to Wordle?  Examine your own conscience, is my advice.)

Of all the Wordlers I know, only two have openly confessed–one of them whispering, if you can do that in a text–to consulting an outside source to improve results. One reviews a website that archives previous words; he checks it before entering a guess.  Does that make him a CHEAT, he asked me recently?  Reading this text, I inhaled sharply.  Not because I was scandalized, but because I felt stupid for not knowing that the words don’t repeat.  Or that such websites exist.

Another daily Wordler confessed to roaming the wild, forsaken deserts of Google to get the word in six tries or less—checking the spelling, or asking the Almighty G if her guess is actually a word (the latter an unnecessary step, as the game rejects entries not found in the dictionary and doesn’t count them as one of your six tries).

My personal diversion from the most rigid standards of play involves asking for clues.  One recent morning I had eliminated so many letters in four tries that I couldn’t even type out a word that actually WAS a word with the letters I had left.  After about a quarter-million attempts and three cups of coffee, I would have happily busted my streak just to finish, but, no.  There was nothing for it but to plead for assistance.  I texted my pal:  Give me a hint, I begged, PRIDE and SHAME abandoned, wondering how I could possibly get on with my day, which happened to contain some actual productive objectives and commitments beyond word puzzles.  Felt the same more than once, have you? If you’re thinking of slinking to the dark side and joining me there, here’s a tip:  Ask for the first letter, if you don’t have it already.  It flips on a switch with illumination more powerful than the overhead light at the dentist’s office.

I read this week that the New York Times is introducing a new word game called “Connections.”  Will it draw away the Wordle faithful, or just consume still more time in the average day for addicted puzzle players?  “The editor of the game talks about how she makes it feel fun,” begins the announcement story.  Oh, really?  I decline to speculate on how much fun is actually involved in my addiction to Wordle.

Yet I stick with it.  And I don’t want for much.  My goals are simple:  I want to improve my stats to show more puzzles solved in THREE tries than in four.  That gap is big, and the mountain looks high. I may never get there, but if I do, I’ll be so HAPPY.

AGONY may be the answer, but getting it in three is still a triumph.

 

 

 

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In Scarlet Glory

Hello, Gorgeous.

So you’re back, are you?  Yes, here you are, in all your tempting ruby glory.  I can’t get enough of you, and I don’t care who knows it.

There are those who may say (sing it, Andy Williams) that the year-end holidays are the most wonderful time of the year.

Perhaps that’s true, but right here, right now, record one vote in that category for Strawberry Season.

These red crown jewels of cuisine, the tiny ripe ones sweet enough to make you weep on first bite if you weren’t too busy reaching for another—they come from right up the road this time of year, if you are lucky enough to live in the right places.  In our neck of the woods, the Strawberry Epicenter is Portland, Tennessee, and on farms stretching out and around the rolling hills of north-central Volunteer State.

Why Portland?  The definitive local source is silent on and agricultural/scientific bases for the local strawberry boon.  According to the website for Portland’s annual strawberry extravaganza, “in the early 1900’s Portland’s big industry was ‘strawberries’.  In addition to the large number of farms and agricultural businesses growing the country’s finest berries, there was a creating factory, a fruit processing plant, a canning factory, and a freezing facility producing strawberries for Breyers Ice Cream and other national brands.

It continues: “During the peak of the strawberry business Portland would ship out 30 railroad cars a day.  Portland started hosting the Middle Tennessee Strawberry Festival in 1941…Each year in mid-May the festival brings 40,000-plus people together to celebrate the importance of the strawberry industry to Portland’s heritage.”

Thirty freight cars a day?  That’s a train worth hopping, like the hoboes of old in search of better times and places.  That “country’s finest berries” part just might reflect regional bias; who knows?  Google reports, as Google tends to do, a maddening variety of conflicting answers on where to find the best strawberries in the U.S.  Here’s our answer to Google’s eternal indecision:  The best strawberries are the ones that are grown right up the road, wherever you may be.

Meanwhile, if you have even one eye open, you cannot miss the arrival of the Most Wonderful Time.  Like a royal coronation or the Super Bowl, it is heralded with street banners, celebrations, and featured recipes in every possible media outlet.

The most authentic fans wait patiently for the arrival of the local gems in glorious early summer, disdaining the hard and flavorless imposters that perch in other seasons in the produce section coolers at any grocery store.  Too large, off-color, or, worst of all, hollow inside (shuddering is the appropriate response here), these are easy to ignore, for they are the poorest imaginable substitutes for the true, local, delectable thing.

Strawberries are tasty testimony to the eternal truth that small is so often superior.  The very best of these scarlet prizes are small, blood-red, no orange tones.  They are firm, not too hard (underripe), and not too soft (overripe).  We the faithful (read: picky) scan container arrays at farmers markets and in neighborhood produce shops, scrupulous in selection.  We are indifferent to how long this examination requires, and we pity those who don’t understand it’s importance.

At this height of the Blessed Season, the chefs of YouTube, the Food Network, and beyond present us with countless recipes to feature our treasures during this brief annual spectacle.  There they perch atop a salad, snuggling amidst Southern pecans and local goat cheese.  And here they are swimming in a cocktail, the scarlet tones drawing the eye like hummingbirds to red geraniums.  My, they photograph well.  A favorite local restaurant, Nashville’s fabulous Midtown Cafe, added strawberry cake to the dessert menu, its lovely pink cream icing proudly holding up the fresh, naked trophies atop each slice.  It is enough to haunt your dreams.  I awake wondering how I can finagle a return visit before the season ends.  One must have one’s cake and…well, you know what I mean.

About those recipes.

Admire them as you may, but there is a great secret among the most indefatigable of the Strawberry Tribe.  We never make it through those recipes.  Because we are bound to the only recipe that matters:  Pop in mouth immediately.  Follow with another.  Continue with as many as possible, before the Blessed Season ends, all too soon.

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Cookie Chaos

Picture this:  The next day, there were cookie sprinkles in my bed.

You really can’t make this stuff up.  How did the little multi-colored devils make their way from the kitchen?  Certainly not because I was eating in bed; I was too exhausted by that time to even open my mouth, much less chew. Most likely they were stuck to the paws of the cat, who jumps on the bed to nudge me awake, no small job on this particular morning.

Heaven knows the kitchen floor was a virtual garden of sprinkles, topping a thick carpet of flour, dough crumbs, and what-all. It was all there for the strolling after a worn-out grandmother collapsed in bed before she finished cleaning the floor.  For all I know, the sprinkles were stuck to my own feet.

It was the morning after the annual holiday cookie-baking extravaganza, with grandkids Buddy, Sis, and me.  The kids are competent, trained clean-up staff, but the schedule went awry for this baking session, and I had to hustle them home before they could do their part.  So, I was a clean-up staff of one, surveying the damage.

More evidence of the previous day’s culinary chaos was traveling on four feet. Reaching down on to clip on the dog’s leash for his routine morning stroll, I lightened his load by plucking a small nugget of dried meringue from the fluffy black spikes of hair just above the base of his ear.  Not hard to figure that one out; he knows exactly where to loiter under the island counter to catch whatever falls.

Why is this baking process so messy?  For one thing, we make the dough from scratch and roll it out the old-fashioned way. We follow a recipe in my grandmother’s handwriting that attributes the recipe to her own mother. (That’s right, the great-great-great grandmother of my baking co-conspirators.)

And truly expert bakers may have other thoughts, but in my experience, the answer to all questions about working with scratch dough is more flour, everywhere and always.  Dough getting sticky, or splitting under the pin? Dump more flour on the hands, on the rolling pin, on the dough ball.  When this technique is employed by bakers ages 9 and 11, turning the kitchen floors into a decorator’s “Dusty White” finish is but the work of a moment.

Next comes the decorating phase.  Supplied with red, green, and white icing tubes, a box of edible eyeballs, the whipped egg whites for texture, and four colors of sprinkles, Buddy and Sis set to work on holiday masterpieces.  A highlight for their G-ma is observing their artistic inclinations evolving as they get older.  In a short year, pre-teen Buddy has blown past friendly gingerbread men with smiles and standard icing trim to a tray full of one-eyed cyclops characters and a tenderly crafted skeleton.

While Sis opted for some more traditional formats—striped candy canes, and dotted Christmas trees—the concept of excess does not haunt the vocabulary or the thoughts.  Gentle suggestions about the thickness of icing or the volume of sprinkles were cheerfully yet determinedly unheeded.

Happily, the children have matured into a phase where humor may trump heartache when disaster strikes.  I feared a hardworking young baker’s disappointment when I pulled a tray of his smaller cookies from the oven.  Apparently, decorative eyeballs require a certain dough thickness to maintain shape while cooking.  The little cut-outs were not thick enough, and they emerged looking like a pack of forest creatures that had been slain by a mythical cave monster, their eyes plucked out by vultures.  “Oh, dear,” I mumbled, and before I could utter anything more helpful, Buddy looked over my shoulder at the melted carnage.  Hahahaha, he hooted.  “That looks WEIRD!  Eeewwwww!”

My girlfriends asked maddeningly logical questions about our baking plans when I shared them in advance.  Why not just buy the dough, make it easier?  asked one.  Don’t you want to get a decorating kit with instructions?  queried another.  How great that you let them do them however they want, said a third, kindly, with only a tiny pinch of surprise.

Staring at the next-day sprinkles sparkling on the bed linens, I admit I pondered those questions.  Is doing things the hard way a family trait, I wondered, not for the first time?  Do the cookies really taste better, from scratch—and is that even the point?  Maybe I just wanted to focus on one family tradition, and the memories attached, in this first Christmas since my mother died.   In the company of the children, this one felt so right.

Observing the wreck that remained for remediation, I remembered one more detail.  Sometimes I actually like the sight of a messy kitchen.  Sometimes, it is a vivid, aromatic illustration of shared fellowship, creative outcomes, and more than a few unexpected laughs.  Even if I am left with melted eyeballs stuck like glue to non-stick cookie sheets and meringue-wearing dachshunds.  It’s the best kind of holiday chaos.

Merry Christmas to all. May the chaos reign.

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Post-Holiday Checklist

Made a few notes for next time after hosting Thanksgiving for the family.

Things I Forgot For Thanksgiving Dinner

  • Graham crackers for the smores.   Oh, yes, we had the snazzy outdoor firepit, acquired in hopes of extending the space for the crowd out onto the back porch, a welcome dose of fresh air and crackling logs after the three pie varieties had worn off.  I could envision the pastoral, after-dinner sweetness of the scene, even smell the toasting marshmallows.  But not clearly enough to remember the graham crackers.  Spoiler alert:  Ritz served as an adequate substitute, but I’m still embarrassed.
  • A bathroom serving at least 10 guests benefits from more than half of one roll of toilet paper.  Surely the other nine were grateful to the enterprising niece (you know who you are) who located the back supply in the other bath and delivered where needed.  Thanks for having my back, kiddo.
  • Carrots, pickles, and smoked oysters for the relish tray for cocktail hour, meant to mimic what my mother always offered on our first Thanksgiving without her.  I kept thinking the tray looked a little dinky with just olives and pickled okra, but couldn’t quite focus on the solutions awaiting their turn quietly in the cabinet. Where they remain.  Does that stuff last until next year?
  • Actually offering liquor to your guests increases the chances of them actually drinking it.  That fine bottle of bourbon, a gift and popular new brand, went untouched.  When I wondered why to my daughter, she said, “I didn’t know it was there.”

Things I remembered

  • Mom was right.  (But you knew that already, didn’t you?) Years ago, I asked her–with what I thought was appropriate reverence–how to watch the antique lace tablecloth she handed down into my care.  One never knows, in a family, when reverence may be misplaced.  “Put a candlestick or serving dish over the spot and forget it,” she advised, an Olympic gold piece of hostess advice if ever there was one.
  • Pre-adolescent children—an age that has been known to try the patience of the most hallowed of saints–can actually be excellent kitchen meal-prep staff.  They’re like dogs, their mother observed later; they do best with a job.
  • Do not buy a used car from anyone who tells you that making gravy is easy.  It’s a myth, perpetrated by the most gifted cooks in cahoots with purveyors of turkey gizzards.  I know absolutely how tricky it can be, because I watched very carefully while my gifted sister-in-law worked really hard on it.  But not closely enough to do it myself, next time.  (And dang, it was good.)
  • A strategic Leftover Distribution Plan is vital.  Even the most calculating and careful hostess might have too much food—I’m told by a friend.  Check your shelf of disposable containers, maybe check it twice. Stand by to load them with abandon, and don’t let anyone out the front door who doesn’t tote one, preferably two or three.  It can undermine dignity to resort to leaving mashed potatoes anonymously on the doorsteps of unassuming neighbors and tearing up homemade rolls in the backyard for the birds.
  • How our dad laughed when he got really, really tickled.  Which was pretty often, at these gatherings.  Nine years after he left us, I saw and heard him in my brother’s laugh and the familiar, gleeful expression on his face.  It’s a laugh that rings bells and lights candles and melts away grief.  Extra napkins may be required to mop the face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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All Hail and Salute

Thinking about your Thanksgiving toasts? Making a list of all the things you’re grateful for?  I’m adding new entries this year, a cadre of stalwarts who deserve way more credit than they likely ever get.

Friends, I give you the Grocery Workers on Thanksgiving Week.  Will you join me in raising a glass?

Here’s to the lovely woman in the friendly green branded shirt motoring past me on a mission.  Even at that speed, she noticed me frozen in place in front of the canned fish, searching with furrowed brow for smoked oysters.  Brakes applied, she offered assistance, unasked:  “Help you find something, ma’am?”  Of course, the oysters were right in front of me, a fact she kindly neglected to point out.

And raise your glass high to her colleague, similar shirt with hair net, who appeared magically out of nowhere, a retail EMT dashing to the scene of the emergency.  Ignoring the grocery-aisle speed limit in my typical infernal hurry, I tilted the cart just slightly, like a race car on two wheels rounding the final turn.  A six-pack of beer (bottles, naturally) on the lowest cart shelf chose this moment to leap toward freedom, crashing loudly on the floor, each occupant rolling in the direction of its own choosing.  “Are you OK, ma’am?” she inquired kindly, stooping to chase the rollers I hadn’t yet caught.  Oh, yes! I mumbled, mortified.  Just wondering if any of these are going to blast a top and spray me any second now.  She patiently checked each cap as she returned them to captivity in the carton, securely placed in the deep part of the basket.  “They look OK, but get them to check them one more time when you check out,” she advised.  If her look indicated concern about anyone who would shove a cart at that speed, she was too nice to mention it.

Hail and thank-you to the butcher, who volunteered, unsolicited, to check the stock room for the particular bone broth I sought.  If our gravy tomorrow is any good, it’s all down to him.  “How many would you like?” he asked, breaking open the carton of containers.  Are you kidding, I wonder silently, I have no idea, counting on my uber-chef sister-in-law to coach me on gravy.  Like all the greatest cooks, she rarely mentions specific quantities.  “Three!” I chirped, a wild guess, and reached for them.  Yet he wasn’t finished assisting.  “Can I get you a basket for these?”  Who ARE these people, I’m thinking at this point—escapees from a remote monastery populated by saints?

Finally, lift those glasses high for the smiling young man bagging the purchases at checkout.  Efficiently wedging the last bag into the cart, he looked me in the eye and inquired, “Is there anything else I can do for you today, ma’am?”

I stared at him for a splint second and wondered—where does all this COME from? A great retail operation that actually hires and trains for customer service—a business that manages, all news reports to the contrary, to have plenty of staff on the busiest day of the year?  The friendliness endemic in our lovely small town?  The heritage that embraces all celebrations (and the preparations they require) in our beloved American South?  Some combination of all of these things?

Nope, I got it! I assured him, adding, Happy Thanksgiving! with the biggest smile my exhausted self could muster.  And thinking all the while:  You and your friends have already done so much more than you know, restoring my faith, today of all days, that customer service is not really dead, that kindness still exists among strangers, that there’s a chance I’ll actually having decent gravy for my family.

And you don’t know it, I said silently to his back as he turned to push a cart for another customer and I waited for the glass exit door to slide open, but I’ll be toasting all of you tomorrow.

Note:  G-ma receives no benefits from any commercial enterprises associated with her stories.  She is delighted to acknowledge that the story shared here occurred at Publix in Hendersonville, Tennessee.  Cheers to that team!

 

 

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