Conflicts

Good morning!   It's a bright, sunny, cold-aired Monday morning, but I believe it's going to warm up considerably later on.  Which is one reason that our chihuahuas, Birdy and Listy, are outside taking the air.  The other reason is that they are piggies and I am tired of their habits.  Newspaper-trained is one thing; newspaper-addicted is just too much sometimes.

"Your living room needs a nice big area rug," said my sister when she was visiting last week.  "Why don't you get one?"

"Because they confuse rugs with grass, " said I.  And nobody is sorrier about that. I too would like a nice big area rug in here.  But we aren't going to get one.

I had a conflict yesterday at church, a big moral conflict.  I didn't like something that Jesus said.  It's in St Matthew.

Do not  trouble yourself about providing for tomorrow, He said.  Do not worry about feeding yourself.  Do not worry about clothing yourself.  Just take care of today, and tomorrow will take care of itself.  Oh, let me tell you--I have serious conflicts about that advice.  It goes against all the facets of my personality that want to lay in, list, hoard, be ready, have something for every need right there on hand...

Not to mention the advice from the Survivalists who populate the midnight radio that this insomniac listens to.  The other night a lady said we need three guns in every house.  We need a 12-gauge shotgun (short-barrelled for easy maneuvering about the house), a 22 rifle which is your basic gun and the minimum, and a nine-millimeter handgun.  And ammo for all the above. I looked all those up on the web and they cost a pretty penny.  Seven hundred dollars more or less for each.  However, if one is going to protect their house at all costs, twenty-one hundred dollars is not a lot.  And the ammunition is reasonable, said she. Well,  what would Jesus have to say about that?  None of those weapons existed, back in his day, but he really didn't mention NOT to lay in a pile of rocks.  The conflicting advice propounded in these last two paragraphs simply boggles my mind.

I feel guilty about not wanting to follow Jesus in that advice.  My whole being rears up and says, who's going to take care of the children? Who's going to protect this little realm that a family builds up, cares for, and cherishes?  When we look at Africa, Haiti, Mid-East, and all the other areas of open conflict and mishap that are taking place all of the world, we can see who.  Nobody.  Is keeping 50 boxes of Band-Aids for future scrapes in a world where crisis has torn things apart any different from keeping an efficient emergency medical crisis system going after a hurricane or an attack?  Will a case of beans in one's garage have any meaning after a few days have gone by, the beans are all gone, and there are no more beans coming to the store?  I DON'T KNOW.  I am conflicted. Monday is not easy, sometimes.  And I have to go make some order out in the kitchen now. YAZZYBEL

Round and Round We Go

Good morning!

This morning at church there were several wheel-byes of concepts I first heard at St Paul's forty-odd years ago.  The Forum was to be about Mandalas, and next Sunday's forum about the making of a Mandala.  We are to make one.  I have been in on many make-it-yourself projects in that Great Hall, from Kites to Christmas Wreaths.  Well, it will be interesting--if it's not too cold up there. Today I had to leave early because it was just too cold up in that large drafty space!!  The lecture was very interesting, however, and I learned one New Fact that I had not known before: Mandalas are actually three-dimensional.  What you are looking at is a blueprint. WOW.  Something new.  So--If I am there to make it next week, perhaps I'll be building a three-D Mandala.  I had already begun to plan mine in my head--abstract butterfly motifs--but, if it is to be in three-D, that changes my concept and my approach.


The next concept that I heard about long ago was that of the Shadow. Your Shadow is the negative part of yourself that lies hidden, unacknowledged.  It darts out at unseemly times and makes a joke of you and your pretensions.  One of the Lenten lectures will deal with the Shadow.  Oh, dear.

People who live outside the San Diego area just do not understand how cold it is here.  Particularly in large unheated buildings.  It's stunning.  St Paul's is stunningly cold. Cold in the nave, cold in the porches, cold on the altar for all I know.  Cold cold cold in the Great Hall.  My sister and her husband were surprised at how cold they were in our little house even though we had the furnace roaring the whole time they were here.  Cold is the shadow side of San Diego, perhaps.  All that beauty, all that sunshine and sparkle. That's what people expect.  And then there's the cold. YAZZYBEL

How to Write a Poem

Good morning!

Let's hope this goes smoothly with not too many interruptions.  Because it is hard enough to organize an essay right off the cuff (is that what I mean?) at this hour of the morning, keep it in my head and write it down, even without interruptions. And I really want to tell you some things I have learned about writing.

Here's the poem as it presently stands.  Note that.

(Cultural note for those not on the Mexican border: La Llorona is a famous Mexican ghost. She is a mother who lost her children, either when the Spaniards came over and changed the world, or during the Revolution, I forget which. She goes up and down the streets at night, crying for them. She scares everybody to death. She used to operate mostly in Mexico but now she spends most of her time on this side, where the benefits are better.)

I have become La Llorona,
That sad old thing, part pitiful
And all scary.  I used to fear
Meeting her at night around street corners
At night in Brownsville, when I was young.
Now I see her all the time.
I have become La Llorona.
Where are my children? My grandchildren?
Who wants their mother?
Who thinks of me, whose heart
Weeps blood and tears when I must think of them?
And now I know that when I die,
Die the happy sunny death of California,
I shall go down and haunt the dark dark streets,
Skulking around the corners near the river,
Crying there in the combustion-heavy nights
Of Brownsville, Tejas, where the trucks go by.
Ay, llora, Llorona.

Presently the poem ends there and is in that precise form.   Here is how it got written. I will tell you in the present tense.

A poem is presented to you like a dream.  It comes to you in a liquid-glass ball of emotions which live in your gut.  Like a dream.  You recognize the poem (most of us go around 99% of the time with unrecognized poems wrenching our insides) and then, like Dale Chihuly with his glass art, you begin to tweak it.  You pull out the ball and look at it as truly as you can, and as you pull it apart you name the names.  You give words to something not of words.  (You do that with dreams too, that is why it is so important to stick with the first words that occur to you from a dream. But back to poems.)

The liquid-glass ball of painful emotions is real. It's up to me to name the names and MAKE a poem of it.  That's all.  I decide the form, I write the lines, I shape the lines, I evaluate and judge the lines: were they true to the ball of pain? Because that is what it truly is.

My ball of pain that surfaces in the gut from time to time is my literal cry for my children.  It is a true emotion and needs no explanation.  Then, not so pure but part of me is the self-pity.  I dare to compare myself to La Llorona, then.  That is a part of the glass blob that I am trying to surmount in my life and have been working on for years. So I wrote down my thoughts and feelings about having been cheated out of the company of my children and grandchildren for the past fifteen years and more.  I tried to put them into lines with some underlying cadence,  and lines have changed a bit and will change more into better music, I hope.

There are still awkward lines or lines that don't quite say what I want.  My favorite line at present (which probably means that it's the worst) is: "Crying there in the combustion-heavy nights of Brownsville, Tejas, where the trucks go by." And they do. Makes  me smile.  Which tells us something.  We have moved abject self-pity up a step, to an observed funny picture, like a Mexican skeleton frightening and amusing us at the same time.  I believe that's called irony, my friends.  Whatever it is, it is part of my personality.  Mine. My poems are me and are not stealable. I own the well, my friends.  You have a well too.  Take a drink; write your poems. YAZZYBEL

Luncheon Out, Part Deux

Good morning!

Yesterday I did go to the nutritionist's luncheon.  It was a most enjoyable experience, partly because I got to participate with the story I told you on my blog yesterday. It fit in perfectly, and FINALLY, I got to tell how a doctor (and my mother!) allowed my pancreas to heal,  way back in the day in Tropical Brownsville, Texas.

We ate the lunch first because everyone was starving.  The food was brought up from Jimbo's, an area health food store with a great deli I can now tell you.  We had:  an enormous casserole with cauliflower, rice, cream sauce, cheese, black olives, and canned green chili strips. I would guess that both the cream and the cheese were soy products as I think this was a dairy-free lunch, as well as gluten-free and white sugar-free.  There was an Indian seasoning in this casserole which I guess to be turmeric.  Might not have been. Jimbo's won't give out the recipe, I heard in response to many requests. WOW that was delicious. Cauliflower is so miraculously filling and rich. 

We also had rice crackers,  raw veggies with a nice dip, chicken salad with grapes in a creamy sauce, and a green salad.  This was all good and nicely laid out on a buffet table in the back hall. The office is circular in layout and people could go in, help themselves to the luncheon, and proceed off to the right to the lecture room.  Oh, and we also had at the end of the table one of those large glass urns filled with ice and lemon slices and water, with a tap.  Nothing more refreshing than lemon water.

Then we listened to the tips from the presenter, a nice young woman who is in an alternate health care practice...She's like a Personal Trainer, but takes on all one's health issues and works with the patient to work out a program.  Her suggestions for us  involved, basically, getting familiar with what is out there to use, to combat sugar addiction.   I am not giving her name because I forgot to ask her if I could, but if anyone writes me on email yazzybel@aol.com, I will tell who she is unless she asks me not to.  I love it that young people are going into this field, providing vitally needed info to the Mc.D's generation.

The women at that luncheon were savvy and good looking. You never saw so many good complexions together.  We all swore by our interest and commitment to alternative health practices. What a shame it can't be paid for by Medicare, really.

The best tip I got was for alternate pleasures to gobbling down sweets.  I'd never thought of stimulating one's own serotonin by using rocking motions with your body. Apparently our brains respond to any alternating back and forth movement. Even knitting, she said. I wonder if typing counts?

There were other highlights that I may tell from time to time. Right now, I'll just say that going to the meeting was a very good thing.  Tomorrow I am going out on a limb and write about How to Write a Poem.  See you then and hasta mañana. YAZZYBEL

Going Out to Lunch Today

Good morning!  Today, I am planning on eating  a luncheon out.

I'll be eating with my nutritionist, who's presenting a lecturer on Sugar Addiction. Since I have decided that I definitely have that, I signed up to go listen.  I think the lecturer will tell us about agave syrup, maple sugar, honey, and a host of other sweeteners to use alternatively to processed white or brown cane sugar.  Maybe that is what she will do. That's fine, I will listen and get what I can out of it.  I am so stubborn that it will be difficult for me to implement any new info that I get, but I'll try if it makes sense.

When I was about eleven years old, my mother thought I might have a thyroid disorder and took me too the doctor. Our doctor at that time, Dr Eiseman, was a wonderful doctor who had his office in an old white brick house that he'd bought and transformed into consulting rooms, waiting room, and laboratory. He had his own lab technician.  Dr Eiseman had worked in the tropics and knew all about parasites and tropical diseases, a skill which came in handy in Brownsville, Texas, gateway to Mexico.

Well, they came up with the diagnosis of no thyroid problems, but a very very high blood sugar reading.  No sugar in the urine, as yet.  Now, in those days there was no Type 2 Diabetes, my children.  Why not? Because nobody had invented a drug to take care of it.  Lucky for me.

Dr. Eiseman sat me and my mother down and said that I had to go on a strict diet. I had to stick on it for a year, and then see how I was doing. No sweets,sugar, honey, no starch, no bread, no potatoes, no soda pop, no nothing except eggs,fish, chicken, beef, pork, shrimps, oysters, and mostly green vegetables. No fruit. My mother was a tyrant and stuck to that diet for me one hundred percent for a year. I remember going to parties where the hostess's mother had to cook me a meat patty while the others ate spaghetti.  I drank my iced tea plain (and learned to love it that way). 


After the year had gone by, Dr. Eiseman checked my blood glucose again.  Perfect function. You know how they do it: give you a glass of  "lemonade" laced with tons of sugar...wait, take blood again.  So the doctor told me that for the next six months I might have one of the following:  one dessert a day, or, one piece of bread a day.  I chose the one piece of bread because the only thing I still missed was that one piece of toast for breakfast with my egg.  Six months later, still functioning perfectly.  Released.

Now, why did that work? Ask any ancient Greek physician.  It worked because my pancreas was put on vacation for that year and a half.  Worn out at the age of eleven, it had the chance to get some rest, rebuild itself, and reset its controls.  It worked, my friends. And has continued to work for seventy years.

And that is why I hate the Diabetes Type 2 drugs that work by flogging the pancreas to work harder.  Yes, they do, folks.  Ask your doctor or better yet read, read, read.  I have been asking my pancreas to work harder over the last few years by eating too many rich foods and specifically sweets. After a lifetime of perfect readings, my triglycerides have begun to rise and the ominous little word  "Prediabetic" has begun to appear on my computer generated doctor reports. "Why do you put that there?" I ask the doctor. "Isn't everybody prediabetic until they are diabetic?"  Apparently not so.  He wants me on the pills.  Flog, flog away. I say NO.

So, I shall bring up these issues with the nutritionist and the lecturer  today if we get a chance to ask.  Or,  I won't.  Sugar is sugar, though there is no doubt that over the long span some sugars are less healthy, some more.  My need is just to expand my power and learn that at the dessert bar and the candy counter and the cookie plate, just as at the drug prescription,  I need to just say NO.  YAZZYBEL

The Color Pink and Other Girly Things

Good morning!! Our company has left.

I was going to entitle this post: How to Gain Two Pounds in Three Days, but that sounded too depressing so I decided to address that in the main body of the theme instead of focussing on it.  Yes, my digital scale, which is never wrong, says that I weigh three pounds more this morning than I did on Saturday.

We ate like kings.  That is, far too much. 'Nuf said.  That it was all delicious goes beyond saying, but the truth is that we also ate purchased candy, cookies, and snacks that ordinarily we'd be ashamed of indulging in too much. So, that's how you gain two pounds in three days of serious eating.

I wish I knew how to add photos onto the blog.  Sometime I must find the time to research that. I barely have time to write uninterrupted.  In fact, it never happens. Right now, now that the guests have left, I am tearing along trying to finish this before Patricia comes over to practice with me on the piano.

Anyway, I love the color pink, though I have never been a pink nut. I had a pink living room once, in my big house in Mission Hills. It looked pretty good. I painted it that color (I did it) in tribute to my mother's big pink living room in Brownsville, Texas, back in the day.  If you have this month's House Beautiful,March 2011, look on page 73 to see the exact pink of her living room, and the color I attempted to reproduce twenty years later with the help of San Diego Paint and Glass. Anybody remember that place? It was way downtown and it had everything the enterprising home fixer could want, from cork tiles to small bags of cement that a school teacher could use on a brief holiday, mixing the concrete in a mixing bowl and applying it  in some needy place  until the daylight ebbed.  Our pink was the light light one at the bottom of the page. A lovely color.

My bathroom has a hated color of pink tiles, a bit more strident. They look horrible to me most of the time because I think bathrooms should be water color, and both my and Theodore's  baths have peppermint pink tiles. His is worse because his pink tiles are trimmed with maroon tiles. Oh my. A sledgehammer is the only thing those pink tiles remind me of.  But I put a small bouquet of pink and white  roses in mine from time, and then I am reconciled to the beauty of pink, tempered with white and with sunlight.  Lovely. You'd love the photo if I knew how to put it in.  I must remember to ask my sister who writes http://www.bennyedictus.blogspot.com/; she puts in lots of them.

I just heard last night on the radio that blogs are now out, out, out.  Gracious. It's taken me so long to start this one.  And now it is already passe. I am stunned. Please do read me. I think I am supposed to put it on Facebook. C'mon, folks.

As I sit here with the unexpected time to write this, my sister and brother in law are driving that beautiful drive east to Tucson on Hwy. 8.  They are probably in the area now where the great rockpiles loom around the highway, looking like some gigantic child's play creations.  They will go over two passes on their trip, descending into park-like or desert-like terrain in between. Then they will hit Yuma where they will have a lunch.  Then, they will be in desert for sure until they get home about three this afternoon. I think it's a lovely drive, in an air-conditioned luxury cocoon.  I have been on it on the train, el bos, and in the old days, many times driving without a/c.  In the summer that's bad, I remember, but now in February every day out here in the Southwest is like Paradise.  I am sorry they're gone, but I wish them a good trip home. YAZZYBEL

Oh, My ! What a late breakfast!

Good--afternoon!! I was too busy this morning to write my blog.  I thought of you, all of you--but just couldn't steal that second or two to come over and tell you that I was thinking about you.

We have been playing cards.  Lots of cards.

When I was a child I hated cards. I hated the noise, the interaction, and competitiveness of cards.  Sometime along the way, say, in the last twenty years, I came to like card games. Not hard ones.  I'll never like bridge.  I have been on the hot seat too many times at the bridge table, and never measured up.  I did not like measuring up, or, rather, trying to.  Not my cup of tea.

But I do enjoy easy games.  Like my family's favorite game, Liverpool Rummy.  Liverpool is easy and we play an easy form.  Six hands, with nine-nine-eleven-eleven-and thirteen-thirteen cards dealt.  Two books (of three), two runs, two books and a run, two runs and a book, three books, three runs.  Those are the requirements for "going down."  Then you play out, and the number of points in your hand at the last are your score.  You're aiming for a total score of zero. Liverpool is easy, because you play alone and it's just you against the world. No pair of hating partner's eyes glaring at you across the table when you make your errors. You make your errors, you lose. Just you.  It's a relief!!

Today after our morning game, we went for a short ride to Trader Joe's, then we went to Tacos Mexicano up at Canyon Plaza. Boy, they were good. I had tacos de papa (potato), served with rice and beans, plus a good Mexican soda pop of tamarindo.  Yum, yum.  We'll go there again.  The others all had beef tacos. The tacos were crispy fried and just right.  And the rice and beans, excellent.

Then my sister went to my hairdresser and had her hair cut.  He did a wonderful job, I thought, and she was pleased.  Then I came home and slept for over an hour. Now while I was asleep, she has made meatballs to put with the Costco sauce she brought us, and will make the pasta. We'll have those with a big salad later on.  Tomorrow they'll go home and Theo and I will go back to being sedentary and quiet and non-competitive. No more games. Well, no more card games.  YAZZYBEL

Eating Too Much

Good morning!!

Here's what I made for dinner yesterday. Or did I tell you already?

Pasta Shells with Tuna

Take a 6+ oz. can if tuna in olive oil, OR two 4+oz cans, OR three 2+ oz cans.
Beat an egg in a large mixing bowl.
Add the tuna, 1/4 cup minced onion, 1/4 cup minced parsley, and 1 cup fresh bread crumbs. Tearing the bread apart with two forks is an easy way to make nice fresh crumbs.  Mix all that together.

Cook 18 jumbo shell pastas.  When they are cooked, drain on a towel. Stuff with the tuna mixture and lay in a  pyrex pan or other rectangular casserole that you have lightly sprayed with oil.

Take a can of celery soup, add 1/2 c. milk and sherry mixed, and stir. Pour over the pasta. I put a plastic wrap over the top and put in refrigerator. WHen ready to bake, bring it out and put tons of parmesan cheese, more crumbs, a sprinkly of parsley, and a spray of oil over the top and bake till it bubbles. You wouldn't think that four people could eat all that but we did.

I also had fresh asparagus and field salad on the side.  Dessert was pineapple sherbet and fresh strawberries sliced over it. Yummo.

Good. That would have been fine if we had not had soup and a huge ham and cheese sandwich for lunch.  You know how it is.  I could be doing more writing now, but I do have to go make breakfast!! LOVE to all, YAZZYBEL

Poor Humpty Dumpty

Good morning!

My sister and brother in law came!! What joy!

This morning we got up at six to watch their daughter and her children get baptized at Exciting Idlewild Baptist Church in Tampa, FL.  Drat it, due my techno ignorance, we couldn't get it.  My sister got it fine--in San Antonio.  An un=replaceable moment missed!!  I am crushed.

Also, yesterday when alone in the house, going from garage/pantry upsteps to kitchen with glass jar full of flour plus two other items in my hands, I stepped into a misplaced dogwater crock, spun slowly and wildly trying to get my balance and footing, and slowly and surely foundered myself upon the steps, finally landing on the very bone of my formerly broken wrist that is misshapen from that long ago former fall.  Spent a few seconds ascertaining the damage and summoning the little angels who attend my mishaps, and I was okay. I got up with nothing but a very red wrist and some sore bones in the lower part of my body to tell the tale. The glass jar and other items went spinning off onto the kitchen floor without breaking. Lucky. Thanks be to God.

In the night, I got up groggily and was rushing madly to the bathroom when I came up short against the bedroom door, which my husband had closed unbeknownst to me.  OW!! What a blow!  I felt a gush of warm liquid from my nose, hurried to the bathroom and found that my nose was bleeding and watering copiously...and it hurt like heck too. But I twisted it about and figured out it couldn't be broken (tho I have never really known what a broken nose actually is), went back to bed after taking an aspirin, and snoozed contentedly the rest of the night.

Moral of the tale: Senior Citizens, always look at your feet, not at your goal.  This rule is inimical to my style of life, but I know that I must observe it at all times...falls are BAD for the elderly.  I was very lucky yesterday, twice.  If bad things come in threes, was the incident with the motorcyclist no. one, or is there a third thing yet to come? EVERYBODY BE CAREFUL and watch those treacherous sr. citizen feet. YAZZYBEL

Saturday Short and Sweet

Good Morning!!!

Today's blog will be short, because I am going to be very busy cooking and preparing food. My sister (no.3 on the roster) and her husband are coming over to visit from Tucson, and they'll probably get here in early afternoon, so we have very little time this morning to get things done.

I have to go take my bath now. When I come out I will make stuffed peppers and put the frijoles on to cook.  I bought the beans yesterday in Albertson's produce department, from a big bin, and they looked beautiful, pale and freckled and fresh, so it should not take them very long to cook. 

I already made a casserole for tomorrow, after arising at six-thirty. It is Pasta Shells Stuffed with Tuna, and is quick and easy but has several steps and so--time consuming after all. I will put the recipe on later if I get a moment.

Tomorrow there will be no church, no forum, probably--as my niece and her teenaged children are to be baptized in Tampa and we can see it LIVE AND ONLINE so we (her parents and we) shall be eating pancakes, drinking coffee, and watching at six thirty a.m. our time.  So, my friends, hasta manana and I'll throw that recipe on if there's time later. YAZZYBEL

All's Well

Good morning!

I'm happy to say that our little scenario of yesterday ended well (and cheaply) as we got a replacement mirror from Witt Lincoln Mercury when we drove up to get it. It turned out to be only the mirror that was injured. Good!  Replacing the whole rear view mirror arm would have been tremendous.

The cautionary part of the dangers of being on the freeway--still with us. Be careful out there, folks!

This is a day for tomato sauce.  Several years ago I worked out the perfect tomato sauce for myself, but have misplaced it over moves and traumatic circumstances. So, I will extemporize about tomato sauce for now.

There is innocuous American tomato sauce which comes in a little (8-oz) can. It used to be priced at a wonderfully cheap rate, three for something, and was a good staple in the pantry.  I still like it. It has a pleasant taste and does incorporate a little bell pepper taste and a little onion taste.  I am not going to go into salt. This sauce is useful for many things, and especially, often, as a base for other sauces.

There is tomato paste, which is supposed to be pure tomatoes, concentrated down until there are eight great tomatoes in that tiny little can, and it is very handy too. Only problem is that with such a concentrated product you only  need a little bit of it in many things, and then the rest of it sits in the refrigerator and molds, unless you agressively plan to make a spaghetti sauce the next day.

MY tomato sauce of preference is the sauce I want to taste on Huevos Rancheros.  Huevos Rancheros  are  eggs prepared the way they would be out on The Ranch, which everyone seemed to have in South Texas but us.  Some people scramble things into the eggs and call it  Huevos Rancheros, but it is not--that's Huevos a la Mexicana.  Which I also love.

The Los Angeles Times, a few years ago, had a wonderful article about going on a number of different Sundays to different restaurants in search of the perfect Huevos Rancheros.  Fun article, and if I lived in Los Angeles, which sometimes I wish I did, I would have pursued the search myself accordingly.

My idea of a good HR sauce is:  Put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into a skillet.  Make the fire be very low because I do not want to brown the onions and peppers.  Cut an onion and a green pepper into strips or cubes.  You are going to
cook these very slowly, stirring, until they are pretty soft.  You will either add a couple of cans of that tomato sauce mentioned above, or a whole lot of peeled cubed tomatoes, and simmer away, after adding a knife tip or two of Gebhardt's Chile Powder.  One knife tip for a few one or two cans of sauce, two for more. You just want a hint of that further pepper plus cumin taste. Continue to simmer.

Heat spray fat in a skillet and crack in your eggs, trying not to break them. If you break one just leave it alone, and that will be YOUR egg, masked on the table with plenty of sauce.  Says me, consumer of many a broken egg, fried chicken wing, and tough little old piece of steak.  If you break in a tiny piece of eggshell by accident, remove it immediately with the eggshell half that's  in your hand; it is the easiest way to get out a little piece of eggshell.  As the eggs are gently frying and you are making up your mind to risk turning them over easy, get your stack of corn tortillas and start toasting them two by two over a gas burner you have thoughtfully turned on.

After your eggs have been more or less fried on two sides, or only on one if you are wise,  place toasted tortillas ( not hard, just a little blackish and soft) on a platter. Place eggs on tortillas, and pour over your sauce.  This is the point at which some would say: Sprinkle with grated cheese.  I don't say it.  But you may. Serve at once with a bottle of Mexi-Pep, Tabasco, Louisianne, or Cholula on the side.  They will be good.

For Huevos a la Mexicana, you don't need tomato sauce at all so I should not even mention them here. But they belong here anyway. This time you need a flavorless fat or oil.  Not flavorless!  Just not olive oil.  You will have cut some onions, some jalapenos or serranos or both, into little cubes or pieces. This time you may  brown them.   After they are browned a bit, some people like to add a bunch of tomato. I do and I don't. Experiment.  Now, scramble in a bunch of eggs, salt and serve. I think they are really good.  I really wonder if I am teaching you, here, anything you don't already know or could instruct me about in spades.  I am writing this because I like to think about these dishes as I  chomp down my hard defrosted and toasted Eggo whole grain low fat waffle, unadorned with anything.  YAZZYBEL

Things Can Happen

Good morning!!

This morning I was going to talk about tomato sauces, but we had a "road incident" last night and it took away all my attention for a while. I'll talk about tomatoes further down in this post if there's time.

Last night we drove up to my church for a presentation by the Cathedral Players of  St-Exupery's "The Little Prince."  We left at six-thirty, already full dark and raining, and auto'd happily northward on Freeway 5 North.

Theodore was driving in the extreme right hand lane, the "slow lane." This sounds like a conservative lane to drive in, in the rain and the dark, but it holds two hazards.  In spite of the excellent planning of our freeway system, once in a while you get thrown off if you are not wary; that is, your lane has turned into an  "Exit only" lane without your noticing. The second problem was our problem last night.

If you are in the slow lane, all traffic that's entering the freeway at your right is entering into your lane.  That can be dangerous if there isn't sufficient maneuver room for everybody. That's what happened last night.  Theo was plowing forward when there suddenly loomed outside my right-hand window TWO vehicles: a car and a motorcycle, both entering the freeway.  The car slithered by just ahead of us on our right, and I gasped in horror for the motorcycle just behind the car seemed to be heading directly into the body of our car, in from the right side.  There was no maneuver room for us, but the motorcycle wisely corrected, yielded, and there was no impact. (A miracle.)

Moments later we were all barrelling forward and the motorcycle came speeding crazily fast from behind us, zoomed close to our left side and BOOM! An impact.
But he went speeding far ahead in the rainy night.  "He kicked us," said Theodore.
Unbelieveable.

When we got to church we realized that the guy had attacked our rear view mirror which is a huge invention on a swivel, and had broken out the mirror part. We were all lucky that the situation didn't turn out worse, though we are not happy about having to replace the mirror or whole apparatus when we are expecting guests this weekend and have other things to do. 

But we were lucky, both we and the motorcyclist, and the many others around us who might have been affected if Theodore didn't have steady nerves (the impact of the club or whatever he hit us with was very scary) to keep driving steadily on. It is just one of those things that can happen. And thank God  we are okay.

I think I'll skip the tomato sauce for today because it deserves a space of its own and Theo is up, needing his breakfast with YAZZYBEL.

Stuffed Peppers

Good morning!

I have been saving Stuffed Peppers as a topic to be used when I couldn't think of anything else to write about. I was going to write about them last week as a second part of something else, but there was no time nor space for it.

But, Stuffed Peppers are good and worthy of a posting of their own. Now I say unto you that they are a good topic for the likes of me.

For you see, there are American Stuffed Peppers and Mexican Stuffed Peppers. They are quite delicious and quite different. Let's do the American peppers first.

I remember when my mother would make stuffed peppers and I did not like them. The bitterness of the peppers is what one would call an acquired taste and most kids don't have it.  I love them now.  Take as many peppers as you have people, cut out the stems, seeds and soft inside parts, and plunge into boiling water for about 5 minutes. That's called parboiling.

In my childhood the peppers my mother bought and used had much thinner walls of flesh than do the peppers of nowadays.  So they would need much shorter parboiling.  I had a couple the other night whose walls were easily a quarter inch thick. Use your judgment.

"Don't you make those with rice?" a friend asked. Well, no, not necessarily. You can use almost anything as long as it's well seasoned. I like a nice ground beef hash with onions and potatoes.  Ground beef, onions and rice is good too.  It is a good leftover user if you have some cooked rice around. Mexican rice will do.  Fry up your hash, and when you have it done, take your drained peppers and stuff them with your beef mixture.  Or vegetable mixture.  Place stuffed peppers in a greased Pyrex dish or even throwaway dollar store pie pan. They won't care. Oh, and I forgot to say that the exposed surface of the hash should be covered with some kind of buttered crumbs.  Around the peppers pour a nice tomato sauce. And a little over the top.  Fannie Farmer says to pour water around, but surely we can do better than that.  After the peppers have baked for forty minutes, take them out and serve. Yummo. The children will take the stuffing out and leave the shells, but just leave them alone; they'll get over it.

Mexican Stuffed Peppers are another matter.  I am baffled by chiles.  I haven't found any reliable indicator on the outside of a chile to indicate how "hot" it will be. This past year I planted a serrano (hot!) which produced and is still producing a bumper crop of duds.  No heat nor flavor whatsoever. How can this be? Perhaps it needed a different kind of fertilizer or something. I should research this.

Anyway, I once stuffed a bunch of Anaheim chiles and found  that some of them took the top of your head off and the rest were as placid as lambs. But lets assume that they are all good and all the same. You first have to perform that grim duty that most real chiles demand of us--take off the transparent hard skin on the outside. You can put them into the oven in paper bags, lay them on the gas burner, whatever. It's a chore to me. You can always parboil a la American peppers, and then remove the skin.  Some people use canned already peeled green chiles and just pretend they've done the work.

Once your chiles are pristine, take a piece of Monterey Jack, or some Mexican cheese, and stuff each pepper.  You need a piece of cheese about the size of two dominoes, no more, per chile. Lay chiles aside on a towel and make a nice batter. See below:

Batter for Chiles:
4 eggs, separated
3 T. flour
1/2 c. milk
BEAT the egg whites with a pinch of salt till stiff.
BEAT the yolks with flour and milk.
FOLD whites into yolks.

 Heat some fat in a large skillet. Dip the chiles into the delicate batter and fry until brown. You can lay them aside to go into the oven or serve right away with a tomato sauce.
You can even make a casserole of this by putting the stuffed chiles into a buttered dish, pouring over the batter, and  baking. Tomato sauce on the side.

You can also put in any kind of meat, hash, or leftovers into the Mexican chiles too.  My dad always wanted meat in his as he loved meat.  I love cheese in certain dishes, such as enchiladas and stuffed peppers, so I need no meat.  Just don't swamp them with melted cheese on a plate.

I heard a couple of days ago from a young relative of mine who loved the blog and made me recall a lot about the year  that we lived in exotic Laredo before going back to the Lower Rio Grande Valley for good.  Her memories are my memories, basically, though we are separated in years and distance. Reminds me of our unique situation in American life, our incomparable environment of wild beautiful brushland with its animals, bugs, birds, huge cerulean sky, sailing enormous clouds--and rainstorms. How beautiful they were.

It's raining here this morning. What a blessing.  Here, a rain means that the thirsty yard gets a real good little drink, the driveway gets covered with moisture, the newpaper gets soaked, and the roof leaks its dripping waterfall all around the edges, prompting the usual argument between Taterton and me over WHY DONT WE GET GUTTERS AND DOWNSPOUTS?  He holds that we don't need them, I say we do.. You notice that I am the one who goes out in the dawn under a sheet of driblets from the roof, to get that soaked paper.  YAZZYBEL

Thoughts for Valentine's

Good morning!

Theodore gave me chocolates for Valentine's. He asked what kind I wanted (See's, of course) and I said, "Nuts and chews" because I am full of truffles.  So yesterday morning he gave me a nice big box of them, mixed dark and milk chocolate, and happy am I.  He also agreed to hoard them for me and give me one for dessert every night. He is good at  passing stuff out like that and at saying NO when one grovels and pleads, so my slim figure is safe with him!!!

If he eats one now and then, it's only his due.

I am full of random thoughts today. But it is February, month of Presidents, Love, and --African Americans.  The last category is often overlooked in the mainstream news though a P/C mention is made from time to time. But it brings forward a truth in my mind, that San Diego is a very racially segregated city.  Yes, it is. I lived for twenty five years in Mission Hills, and everybody there was white.  There was one house which was notable and pointed out as the residence of a black family, but I never in all those years saw one glimpse of purported owner.  We were all full of amistad and tolerance, but that was the fact: No African Americans lived there.  I don't see any when I am visiting up there now either.

On Sunday that very random thought passed through my mind. There was not one dark face, that I could see, in all those faces in the San Diego Master Chorale.  Not one.  In a city of 3 million people, that is hard to believe.  In the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, not one that I could see though I do believe that there are African American players, a few.  Why should this be so?

In about 1978 I really had to go to work. Postponement was no longer an option. My first year with the San Diego Unified was as a sub.  I arose from my bed in a big house in a wonderful neighborhood, and traveled in my car by freeway and many an unfamiliar street, to some cold and dank classroom in a poor neighborhood, hurriedly studied the instructions left by the absent teacher, if any, and surveyed my temporary workplace.  I was in a universe so far from Mission Hills that I might well have been on Mars.  My comfortable life with my children was changed for good.  Most of the people I knew in my neighborhood were keeping on with our old routines and occupations, though some were pursuing higher education and taking jobs too.  I will never forget the gut-clenching moment in those strange classrooms when the bell rang and the thundering hordes lined up outside or came into the room, and I had to meet my reality. All my San Diego working life was spent in neighborhoods far far from the life of Mission Hills.

My Episcopal Church now has more than just a handful of African Americans--well, a large handful, perhaps.  I am so glad to see this, because it never made sense for any large cultural institution in a city of three million to be exclusively utilized by one faction.  As for Mexicans, we have a separate congregation, a principle I do not approve of as it is just another form of segregation. "Well, that's okay because that's the way they want it."  Oh? Really? Too bad. It is wrong. They should learn English like lots of other people are   trying to learn Spanish, and even if they don't know it they should be absolutely more in the mainstream of the rest of the church.

Fifty percent of my ancestors had their roots in Spain, overlooking for now the indigenous bloodlines that worked their way into us in Mexico.  But look at Spain. Occupied by the Moors for hundreds of years, host to Jews for many hundreds of years, it is a Joseph's Coat of skin tones. "Scratch a Spaniard, find a Jew," runs the saying, which might well say, "Scratch a Spaniard, find a Moor." My own immediate family has skin tones that range from the darkest to the lightest.  I can't afford to be prissy about skin color. Thank goodness our television generation has finally liberated the dark-skinned person and has begun to celebrate dark beauty. What glorious people. 

I have more to say about this topic, about Ebonics, Bilingual Education, and so forth.  I was also going to give a recipe for truffles (my favorite kind of) from Alice B. Toklas's cookbook. I don't know if that 's against the law or not.  I had trouble getting onto my blog today but have become so habituated to sharing everything with  you that I couldn't bear it if I had to go to jail and not write my blog. Anyway, more writings will have to wait till tomorrow; I have written enough for today. YAZZYBEL

Concert and a supper

Good morning!

Yesterday afternoon my friend Patricia took me to a concert. The San Diego Symphony Orchestra  played The Overture to the Marriage of Figaro.  I love that piece and it seemed that the orchestra enjoyed playing it too.

Second on the program was Brahms' Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. I think I know that piece by heart from listening to it over and over in the old days.  I used to have the leisure sometimes to just listen to music or read for hours, it seems, so I would put on a recording and get out my novel and read and listen together. I think the recording we had was the one with Isaac Stern and Leonard Rose. The solo parts were played with genius and abandon.  Yesterday's performance was  by William Preucil, violin, and Eric Kim, cello.  Their style was more delicate and restrained than I expected, but still very beautiful.  The two lines talk back and forth, scroll back and forth, finish each other in the midst of a run or figure, in an exquisite way, and I felt that these two musicians gave every measure to that part of the presentation.  There was one note, in the third part, which the violin makes at the top of a beautiful run, and Preucil played it so masterfully, like a little gnat of a note that he tossed into the air. It enchanted me and I give him an A+ if only on the strength of that note.  The piece itself is just wonderful in its entirity, complicated, complex, joyous, charming.  You can see that I do not have the professional reviewer's vocabulary for this, but you understand how much I liked it. My ear is actually more sophisticated than my brain.

Then, after a long long intermission, of which more later,we came back to hear the piece de resistence of the afternoon, Schubert's Mass No.  6  in E-Flat Major.  Here is where I start to get crabby and reveal my whole carefully glossed-over mean self.

Let me say first that I think that religious music belongs in church. And, second, I had already been to the Episcopal Church and been through the Mass that day.  That I am not really religious is not the point.  Surely there are other large choral works, secular ones,  that could have been presented.  Well, at least it was a Mass and not a Requiem. I don't want to listen to another requiem, because I fear that the rash of Requiems that are being presented now, to be a cry for our foundering civilization.  Maybe I am gloomy as well as crabby.

Another horrifying confession: I don't like choirs. I have been in them, and I am just not the type.  Young choirs, church choirs, senior choirs. Not for me. I may have some sixth sense; as I look at a choir I seem to feel a very negative impact arising from the whole gang.  I feel respect for the brave man or woman who can take on the management of that whole welter of voices, egos, hormones, and human flesh and try to corral it.  No matter how innocuous the program seems to be, I always expect to  hear them singing the Chorus of the Damned from Faust.  The closer to professional they are, the worse.  They are scary.  Little church choirs open to all, children's choirs at church or school, fine.  They are okay. But give me your  mighty chorus and I am aghast.  The paper thought they were wonderful, by the way, and so did everybody else in the auditorium it appears.

The soloists were wonderful. There were three men and two women and they hardly got to sing at all. They were meant to be singing in church, after all, as part of a meaningful rite, not sitting on the stage for long long periods waiting for their turn. The mezzo soprano sat there with a look on her face that said: I know something  you don't know. When she arose to sing, we found out what it was. What a beautiful, unusual voice!  And all the others were just wonderful.  I like operas and small ensembles.  You notice that in an opera the chorus always has something to do: they mill about, act natural, do something besides stand there with open mouths emitting cris de coeur, causing you to look for the smoke and flames in the background.  Ouch. I dont mean to hurt so many feelings. I certainly dont mean to be mean.  But sometimes I am. And a blog has to be true to me, doesn't it? First of all?

After it was over, I drove home in the opalescent twilight and when I got home I walked straight to the refrigerator and brought out a pack of baby carrots and put them in the saucepan with water. When they were boiling merrily I threw in a lot of brussels sprouts that I'd trimmed up and washed.  I took two plates and  put on two thick slices of (peeled, of course) tomato, and when the vegetables were nearly ready I grilled the meat that had been waiting there while the vegetables cooked.  I cheated on the vegetables by adding a big dab of butter and some s and p after I drained them...but oh it makes them so much tastier. There ya go, a nice nutricious little supper with fresh food, ready in twenty minutes from start to finish. For dessert I had my mother's chocolate pudding made with cornstarch and cocoa, which I made and put in the refrigerator two days ago.  As I worked I kept thinking of this post, and how grouchy I am about certain kinds of music, and thinking all the time how much I'd have loved it it that whole huge chorus of magnificent voices had just broken down and regaled us with a might roar of "Oh Shenandoah!" Ah, that were pleasure indeed. YAZZYBEL

oops, got cut off this is still Sunday

To continue:

Past: "You said I was a selfish pig."

Feelings: " That made me cry and feel terrible."

Future goal: "Next time I wish you would sit down and talk with me a bit while we hold hands and then let me know how you feel,so that we can get to the heart of our differences (on that subject.)"

Timing, the quickness of our response, is responsible for  lots of mistaken communication on the Computer.

The latter part of the Forum was taken up with a quick explanation of Facebook, which personifies all the pitfalls we can dodge while on the Internet, and was very valuable to me who, in spite of having been on Facebook for a while, has not the first idea of how to handle it. 

If you hit this page first, please go back to the former post as I think I blew that part away OR published it by mistake. YAZZYBEL

Movie and a Forum

Good Morning!!!

On Friday afternoon Theodore and I went to see the Spanish movie, Biutyful, starring Javier Bardem and a host of other very good actors not so well known in the United States. It's hard to put this movie into a nutshell, but basically it is about the life and dying of a Barcelona man who makes his living as an entrepreneur. I don't think I am telling you anything that I shouldn't in that statement, as the condition of his health becomes very apparent early on in the movie.  The most striking thing, aside from the very big element of Bardem's presence, is the poverty of all the people in the film.  Uxbal (Bardem) and his little family and his clients too all move around from place to place, each place as cramped, gloomy and poor as the others. 

Uxbal makes a part of his living going to funeral homes and communicating with the dead to pass messages on to the bereaved.  The bulk of his money is made in contracting people out to work, kind of a sub-rosa employment agency for illegal aliens of several ethnic groups.  Most striking are the Africans who hawk his purses and such on the streets (and dope too, getting more in trouble with the law) and the Chinese who are locked in the basement at night en masse at their sweatshop, and let out in the morning to do their  labor.  Uxbal is trying to keep his little family together also, two cute little kids and a beautiful strung-out nutty wife who needs to be kept away from the kids a lot of the time. 

One thing follows another, and the film goes out to two hours plus.  It was worth it to me. I was right in there with Uxbal all the way.  I think everyone will be. Should you see it? Yes.  Even though you cannot bear sad movies? Yes.  It is no sadder than life itself, and we enjoy most all of that.

Today was the second part of Holy Communication at the Forum.  Some basics of communicating well were taught.  The Dean taught us about Conditional and Unconditional, Positive and Negative.  Any criticism you might make will imvolve a combination of those attributes.

Conditional Positive: You did well today.
Unconditional Positive: You are so great.
Conditional Negative:  I can't understand your words very well.
Unconditional Negative: You selfish pig.
We should be away of what we are saying to others.

Then there's the way to approach a difficult topic between friends, when you have been hurt and want to get things straightened out:

Past:     "You told me I was a selfish pig."

Important Days in February

Good morning!

Our nation celebrates (not very seriously) two important dates in February. Abraham Lincoln's birthday is today, the 12th.  George Washington's is the 22nd.
Cars and furniture are put on sale at reduced prices. When we were in school, those days were flurries of activity centering on stovepipe hats, cherry trees, hatchets, big skirts and powdered wigs.  (Note which president made a bigger impression on me.)

There is another date that is more important than any other in February, though celebrated by even fewer people. Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother's birthday.  It slipped by this blog because I was thinking in the moment, rather than taking note of the date. 

Linda Proctor Temple was born on February 11, 1904.  That date was fixed in our brains during childhood, and it had an incomparable aura.  That was the birthday of OUR MOTHER.  I was born when she was twenty-five years old, so I can remember her as a young woman.  I do not remember thinking of her as beautiful when I was a child, but beautiful she was. In a culture in which beauty in women and money-making ability in men are the two crowning talents, she was up there with the best of them.

Mother was born in El Paso, Texas.  It happened this way.  Her parents had been living in Temple, Texas, until their older child, a son, developed such bad bronchitis that the doctor suggested that they move to a more arid climate. Doctors actually did that, in those days.  No pills available for most things.  So, they packed up and went out to El Paso for a few years.  My uncle's bronchitis did indeed go away and his state of health improve, and when they went back to Temple they were four instead of three. 

My mother was named Linda, for a deceased Aunt Belinda, and Proctor for her Maine-born grandmother's family.  Another family name from that area (Orono) is Brown.  Down that line came her level-headedness, perhaps.  The Temples were a fine farming family in Tennessee who had to struggle after the War and moved en masse to Central Texas to retrench. My own grandfather went into the mercantile business and there they lived until they again  de-camped en masse and came down to the Lower Rio Grande when it opened up to American farms and stores in the twenties.  I say, to American farms and stores instead of Mexican ranches and stores, but it was all one big (uneasy, sometimes) amalgam when I was growing up.

My mother taught school for a while, but meeting my dad changed her course  and she became a housewife and mother in South Texas, basically for the rest of her life.  True to my father's promise, she nearly always had a maid in the house, which was good, for it allowed her almost fanatical neatness to flourish.  Her method of keeping things under control was to throw things out. Almost nothing was of enough sentimental value to keep.  A child's treasured piece of metallic paper couldn't make it from morning till school lunch even though I had hidden  it under a sofa cushion to try to save it.  She did hang onto a few books, but nothing was ever saved "just in case." So her house was orderly as well as immaculate.  When it was my mother AND my grandmother going at it, you practically had to hang onto the bedpost to keep from going out with the trash.

I have talked enough (for now) about my mother's cooking, but there are lots of other topics about feminine virtures--keeping her kids looking good under very straitened circumstances, for example.  I remember how she used to say that my and my sisters' hair shone like silk under the Texas sun.  People were constantly remarking on it.She washed it every week with Kirk's Hardwater Coco Soap and gave it a vinegar rinse. My grandmother sewed most of our clothes, because my mother was too impatient to sew.

Her friends were a large group of valiant ladies who coped with absolutely terrible climate issues: dust, heat, wind, to keep really lovely homes and take really good care of their families.  It is a quality to be admired, my young feminine friends.  In the meantime, they had some really good times.  Card parties, almost every afternoon for some (not my mother), shopping even with a limited budget, coffees in the morning and meriendas in the afternoon. (Merienda is the best although you can gain more weight by having meriendas than you can imagine. What's merienda, you ask? More later!)  Sporting types golfed, and, if not golf-incined, hung around the nineteenth hole.  My mother had little time for any of those daytime activities.  But, when my father was not working in Mexico or California, they either went out or had people in for cards every evening.  My father was a sociable person and loved company.  Mother was lucky to have her parents there so she could go out with impunity. She wouldn't have entrusted us to the maid.

Mother loved the movies. In those very poor depression years when all you might afford was a ten-cent movie, she'd often take me along when my father was out of town. I loved the movies. They formed a great part of my slangy in-family vocabulary. "Fork over the dough," some crook said at some point in a movie, and it became part of me.  My mother did not take part in the  hilarity, however, and kept her original self wherever she went. The people she identified with were those beautiful, charming socialites who frequented so many  movies we saw: Myrna Loy, Melvin Douglas, Franchot Tone, et al.  I admired the women's clothes and wanted to be a dress-designer.  I don't know if mother came away from those movies more dissatisfied with her life or not.  The truth is that it was education she wanted, whether she knew it or not.  She was awfully smart and talented and had to pursue her life on a smaller canvas than she might have.

When she was a teen-ager in Central Texas, and as beautiful as you can imagine with patent-leather black hair, ivory skin, brown eyes and a perfect figure, an entrepreneur came into town and wanted to take my mother away to Hollywood to make a professional Spanish dancer of her.  Of course her family said NO.  They were wise.  But, say, she had somehow escaped the surly bonds of Texas to go--somewhere else, where a larger life could get a look at her--that bundle of brains, beauty, talent.  Would her life have been bigger? Better?  We cannot possibly say. We loved her so much.  We were glad she stayed, and let  us come along. YAZZYBEL

Writing and Batheing

Good morning!

No "e" in Batheing, say you? You are right.  But why do we say it, bathe-ing then?The British say, bath-ing. Makes more sense. But I bathe. Bathe. Many will say to me, "You old fashioned thing. Why don't you shower like everybody else?"

I love my bath. It has to be hot, and there has to be enough hot water in the tank to replenish water and temperature as I linger there in a torpor. Wonderful ideas come to me in the tub. Whole poems. Good things.  I 'm not the only one, either. Bertie Wooster's nutty old uncle did all his thinking in the tub.

Showers are often cold, to me. Clammy tile walls or moist shower curtains don't appeal to me.  And my solar plexus does not get that stimulus that provokes those wonderful ideas mentioned above. 

The best shower I ever took was at Padre Island when I went down there with my sons, aged four and two, to visit my parents. They had a place down at the Island at the time, and one night when the infants slumbered in a baking temperature (no AC there, yet)  with my mother on duty, I went down to the surf in the moonlight and had a wonderful little swim.  When I came back to the beach house, I went to a shower underneath the house, stripped off my suit in the dark, and washed all  that sand off my body.  It was wonderful--the dark, the warmth, the water that was right out of the shower head just as warm as the temperature and my skin. I could scarcely feel it as water, or tell where it differed from the night around me. Next day, it was just too hot for us to stay down there, so we went back to Brownsville where my parents' house was air-conditioned.

When I grew up in Brownsville, nobody's house was air-conditioned.  If we  wanted relief from the heat, we went to the movies and basked in coolness for a couple of hours.  Houses were built, as they always had been built in that climate, to take advantage of the prevailing stiff breeze from the southeast that has always been Brownsville's blessing under a very hot sun.  A little shade, and that breeze, and life was quite liveable. But even with an air-conditioned house, the shower inside was all right in summer time for me.  Pleasant, even. You didn't even have to worry about the water temperature. It would be warm.  I don't remember any good ideas from it, though.

I guess you have to be immersed in a pool of water for the imagination to open up. Try it. You will like it. My bath is ready now and I am ready to start the morning. Wonder what I will think about in the bath today?  YAZZYBEL

More men cooking

Good morning!

There have always been men cooking in American homes. Take a look at the comic strips and the movies of my childhood where there was  often  a big handsome-type fellow or sometimes a Dagwood, apron tied clumsily around his man-waist, cooking up some food.  Dennis the Menace's father barbecued, didn't he? 

Yet, in many American homes, Dad never went anywhere near the stove.  He sat down, and was served a plate of food by someone who cared enough about him to perform that holy service.  John Steinbeck wrote a beautiful piece about a young woman, baby on her hip, skilfully making a breakfast.  And someone else has written a beautiful piece about someone making him a sandwich. Holy service!!

Right now, the men in the younger generation in my family of sisters, all of them, perform the major cooking duties in their families.  In the course of watching their mothers, and repudiating a role as her helper, often, they learned something --cooking is its own reward.  We cook because it's necessary, and we cook because it's rewarding to make something good.

Something happened to the girls along the way.  They looked at that kitchen slave mother and said: Not me!  I'm not doing that!   And along with their growing  up came the maturation of the American prepared food-fast food-ready to eat food industry, and the girls never had to learn how.  And they lost a lot, I think, but they gained a lot too. I am not going to argue that at all.

Benjamin is like his mother and has become a master of baking, first, and now a master of soups.  He loved baking, and like me made everything. His own fig newtons...his own curry refrigerator cookies (Fannie Farmer)... My only criticism of his cookery is that he like many of his generation LOVES hot stuff, and sometimes puts in a little too many chiles even for his mom.  It has always been fun to talk cookery to him, and it gives us a common bond for shopping and browsing.

Alexander is a master of the pizza.  He has spent years mastering a perfect pizza dough for the home oven.  Supper time at his house is sheer pleasure with one little hand shaped oval or roundish pizza after another appearing out of his oven.  His daughters have taken over the cakes, cupcakes, and muffins from their mother. I hope my grandson is learning about pizza dough.  If he doesn't, I am sure there will be another phase of cookery that he'll find for himself and reward himself and others with!!

My husband Theodore is an okay cook too. He has turned out many a family meal but never when he had me to do it. His meals were the meat, boiled red potato type. Not to be knocked when you are really hungry.  For a while he went on the oat bran muffin kick and turned out many a nice muffin...Then he stopped. 

My family, in short, is obsessed with food.  Some slender young women have been known to think that it is a bad obsession...At some point they had a baby and realized that that baby is obsessed with food, too. 

Little kids welcome a set meal at a set time, very much.  I feel sorry for the many many children in this country who never have one, at home.  I had whole classes, when I was teaching school here in San Diego City Schools, whose entire nutrition came from the school program.  They ate the school breakfast, and they ate the school lunch.  "What do you eat when you get home at night?" I would sometimes ask.  Oh--not much, they'd answer.  Sometimes their mother tossed them a bag of chips, they'd say. 

A teacher in the East County here noticed that many of her children had had their last meal for 72 hours or more, when they went out the schoolroom door on Friday afternoon.  She began rounding up foods and putting them in bags, which these select children would be given after school on Friday.  Things like apples, crackers and cheese, cans with easy pop tops that could be eaten directly out of the can like stew or beans...children would tell her that they fed toddlers at home too out of these cans.  The teacher's retired father got into the act and they  made it a bigger project.  The truth here is that there lots of hungry kids in our United States, and they will never get the wonderful prepared meals at a home table that I got as a youngster, and, grown up, cooked for my kids.

I seem to have gotten away from men cooking, but I haven't really.  Men, wives, cooks, kids, all are part of the picture.  I still think the family meal (if only once a day now) is a very important part of our lives....YAZZYBEL

Who cooks?

In my long ago youth, there wasn't much question of who was going to cook.  You were, if you were going to get married.  You would stand and cook three times a day, for your husband and your family.  Your own taste and your own taste buds and your experience would provide the framework for your work, as you developed your skills.

I went into marriage very young, at nineteen.  I had cooked only one meal previously, one time when I had a tantrum at eighteen and refused to eat with the family.  My mother removed all traces of my meal and wisely grabbed everybody and took off.  Before she left, she told me that there was ground beef, and peas, and so forth in the refrigerator and that I would make my meal for myself.  This was at mid-day, and it was probably about one before I crept down to the empty kitchen and got to work.  I made myself the worst tasting meal that I can remember.  I wondered at the time how my mother could take these same elements and come up with a delicious dinner.  My sisters, most of them, seem to have spent their girlhoods at my mother's elbow, learning how she did it.  I guess I was somewhere else, reading a book.

I went to Hargrove's Stationery Store, literary center of Brownsville, Texas, in 1948, and bought myself a book.  I chose Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook.  I chose well.  Just reading her recipes made me want to cook.  But I did not really use the book until I got married.  In a  fusty little kitchen in Waco, Texas, I made food for myself and my student husband.  I was a student too, and we had a very limited budget.  AND an oven with no calibration.  Wow--how far have I gotten in sixty years?  I ask you?

But , I found that I loved cooking and started myself on a routine that has served me well for all the years since.  I am not as good a cook now as my younger sisters, but I have had my years.  I would still eat any meal that I prepared in preference to the majority of those set before me in the cafes, bistros, or restaurants we frequent.
I am so glad my husband Theodore is finished with painting and screw-driving in the kitchen.  We do not have to search fruitlessly for something good to eat out there.

A few of the husbands in our little far-flung sisterhood have outdoor cooking apparati, and will go out to grill on a regular basis. I wish Theodore loved to do this.  I am at the point in my life where I no longer look forward to grilling, broiling or frying meats and fishes.  It's greasy and messy, and not as good for us as simple broiling on a grill outdoors.  Salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice, and there it is.  We have to have meat because Theodore has diabetes and it is a good form of controlling blood sugar to eat a bunch of meat in place of pasta, cornbread, rice, tortillas and other starchy stuff.  So I would like that.  I like meat, too.

When the next generation came along, my three sons eschewed cooking lessons and were glad to have Mom to put the food on the table.  However, adulthood doth place strictures on us all.  Alexander is a good cook, Gregory was a good cook, Benjamin is a good cook.  They have learned to cook in self defense: because they have taste buds, imagination, and a desire to eat a certain way.

In the late seventies, a young schoolteacher friend of mine got married. In the age of Liberation, she made a pact with her prospective husband:  One week, she'd cook.  The next week, he'd cook.  With those rules in place they would venture hand in hand toward a future of shared cooking. 

Her week was week one. During that week, she tried out all the variations of her cooking repertoire, all the salads, dressings, pasta salads, chicken breasts, lamb chops, and all the dainties she could produce.  A very well thought out and pondered over variety.

Comes week two. (Do you hear a distant drum-roll of doom? Ah yes.)  She comes home from work to be greeted with a huge baked ham.  And some bread. Next day, sliced ham sandwiches.  Next night, more sliced ham, ad infinitum. More bread. I don't think they made it through the week.  And the marriage?  'Bout the same. I think that people who have been very careful about trying out the marriage bed beforehand might well profit by trying out the kitchen too.

Tomorrow I'll write some more about men in my family who do a lot of the cooking for their families.  They are so good.  But why should I say that? They are no gooder than the rest of us!  Stand up for yourselves, ladies.   I have to close now, as Patricia is coming to play piano and I have not made breakfast. Theo is rooting around in the kitchen.  To arms!  YAZZYBEL

There has to be a Morning After....

Good  morning!

That line up there is meant to be sung lugubriously, I guess.  This morning the only thing feeling lugubrious is my digestion.  Eighty-one year old ladies should not be scarfing down huge portions of meringue, cream cheese, whipped cream, marshmallows, and berries at night.  However, I slept well, thank you.

The book club meeting was fine, though my little living room was cramped. Well, it will be so.  I think thirteen people came, and all found a place to sit down.  The difficult (to me) book was beautifully presented by Jean.  There was a lot of discussion  and many people really loved it.  The members appreciated and guzzled down Gloria Ferrer's Sonoma Brut, Longoria Vineyards (Los Olivos and no close relative) pinot noir, sparkling pear juice, and a lot of water.  They noshed on See's Bridge Mix and some almonds that I had sprayed with a little olive oil and lightly salted with Premier Pink Salt.

Then came the dessert. A number of nice people helped me to part out that giant pudding, put it on plates, ladle the berries over, and serve.  The Berries on a Cloud dessert was much appreciated.  For my part, I do not wish to see it again. My liver just quails at the thought of it.  Keep me away from whiteness.  The leftover berries are in a sauce pan, and later this morning when I regain me sea legs, will be cooked up with a little tapioca to be used as a topping for stuff.  I can't even think of that, at this moment.  We also had de-caf, but I don't want to think of that either.

In a session laced with very little conflict, John Banfield's The Book of Evidence was chosen as our next selection.  Several books that centered on women and women's lives were passed over but that's okay. I will happily read the book carefully and expound on it next meeting. March 7.  Somewhere .

This morning a flurry of emails containing photographs that my archivist-search-hound sister has turned up have been popping onto the email screen, prompting memory and much  re-hashing of the past.  Very nice. I am almost tempted to go back onto the round robin, but not yet. Not yet.  Hasta mañana....YAZZYBEL

Cherries, and Berries, and Clouds--Oh My!!

Good morning. Today's posting may be mostly about food, but I am not sure, as I haven't written it yet.  We are never quite sure until we do it.

Last night I made the base and the cloud for Cherry Berries on a Cloud.  I had already sliced a trillion strawberries and lightly sugared them, and stored them in the refrigerator. There they sit, juicing themselves, under a plastic wrap.  Near them are boxes of  other berries, awaiting their introduction at the very last when they are incorporated into the berry bowl.

And the cherries? Well may you ask.

Have you ever heard of  "Eton Mess"  ?
No? Well, it is a dessert famous in England where Eton Mess was cooked up in the school kitchens of Eton to please boys and mamas alike.  It is, in essence, broken up dry meringues, whipped cream,and berries, all melanged in a serving bowl.  Very very delicious.

I suddenly realized that Cherry Berries on a Cloud is essentially Eton Mess, with the addition of cream cheese and marshmallows to make a more sturdy cloud. It also uses prepared cherry pie filling, with cornstarch and red coloring and all. Well, we went to the store and I could not find a proper cherry pie filling , only "Light" filling with is poisonous aspartame which I will not eat.  So I bought two cans of cherries, which I'd only have to sweeten and thicken up with my own cornstarch or tapioca--not a big problem. But when I got home I looked at the Albertson's receipt and saw that we'd paid $4.69 for each of those cans of cherries. No, thanks!  Those cherries are sitting in the pantry with the receipt and will go back to Albertson's tomorrow, thank you. Imagine, paying nearly ten dollars for two cans of cherries. Not me.

I realized that with plenty of sugared fresh berries,  I really would essentially have Eton Mess except that it can be cut into squares.  Well, that's the theory. We'll find out tonight.  Then you spoon the berry mixture over the cloud. Yummo.

I was worried about baking the meringue, which has to be baked at a controlled temperature and left overnight in the oven, but when I opened the oven this morning, there was a perfect huge white drift of dry but not too dry meringue in the pyrex rectangle.  The cloud itself was shortly beaten up and mixed up (too many marshmallows fell in, but what the hey) and spread whitely over the white field of meringue. Then the whole was covered with plastic and inserted into the refrigerator to await the festal event.

I did cut the sugar in both meringue and cloud. I hope I didn't cut it too much; you have to have enough or it won't be good.  But I will take a tiny taste out of a corner (well of course I will) and if it is sweet enough, I shall add the raspberries and blackberries and a soupcon of balsamic vinegar. (That's the genius idea.)  Bland sweet meringue, bland sweet cloud, BALSAMIC  berries.  Bingo.

If you want the basic recipe, google "Cherry Berries on a Cloud," and that will take you to Betty Crocker's recipe which is as basic as you want to get.

Now I am almost ready for the book club.   And the book, you ask, did you ever read the book?  Answer: I read AT it as usual.  It did not grab me enough for a real reading. I thought he wrote copiously, but tentatively.  Needs more work, I'd suggest, if I were at the writers' workshop.  YAZZYBEL

Dusting, here

Good morning!

Yes, I am still dusting. This will be short and sweet, as I'm very late to the post (LOL) and still need to get something done around here.

Today at church the Forum topic was Holy Communication.  It was amazing, the number of tweeters, texters, bloggers, e-mailers, IM'ers,  and so forth that were in the audience.  Today, the main message that came out was--Mindfulness. Pay attention to yourself. Take a deep breath before you thoughtlessly send off that (vituperative, critical, negative, nagging, irritating) communication. Also take a deep breath before you misinterpret what you receive.  All true. All true.  What more can be said? We'll see next week.

I also went through church in a fog, it seems, as I did not kneel when the Dove descends and enters the consecrated elements on the Communion Table.  That is the old fashioned way.  In the Catholic Church a bell would ring to snap you out of it and tell you to kneel down.  Nowadays, what you do in church is up for grabs. You may do as you please.  A former priest taught us not to kneel at that point (to wit:   Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the Highest.)

I used to argue about it with my son Gregory. "But he says that you'd just be kneeling to some people on an altar," said Gregory. Oh, I see--and the rest of the whole service? Off to the golf course we may as well go, to me, in that line of reasoning.
But, as it is, some kneel, some continue standing, and some are in the "Anglican Crouch," as John Mortimer describes a much used posture in the Anglican church.  That's when you are neither kneeling nor sitting, with a large part of your anatomy flung over the pew in front of  you, and  your behind comfortably remaining in its perch. Never say we aren't democratic. Every person  for k'self. 

K'self originated in my family and comes in handy when a gender bias is not to be established.

Anyway, I forgot to do it today-- consciously to kneel down at that point. I think we should kneel down as much as possible in the Episcopal Church, for two reasons: 1) to honor The Incarnation, and 2) not to be such pew-potatoes as we are getting to be.  We might as well be Methodists, or Congregationalists!  Let us ACTIVELY participate in the Mass as far as we are bodily able.

So today I was not mindful...that much unmindfulness is rare. I wonder what clouds were going across my mind as I was saying those words today!!!  What was I thinking about, or was I thinking at all??? Scary.  YAZZYBEL

Pick-up Day

Today's Saturday, and the book club comes Monday night.  Today is pick-up day around the living room, here, the day when I'll be going around with a big cardboard box, trying to get this room into a Martha Stewart state of blandness. It is such a small room; it really should never be dominated by the welter of papers, books, music, souvenir rocks,  pine cones, family photographs and candlesticks that are usually lying around in it.

So, I'll get everything out of it and it will look so neat!! I 'll take a photograph of it and think: wow, how nice. Wouldn't it be great if it could look like this all the time, in the Temple Tradition? My family would be proud of me. Then on Tuesday morning, I'll go back to living in it.

I can pick up a few things on the blog too. Yesterday's cold brought another flurry of dire reports from my sisters.  Things are really dead over there in South Texas. And when a lot of plants die there, that's a lot of botany that is going to wilt and rot over the next few weeks. It is going to smell terrible, because shortly the weather will be hot again.   It's sad.  When I was a kid, there were a lot of citrus growers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. If it was going to get cold, they would put out smudge pots to save the orange and grapefruit and lemon trees.  My mother or grandfather might go out with an old blanket or carton to protect a special plant or tree.  But cold like this was not something that happened then. This is huge, a massive blight that will leave its effects behind it for years.

Another thing. I found a book in my bookshelf yesterday entitled, A Wholly Different  Way of Living.  It is a transcription of some dialogs between Professor Alan W. Anderson and J. Krishnamurti. Professor Alan W. Anderson is the man I told you about some days ago when I was writing about the I Ching.  I had his first initials wrong, as I knew at the time (but you have to just go along on a blog).   Anyway, the important point, besides getting the name right, is my remembrance of seeing those very dialogs on KPBS TV in San Diego.  I heard them shortly after my transformative experience with Jungian therapy here in San Diego, and it was a shock to me then  that I heard them and understood them.  Oh, I didn't and still don't get the depths that those men could plumb in their discourse, but I could follow along quite easily. I knew what they were talking about. It was like picking up a book in a foreign language that you suddenly realized you could read and comprehend. So, we can grow.  I have put A Wholly Different Way of Living out where I can put my hands on it when the book club has gone and I can read at it from time to time.

Another thing. I went to the Mission Hills Library Book Club on Thursday morning. They had read Swann's Way by Marcel Proust.  It has been many a long year since I read at Swann's Way. It is indeed a remarkable book.  Most of the readers seemed to be impressed by the quality and quantity of his observation. Call it presence.  Call it Mindfulness.  Call it a wholly different way of living. Only it isn't wholly different. He just happened to have the time, with that asthma and all, and not having to go out and teach school every day, come what may, to lie back and recall, and let it all happen through him and his writing hand.

But now I have to pick up the living room and sort out the silver forks and spoons and worry about the timing for the Cherry Berries on a Cloud. The book club will be disappointed not to have whipped cream on the side, but there is whipped cream in the dessert.  I have to do a little actual cleaning, for a change, creeping along in my husband's wake as he's already done the most, as usual. It has to be neat, and it has to be a Good Thing.  Ah, Martha, Martha!! Which Martha can I mean, you ask ?   Just think, if Martha Stewart's mama had named her Mary Stewart, she mght have been the one having the  dialog with Krishnamurti!
YAZZYBEL

Everybody's freesin' !!!

Good morning!

My father spoke really good English even though it was his second language.  He hardly had any accent at all when he was younger and fresh out of the University of Texas, it seems, but as he grew older his Spanish accent, like other parts of his personality, inclined more back to the Mexican.  One thing he never quite seemed to master was the treacherous English "z".  He spoke it  like an "s" no matter how hard he may have been trying.  As far as I know, he never had to live through weather such as his beloved town of Brownsville, Texas, is sustaining now.

Perhaps the most southerly US point of all this cold that's sweeping the middle part of our country now, Brownsville is suffering hard.  I spoke to my sister on the phone this morning, about six my time, and she told me that every single plant and tree in her yard is gone.  Brownsville is semi-tropical in climate, and lots of beautiful big-leafed tropical plants and trees thrive there.  It is generally warm, and it rains a lot, and things grow wildly. Gardens are beautiful. But now, every single plant gone! That's heart-breaking.

Their power is still on so they are warm.  Their passion is birdwatching, watching the little and big birds that frequent their backyard feeders.  The birds are out there this morning, jumping around to keep warm.  Their water is frozen, of course. She is going to put some fresh water out there now. It probably won't freeze today,though she says they haven't seen the sun for days.  Oh--and dead sea turtles are washing up down at the Gulf....

My sister in San Antonio has sent us beautiful photos of Encanta St. in northeastern San Antonio, where it has been even colder. Everything is frozen there too and there is a beautiful light covering of snow all over.  Underneath that snow there's deadly ice, and the people of San Antonio are advised not to go to work until the ice has had a chance to melt off.

My sister in Tucson is the coldest of all. She and her husband went to bed with all their coats on last night because it was TEN DEGREES by their garden thermometer, and they have no heat. Right.  No heat. I asked why and she said that the city of Tucson ran out of gas. Instead of sharing the problem around, they just cut out a whole area, and Ventana Canyon got the ax.  Imagine!  Did they leave Glens Falls for this???  The city underestimated the amount of gas their inhabitants would be needing, and they didn't order enough...James Howard Kunstler would be pointing his finger and saying, AHA!  He knows it is going to be difficult when the petroleum products all go away.

My sister in North Carolina is still freesin', as she has been for some weeks now. She's more used to it, and has wood to burn, so she's more prepared than some. She wraps up and hunkers down by the fire and reads.  Hope the lights don't go out, my  sister.

Here in Chula Vista, it is as cold as heck, but we have a nice blowy gas furnace with plenty in supply still, it seems. The sky is clear and the sun will be out, but, Daddy, we're still freesin'!!!   YAZZYBEL

Oysters Then and Now, Part Deux

Good morning! This will be short and sweet as I am going to run up to Mission Hills Library to catch a discussion of Proust's Swann's Way. Theodore will obligingly drop me off for an hour. How he will amuse himself I do not know; perhaps he will come into the library and read the Wall Street Journal, or go to Trader Joe's.

This post is less about oysters than about the title up there. I chose that title yesterday (an arresting one, isn't it?) as a tribute to a theme written by my son Alexander many years ago, entitled, "Artillery Then and Now."  This effort is bound up into a red folder and bradded in strongly. It has a title page, and in every way conforms,  I am sure, to the instructions for its presentation. I look at it every now and then when I want  to enjoy a gentle laugh.

Is it wrong to laugh at our children? Of course not, if we don't mock them to their faces.  It is good to have a little laugh once in a while at the absurdities they practice as they work their way up to committing adult absurdities, is it not? I am lucky enough to have preserved some of the writing efforts of my kids, all seriously marked and commented upon by the teachers lucky enough to have them in their classes.

I would also like to report that they turn the tables on us when they are grown up and do not hesitate to indulge in rollicksome merriment when advised on topics such as finances, ailments, personal health, intestinal parasites amongst their restless children, the coming collapse of the USA as we know it, and vitamins. Among other topics.  And they do not trouble themselves to be discreet either.

Back to oysters.  My mother allowed us to put catsup on seafood when we wanted to.  I thought that was wise, for some kids just have too active imaginations. If catsup makes something more palatable, let 'em use it. I did that for my kids, and they cheerfully ate any amount of liver, strange seafood, or anything else as long as I allowed them catsup.

The only things they ever refused to eat, period, were : eggplant, which turned out to be because I put green pepper in the mix, and an asparagus quiche I once made (it was simply delicious, at the beginning of the quiche era when we used all the eggs we wanted and made the whole thing with lots of rich whipping cream). NOBODY would go near that quiche, which proves that the boy is father of the man.

Now, in those days, my readers,  kids ate at the table in our house or they did not eat at all. After the big refusal, I offered to make anyone who cared enough to purchase it,  an alternative--a cheese sandwich for twenty five cents.  Alex and Greg were broke and had to go hungry, but the youngest, Ben, went upstairs to his room and searched around for ages and finally came down with twenty five cents. Gregory told me many years later that he would never forget the sound of Ben rooting around in the toy box for those coins. I didn't think of offering catsup for the quiche, but I would have if I'd thought of it.

Right now, all the oysters in Port Isabel are freezing in record low temperatures in their oil-sludged beds at the mouth of the Rio Grande, at the conjuction of river, bay and Gulf.  I pray they survive in good health for the delectation of all of us. I seem to have gotten away, largely, from the subject of oysters and onto the subject of kids. Aren't they wonderful? Oysters, and kids? YAZZYBEL

Oysters, Then and Now

oyster: Middle English, oistre, from Middle French, from Latin ostrea, from Greek ostreon, akin to Greek ostrakon shell, osteon, bone.

That's its etymology (edited) according to Webster's New Collegiate. I won't bother with the definition because everyone knows what oysters are. Don't they?

"The bravest man is the one who first ate an oyster."  No doubt about that. My grandfather said that he followed the precepts of his own father, who "would not eat anything that still had its bowels."  Lucky for him that he lived on a farm in Tennessee, and then in Central Texas,  where there are very few oyster beds.

When my father, traveling on the cotton business right after WWII, went to New York, he went to the hotel restaurant, where fried oysters were presented at some certain price by the half dozen.  "I'll have two or three dozen," he said to the waitress.  "Are you sure you want that many?" she asked, boggled. "Well, start with two dozen, then, " said he.  "I'm going to start you with six," said the lady, "and then we'll see."  When the oysters arrived, they were each the size of a small steak, of course, and had to be cut into with knife and fork. What a surprise.

My mother loved to tell that story of how surprised my father was to receive those six  fried oysters on a large platter.  We could all imagine his surprise, because the oysters we ate were very small Gulf of Mexico oysters, as fresh and sweet as you could imagine in the ages before petroleum laced their natal waters. My mother fried them up in cornmeal and salt and pepper, and even the kids could eat a dozen each without ever having to cut into one once.

The best place to eat oysters out was down in Port Isabel, about twenty miles away on the Laguna Madre and the Gulf both.  When I was very very young it was Point Isabel, but at some point it became Port Isabel as I remember the younger generation (my mother and uncle RB) correcting my grandmother to set her straight.  The best place in Port Isabel to eat oysters was at Carlos's Cafe.  Carlos just knew how to make those oysters so perfectly delicious.  His crowning success was Oysters En Brochette. I can still see the grease-marked piece of paper with the menu items typewritten across it...good, I can't see the price. It would make me cry for our monetary system.

Carlos strung those little oysters on sticks of wood, dredged them with flour, salt, pepper, melted butter, and grilled them over a flame.  I can't tell you how good they were. Even my mother, dauntless cook, refrained from ever competing with Carlos on Oysters en Brochette.  In my memory, it is always November when we are driving down there in the frigid twilight, driving about to look for Carlos who tended to move his operation around from time to time. Yes, it did sometimes get cold in our tropical kingdom of South Texas, when a norther hit and it became very cold (in the forties), damp and dark, with a neat 50 mph breeze constantly buffeting us as we drove.  The oysters  were worth it.

I did not eat raw oysters until I grew up, and those mostly were in San Francisco or San Diego restaurants. I have forsworn for a number of years the presentation of raw oysters in my own home.  One Christmas holiday I bought some wonderful raw Eastern oysters flown out that day, from Ron Kiefer's market in Mission Hills.  I am sure they were perfect.  But instead of putting them bravely out on chilled plates with lemon and hot sauce (yes, yes, we have to have it at every meal), I chickened out and served my guests from South America a pallid bisque, instead.  Since then, if I want a raw oyster, I leave the responsibility of buying, keeping and serving it to professionals (like Carlos). The best raw oysters I ever had were at lunch, at the counter, at Dobson's in San Diego. WOWie. Who needs pearls?   YAZZYBEL

The Bliss of Retirement

Good morning! Younger readers can retire off this essay right now, as I am writing for the elderly. HOWEVER, if you are young you will someday be where we are right now. So you may want to stay on and learn something. (Crabbiness.)

I retired in 1996 or so, and my husband retired about a year later. I don't know what I did with that year I had alone, but I should have photographed it or something.  It was probably just too good to believe--being on the loose and having nobody to answer to for a number of hours each day.

Read that last sentence over again, especially, "having nobody to answer to for a number of hours each day."

I would not want to be completely alone now, but I do resent having company twenty-four-seven.  I know, it's ungrateful of me.  It's great that my husband and I are both in pretty good health so far, but I wonder if I am alone in wishing he'd go somewhere for about four hours every day, at a consistent time so I could count on it.  It's a mistake for me to mention it because it hurts my husband's feelings, and, besides, he does not want to go.  He has nowhere he'd rather be, so far as I can figure out, but here in the house or in the yard.  Like so many American husbands, he has no pals with whom to share the joys of retirement.  He is bigger than I am, and stronger.  I need him in many ways around the house, but I don't like to call on him too much because it just reinforces his strong conviction that this little world can't function without his input, minute to minute.  I have known some wives who shortly have said, "Listen, I ran this house and got your meals on the table for blank number of years without your interference. Scat!" However, for me and for many who will come after me in the future years, this won't be true as we too were out working.

When I was young with little kids, I had the luxury of not having to work for about ten years.  What a blessing. What a bounty.  There is no better sound than that of the front door slamming after the last of your housemates has gone off to work or school.  You can actually go to the bathroom without someone turning over a cabinet full of dishes, or desperately needing some lost thing.  You bathe at leisure, you get dressed, the sun is shining--and you still have hours ahead of you. Dishes to be done? You'll do them when you do them.  Beds to be made? Only one if you have bought comforters for your kids and taught them how to pull them up to cover a multitude of books and toys.  Groceries to be bought?  Happily you can put the keys into your car and go off into the great world, there to see friends and strangers upon your own pleasure.  You can sit at home alone at noon and savor the quiet and light and peace of solitary mid-day. Even if you still have toddlers about, they are not being critical nor showing you how they can mop the kitchen floor better and more frequently than you do. You can TAKE COURSES!! And learn things.

The Spanish word for "retire" is "jubilarse."  I dont like the word because I always have a picture of people jumping up and down for joy and that isn't always the way it is.  It is good for people not to have to go to work after they have put in a lifetime or even a partial lifetime at the daily grind. But you can't sit around and do nothing, you can't take over another person's role or life.  And a woman has always had a life at her house even when she went out to work. It all depended on her, and she handled it and got used to its being HER house.

My house is not my own.  I get so bound up in a deep resentment that I become immobilized.  I know that that is a grave sin, a true flaw. I don't know how to get myself out of it and still stay in my house --where I , also retired, also want to be. Alone.  Some of the time.

I was going to write about oysters today, but got sidetracked.  Tomorrow I will write about my oyster sandwich that I had at PLSF last week with a friend.  And I will write about the Gulf of Mexico, and about Oysters I Have Known.  Hasta mañana from crabby old YAZZYBEL.