Let's Try to Get This Done

Good evening...ah yes, gone are those early morning hours when my mind was sharp and fresh. Well, OK, at least sharper and fresher than it is by evening. However: This is the time I have.

Ben flew off into the afternoon sun, and Theo and I settled down to our continuous honeymoon.  LOL.  We are doing pretty well.  He is feeling better. I've got him doing the dinner dishes whether he would or no, because I am tired of cookin' and washin'.  Too bad for me.

Tomorrow we go to his Kaiser doctor.  Shall I ask him, "Why was Theodore's heart not brought into the picture when we've been talking about his health all these last months?"  No, I shall not, probably. I have my own doctor to battle with.  So I'll just function as official mama and answer the questions that Theo does not connect with.  I'll try to be good.

I am headed back into the McDowell Diet as well.  My little foray into meat-eating didn't seem to function too well.  Hope I go back to feeling better after a few days of vegetables and fruits.  Theodore looks much better than he did a week ago, by the way.  Getting the water yanked out of him did him a world of good, and the regular and unrelenting beating of his heart should get lots more oxygen into his body.  All good.

There are lots of worldly issues I could deal with nowadays if I had the luxury of being a person.  I am so concerned about our (American) society.  How vulgar and mean the people on the tv are! How nasty.  Making the cruel and nasty remark seems to be the hyperion of conversational talent nowadays...as it always was, probably--only now the people making the remarks are uneducated, ignorant, ugly, ill-dressed, and fat.  Speaking of ignorant and uneducated, I don't think that hyperion is the appropriate word in the sentence preceding...but I can't think of another....you know what I mean.  See why I am so concerned?

Today is the birthday of sister no. 2.  She is eighty one today, eighteen months younger than I, and is the "baby" of my memory.  She was so precious that I took a bite out of her.  My mama did not take kindly to my show of love, and bit me back, thus causing trauma that no amount of therapy has ever been able to alleviate. Gracious, mama, I was only two.  Love to my sister of the peach-like cheek, on her birthday, and love to my Mama too. YAZZYBEL

Wow, what a Thanksgiving!

Gracious.  It's been a long time, baby.

Ben cameth and broketh my computer in attempting to clean it. I am glad he did for have now a better computer. I hope. It is a Toshiba laptop and would be good if I had a lap. But it functions well on a desk as well, and I am learning to use the little rubbing-board instead of a mouse. I learnt all this several years ago when I had a little mac but thought I was doing the right thing by going back to an HP desktop. Not so good, not so good. So I shall attempt to adapt to change.

Theo's story is that after a couple of days, instead of sending him home, they found a new heart arrhythmia which was more serious and different from his usuall atrial fibrillation.  They wanted to do an implant, an ICD, which will control the beating of his heart.  In the meantime they had given him enough intravenous Lasix to enable a race horse to win the cup, so he was feeling perkier than he has in a long time. (Still not very perky.  But less like The Mummy in demeanor,)  They did the operation at one am on Thanksgiving morning, and we took him home in late afternoon, arriving here in time for supper.

We had our belated Thanksgiving Dinner on Friday, and I was able to put forth my batty idea for a small scale meal, in which the entire meat section consisted of two roasted wings flanking a big pile of stuffing. It did look funny and tasted delicious.  In the stuffing I put celery, onion, garlic, and orange pepper all chopped up...oh, and a fistful of frozen corn kernels.  Oh, how yummy it was. I used Pepperidge Farm Cornbread Stuffing as the base, and I did not stint on the butter.  A photograph of the "bird" should appear below if I can find it and get it onto this page.

We are all thankful that Ben was here as it was a very stressful time. He leaves at twelve thirty today, and I will eerily be left alone with my Bionic Husband, to watch over and care for. Yikes. I wasn't cut out for a nurse, but we do our duty, bite the bullet, and man up.  In a week or so, Theodore should be feeling much better than he has for the past couple of months, and I will put him back to butler duty.  No more yard man, though. We are getting a gardener. Love to all, YAZZY

What a Difference a Day Makes

Good morning. Twenty four hours I was on here ready to talk about something important, I can't remember what. I had to stop everything though, and write out my church pledge, and then remembered that I had not paid the church for November yet...so did that, and then on and on...I didn't write my blog.

When I got home from church, Theodore was just sitting on the sofa. He was completely winded, having just taken out the bag of trash to the bin...and was worn out and winded.  I found out he had not had his breakfast, so I made breakfast  for us. (My 'second breakfast')...and as we ate, I talked to him about going to the ER as he'd been ordered early in the week, but he would not. Said he would think about it on Monday, but I told him that we would be expecting the arrival of Benjamin on Monday and it would be better to go to Kaiser NOW and get it over with. So he agreed to go and we were out there by eleven thirty.  I left at three with him still in the ER...he'd been ordered to stay overnight so they could get a handle on what  was going on with him...and were searching out a room for him.

He waited for three hours AFTER I left, in the ER, before they got him a place. I had to nag and beg for him to get something for lunch about two...and they finally got  a drink and sandwich to him.  They are not ill-intentioned, but they just forget to honor the request that  they realize is perfectly reasonable to make. His blood sugar was 55 or so when he got the food. No wonder he is weak.

Anyway I came home to a big wind and a ferocious rainstorm all evening long, but when I got up at five thirty this morning all was calm.  Let us pray that Theo had a good calm night and will be able to come home today. YAZZYBEL

Demise of a Giant, Illustrated

Good afternoon. The tree, in most respects, is all down. It has been a whale of a job on a whale of a tree.

My sister asked me what it would be like without it. I do not know yet, for only the seasons will tell us what it is like not to have it looming over our back area and dropping leaves, twigs, mini branches, and threatening us with imminent collapse when the wind blows. Jose the tree man seemed to think it was about to drop a lot of big limbs too...and you should have seen those limbs. As parts of the tree were removed, more were revealed, twisted, doubled back, hanging down and leaning on other limbs, leaves dangling, whole portions dead...it was scary, but it is also sad to see such a big thing reduced to dust.  I am happy to say that its children are residing in a couple of pots in our yard, and that they will be planted out there somewhere in the lower forty,to grow to glory, and to terrorize the owners perhaps fifty years from now if they are not given some care. Now, the pictures...I should be able to get a few on if I am careful, without blowing this whole dang thing away. YAZZY

Demise of a Giant

Today, Thursday, our huge old eucalyptus is finally going down . I  say, "ours," because it is within ten feet of our house at the back. Though on the other side of the fence, and the property of the neighbor, it has been our companion ever since Theo or I have lived here...

It used to shelter little birds by the hundreds at twilight, and I loved to hear them settling down for the night. And it has had the nests of hawks, too, and of later years the crows who probably have driven all the others away in time. Of late years, even the crows have had it with the tree, and this year they did not nest up there although they hung out and chattered.  I felt that they did not make their nest there because of the tree's precarious state of health and care. It had not been trimmed for years and years, if ever. Theo took down two huge overhanging limbs about ten years ago himself, which were nearly touching our roof.  Since then, nada.  The tree man says the tree's seventy feet tall.

There is a machine out on the street, spewing ground up debris into the bin of a large truck.  They have a lot more to do. I'll come back on later and post more on this if I can, and show you some pictures.  My sister no. 5 asked if I am going to like the results. My answer is, We'll have to live with it and see.  It ought to be a lot neater around here at least. YAZZYBEL

Stll with the Breath

I wanted to tell you about church, a play, an Evensong, and a reception, but I need to finish some thoughts I had about breathing, the wind, the words, the living entity about us, that solid thing that is solid and apart and yet within us--the air.

I was thinking about the air and imagining it as a solid thing, a person. The Navajo think that this air in the largest sense is WakanTanka.  It exists inside of us and in us it is made up of Little Winds but is still part of the whole. When the fluids of a man and a woman unite, then a small wind or little winds are created, and that happens at the moment of conception. (So that settles that!)

I was thinking of when Gregory died, and when I was wakened up and told that he had "stopped breathing," and I visualized his Little Wind, the part of Wakan Tanka that was apportioned to him at conception, drawing back into the larger body. Just gently joining back in to something that was there all along.  When we wear out or lose the house where the Little Wind has been residing, then there is a receding of the individual's wind into the Wakan Tanka that has been in us all our lives.  That is a gentle concept, for it means that the essence of Gregory was not lost, and I never thought it was.

In fact, so many people who have lost a loved one have told me, not in any Native American sense, that they 'feel' that their loved one is all around them still.

Then I thought about our Christian theology (which I am not too knowledgeable about either) and wondered what idea could compare to where all our loved ones are now, and I thought--Purgatory.  There they all are, (and we too if we remember that it's all around and within our houses of flesh)...and when the Great Gettin' Up Morning comes,--what will happen? We don't know yet.  But we will only be where we have been all along.  All is OK.

I won't talk about the play, the Armed Forces Evensong, and the reception yet, but perhaps later, when I have sorted out the email, read the paper, and fed Theodore his breakfast, I'll come back and do just that. YAZZYBEL

The Beautiful Stars

When I wrote about the stars about eight days ago, I forgot to remember that I got the idea of thinking about the stars from an incredible book I got in the mail last week.

The Spell of the Sensous is the book's  name, and its author is David Abram.

This book is like a giant diamond with a myriad facets, and  I do not really grasp any of them.  But the book starts with an unforgettable picture of when the author, once when in Bali, stepped out of his hut in the midst of a rice paddy in the middle of the night. Suddenly he was standing in the midst of a boundless skyful of stars. It took him a moment to orient himself to earth and to realize that the rice paddy, being deep in water, was merely reflecting the great sky full of stars and clouds. Visually there was no delineation between earth and heaven; he was surrounded by the starry firmament.  Merely thinking of this makes me dizzy.

This book is so beautiful.  I cannot yet say what he is writing about because I do not yet understand it.  Perhaps I never will.  As I riffled through the book, like riffling through a sky-and-earth-and-water book of stars, I came to the concluding portion of the book where at last I found a little toehold familiar enough for me to grasp onto, so that is where I am starting the reading.

"The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air," is the name of this section. For an asthmatic it's a godsend. It is rich enough to be a whole book by itself.  It's about the Lakota  and the Dine, or Navajo, and their concepts of creation and existence. Just the first premise is overwhelming enough to totally change the way I look at myself instantly.  Basically, it is that the Air is a person, all around us and within us, and we are within it.  How unclearly I put it.  But it is as far as I can conceptualize the idea yet.

Then, looking ahead, there is the idea of speech and words as part of the divine matrix of the air. Think if the air were thick and pink or pale blue, (to give it some substance in our visualization,) and we drew it into us and blew words out with it with our breath, as part of our breath, and think if we could see it.  Doesn't that give us another idea or picture of what the creation around us is like, what it's made of.

And, looking further ahead, I see we are going to get into another of my favorite subjects, the alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet to be precise--its genesis and development and where it came from and how it came into being.  All too complicated for my simple brain, but I can grasp features like little gleams of light from time to time, and I love reading it.  It is wonderful. After I read from this section to the very end of the book, perhaps enough of Air will have entered into me to enable me to understand some of the other chapters. YAZZYBEL

Do You Really Wanta Hear About My Breakfast?

Well, here it is anyway.

I am eating a bowl of:
1/4 c. Bob's Red Mill Oatbran and Oatmeal Hot Cereal cooked in
1 c distilled water
With a pinch of pink dinosaur toenail prehistoric salt,
And adorned with a spray of grapeseed oil,
1 T. of maple syrup,
And 6 raisins. YAZZYBEL
That  was written this morning in response to a number of emails regarding people's breakfasts of oatmeal, brown sugar and butter.  The only real sin in my oatmeal is the pinch of salt, prehistoric or not.  But those few grains add a world of flavor to complement the rich blandness of the oats.  And the maple syrup is pure luxury. I love it that it's healthier than brown sugar. I would buy maple sugar, but it is way expensive.

I read in a favorite news blog today that it costs, per year,  $37,000 to send a young person to Princeton U.(a private university)  and $43,000 to keep a person in NJ state prison. Now, there are many things to lament in that bit of news, but to me the biggest one is the fact that some people are proud of getting the government out of housing and feeding the prisoners.  When caring for/housing/feeding criminals became a business, with a profit line, things got way out of hand.  I'm agin it.

Should we go the way of Sheriff Arpayo of AZ, and deck the crooks out in pink underwear and make them live in tents? Why not? Doesn't hurt them and might make them think.  I have always thought it unjust to have these people who defy the system of laws be choosing from three salad dressings at every meal. Feed them well, but no catering to whims.

And that brings us to another pet peeve of mine. I get more news on this topic from my sister no. 2, who is on the front lines of free food. (She doesn't get any.) She is on a severe budget, and recalls the day she decided she could not afford steaks and cherries at the supermarket, and saw before her in the line a woman with her cart piled with cherries and steaks, paying with a free food card from the State of Texas.  This is not a time in history when those of the stiff upper lip will get what they deserve out of the bounties of this life.  Those who don't mind weaseling and getting the food card are the ones who get the goodies.  This past week, in the same store, in the same Texas town, my sister saw the (same?) woman in front of her in line. This woman had a cart full of good stuff, plus a number of big cans of dog food.  "Oh, I'm sorry. You can't pay for dog food on the (State food card)..." So the lady put the dog food aside, held up the line while she marched to the meat counter, and came back with packages of ground beef.  Done and done. Sold and paid for(by the taxpayer).   I wonder what the doggies had for dinner that night? Grrr. YAZZYBEL, disgruntled but happy in the tummy with health food breakfast.

And it's Wednesday

And there was music.

We are playing a duet by Jacques Ibert, Histoires. En francais, Histoires means stories.  This piece is a series of five of the most charming musical stories I've ever encountered:  La Meneuse de tortues d'or (Girl leading the golden tortoises), (slowest piece ever written but how beautiful), Le petit ane blanc (a   donkey with quite a personality),A Giddy Girl,( a sly and sexy ragtime jazz blues dance), La cage de cristal, a quite touching sad depiction of fish in a bowl, or birds in a cage as time ticks by, and last the piece de resistance, La cortege de Balkis.  Balkis is the Queen of Sheba, and here she is going to meet King Solomon.  There's no question of her value as a human being as she solemnly processes along, swaying on her elephant or camel as as she's transported to an encounter of world-shaking significance.  Wow.  Good, interesting music.

For lunch I gave Patricia an almost vegan soup.  That's like "almost human." Are you or aren't you? This soup was vegan as it started, with minced onion, red pepper, mushroom, corn kernels, and tiny cubes of crisp bacon.  Bacon doesn't count as a meat. A can of chicken broth was added. Boomp. No longer vegan, but the flavor needed deepening.  I also baked a potato while breakfast was making, and cubed the white meat of that into the soup. After Patricia and I had played, I sprinkled flour and curry powder over the resting soup (dry by now) and added skim milk. Double boomp.  Cooked it up and in the meanwhixt toasted tortillas with a grating of cheese and a sliced tomato with tarragon sprinkled over, in the oven. When all was ready, we ate.  The soup really was good. Would it have been as good without the chicken broth? Probably.  Would the tortillas have been as good without the cheese? Yes, in their way.  But I did it that way, and it was tasty. A tasty lunch.

Then a man came to talk to Theodore, to assess the errors made by Home Depot in planning and installing our new bathroom floors, and Patricia left, and I sank down after all for a well-earned slumber. YAZZYBEL (but I didn't sleep.)

And It's Tuesday (and I lost Monday)

I've been thinking of walking in the mysterious footpaths and byways of San Diego .

I had a friend who lived near a footbridge that has become quite famous and has even been shored up to keep it going and has made the papers. It was off First and went west to a really incredible batch of houses...My kids and I used to park over there and walk over and back just for the thrill of it. And there was at that time (70's) another one nearby there, less imposing, but just as interesting.

When I'd walk in Mission Hills, I'd walk at night (early evening) and really enjoyed my hour or so out on the sidewalks of the neighborhood. I discovered oddities  too, as well as houses where the same four oldsters played cards in a window behind a semi-screen of cannas every evening, houses where there was never any sign of life beyond a vague blue flicker of light from a television screen, huge houses with every light on and you knew that a family of kids lived there...and I found a sidewalk that wandered along the edge of a mini-canyon with houses facing on it, that came out on another street--and you'd never have known it existed, in a car. Fascinating San Diego.

And there were the foxes.  To walk at night in San Diego was to know our neighbors, the ones who inhabited the great, sighing dark canyons that paralelled our civilized streets.  They might have been coyotes, but I believe that they were real foxes.  We'd meet unexpectly, bow, and part in mutual respect.  There were lots of them.  One night, and I would attest to this, I saw two foxes trotting slowly before me..and as I got closer I saw that the two were supporting another fox between them as they disappeared into some bushes.  I felt at the time that they were moving from one canyon spot to another,(we were between great rainstorms that winter), had to use the street to get into it, and were taking along grandma. Nice of them, really.

One afternoon I was standing in my back yard (canyon) and looked to the east where there was a big hill, warm and pleasant in the afternoon sun.  I couldn't believe my eyes as a fox appeared in broad daylight on the hill, made his round-and-round circle of a nest in the tall dry grass, and lay down for a warm nap.  I believe that that was the only time I ever sighted one in daylight.  You wouldn't have wanted to meet one in daylight because that would have meant he was ill probably.  Sometimes in the big Santa Anas, they'd get needy for water, and that is when I'd  put a big tub  a number of yards down the canyon and fill it with water from the hose, from above.  They needed it.

When I came back from my sojourn in Texas, I'd go to Mission Hills to walk in the evenings but that sense of solitude and invisibility never returned. People had established automatic sensor lights on the fronts of their houses, and instead of skulking by in peace and privacy, you got "lit up," and had to hurry on in search of shadows.

Life was good, in San Diego. And beautiful. YAZZYBEL

Sunday and no Church

As I re-read yesterday's blog, I was left with an impression that I want to correct.  In no way did I make any unselfish decisions.  All my decisions along the way have been selfish in that they were a path to the survival of me and mine.  And the positive tone at the end of the essay means to say: here I am, and thank God for it all. For the loss of what I had (if it can ever be lost) (and if I ever had it) and for what I have gained.

I am not happy to be living on Fairway Court in Chula Vista, particularly, for Fairway Court in Chula Vista is not a particularly great place to live if we compare it to living in Central San Diego. I miss the easy connection conversation in day to day matters with people who are educated and have a view of life that compares with my own.  They are hard to come by for me here; I know they exist, I just don't know them and I don't run into them at the grocery store.  I think I came here too late to make a place for myself that is comfortable.  I also think that Chula Vista (the old part, where we live) has been and is being sacrificed to the economic and political gears that are grinding away at our areas that border Mexico.  There are people (who don't live here) who think it's cute to have your main streets peppered with  persons who make their living by tossing heavy signs around in the air for advertising.  I happen to think that it is not quaint, but horrible to have to earn a living that way and it says little for our culture to tolerate it.  I don't think it is charming or funny for all our business signs to be en espanol as we drive along Third Ave. or Broadway. If I wanted to live in Tijuana I would move there.  Haven't had to; Tijuana has moved here.

That said, I will say that the bees and hummingbirds are happier in our yard than I have ever seen in other parts of San Diego.  Plants grow astoundingly well.  The sun is as benign and pleasant as it could be.  A very chill wind blows onto our high elevation lot, directly in from Point Mugu--or is it Point Conception--all summer long, lending us natural air conditioning that almost never fails us.

And if I hadn't moved here, I never would have been writing my magnum opus, One Hundred Views of Fairway Court (thank you, Hiroshige)...which I only discontinued because it seemed to be rather negative and carping instead of doing what I wanted it to.  It needs to be shaken out and dusted off.  It is time to be here, to be here now. YAZZYBEL

I'm All Agog

Good evening! These breakfasts are getting later and later.

I am all agog, because I have been set back today in many ways.  Set back in more than one way, in many ways.

My church, as I believe I may have mentioned, had a tea party today, to which I took four dozen little tea sandwiches...

The tea party was held in an old old San Diego house just off  Balboa Park, in the home of an old San Diego family, two of whom go to my church.  I'd never been in this particular house before, and it was stunning to behold, house and garden.  Not a pretentious house, just a perfect family house of the past century, of red brick and plaster and masonry and wide halls and rooms large enough to live within without feeling cramped.  It reminded me so much of the house I lived in for twenty-odd years a few miles to the north in Mission Hills.  Things like old moldings and old window sills and old floors and old doors...we don't realize the hold they have on our memories and our emotions.

Then, the people I go to church with at the early communion service every Sunday were there, all happy today in the bright clear sun of an afternoon on a blessed day between rainstorms.  Sometimes they all seem so privileged, and they seem different from this little Texas Mexican girl who just lucked into moving into this beautiful city so long ago.  But then, I am set back into realizing that they do not know how privileged I was to have had the unique life I had as a girl, in a unique town of Brownsville, with unique parents of intelligence and graciousness who could make a fine home under trying circumstances in a harsh climate like South Texas. 

 So here today were all of us, members of the Eight O'Clock Club, all so different, all drinking tea and sherry and eating little sandwiches and scones and sharing conversation...I learned things about lots of people today that I've not known before. I have learned how kind most all of these people are.

I walked out of the party with a young man who showed me a way to the path that will walk you east out of the park, across a hidden footbridge in the trees, and bring you out way over in Hillcrest not far from the Junior High School where my kids went to school, toward Essex Street and  Myrtle Way where this young man lives.  I mentioned that I'd lived for many years on a canyon in Mission Hills.  "Where do you live now? " asked the young man. "Chula Vista," I replied.  "Oh, my, " he said.  "How did that happen that you came down so far?"  A blunt thing to ask, but I did not mind because this is a day for setting back, in many ways.  "Oh, I wanted to live with my husband," I said.  "Well, I hope he is worth it for you to have given up so much."

My goodness.  What an astute thing for him to have said.  Yes, I did give up a lot. Yes, Chula Vista is a big comedown from what I had firmly within my grasp and loved.  "Yes," I said. "I love my husband and he is worth it," (said lightly.)  But the living of it has not been light at all, and it has set me back today a lot remembering all that, the home  I loved, the husband I loved, the sons I loved more than anything, the trying to hold them all together. Something had to be sacrificed, and the little Texas Mexican girl knows that I sacrificed the right thing. YAZZYBEL

Perhaps a Dull Day==who knows?

Good morning. It is seven, dark outside...well, as I turn I see it is getting light...and I am sitting here sneezing. Why am I suddenly sneezing this fall as opposed to the last few years, when I have hardly sneezed at all?

Now that's a dull first paragraph.  I guess I'll get duller and talk about grammar.  Yesterday's post about stars contained the sentence (more or less) "I doubt that either he or I have seen anything like (those stars) since."  Should I have used "has" or "have" there? Since it directly follows "I" , "have" seems to be an okay choice. But the real subject of that verb is "either", and  I should have written it, "I doubt that either of us has seen anything like...," to avoid choosing a verb so precisely.

I know English grammar, thanks to Mrs. Ellis of Ellis Private School in Laredo, Texas, in 1940.  Mrs. Ellis, then, was as old as the hills, and had learned her grammar in 1890, probably.  She really knew her stuff.
And sister No.2  and I were of the right mindset to take it all in right then, and we did. It gave us a four-square solid foundation with our language that we have used and appreciated all our lives. I find my everyday language corrupted nowadays, by laxity and carelessness, but the solid boards are there.  I could diagram any (correctly written) sentence that you could give me, right now. Just try it.

Well, I have been eating vegan-ly for a week or so, but I have been adding on some cake that I made for my no-show cousin, and a few nips of Halloween candy. The candy does not taste as bad as it did at first so that means that I have lost it as far as the advantage of the diet is concerned.  If I were still on the Path, those little peanut crunch-molasses bars with the stripes would taste quite alien instead of yummy. Note to self:  Improve. Go back.  Get with the program.

Last night I made a vegan stew.  I need to know how to make one that is more deeply flavorful. Perhaps browning the onions a bit would have done it. The dish was tasty but a bit weak and vegetable-tasting. It was made of carrots cut in big chunks, onions, green peppers, red peppers, tomatoes, corn kernels, and a sprinkle of herbs and dried garlic bits.  It was a bit watery because I wanted to be sure the carrots cooked long enough.  Instead of cut tomatoes alone, I could have added canned tomato sauce...Let's see...what else? I'll think.  More garlic. 

Today I have to weigh and thanks to the cake and candy I won't have lost anything and can only pray I have not gained.  See, I said this would be dull, right? And tomorrow I make and take tea sandwiches to the church tea party, and then sit there to be harangued into increasing my pledge.  Oh, I am resistant.  You guys don't know how resistant. YAZZYBEL

Thinking of the Stars

Hi==today I am thinking of the stars, and how people used to be so familiar with that glorious canopy over our sleeping heads...and how we can hardly see them any more.

When I went out to get the paper at six o'clock, there were about five or six stars up there.  The same ones that are always there, the biggest ones.  All the rest are obscured by a screen of reflected city light.

I remember when Alex was three or four, I went into his room in the middle of the night. He was sitting in his window sill, and when I asked him what he was doing out of bed, he said, "I was just looking at the beau-ti-ful stars."  I am glad there were still some middle of the night stars to be seen in San Diego in the early sixties.  The color of the night sky as I'll always remember it was rose-color.  When I wrote a story set in our neighborhood, I described the fox's water (a tub I'd set down in the canyon during the dry spell) as "gleaming like an opal" under the night sky.  A rose-colored opal.

Once when Ben was very small, perhaps a year old but no more, we went camping at Ocotillo.  He was sleeping in my sleeping bag, as protection against the mountain lions and scorpions. Hah.  I woke in the night, and he was sitting up beside me.  When I said hi, he said not a word for he could not speak yet, but he pointed his baby pointer finger up at a night sky too glorious for any words. I am not sure that either he or I have seen anything to compare with it since.

When I was a girl, the young used to run around barefooted at night, playing massive games of hide and seek that might span blocks...when we got tired we threw ourselves down on the Faulks' carpet grass and watched the stars until it was time to go home.  I am glad we had a familiarity with that wonderful phenomenon then.  Now, it's so nearly gone from our lives that wise people are trying to set out "parks", intentionally darkened areas from which watchers can get some glimpse of the glory overhead.

They say that our infrastructure is going. That will surely take some getting used to, but I am secretly comforted to know that  Wakan Tanka has a pleasant and profound surprise for us when the grid is gone. YAZZYBEL

No Cousin Coming

Hi, folks.

That headline's right. No cousin is coming this weekend.  That freak snowstorm that hit the northeastern US this past weekend hit his town in Connecticut, and brought enough disturbance in his property that he decided not to go to his conference in LA, and, by extention, not to come to see us.

I accept it, but I am disappointed. I know he is too, because he is Family, and Family wants to know Family as much as we can when separated by miles and years as we are.

Well, today is Nov. 2nd.  Halloween was day before yesterday, now, and we did not have the large throngs of little kids from Mexico that we have had in years past.  The costuming was just as great, however. It's incredible how much people are putting into garbing their kids at Halloween. 

In fact, we had very few kids at all.  Theo and I closed down about an hour earlier than we usually do, but nobody was coming around anyway.  We had bales of Bad Wicked Candy left over. I wrapped it up, tied it up, and added it to a pile  of stuff I put out for the AmVets to pick up today. So, I'd say that Halloween was a dud. C'est la vie.  Another year....

Today Patricia and I played the piano. I gave her a vegan lunch of bean soup, slaw, guacamole, and home made tortilla chips.  Very delicious.  The doctor (whom we saw yesterday) has instructed Theodore to eat a wider variety of foods, so our menus will be looking up if I can make him eat some of the stuff. And I will continue to make meat patties for him. Tonight: baked potato, sweet potato, last of the slaw, and--who knows? Maybe baked carrots. Zzzzz....but good. YAZZYBEL

A Vegan Breakfast and a Vegetarian Second Course

Good morning.

I had a delicious vegan breakfast today. I toasted a tortilla, and as it lay on the gas flame I opened and mashed an avocado, added a dash of vinegar and a dash of pink pre-historic salt, and finally put it all together and ate it.

It was great, but not enough. I am vexed at these Walmart avocados, though I should be honored that they are close enough to their antecedents to be small and have strings. Yes, strings!  After all the homage I have paid to strings, I should not be offended at having to take them out.  But it's like anything else--I am lazy and want no trouble.  It was a pretty tasty little avocado, though, even though there was little meat after I removed the strings and black spots.

After I ate that delightful vegan breakfast, I found myself ready to eat something else as I fried up Taterton's bacon and eggs, so I took a "waffle" out of the freezer and toasted it up in the toaster, spread on a little jam, and ate that too.

I can tell that my innards are all roiled up from indulging in Halloween candy (though moderately) yesterday.  It is really strange that just a few days on the vegan idea of eating sharpens up one's body so much.  So the indulgence in Halloween candy becomes a penance of Halloween candy. Who'd want to punish herself enough to eat it? It is really nasty. 

The Hershey Corp. is getting a lot of negative publicity for having moved its production lines to Mexico, where child labor is supposedly employed in putting out those strange-flavored little bars which bear little resemblance to the Hershey bars of my childhood. This ends my association with Hershey forever, and that includes a lot of candy bars, folks. In fact, all of them, as practically all the makers of US candy have moved "offshore" to Mexico, including Brach's, makers of Candy Corn and Indian Corn, which also don't taste much like they used to.  The alien quality of those substances is pointed up to the maximum by the sharpening of one's taste buds as one cuts way down on animal products and tries to eat the natural plant foods that God instructed us to, back there in the Garden of Eden.

Of course, chocolate and sugar are, in themselves, vegan if anything is.  But--there is something wrong with that candy. It's too sweet, for one thing. Way over processed for another.

How long can I stay on this eating plan?  I do not know. When my cousin comes this weekend, I plan a wonderful chuck roast along with the beans and rice of the Divine Plan.  What if my cousin turns out to be a vegan?  Nah...he won't....but, surprise, one of my own sons is experimenting along those lines and finding remarkable results in the lowering of his blood glucose readings in a very short time.  Isn't that wonderful? And I did not nag.  He discovered it all on his very own. The best way. YAZZYBEL