Good afternoon!
This morning Alexander went with me to church. He viewed the resting place of Gregory's ashes near the baptismal, took some pictures, and saw a few familiar faces.
After breakfast we took a ride through Mission Hills, where he grew up forty to fifty years ago. Then we stopped at El Cuervo for a second breakfast/early lunch. My it was delicious.
Then we drove to Chula Vista by way of the barrio, south and south on 30th Street basically. Since then he has been working hard around the house and I have been lazying around showing him things.
I drew those lemons with colored pencils since I got home from church. I need to take a class so I won't be so timid about using brilliant colors. YAZZYBEL
Good day!
Today is the birthday of Gregory, our second son. Gregory has gone on ahead of us, and is not around to hear our professions of love and affection, and appreciation for his presence.
Greg was born when Alexander was 2 years and 2 weeks ahead of him. He was the cutest little thing, larger and looser than his brother, with a fright-wig of long black hair that stood out around his head like a halo. When he was born the doctor absent-mindedly left some of the placenta inside of me, and after a time there were some tense moments while a nurse took care of the situation (the doctor being long gone.) Girls, it is a wonder sometimes that we made it to today, isn't it? But by afternoon all was well and mother and son were resting well.
If it was a joy to have one kid, it was double joy to have two. Interesting as they got a bit older to lie in your bed when you woke up and listen to them sort out their future pecking order bit by bit. Greg was larger (considering his age) but Alex was more determined, and they gradually worked it out in a situation that remained fairly stable for them for four more years till Ben came along.
As Greg got older, he developed his music and his personality traits and humor that made him such a joy to be around. How can someone have all that going for him and still be diagnosed as a person with a "mental illness" when he is nineteen years of age? I keep wondering. Doctors or hospital people would keep telling me: "We do not know how to diagnose (NB: medicate) Gregory. We don't know whether he has a psychosis or a neurosis, or what it is." Well, he had Longoritis, dear doctors, the family ailment, with a free-floating anxiety, too much imagination (there's a name for that), depression and mania, and a feeling of insecurity. I have of late years wondered if he did not have a touch of Tourette's--not the bad word parts, but the spontaneous movements part...but it is too late now to put him under a glass. I have the feeling that even now, thirty years later, they would not be able to pin down his condition to their satisfaction nor mine. That didn't stop their medicating him, though. Aye, there's the rub. There's the rub.
Gregory, funny guy, wherever you are in this universe, please remember us remembering you on this your day. And send us some more of your music and your jokes and your wisdom that shone on in spite of everything. YAZZYBEL
Good morning!
Alexander is here! He is doing momentous things to the computer. I hope the improvements stick.
Kitty Blanko came in today. He has been eating here yesterday and today, and I am glad to see him. Today, observing him slinking through the house (where he was not invited) I came to the conclusion that probably he is a girl cat. Just something in his style.
That picture above is something I dashed off with the aid of a few kitchen vegetables as models. An art blog I'm receiving now recommends a picture a day, painting or drawing, to keep one's awareness at peak. So I am trying to do it...and write a poem a day too. But I have not gotten beyond the "trying" part on the poems: I keep thinking there are no poems there now. Silly me, I well know that as long as there is a pulse of life in a single cell, there is a poem there. So I'll draw one out soon.
A sister wrote to me about blogging:
I don't know about blogs, facebook and the
such...I think people write blogs because no
body in the house asks them how they feel,
what are their wishes and dreams, what THEY
want to fix for another's dinner. So my blog
would be a giant whiny complaint.
And she expounds on that theme a bit. I think she is right about loneliness or isolation as a motivator for blogging, or a desire to be heard out there in the ether. Am I here? Does anybody hear me? But one can try to make of the blog a work of art, of limited scope that it is.
The red fruits above, an onion, two tomatoes, and a red bell pepper, are all so beautiful sitting on my kitchen table. I just had to draw them. Putting them onto this page has made me realize how sketchy they are, how coarse the strokes, how inaccurate the eye/hand coordination. But there they are, up there above it all. YAZZYBEL
Good morning!
Alexander comes today and we'll leave after 11 to go down to the "cell phone lot" provided by the airport, thence to lurk and await his call that he's arrived.
Yesterday, things didn't go as I airily predicted as I closed off my blog. It was indeed music day, but I did not play piano nor anything else after cutting my finger while washing out the glass coffee pot. Imagine, the pushing power of one of my fingers was strong enough to break through the glass and make a circular cut in the pad of my right middle finger! BLOOD! I have not seen so much blood in a long time. I patched it up with a lot of paper towels whilst holding the finger up...blotted...got 2 band-aids and squinched it together, stuck them on and prayed. It does not hurt if I do not strike it on things (as in keyboarding)..and it is amazing how often I do. Anyway, no piano.
Patricia lent me a CD of a ballad singer, Jack Brown, and mentioned that one of the songs, The Blog, was especially touching. I listened to it and its repeated line is, "so everyone can see my brilliant brain....". I wonder, was she giving me a message of what she thinks of my blog? If so, is she right? Others have also suggested that the blog is an ego trip of large magnitude...still others have suggested that the blog in general is obsolete and has been replaced by Facebook. If that is so, then is Facebook an ego trip of large magnitude? As far as I can see, Facebook is a huge confusing bunch of gobbley-gook and hazy pictures...but I am techno-impaired for sure. (I am also on Facebook, of course, impaired or not.)
There are five more months of this year. I may rethink my blog to some extent. I'll still try to write every day but the slant of it may be different. The soul of it can't be different however; the soul of it is me. YAZZYBEL
Good morning!
To blog or not to blog, that is the question. Is the blog a "journal"? I have not thought so because it has always been impossible for me to keep a journal or diary. And I am clipping along quite nicely on this blog.
Yet, yesterday, talking to sister no. 5, it was suggested to me that in blogging I am letting it all hang out. Yes, I am doing that, kind of, but let it be understood that I am censoring all the way: snipping and turning and choosing as best I can on the run. So it is off the top of my head--while not being of the gut. Journaling is belly-button activity, to me, while writing for others (which is what my blog is for me) (though very dang few are reading it, apparently) is an Artistic Endeavor. I do tell all (up to a point) but I do hope that you can see in each effort an attempt to pull it all together, to bring it to a conclusion that lifts it a fraction higher. That is what I try to do.
AS Byatt in Possession, her awkwardly titled novel, says: If you want to write, don't journal. If you want to write, write. Try to use and practice your craft every time you sit down to it. (That 's paraphrased of course.) I am writing this blog for my grandchildren, who may never read it, that they may know me as I knew my American grandmother. So in a way it's just from the gut and personal. But I do try to shape each posting as I can, on the fly and in a hurry as it is.
I am thankful to AS Byatt for exposing to me that great difference in writing for the heck of it and writing literarily and artistically. Perhaps I should go back to A Poem a Day, which I used to try to do before I figured out how to get on the blog. I'll think about it. For the present, it's Wednesday, and you know what that means. Patricia is coming, and that means music, and lunch. "Lunch will be a salad." Is that journaling or literature? "Lunch will be a crunchy cold green salad of romaine lettuce with field greens mixed in and cold asparagus laid over the top, with hot toasty French bread on the side." How about that one? YAZZYBEL
Good afternoon!
We ate out at the Souplantation a few days ago. It's virtually all salads and soups. Plus breads. Plus desserts.
That sounds good, but I think it's no secret to tell you that the salads were nearly all desserts. And probably some of the soups too.
Crunchy pineapple something salad was delicious. And sweet. Plus pineapple coleslaw. Plus most of the dressings likely had sugar in them even if you made your own salad.
The soups were not sweet per se, except for the Lime Coconut Chicken soup, which probably had sugar in it, as it was a bland, pleasant tasting broth. Folks! We are going to have to consciously STOP eating all this sugar.
In the best old cookbooks, meats were meats, salads were salads. There was no sugar in those dishes. If you had a "fruit salad" you could have a fruit salad dressing whch was usually a slightly thickened sweet delicious concoction with poppy seeds in it. See Helen Corbitt's Cookbook for a tasty dressing of this type.
Now, the kitchen wizards have discovered the tantalizing tastes resulting from a mixture of sweet-salty-sour. Broccoli Salad with its mixture of broccoli buds, diced onions, raisins, and sweet dressing is an example this type of presentation. As a main dish, Sweet and Sour Pork (shrimp, chicken, etc.) is another example, as is Lemon Chicken, Walnut Chicken, and even Orange Chicken which has lots of cayenne added to it to add a fourth dimension of taste. They are all heavenly. But any and all of these dishes are equal in sweetness to a piece of pie--which is a dessert in the old terms of the cuisine. Honey mustard dressing is the latest big thing and has taken over from the clabberish sour "Ranch". Honey mustard can make any stark raw wild tasting bunch of greens taste quite yummy and more easy to wolf down.
Here's the recipe for vinaigrette as I first learned it.
1 part vinegar
4 parts oil
salt, pepper
And perhaps a pinch of dry mustard.
You beat these up and beat them up and put onto your salad. You will have a salad that tastes like a salad, not a dessert. I blame the low-fat craze of the eighties for bringing all that sugar into our daily fare. I mean, I love sugar for its taste. But I know it is better not to kid ourselves that it is doing anything nutritious to all those greens except to make them more palatable if you like things sweeter and blander.
Everyone should read Dr. Atkins' first book now. Note that the authors of the recipes have scrupulously avoided the addition of sugar to any recipe. When it's dessert time they do add artificial sweeteners to make us think that something's sweet. When I did the Dr A, the only artificial sweetener in soft drinks was saccharine. Everybody's been warned enough of saccharine to try not to overdose on it. Not so of the newer sweeteners: Aspartame, Splenda, Ace-potassium, etc. which are suspiciously sweet to me.
When you'd drink a soda with saccharine, you instinctively KNEW you were not getting any sugar. Your body said, "Yes, it tastes a bit sweet and that is what I have been craving," but all those little sugar-devils in your body KNEW you had not had sugar. That's good! If the little sweetish taste of saccharine could keep your cravings at bay, those little sugar-devils got gradually weaker and weaker. Because sugar feeds sugar. And sugar makes more sugar cravings. It is true. Try it for two wracking days. You'll emerge a new person. I have done it. I just wish I could summon the moral stamina to do it again. YAZZYBEL
When we first lived in San Diego, our cat was named Flora. She was a beautiful black long-hair with copper eyes. She was our cat when Alexander was about three and Gregory one. Flora bore three kittens at one point, and Alexander was given the task of naming them. It was easy: Mickey, Kitty, and Fishy were their names and thus it was. Mickey, Kitty and Fishy had six toes on their front feet and it made really amusing-looking feet I must say. Like flowers. I do not remember what became of Flora nor of the kittens. Guess they were all taken by friends.
Kitty Blanko, my latest acquisition, has been running askance of us lately. I was about to write a blog entitled, "Kitty Blanko is no more," when, just a couple of days ago, I saw him strolling through the yard and out over the back gate to the lower forty. I followed him out and saw him disappear into a rift in the ground far out at the point of the lot where his kissin' cousin Lily used to hang out. There is a huge group of semi-wild cats around here and they do come and go as there must be attrition on a fairly large scale.
We found out last evening that our first son, Alexander, is coming to visit. He's coming alone and he'll be here for several days!! I am so delighted. We certainly need his presence for a while. He can confirm (or negate) my perception of how things are around here, and talk with us about needs and ideas. I wanted him to come and bring everybody but this is certainly good in itself. We need somebody now and a fresh perspective will be welcomed.
Right now we are dealing with a (to me) horrendous medicating schedule which Theo claims to be incompetent to deal with. Perhaps he is right. I'd feel better about dealing with it myself if I did not have the "summer flu," or whatever it is that's making me feel under the weather. I have five days to get over it before Alexander arrives.YAZZZYBEL
