everything I know about the bible I learned from a children’s story book

Day 14, NaWriMoPo November challenge when the going’s getting tougher and I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. Please don’t throw any stones!

Last weekend as I was walking past a large display window of a children’s library, where books are attractively arranged so as to entice children to want them, I happened to notice a copy of a large, beautifully illustrated book of Bible stories for children. An old book memory flashed quickly to mind so I circled back to have a closer look. The cover featured Noah’s ark sitting in a dry riverbed as I remember, and even though there was no sight of the flood God had warned him about, the animals are already going aboard in pairs.

When I was a child, I inherited my own book of Bible stories from my two slightly older boy cousins after Grandma felt they had outgrown it. I remember it like it was yesterday. The  front cover was hanging by a thread, and much of the illustration had been torn away–clearly not the quality book we expect today. Enough of the cover illustration was intact, however, that it made quite an impression on me.

It was a picture of Daniel, sitting behind the metal bars of a jail like room while he was being menaced by two very large and very angry lions. Eyes had been gouged out with a knife, though I cannot remember at this time if it was Daniel’s or one of the lions’. Sentiment makes me hope it was the lion’s eyes–not Daniel’s–that had been cruelly cut out, no doubt by one of the boys trying out his knife,  as clearly the apprehension I felt every time I looked at the book was for Daniel and not the lions.

The only thing I knew about lions at the time came from seeing the giant one that roared on the MGM movie screen and scared the beejeesus out of me sometimes when we went to a picture show. I knew I had to get through that lion on some occasions, though not every time (didn’t know at the time it was an MGM icon) , but I loved movies so much I was willing to brave it. I remember bracing myself, however, in case the lion came because I was so afraid one day it would leap from the screen and not only attack me but eat me up. Remember the days of childhood when things like that happened all the time in books?

You’ve heard the old axiom when it rains it pours. For some reason, it seemed the season for Bibles popping up in my life, having–just the week before–found the new testament written in modern English which I’d given my father years ago. My mother passed it back to me after his death in 1973, and I always thought I’d read it someday.

Everything I knew about Christianity heretofore I had learned from that story book, so I thought I would sit down and read a few chapters of it since Hubby was off helping at the elections and wouldn’t be home until very late anyway. So I did–and was truly impressed and surprised how easy it was to read.

I was also really surprised how depressed King Solomon was when he was writing Ecclesiasties. I mean, if someone that rich who had everything at his disposal, armies to fight to keep his stuff safe, as much food as he wanted plus somebody to prepare it for him, and as many beautiful ladies to oil and annoint him and whatever else he wanted–I mean, how do mere proletarians such as we expect to keep the faith?

Getting back to the Bible connection, today there was a letter to the editor in the local paper that made me want to go to the library again and check out one of those children’s Bible story books and see if I could find passages and stories to fit what the letter writer referred to in his letter, which I found very interesting indeed in light of the fundamentalists from the bible belt insisting the Bible is God’s word verbatim and everyone should live exactly the way the scriptures exhort us to.

To paraphrase the letter, the writer quotes the Bible’s words concerning same-sex marriage (Leviticus 18:22) which states that it is an “abomination” to “lie with a man as one lies with a woman,” which is a pretty serious issue locally as it is in the rest of the country. So, if he accepts that Bible passage as inarguable, he says, then he needs a lot of help and maybe a little further advice on some of the other laws he’s come across in the Bible. Here’s what he had to say in his letter:

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. What would be a fair price?

My neighbor insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

Leviticus 25:44 states that I may own slaves, male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend claims that this applies to Mexicans but not to Canadians. Why can’t I own Canadians?

Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 19:27. How should they die?

He ends his letter thankful that God’s word is eternal and unchanging. And with that, I end my post today by promising to look for a new illustrated childrens’ Bible story book with stories from Leviticus and Exodus. How good do you think the odds of finding one? In the horror section perhaps?

mama’s pumpkin bread for the holidays

Day 13 of  NaBloPoMo post a day in November challenge.

Mama loved to eat. All her life she struggled with a weight problem though, so she was often dieting as I was growing up. She’d lose several dress sizes, and gradually go back to her eating habits and gain it all back again. When I’d go home for visits, I always slept in one of the two spare bedrooms and dressed out of my suitcase each day. No room in the closets for she had them full of clothing she’d probably had all her life, all colors and all sizes. Probably one reason I’ve been able to pretty much maintain my weight over my lifetime has to do with watching her and coming to the conclusion that yo-yo diets all your life make you fat.

In the late 1980’s or very early in 1990 when she was in her ‘mid seventies, her doctor found a spot on her lung in an x-ray and told her she had cancer. He explained that cancer grows much slower in  older people because their metabolisms are so much slower, so she may have a year or two, maybe more,  years to live doing nothing. Or, she could submit to a round or two of radiation treatments directed at the spot and that it might work since it was relatively small.

She seemed stunned at this diagnosis and was at a loss for words sitting there on the examining table. I expect I would be too, actually. Finally, looking back and forth from the doctor to the nurse holding her hand, she recovered enough to respond. “Well then, I’m going to eat whatever I want and as much as I want from now on!”

That reasoned response broke the spell and the doctor and nurse had to apologize for laughing. Seeing as how at the time she was tipping the scales at 200 pounds on a 5′2″ frame, and understanding this was not to time to talk about dieting, I can understand why they were amused. My mother, as she aged, became very good at saying what was on her mind, regardless of how politically incorrect it might have sounded. I hope it will happen to me. Hubby might say I’m already there!

Radiation was the treatment they chose, and she went on to take one full round. She’d complain from time to time that her chest was beginning to look like burnt toast. We talked on the phone every week and she seemed to stay very upbeat. After the treatment was completed, new x-rays showed her to be completely cancer-free. She died years later, in 1999, of congestive heart failure just a few days shy of her 85th birthday.

‘Coulda been the radiation, ‘coulda been a misdiagnosis, or it occurs to me that it ‘coulda been a prayer induced miracle, I don’t know. I suspect though, that the outcome could be traced to her plucky “I’m gonna go down eating, death be damned” attitude.

Here’s a recipe for Mama’s Pumpkin Bread. I think she’d be really happy I’m sharing it with you in time for the holidays.

MAMA’S PUMPKIN BREAD

Beat together:

1 cup sugar
1/3 cup dark molasses
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt

Add:

1 cup pumpkin puree
1 + 2/3 cup of flour
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon grated orange rind
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup chopped nuts, walnuts or pecans
1/2 cup raisins or coconut

Mix just until all ingredients are blended and moist and bake in a lightly oiled 5×9 loaf pan for and hour and half at 350°F. (Or when it’s pulling away from the sides of the pan and tests done with a cake tester.) Let bread cool for a half hour before removing it from pan. Bon appetite.

Note: I modified the recipe slightly here in the higher altitudes and got great results, so if you’re above 3600 feet it might work for you too. I lowered the oven to 325° and left out about 1/8th of a cup of the sugar. I was afraid the hour and a half were too long to bake it, so I took it out after an hour and twenty minutes. It was good, and very moist, but next time I think I’ll watch it and leave it in the oven for the whole hour and a half. I think it’ll slice with less crumbs if I do that, more like bread than cake.

the most expensive movie we never saw

Day 12, NaWriMoPo daily November posts:

Well, it’s been a quiet day here in the Wasatch where, even as I sit here in the light of the  energy saving light bulb (that start off dim and get brighter the longer they’re on). I keep glancing out the window to see what the weather’s doing, but it’s only a slow drizzle so far, teasing us. Probably it’ll wait til the wee hours of the morning and confound everybody trying to drive to work as they slip and slide their way down the hill because the snowplow hasn’t made it this far up the benches yet.

Now that two or three weeks have passed since that day of which I plan to write today, maybe it’s time to tell the story to others. The hurt, or more truthfully the shame, has subsided sufficiently that I think it’ll be okay to to tell about it now. Don’t you dare blog about this, Hubby retorted at the time and to put his mind at ease, I agreed. Everything in it’s time, I decided. I learned in writing classes a long time ago that writing about an incident in the third person gives it distance and makes it easier to write  without getting swept away with emotion. Maybe that’s how this story should be told.

For weeks she’d wanted to see the new Michael Moore movie, CAPITALISM. So that morning over breakfast, when she saw the calendar presented nothing more pressing or interesting to do, she suggested that maybe today would be a good day to go to a matinee and see it at last.

But when they arrived at the movie complex–chosen because it had stadium seating–the ticket seller said it was sold out. She glanced at the next showing, and sure enough that show was sold out too. So were the next two. It was barely past noon and no one else was in sight; they’d driven a full half hour to get here–they were several minutes early. Surely that could simply not be right! Were they even showing the movie there? Or was it a ploy to lure people in order sell tickets to one of the other movies?

It made her so angry she said no to her husband’s suggestion to see one of the other 20 or so movies on the schedule. Could they still make it to the one other theater in town where the movie was scheduled to start in half an hour? He said, sure they could make it. The first 10 or 15 minutes after showtime were always used for previews anyhow. Piece of cake. They’d just jump in the car in drive downtown and see it there.

So they did. The problem was, they were so far on the side of town they weren’t familiar with, and they weren’t sure of the theater’s address. While there was no question they could find the it, it might take time and they needed to find it FAST. It would be best to know exactly what street it was on. So she went to work fiddling with the GPS built into the car’s dashboard. The nice voice would tell them exactly where to turn and when. First she laboriously typed in the crossroads where they thought the theater was located. No luck. So then she tried typing in the name of the theater. Still no luck. She scowled every time her husband suggested she try some different. He always thought she was inept at figuring out electronic things. Grrrrrrrrrr!

No the problem lay in the system…at some point in the menu it would shift to another window and a quick decision had to be made about which option to press next and it kept leading her to dead ends anyway. So she tried again. And again. And again.

All the time she struggled, he keeps driving and his foot is pressing the pedal a little harder and he doesn’t even realize it. He’s getting frustrated because she’s beginning to cuss a little. Okay, a lot, calling the instrument panel a…well, just imagine you know, ’cause you surely do if you have a little imagination. He keeps telling her to watch her language, there’s no call for that, and suggesting things she’s tried already over and over again.

All that time she’s getting madder and madder because she knows the problem is not her, the problem is the GPS that won’t let her enter what she needs to enter, dumb machine. This thing is absolutely useless, she cries out in annoyance, at just about the same time she sees him glance in the rear view mirror and hears him say “Uh Oh!” Then she hears the siren and feels the car pulling over to the road’s right, hears a frantic motorcycle cop shout, over there, I’m right in the lane of traffic here! a sitting duck to get hit!” And he was, as they were on an Interstate highway with about five lanes of traffic and cars were whizzing by. Who could possibly know where they were supposed to pull over on an interstate highway when they’d never been pulled over on a multi-laned highway before?!

When they were all finally properly positioned, over to the left of the fassssssssst lanes that were separated from the traffic going the other way by the railings, the young cop–just doing his duty–leaned in and said I pulled you over because you were going 65 mph in a 50 mph zone. At least he didn’t holler as us, she thought.

She began to see dollar signs with wings on them flying out the car window while the two men talked. Her hubby didn’t bother arguing because he knew he was as guilty as they come. He had been driving way too fast all the while he was trying to tell his wife how to program the GPS on the dash, so neither of them noticed the speed change, and how could he help it if his foot kept getting heavier and heavier? After all was said and done the nice young cop only charged them with going five miles over the limit, which was only $105! It could have been much worse.

Now this was a couple who’ve been known to drive miles out of the way just to get something they need for a couple dollars less. They were so careful with their expenses and prided themselves on how inexpensively they’ve managed to live from month to month since their retirement. They even managed to afford some nice travel and new shoes now and then, and they’d never had to go without a meal because they were so frugal. Damned movie anyhow. Because of Michael Moore they were going to have to fork over $105 just like that.

Afterward, they swallowed hard and fought their way back into traffic from the fast lane side and when they got through bickering and trying to fix the blame and she said that he had no one but himself to blame because he was driving and that meant he was the one that had to pay attention to the road signs. She was tired being blamed for everything, so there. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. After a little more back and forth insulting, they finally cooled down a little, decided to laugh about it, it was only money after all, nobody had been hurt. So there they sat, mostly in silence, while they tried to decide what to do next. Maybe they should just go back home and watch television. That would be such a letdown, though, wouldn’t it?

No! she said emphatically. We can’t go home without doing something to distract us and take the bad taste out of our mouths. In he end, they looked at the clock and decided to go on and see the movie just like they’d planned, only downtown at the other theater. It was a cinch, he said, because the movies wasted so much time on previews anyhow so it wouldn’t matter if they were late. And after that she remembered the Yellow Pages under her seat where she could quickly look up the address in the black pages, so it was decided. Who needed electronic gadgets when they had a printed book of addresses under the seat?

They parked in the garage and rushed to the theater all out of breath. He plunked the plastic down and announced two for Capitalism please. The clerk swiped the card and handed him the receipt to sign. He was scribbling fast when she–just in case–thought it a good idea to ask has the movie started yet?

The clerk checked the schedule and looked at her watch and said Yes, it’s seven minutes in.

Into the movie? she said.

You mean into the previews, right? he said.

No, the movie, the clerk repeated.

Seven minutes! More like eight by that time. I don’t want to miss the first seven minutes, she said. Sometimes the opening minutes are crucial to the whole film. So the clerk refunded their money, and the two of them walked dejectedly back to the car. At least they were able to get the parking ticket validated, they reasoned, so they wouldn’t have to pay for parking at least.

Back in the car, the question arose for the second or third time that day, what to do now? Go home? It still seemed like a defeat go home, especially now that they felt insult had been added to injury. Give up, admit defeat–that they weren’t meant because of who knew what conspiracy by that first theater–to see a much anticipated movie on this day? There had to be something they could do to make them feel better–get control of their lives again.

Just as they were nearing the shopping strip where the Indian store was, she suggested they stop off to see if they could find some pre-made bhatura bread and frozen unsweetened coconut so they could go home and throw themselves into making a good Indian meal. Maybe some choli with the bhatura bread and some delicious coconut chutney. That would make both of them feel better.

There was no bhatura to be had. Maybe next week. Ugh! How many things can go wrong in one day!  Then she saw the fresh okra in the box on the table that held new shipments. It had been pretty much impossible to find fresh okra the whole summer. Not only did they have fresh okra there, it was fairly good okra–the tips still crisp, and the pods mostly small and tender. Fried okra always made her feel good. So she bought a whole lot of it along with the coconut they wanted.

They drove home and she cooked okra for dinner while he went online and paid the department of transportation $105 so he could get it out of his mind once and for all. Afterward, they agreed never to speak of it again. First one, and then the other, would begin to giggle like children who get caught licking the spoon in the candy pot when Mama’s not looking.

To this day they still haven’t seen the movie. Now they figure when they do see it, and they still hope to, they will always also associate it with a $105 speeding fine attached to it, thus it will always have the distinction of being the most expensive movie they’ve ever seen. And therein lies the dig. They figure if they wait long enough it’ll come out on DVD and be available at the RedBox rental kiosk where they can pick it up for overnight for just $1, then it’ll only have cost them $106.

gridding a quilt and remembering the cats & veterans of war

Day 11, NaWriMoPo, November challenge.

No earth shattering news or thoughts today. It was all and all a pretty quiet day and after I got the kitchen tended to after breakfast, I was able to sneak down to the sewing room and work until noon on the quilt project.

I cut a out the  2½ white squares that each of the printed squares shown below will be paired with and sewn into strips.

Then I sorted out printed squares according to color family. Each one is 2½ inches square. It occurs to me that putting a quilt together like this is very much like putting a puzzle together and it’ll be easier if the fabric pieces stay put so you can see how it will look.  A printed grid fabric has a special felt-like feel to it so that you can press all those small squares onto it so they’ll stay put while you get the colors sorted and placed the way you want them.

After I pulled it out the basket drawer I’d stored it in long ago, I couldn’t help thinking I was working once again with my cat Bridget underfoot throughout the day for one more time. Lest I sound like a crazy old cat lady off her rocker, I’ll explain.

At some point Bridget, dead now for about three years, must have crawled into a partially opened drawer and burrowed up on this soft fabric to take a lot of naps–probably when we first moved here and she was all out of sorts and confused because of the move. No matter when, she left bits of herself through all those black hairs she shed all over the portions of the fabric.

I actually knew it was there but had forgotten. I found it originally not long after she died, you see, when I was getting my sewing room organized after Hubby and SIL finished out part of the laundry room for it, but hadn’t wanted to wash it at the time. Those hairs were all I had left of my cat family so I thought I’d wait and wash it some other day, when I was feeling less sentimental. Obviously I never got round to it. Today, there it was again, little black hairs that don’t want to let go. This time I didn’t want to take the time to wash it, nor chance washing away the soft finish that help the squares stay put.

What else can I say?!  Seeing all those black cat hairs brought back lots of nice  memories of all the years I spent with my cats–all those times Hubby was away on business trips and it was just me and the cats–solid black Bridget and Blossom the Calico– the last good years of their lives although I didn’t know at the time. Curled up in my lap, they were my constant companions for close to seventeen years. Then when we came here they were old and the vet warned me the adjustment may prove too difficult for both of them. So anyway, the hair is still there, and when this quilt is done I’m ready to wash the fabric grid now. It’s time.

And this is how the quilt project is coming along. After it’s all assembled, I’ll sew the squares together into strips, then sew the strips together, sandwich the quilt top with a nice printed backing, and hitch up the quilting stitch on the Bernina and try to figure out the best quilting pattern. The progress will be slow, but God willing and the creek don’t rise, it’ll be done someday.

Today was Veterans Day, and I hope you remembered the veterans, and if you knew one personally gave them a hug. While I was working around the house I had my ear turned to some of the special services. Tomorrow, Hubby and I will be back at the gym early because snow is forecast, starting in the mountains as early as tonight perhaps. Thank goodness we got the studded snow tires mounted yesterday. Timing is everything. So if I don’t otherwise screw the day up somehow, I hope to have more time to write post #12, about the most expensive movie  we never saw.

a warning to seniors and anyone else who had chicken pox as a child

Day 10, NaWriMoPo November challenge.

I wish I could remember who the blogger was a few years ago who wrote about a friend having been diagnosed with shingles who was then in the throes of not just an active attack but an acute attack, because I would write to tell them Thanks! for the warning. As a result of reading that blog, I was quite ready and willing to have the shot my doctor recommended only a few weeks afterward as a precautionary measure.

Please don’t mistake these for hives. Hives are caused by an allergic reaction. Herpes zoster, which we commonly refer to as shingles, is a painful, blistering skin rash due to acute infection with the varicella-zoster virus, the virus that causes chickenpox. Apparently it feels as if you’re burning underneath the skin and narcotics are needed to deal with the pain. Plus there’s no way to predict how long they’re going to hang around to annoy you.

The person mentioned in the blog I read and mentioned above had still not recovered even after a year. So I urge anyone who had chicken pox as a child to read and take heed, as the virus stays in your body and may not reappear for years, but when it or if it does this is how it presents itself:

Our friend Robert sent us these pictures in an email recently to show us why we haven’t been seeing him at the gym latetly. The good news is that, unlike chicken pox, it isn’t passed on from one to another through exposure, but the bad news is that it tends to reappear  as we age as I noted above.

He didn’t send the pictures to gross us out, but just wanted to urge us to get a vaccination against it as soon as possible because he’s been suffering from it terribly this summer.

You can see it seems to have no boundaries, as it’s crept up into the hair line and inside the ears.

I had the vaccine several years ago, and hubby had it a year later although he fussed a little at my insistence because of the cost. In our case, the full cost was nearly, but not quite $200 each. The insurance we had at the time didn’t cover it, but the doctor assured us every one of us should have it. Now that I see what Robert’s going through, I’m so happy we did.

Some insurance seems to cover the cost or at least a substantial part of it, as I’ve learned from other friends. In our case nearly $400 (or about $180 per) seemed like a lot for something that MIGHT not happen, but if you get shingles . . . heck! Just see here what our friend Robert says in his email when I mentioned cost:  Alice, since getting the shingles and knowing what the hell that they are, I would gladly pay $20,000 for a shot.  I’m still not over them even though they have scabbed over and there is little visual evidence that they are still there.  I’m still having great pain and taking the narcotics to make the pain diminish.   I worry on how that is going to leave me.  Three straight weeks of narcotics!

There, you have it! Even though I’m lucky to have had the vaccine, and my case of chicken pox was very light when I did have them, I appreciate Robert agreeing to let me pass along the message to you along with these vivid pictures. As he would say, “don’t ever get the shingles if you can help it!”

stick-to-itive-ness gets things done

Day 9, NaWriPoMo November challenge.

It’s 4:42 p.m. as I sit down at my keyboard to enter my post for today. I thought I’d do things a little different today, so instead of blogging first, I decided to get a few things done from my list of needful things to accomplish today, then blog later even if it meant just before midnight. So far so good in this daily posting challenge, but I already realize I don’t know how people doing a personal blog as a hobby, or other more personal or individual reasons, ever manage to do it every day of the week. That takes a lot of dedication. I’m already looking forward to December when I plan to drop back to two or three times a week.

First I took the upstairs bathrooms and made things not only look clean but smell clean too. After that was done I decided to go downstairs and begin the next little quilt project on my list–a lap sized version of a retro-style quilt. This one will be a diagonal series of 2 1/2 inch blocks printed fabrics like those from the 1930’s (tiny ducks, cats, flowers, etc.) connected by 2 1/2 white blocks. First order of business was to rotary cut all the prints that had already been cut into 5 inch squares into quarters. Precision rotary cutting is easy but takes time because you need to measure as precisely as possible, all taking time.

Then it was time for lunch. While we were eating, Hubby–who had been outside trimming shrubs and bushes–announced that we should get in our day at the gym in the early afternoon. While I was chomping at the bit to get back downstairs to begin cutting out the contrasting white squares, I agreed that it was good to get the exercise done. Another routine, but a necessary one. After an hour or so of playing e-card games while we let the pizza settle we set off. Sometime over the summer I had hit onto a nice routine at the gym and now, once I’m there, I don’t mind it half so much as I used to. Come along with me and see how I’m managing to conquer my hatred of routine exercise.

When we arrive at the gym, the first thing I do is take a towel and choose a stationary bike and set my reading material up. After I’ve washed down the bike with a disinfectant soaked paper towel, I adjust the settings and pedal for a half hour. Others may think I’m anal about cleanliness in the gym, but being on an immunosuppressive drug as I am for RA, I must be extra careful about germs so I’ve made it my goal never to touch a surface in the gym that hasn’t been sprayed and wiped, and that’s where the towel comes in. When I climb the stairs or open a door, the towel is what touches the surface, not my hand.

After the biking session, which I mainly do to strengthen the muscles of my knees to help keep my joints flexible and support my weight on those muscles rather than the joints themselves. Since I had knee surgery in the late 1990’s, I can tell you that if you suffer osteoarthritis, it definitely helps if you do it regularly.

Afterward I go into the ice rink area. Actually, there are two rinks separated by large thick glass walls so you can into either one if you’re walking around the rink. This one has a smaller audience area, and it’s where hockey players practice, or sometimes–like this day–they have small audiences and people with cameras around being nosey, like me.

During much of the summer, however, when I took these pictures,  this rink is where the kids were practicing and getting ready for the qualifying rounds of the  junior ice skating regional championships. This is where I like to do my brisk half hour walk around the rink, which totals a little over a mile and a half at my pace, at least three times a week.

Not only does it give me entertainment to focus on while I’m walking instead of my creaky knees, there are always coaches down on the ice working with students and one or another will put on a program of music for skaters to do their routines to. The music is quite nice, the usual sort of music you expect at an ice rink–from a bouncy Rockin’ Robin from the 1950’s or Broadway favorites like Gershwin’s American in Paris and Rhapsody in Blue, to Ravel’s Bolero just to name a few. My feet fall naturally into a rhythm to match the music numbers and before I know it, the half hour is up and I’m ready to go into another part of the gym.

This is one of the bikes, and you can pretend this is me with flowing long black hair. Beyond is the weight room which I used to do a little working out, but the handlebars on the machines are saturated with sweat and the air infused with testosterone that I quit going there. Now I follow my walk with a few minutes at a rowing machine and that’s about all the upper body work I’m doing for now. I’m up to seven minutes per session, and who knows? One day I may learn to even like it.

So this is a typical day for me on gym days. I feel good that I’ve managed to post 9 posts in a row, though, as well as learning to get the routine exercise in every week without whining too much now that I have such an interesting routine. I was thinking about it today during the walks around the ice rink. If we’re less rigid with ourselves about the way things “oughta be done,” not expecting perfection and letting things progress as they will with the best of intentions, everything about routine things that bog us down–from exercising to blogging to doing housework–can be overcome, and things can get done.

Tomorrow, back to the quilt!

looking back while spinning forward

Looking at this old photo taken in Cedar Key, Florida possibly as far back as the early 1960’s, it’s easy to see why this restaurant is no longer there. Cedar Key was a quaint little fishing village on the west coast of Florida just below the panhandle and north of Tampa, barely an hour’s drive from where I grew up.

It was a fairly frequent weekend destination for us in less busy seasons of the year, especially when we felt the urge for freshly caught fish dinners or gulf shrimp. Sometimes someone in the extended family would drive over on a Saturday and buy several pounds of striped mullet the west coast was known for and bring them back to share with the rest of us in a joint-family fish-fry complete with hushpuppies and sweetened iced tea.

Sometimes the family went along and the grownups would fish with a cane pole sitting on a portion of the boardwalk with other fishermen, while my brothers would go crabbing with sharp pointed poles. Once, when I was 16 or so, several members of my father’s family, including my grandmother, chartered a boat and went deep sea fishing. The fishing trip was shortlived though, as a storm began brewing and the waves got choppy and several people started turning green at the gills and hanging overboard to vomit. I felt pretty superior that I didn’t have a problem, but very sorry to see how ill my grandmother was.

As I got older and more mobile on my own, I preferred to drive over with friends to eat shrimp and hearts of palm salad at the boardwalk restaurant where the views were magnificent. I’m not  certain when, but I know that it and much of Cedar Key was destroyed by a hurricane, perhaps Dora who whipped across the whole of north central Florida in 1964. The boardwalk was pretty much destroyed along with the restaurant.

When we visited Florida exactly a year ago today, it was one of the first places I wanted to re-visit after a small family reunion at my brother’s rural home in Columbia County. I hadn’t been there in 30 or 40 years and I wanted to see if it had maintained the charm I remembered from childhood.

It had changed quite a lot in some ways. I don’t remember all that many commercial buildings (top photo) back in the 60’s, and the boardwalk had been replaced at the edge of the gulf now, not extending out over it as I remembered it. I did find these skeletal foundations for what may have been part of the boardwalk where the old restaurant was.

This is what Dock Street looks like now. It runs along the water’s edge, but with the concrete sidewalk and street and what appears to be solid ground beneath them, it’s probably sturdier against hurricane force winds and cyclones, but not quite as much fun somehow as walking out over the gulf on a flimsy boardwalk.

The second reason I wanted to visit these scenes from a favorite childhood place was to meet a fellow blogger. I’d discovered Terri Writing Away in Cedar Key around the time I started Wintersong. I wrote her and began visiting her blog and we developed a friendship through our shared passion for writing and visiting back and forth through blogposts and comments. When I told her of our plan to visit Cedar Key, she invited us to meet her for lunch on Dock Street. We arranged to meet in front of the restaurant that bore the name of my old favorite, although it wasn’t the same place.

Hubby chats here with Terri and her husband Ray, who treated us to a delicious lunch. I ordered crabcakes, which I ordered several more times while in Florida and never seemed to get enough, but was too full afterwards to indulge in a hearts of palm salad. Instead Terri and Ray invited us to follow them to their home on the island where a delicious dessert baked by Ray, carrot cake if I remember correctly, was waiting for us along with a hot cup of coffee.

This is how Terri and Ray get around. Yes, it’s a golf cart and the island is small enough they don’t bother with the big car. We followed behind in our rental car, not nearly as much fun as a golf cart, but the charm of the island was beginning to come back to me after all.

Along the way, we stopped off for a few minutes to see Chez Soliel, the vacation rental home they recently opened. It was lovely and spacious, and if we ever have the chance we’d love to spend some extended time there, but it’s really too big for just two people. The trees with the Spanish Moss were another fond memory, as were the abundance of flowers. Always in the distance was the occasional glimpse of the gulf and sea air.

After animated conversation over dessert, we found we had a lot of things in common–particularly our disdain for the man in the white house at the time–and Terri gave me a tour of the house and garden and showed me her writing studio. It holds a big desk with another feature we have in common–a beautiful Tiffany lamp. I started collecting Tiffany lamps in Las Vegas and now have at least one in nearly every room in our house.

Here’s Terri in front of her studio, aptly named Pages and Paws. Not long before we met, Terri had just landed a contract from Kensington publishers to publish her debut novel. Needless to add, she was very excited. I ordered an advanced copy as soon as it became available through Amazon.com and just a couple of weeks ago, it finally arrived.

Here it is, and it’s called Spinning Forward as you can see on the cover. I have it opened here to where I am in reading it today. And I can tell you this. For a Yankee transplant from north of Boston, Terri has a done a marvelous job of establishing a definite sense of a southern locale. She has especially captured the unique and outspokenness yet quaint sweetness of the people of not only Cedar Key but much of the Florida. And oh yes. I have to add that not only is Cedar Key still a charming little fishing village, it has become even more today with its inclusion of  artists (and writers like Terri) as well, so that spinning forward as I have from my childhood  through the 1960’s to today, I not only have re-captured good memories of old times but now have even better memories.

I’m about half way into the book, but probably took less than 50 pages before I’d decided that Terri makes me want to live in a Cedar Key too, with quaint and loveable characters like those she captured in the book. I grow up only as a neighbor of Cedar Key but I can tell you that Terri knows those characters just as well as I once did. It’s nice to know that she loves the place as much as I did once.

Note: SPINNING FORWARD, by Terri Dulong is now available at bookstores, or may be ordered through Amazon.com. Those interested may contact Terri directly through her author website http://www.terridulong.com/.

relating mathematics to poetry and music

Day 7 NaWriPoMo daily posts in November.

Normally I know I’m out of my league when mathematics is the featured topic of a lecture, but several weeks ago I had a slight paradigm shift in my idea of math being boring and incomprehensible after I attended a lecture by Westminster College (SLC) math professor Richard Wellman who spoke of how a group of mathematicians whose theoretical models of how things were supposed to work didn’t work out as planned and helped to lead to the current global economic crisis . In his explanation he discussed the mathematical models and what they do and don’t say about the real world. The upshot is that when I left the lecture room, I felt really good that I had actually enjoyed a presentation with mathematics in it. After 60 some years of math phobia, maybe I’d opened a tiny little path in my right-sided brain that would eventually lead to a break through before my assignment on this earth is over.

So I readily accepted when our daughter extended us a special invitation to attend a lecture at this year’s Utah Symposium in Science & Literature at the University. The speaker was Harvard Professor Barry Mazur, who has won numerous awards from peer organizations, and his presentation was on the language of explanation. As I understood it, his lecture would expound on how one’ s choice of medium–poetry, math, or of music–would shape both  imaginations and how they express themselves.

In tying the field of mathematics to language of expression through music and poetry, Dr. Mazur describes number theory as a field which produces (his words) “–without effort–innumerable problems which have a sweet, innocent air about them and tempting flowers; and yet . . . number theory swarms with bugs, waiting to bite the tempted flower lovers who, once bitten, are inspired to excesses of effort!” For math and language lovers, his 2003 book IMAGINING NUMBERS particularly the square root of minus fifteen expands on these thoughts.

I hung on, thinking any minute now my brain is going to be able to make the leap, the connection if you will, and I’ll begin to understand what this apparently brilliant man is saying that everyone else understands. Friends, after a full hour, I hadn’t understood a single thing. I think the audience needed to be a little better at understanding algebraic concepts in order to algebritize the process (to borrow a favorite phrase of his) of writing a poem. What I most enjoyed about the evening turned out to be the reception before which was catered by one of the better middle east restaurants, Mazza, where we sampled a spicy and rich variety of all kinds of vegetarian dishes followed with baklava and date and walnut sweets.

Is it any wonder then that my sleep last night was haunted by disturbing dreams. I’m no dream weaver or interpreter either for that matter but it was easy to see that most of the dreams I remember came from my insecurity about my place in the world. Dreams where I was on a bus in one foreign country after another, always seeking to figure things out, or find someone who could help me understand how to be where I needed to be.

There was one dream, however, that was pleasant in some weird way. I was staying at some sort of country estate and among other guests were Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and their daughter Suri. I’ve never thought much about Suri except an occasional thought that she’s really beautiful and rich and probably way overindulged. Strange then, that she was an integral part of that dream and when she disappeared I seemed to be the only one on the estate who was worried. Katie was sleeping, and Tom was enjoying being the center of attention and couldn’t be bothered to speak with me and I was trying so hard to tell him Suri could be in danger.

I suppose it could be explained as another layer of insecurity. Or could be it that my dreams tell me this is just another example that I’m at a loss to understand things the way everyone else seems to. On the other hand, it might have been the spicy food.