Love in Small Bites 1001:27

At our family holiday gathering, as the young and healthy sat interspersed amongst the aged and overweight, many small topics were touched on and passed around for a verbal chew.  The Sharing of Small Topics is a common holiday gathering ritual--like herd animals brushing against each other for reassurance of safety and continued extistence, we nit-pick at each others' fleas of inane realities as an expression of interest and vestment.  Topics are generally kept light, refraining from discussing indiscretions, credit card debts, personality flaws.  Those topics are better suited for common, daily herd activities.

During our holiday gathering, sugar was, briefly, a topic of conversation. Not a hot topic, because who really wants to think about what we do to ourselves gastronomically during the season of joy and excess? Nevertheless, it came up during the Sharing of the Brownies and, once the ball was rolling, the forward momentum had to work its way to the end.

“These are sugarless,” I announced, bearing a plate of fat and obviously dark chocolate brownies to the cluster of listless bodies digesting holiday cheer atop stuffed furniture.  I held the brownies aloft with the expectation that they would be fallen on with joy and thanksgiving, not to mention scientific discussion. Doesn’t everyone want to cure the common cold AND have a cake and eat it, too?

A few heads turned soundlessly in the direction of the plate I proffered. A few eyebrows were lifted to aid in mental digestion of my seeming oxymoron. Someone who’d already tested the sugar content of some nice wine put themselves on the line and came up with a reasonable clarification of my statement.

“Oh, you mean they have aspartame?”

Well, I am not renowned for light social chatter, but the wine drinker had lost his conversational reserve and exposed his innocence with the question, so I went through that door of conversation with earnest good intentions. A few clear heads wished they could close that barn door, but the horse was already through it.  So I zeroed in on the one soul in the room who seemed willing to be saved—or at least to bite—and switched on “save the room if not the world” mode. My eyes clamped on his, as I held out the sugarless visual aid.

“Oh, no. They do not have aspartame. Aspartame is evil. God knows what it does to your body.” I paused because I choke up when I talk about fake sugar. When I was able to continue, I said, “Sugarless actually means ‘without sugar.’ "  Everyone knows I am a teacher, but they still find it hard to forgive my habit of dictionary definitions.  The silence thickened as I continued. "These were made with half semi-sweet chocolate squares, and half unsweetened chocolate squares.  And no sugar.”

There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. Everyone might have been digesting the turkey, I don’t know. The amiable one finally accepted responsibility for the barn door and said, “Wow, that’s nice.”

This slight acknowledgement of my work to save his body and soul (which in my religion is one and the same) threw the door open wide. I dropped the Exhortation and went straight to the Invitation. Years growing up in a Baptist church cemented my personal psychology of saving souls; the roadmap to salvation was ingrained by a childhood of observation.  Who better to salvage than indiscretionary family sugar-mongers?  Encouraged, I kept the floor.  Everyone else was sitting in a food coma, anyway.

“A lot of my friends have food issues. Some have high blood sugar, some have high cholesterol. If we all do some adjusting, sugar is a small thing to give up to save ourselves. And the truth is, a month off sugar weans you off it. Spend a month in Japan, for example--you’ll lose ten pounds AND your craving for Hershey bars. Japanese think American food is horrendously sweet.  Which it is."

When I called down the Holy Ghost of National Cultural Straying From the Path, a few eyes glazed over. It often happens in church that way: keep them in the sermon past lunchtime, and you lose them.  Know your audience.

So I skipped straight to the Offertory and passed the plate. “Try them,” I whispered. “They have fresh dates and dark chocolate to compensate for false sweetness. What you will taste is pure….taste.”

A few people took a brownie, in the spirit of the season of goodwill, and to move me out of the doorway, and nibbled them. A few, full of turkey and annoyed at having their dietary souls searched at a culinary bacchanalia, declined.

"Um, very nice,” said the amiable one. A few others nodded. No one asked for the recipe. No one swore off sugar or aspartame.

No one was saved that day. But they had come. They had listened. And now, for whatever use they might put the knowledge to in the future: now, they knew:
There is another Way.

Growing Old 2001:26

Yesterday was classic bright November--clearly THE day for harvesting loofah sponge gourds from the backyard pergola.  And it was Sunday, which suits a day in the garden.  An all-round micro-momentous day, Harvest of the  Loofah.  The vines had lavished leaves and shade and bright yellow flowers across their trellised perch all summer (cat litter = good fertilizer).  Pollinating insects had a thriving metropolis in the high-rise vines.  Now, clearing the remains of all that exuberant life said summer--and a good chunk of autumn--was gone. Long gone, with winter knocking at the door.
So with joy in the morning and sadness in the ending, I plunked my trusty green 6 ft. folding stepladder against the pergola crossbars, stepped lightly upward, and peered into the morass of withered vines to see what I could see.  Without the ladder, only 4 gourds had hung below the trellised roof and were visible.  I didn't know how many had fruited between the thicket of leaves overhead.  I had my hopes up.

I was not disappointed.  The elevated explosion of rope-tough vines had changed into a different kind of beautiful.  Green leaves full of sun every summer morning, and dozens of yellow blooms, hopeful of pollination, had changed.  They were now gray, dried-up, and draped around sinuous dark gourds: the loofah crop. The gourds ranged from an immature 4-inches to a whopping 18 inches long, with up to 6-inch diameters.  Lots of em. Wow.  Happy Day.  The universe was loving them up there in Pergola Heaven while they were loving the growing of themselves.  They had quite a party and were wonderful to watch all summer.  Now, they lay between the thin strips of the trellis, naked and ripe. Hm.

I snipped the vines of the nearby ones, and pulled on the vines of the far-away ones, moving the ladder around a few times.  Altogether I had about 20 salvageable gourds.  Neat!  Some had been too immature to survive last week's mild frosts and were going soft.  The discards went into the city mulch collection.  I left a few small ones lying on the garden patch surrounding the pergola.  The soil there can decompose a few small smooshy contributions.

The rest went into a cool, dry basement where they will evolve to their final form.  They will sweat out their moisture for a few months.  The moisture will collect on their outer rind, in the form of soft mold.  The mold will eventually dry out, around January, earlier or later depending on their girth. Then the gourds are ready to have their dried, crisp skins peeled off.  The peeling will reveal underlying, dried fiber structure which provides a reason for their propagation (besides fun and beauty): loofah sponges.  Excellent for scrubbing, lovely to look at and hold, and a good story of the intelligent design of nature.

Its obvious I love my garden.  It gives me a lot of joy, and things to think about.  Growing loofahs, growing old, mutability.  Process, joy, end, and purpose.  They grow, and then they grow some more, growing old.  http://len7288.hubpages.com/hub/Benefits-of-Using-Loofah-Sponge-on-Skin

Stories are Good Things 1001:25

My Mom recently turned 90 years old.  For a present, she wanted her kids to show up from the various states we fled to over the years, and have dinner with her.  So I drove 600 miles to help her celebrate, with my siblings and cousins, her siblings and cousins, and long-time neighbors and friends. 

For a couple days, my brother hosted all of us for food,  hayrides, and a firepit.   The last time I saw so many friendly faces from my childhood was at my father's funeral a few years ago.  Everybody appreciated the opportunity to, as one cousin kept saying, "get together for a GOOD reason."   It becomes more apparent as years go by that we might not see each other again, and this reunion was appreciative and reasonably friendly.

For the hardy and well-rested, the evening ended around my brother's firepit, with a cooler of drinks by the chairs, and a rural sky full of stars overhead.  Children ran around in the brisk night, occasionally coming to roost on a reassuring adult lap.  And catch-up conversation evolved, as all night time talk around fires will, to stories.

Many people in my family are good storytellers, which I like to attribute to Native American, Irish, and French blood.  Some stories told on those two nights revisited family idiosyncrasies, or warned of relationship problems, or reminded us of shared history.  Some stories I had not heard before. 

My brother told a story I hadn't heard before, about my mom's older brother, Uncle Vernon.  Vernon had saved Mom once, as a child, from drowning in the Kaskaskia river (or was it the Mississippi river?), by grabbing her by her hair as she went down for the third time.  He pulled her out of the current and to the shore, thereby insuring all of her children of a future.  That story we had heard many times, from Mom.  Vernon went on to join the Navy in WW2, got married, moved to a nearby state, and produced three of my favorite cousins (who were all at Mom's party, by the way).  He brought his family to visit ours often.  As my cousins got older, Uncle Vernon sometimes came to visit by himself, and sometimes stayed with my brother when he did.  Uncle Vernon died several years ago, but remains very much alive in our memories.

My brother loved Uncle Vernon.  He prefaced his story this night, in the dark around the fire, by saying yeah, Vernon was a big guy, well built, about 6'6" (I don't remember him being THAT big, although he was a big guy.  But the cooler had been accessed a few times at this point and maybe all the facts weren't straight as they could've been).   Then he said that Vernon had been a Golden Glove boxer in the Navy, which I didn't know.  The story concerned one of the times when Uncle Vernon had visited my brother, driving several hours from Kansas.  Vernon was about 70 at the time.  He wasn't much of a drinker, but he was tired driving and decided to stop in a little town about an hour from his destination.  The establishment he walked into (one of only two in the town, we all compared notes as we tried to figure which place he had stopped at) was nearly empty, with 3 other patrons and the bartender.  Uncle Vernon ordered a cold beer and a sandwich.  While he was eating, one of the men in the bar got up and came over to sit at the bar next to Vernon, crowding him.  Vernon moved over for a little more room.  The man moved over against him, again.  Vernon moved a little further away.

The third time this happened, Vernon looked at the man and said, "Excuse me, sir, am I in your way?"  The man said, "As a matter of fact you are."  So, my brother reports, Vernon laid him out on the floor.  He then looked at the two patrons remaining, and asked "Do you want any part of this?"   They both said, "No, sir."  Vernon finished his sandwich and drove on his way.

Makes me proud to be part of the family.  Great story, great night, and a great memory sharing the memory.  That, I am coming to believe, is one of the nicest things about growing old: remembering good things.