Herban Sprawl

20 August 2010

After having had a basically unproductive week, I decided today to blow it all to smithereens and do something my beloved Grandma Kate referred to as goin’ bummin’. I got in Red Rocket and I headed out.

One of my haunts has been an antique mall that is fairly nearby, so after I hit the art supply house (the high priced one, not the one with the discounts and coupons) for some PVA glue, RR and I zipped down the road. I actually had one thing I wanted to find. A handkerchief. Anything after that would be great fun, but not a necessity. This item was for a friend.

Here is what I like about those places. You get to see the stuff you grew up with. You also get to see a lot of neat things that people used to use. Then there are the beautiful things that graced someone’s home until the estate sale. I like history a lot, so wandering through one of those places is just plain fun.

Recently I have been stopping by the vintage clothing booths. It’s great to try on hats, furs, and even old shoes. I saw an evening gown today that had to have been a size 2. It was classic 1950s, navy blue and simply beautiful. I could see a young Jackie Bouvier in it.

My other weakness is old linens. I do needlework, and Grandma did it, so I truly do appreciate the lovely things people made even lovelier by embroidery, or a little crochet around the edges. The printed tablecloths from the 1930s - 1950s are also attention getters. They are often so bright and cheery that I can imagine them in my aunt’s kitchen with its southern window and red Formica countertops.

I had an armload of goodies when I spied a cache of Wedgwood. I don’t know how I missed it because I had wandered through that booth, admiring all the vintage cocktail glasses. I scored three reasonably priced bread and butter plates, one decent cream soup set, and four other bowls that are pretty ratty. Four underplates are just fine. The ratty bowls, however, are just about as ratty as the rest of the set. (It lived through hard times with my dad’s various women friends washing dishes under the influence!)
When I hauled that set home from Illinois, I swore I wasn’t going to add to it, but four plates weren’t enough, so I brought it back up to the original eight. I recently discovered that two of the six remaining cereal bowls were actually broken and glued together. As I pondered the problem, I realized I’d really rather have rimmed soups, or even more nifty, cream soups. The other missing items were bread and butter plates. Mom never seemed to want them, so we didn’t buy them when I conned Dad into giving her the set. I, however, find them very handy for dessert and a spot of tea.

This grand find came at the end of a revelation of sorts. It dawned on me the other day that when we talked about reviving the old dinner group, I really wasn’t interested in another group of ten people. I rather enjoyed having six for dinner last weekend. It didn’t involve the table leaves and it was less crowded in our small dining room.

Obviously, from a dish freak’s standpoint, it also afforded me a larger selection of tableware! I only have three sets that will serve twelve, and one is for Christmas. The smaller group meant I could use Mom’s Wedgwood, and that was a nice change as no one present had ever seen it.

Friends have a great time teasing me about my dishes, but there are worse things I could be collecting. How about Jim Beam bottles or shot glasses? At least they get to enjoy what goes on the plates! I have Anna’s Rosenthal in the basement and it’s killing me. Oh, my but what an elegant 1950s table I could set with that collection! There are even egg cups! My job, though, is to guard it carefully, watch eBay to see if it’s value ever rises, and dispose of it as she dictates. People are collecting “mid-century” stuff these days, so I do look for its value to increase. Raymond Loewy designed the shape of the set, but Rosenthal used their own design on it, which means it will never fetch what a set with his name on it would.

That’s one of the interesting things about china. My wedding china is through the roof in value and it’s my least favorite set. Who knew?! I lack four large rimmed soups or it would be complete in just about every way. Sadly, they never made fruit saucers in it. (There were cream soups, though!) It was a Williamsburg reproduction pattern and I chose it because I figured it would be around forever. Who would ever guess that Colonial Williamsburg and Wedgwood would have a falling out? At the time, it was unthinkable. Of course, Wedgwood filing for bankruptcy protection was equally unfathomable!
If I had known then what I know now, I would have just picked what I wanted in the first place! But my parental unit was going to England and he loved buying English china. I picked English china. Oh, don’t misunderstand…I adore English china! But there was a set of Ceralene that caught my eye, and then there was a white porcelain set I loved, and then there was the Richard Ginori set….

I hope we do revive the dinner group, but I’m going to lobby hard for a smaller number this time. I want to be able to use everything I own because there is no point in having it if you don’t trot it out. There are at least four more sets they’ve never seen!

And on that note, I need to go update my inventory book!

18 August 2010

Recently a friend of mine ran into a hitch in the ongoing care of her elderly mother. It seems she, herself, was running out of steam in terms of driving back and forth to her mother’s small town and dealing with the team of caregivers. In an effort to look for that elusive thing we call “there just HAS to be a better way,” she discovered they were in violation of a whole raft of rules and regulations, not to mention underinsured.

In typical fashion, my friend began the process of research. Now when I say this, I am not being critical. We all have our quirks and hers is to find expert after expert after expert who often A) tell her what she already knows, B) scare the hell out of her, C) give her cover for her own ideas, or D) validate her feelings. But she can also spend a lot of time spinning her wheels looking for that elusive expert who will tell her what she wants to hear. Item C is often the reason. She doesn’t want to take credit for being the smart person she is because she fears the outcome. That outcome is generally resistance from her siblings.

She finally discovered a dandy assisted living center that offers “respite care.” After a whole lotta emotional convolutions,  lukewarm support from the sibs, who live waaaaay out of town, she got Mama installed in the place with a 70 year old caregiver available to run Mama to the salon, church and a few other social activities.

Mama is 85 and had suffered a few strokes that would have sent a lesser woman off to the cemetery. She is a bit wobbly, but she can manage, with help. Mama is also comfortably well-off, so staying at home with caregivers was an option for her. However, the issue now is that in order to bring her situation in compliance with the laws of the land, and to protect her by means of increased liability insurance, Mama’s nest egg is going to be depleted long before her body runs out of steam. What to do?

This is the problem many of my peers have been facing and for many it is uncharted territory, fraught with traps and misery. Once upon a time, our elders suffered debilitating strokes, massive heart attacks or cancer and they died within a short period of time. Those who didn’t often were taken care of in the homes of their children. But those were the days when there was a stay-at-home parent, household help and other support systems of that nature. In today’s society, we don’t see the spinster aunt taking care of the elderly parent in the family home. Nor do we see the set up we all read about in Tomi DePaola’s book, Nana Upstairs, Nana Downstairs. We now have rules and regulations regarding paying into Social Security, etc. etc. It’s complicated and it’s not an intuitive kind of thing. You have to know what to do. Hence the numbers of social workers and other “experts” who are out there to help us thread our way through the maze.

The cost of respite care, assisted living, nursing home care, retirement centers and so on is tremendous. And some of us discover, much to our shock and dismay, that our elder has done something really, really risky like taking out a reverse mortgage without the knowledge of the kids. Rossiferous@blogspot.com has a piece about saving a client from that trap. (Lucky for that client!) Elderly people who were able to sell their homes during the housing bubble in order to pay the upfront fees in the nicer retirement centers are the only ones who are in the catbird seat. Most of the elderly are not that fortunate.

And so it has fallen to my friend to try to organize her siblings. Her mother has lived far longer than any of them reasonably expected, and because her general health is excellent, there is no reason to believe she won’t last another five or so years as her body winds down. But my friend has been dealing with this for over ten years and she is plumb tuckered. The siblings live far away and don’t have a clue as to the pain in the neck it is to try to keep a team of decent caregivers in place. The news that they would soon have to have taxes and such deducted from their paychecks sent a few over the edge and they quit. It seems they were more than willing to work for unreported income.

In our own situation, after a revolving door of live-in caregivers, we lucked into one who had come in as a substitute caregiver. She had the bright idea to manage our dad’s care with a team of local ladies, and she volunteered to be the leader. She was worth her weight in gold. It was not without hiccups, to be sure, but there was nothing so difficult that two college educated daughters couldn’t figure out. One involved sending a letter informing the parental unit’s girlfriend that she needed to back off or we’d take legal action against her. It was a bluff, but it worked. I mean to tell you, having a shrieking virago bitching that the caregivers hired to provide assistance in the home - light housekeeping, cooking, personal care, companionship, errands, laundry - needed to be outside running the lawnmower or the weed whacker really got on our nerves as caregiver after caregiver quit. We had to do something.

Eventually it came together and it worked because my sibling knew the tax rules and so on. My friend’s family for some reason never figured on any of this, so the recent revelations were a shock to all concerned. I have to ask how many other families are in this boat and what do they do to bail themselves out?

For my friend, having her mother in the assisted living center has been a huge source of relief. She would like this to be a permanent situation, but Mama has to be convinced it is in her best interests. This means she has to have the complete picture laid out before her so she can make a decision. She has all her faculties, so, yes, she will be the one who decides. The siblings, however don’t have the same sense of urgency as my friend, and their fact-finding assignments haven’t been completed on time. Her emails to them have fallen on deaf eyes. I read them. I see why. She fails to be direct in telling them what she wants. She can’t be direct. She cannot be succinct. She does not have it in her to say what she feels: I am worn out, I have had enough, I never thought this gig would drag on this long and I want out.

And so after a lot of “miscommunication” in which she was positive I wasn’t hearing her, I forced her to participate in a simple exercise of -her favorite word - prioritizing. Then I composed a to-the-point piece for her to send to the siblings. It assigned them their tasks and it gave them deadlines with specific, businesslike reasons for those deadlines. All pointed back to one thing: she wants out. It’s what she did next that sent me over the edge. After freaking out because she needed to send this right away, she slammed her computer shut and headed down the road, saying she didn’t have time to read through what I had written and to process it.

Now I am no fool. I know she was cringing because I had been -gasp- direct. I knew right then she had absolutely no intention of sending it and that I had wasted an afternoon trying to help her make herself understood to her two no-nonsense siblings. I knew she was having trouble taking responsibility for her need to get out from under the whole business, and by golly there is nothing wrong with saying so. It ain’t like she hasn’t pulled her time with this. But she is single, on her own, and due to her inability to stay focused on one thing at a time and a propensity for “multi-tasking” where she gets not one single thing brought to completion, her entire life has been in disarray and she can’t stand the mess anymore. Imagine being saddled with attention deficit disorder and being obsessive compulsive. Get the picture? She cannot see that she has done a good job so far and she cannot see that she is within her rights to say to her mother, “Mom, I love you, but I have to have a break. You are going broke under the current system and I can’t manage it any more. You need to be in assisted living for our peace of mind for your safety and well-being. Being at home isn’t working any more. I can’t get help who will agree to have taxes deducted from their paychecks and we’ve run out of alternatives. I’m sorry about this, but this is the way it will have to be.”

What she did was get on that infernal earpiece thing that makes her look like she’s talking to herself and keeps her from focusing on her driving on a very dangerous piece of Virginia highway. She called one of her experts. Then she called me back and told me what the expert said. It was exactly what I had told her. She had to get permission to send what will likely be a watered down message to the siblings. And it will certainly become a watered down message that will revert to being indirect and never will tell them what she is within her rights to say out loud.

Furthermore, she has arranged for an expert who will deliver this to her mother, but it still involves her siblings doing their part to assemble all the facts and figures of the various alternatives so her mom can see it in black and white and to have the message delivered by her financial adviser. No one wants to be the bad guy.

My point in all this is that it’s business. There is nothing more littered with hidden landmines than family business. And there is nothing more emotionally charged than the care of our elderly within that structure. With our changing landscape of scattered families, we no longer have the same options and we no longer really want those options. Parents want to hang onto their independence, children struggle to accommodate that in order to preserve their parents’ dignity, and in the end, there has to be a safety valve or the whole thing will blow up. Without carefully put together estate plans in which we look to our own futures, we Boomers are setting ourselves up for even bigger fights.

See an elderlaw specialist today. Get your own affairs in order. Don’t be an ass. Your kids may deserve a little grief, but not this kind of nonsense.

10 August 2010

The old Sprawler is tickled pink. Our neighbor with the tree that was all over our roof (and hers) called tree cutters and has had the miserable thing trimmed back. This means I do not have to fret and worry about Big Kitty taking matters into his own hands from atop our steeply pitched roof. I can’t say this has been a particularly nice looking haircut, but I don’t much care. As long as it no longer is in a position to provide a squirrel launching pad or landing strip and isn’t rotting my timbers, its looks are immaterial. Besides, it’s an ugly Bradford pear anyway.

I got the guy’s card, though, because he owns the company and is not even remotely related to another tree guy who charges a lot for only passable work. This gentleman was delighted to discover a mutual dislike of the other guy. Here’s the story from my end.

Several years ago my elderly dogwoods needed serious grooming. Brain told me the name of a really good arborist. Got that?  An arborist, not just some good old boy with a bucket truck and a tree chopper attachment. He came out and looked over the trees very carefully, examined the bark, tugged on a limb or two and gave me a price and the date he could show up. The work was good and my trees really did well for a number of years thereafter.

It was time for them to need another grooming, and so did Fred, our corkscrew willow. I called the arborist, but he wasn’t the one who answered the phone. It was the father of a kid I had taught when he was in seventh grade. Turns out he’d bought out Rob’s business, kept the name of it and even the phone number, but didn’t let on in the yellow pages that the business was under different ownership. Reluctantly I had him come out to deal with my trees, which meant that little monkey of a kid of his was going to be hanging in my trees. Ugh. They did a passable job. I wouldn’t say it was great, but it was passable.

Here is what I learned today. The same guy owns several different tree companies around the valley. All have different names and phone numbers. According to these guys, when there is an insurance job, three estimates are required. So an unsuspecting customer calls three companies, gets three estimates and all three companies are owned by the same guy. Hmmmm

I was taken aback to say the least, so after they left, I did a little homework on the internet and discovered the guy owns something like six different tree businesses. They are all registered with the Better Business Bureau, too. He also claims to be an arborist. Of course, he isn’t the one doing the work, so arborist owner or not, no real arborist touches the customer’s tree. You may think I’m splitting hairs here, but having watched a true-blue arborist at work and comparing it to a tree monkey, there is a huge difference.

This brings up the matter of ethics. Does the Better Business Bureau know this guy bids against himself on insurance jobs? Is this really kosher? What protection is there for a customer who calls what she thinks is a different tree service and when they arrive to do the work, she discovers it was the same tree service who did a so-so job once before? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like this is a matter of truth in advertising. Why have six different companies with six different phone numbers?

I have no answers - only questions. My own experience with the guy is that unlike my favorite roofer, who is cocky because he’s so darn good, this one has nothing to recommend him. When I tell friends who ask who I have used, I can only say who NOT to use. A breakdown in the tradesman-client network is never a good thing. At least I now know that before I call a single one, I should look them up with the BBB to learn who owns them.

Meanwhile, Fred, according to the guy who was here today, is nearly dead. I am really sorry about that. Fred was barely a shoot when our friend Fred planted him 23 years ago, and he’s been a great tree, offering a lot of shade in the hot summer months. He’s been trimmed and groomed twice, but now he has a lot of dead limbs. I really don’t want to lose him. The same goes for our ancient dogwoods in front. They are pink, and in spring when they are at the height of their glory, they look like one huge bubble bath. But, they have a lot of old age issues, as do we all, and I know that we’ll have to take them down one of these days.

It’s like that with trees. BS Squared was a maple we dug from the wooded lot owned by some friends in Charlottesville. We planted BS Squared in front of a cute house we rented and today she is a very pretty tree, making for a quite picturesque front yard. Over the weekend, I realized there are a lot of oak saplings at the Oak Grove in Verona. A board member gave me permission to bring in my shovel and a bucket to take away a little tree. I’m thinking it might be nice to get a little oak started in front, and perhaps by the time it takes hold and starts turning tree-like, it will be poised to replace a dogwood.

And so it goes. One tree after another, and due diligence before calling one single tree guy in the phonebook!

6 August 2010

This one is for the daughters of Sy Cohen: a matched set of lifetime Cub Fans, who are, as everyone knows, the greatest people in the world.

The Dawg Days in the Friendly Confines are upon us, sports fans. Our team has reduced Lil Linda to tears, but as she and her sister Miss Tupelo and I have agreed, they are our team until death do we part. As of this morning’s paper, Da Cubs are fourth from the bottom in the league. At 13 and a half games out, it’s pretty hopeless. I’m not sure where they were 35 or so years ago, but I’m sure I was sitting in front of a fan while it happened.

The topic has to do with being a lifer. These two sisters were trained in Cubdom by their dad, Sy. Sy was a prince among men. He had the self-deprecating humor of an intelligent man with four kids and a spouse living on the edge of Skokie and a day job keeping Fords on the road. He was a DieHard Cub fan.

I met his eldest daughter in college, where we were “wing mates,” so to speak. It’s been a 40+ year friendship, and the circle includes ole BGF, as well. Where he taught us the ease of y’all vs. youse guys, she, a very quiet person, waged her own war against conformity with a pair of white Keds. When we least expected it, she’d leave us gasping for air with one of her infamous one liners. She’d just smile and watch us as we tried valiantly not to choke to death. Ya gotta love that about a person, ya know?

And so it came to pass that when I migrated to Chicago for a little bitty stint as a grad student at the august University of Chicago, I found it necessary to wage my own war against conformity. I found refuge from the pretentiousness of the art history department in the Friendly Confines. I’d take the Illinois Central to the Prudential Building terminal, get a bus to the Northwestern Med School campus, meet her and then we’d trot over to the Chicago Avenue subway. Minutes later, we’d emerge from the El stop at Edddeeeeson (that’s El conductor for Addison), where the air was electric with excitement. Armed with a scorecard, a pencil, a hot dog and a beer, we’d settle into the left field bleachers, the domain of Jose Cardenal.

The Cubs rarely won. We didn’t care - oh, I mean we cared, but people go to Wrigley for the same reason they go to a church. It’s all about the community. Rich, poor, blue collar, white collar, no collar, bikini top - all wo/men are created equal in the Friendly Confines. It is a ballpark like no other, and for good reason. It’s in Chicago, the city of broad shoulders where people pronounce their Rs.

Okay, this is a sidebar, but there is nothing that gets me grouchier than a movie depicting Chicagoans where the street toughs sound like they are from Brooklyn. Hollywood, take a memo:  in Chicago, da mob pronounces their Rs. Our mob is home-grown and not imported from Noo York. There’s an R in that, too, and we say it, f’cripes sakes. Forget those idiots who talk with marbles in their mouths. Chicagoans talk fast and pronounce their Rs, dammitanyway!

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Da Cubs. So, it’s like 1975 or 6 and I’ve got a cat from Lil Linda’s family. Her brother is home from college with his Siamese male, Circus, and everyone is afraid Circus will do in Abby’s litter. So Abby comes to my home for unwed mothers. My aunt even bought me a sign that says ‘home for fallen women, one flight up’ because she thought it was so funny that I’d taken in this pregnant cat. I had a temp job at an accounting firm and they all thought it was a gas that I would be in a countdown with this cat and there were still no kittens.

My gig there ended and I went to another job for a week. Then the accounting company’s receptionist was going on vacation and they requested me for another week. When I showed up on Monday, the first thing everyone asked as they filed in the door in the morning was, “Kittens, yet?” “Nope.” It was a running joke until one morning, while I was having my coffee and a danish, Abby went into labor. I was transfixed. My cats and dog were very careful to have their litters while I was asleep, thus sparing my mother from the horror of having to explain the birds and bees to me. This was all new. I was late that morning, but when I dashed into the office, they all knew…”Kittens?” “Yep, while I was drinking my coffee, I heard her in the box I’d fixed her. I just couldn’t leave.” “All right!!!”

One of those kittens was an orange tiger. He was the biggest kitten and he was a charmer. Da Cubs were on, I had a burger and onion rings from the Jack-in-the-Box, and he climbed up my chest and helped himself to the other side of the onion ring I’d bitten into. I fell in love. He stayed with me and he needed a name. He became enthralled with the ball on the teevee screen and as Pete LaCock, a lanky blonde whose father is Peter Marshall, caught the ball at first, my kitten found his name: Pete LaCat. Petey to me and everyone else. And he was a Cub fan, too.

It was fun in those days. You didn’t need an advance ticket for the bleachers, and ladies got into the grandstands free on Fridays. You weren’t supposed to bring in your own food, but I had an Andy Frain usher that I bribed with homemade brownies so I could eat my own sandwiches for lunch. While at U 0f C, that was my chief subversive thumb-on-the-nose to culture. I did my homework in the stands for free on Fridays. There was some divine synchronicity about writing papers on the Prairie School of Architecture while sitting in an historic ballpark. There was one other guy in the art history department who used to do publicity photos for the Wrigley family. He taught me the value of a utility player like Carmen Fanzone and informed me that it takes a rare individual who will happily put himself in the way of a 90 mile an hour projectile that could kill him.

My family was less than thrilled about my ballpark escapades, but as it happened, I was blessed with a nephew whose first baseball hero was Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves. The first time I got to Wrigley with him was a summer when his Rockies were in town for a double header.  While he was off getting us some beers, I read off a University of Chicago prof who was showing off for what was clearly one of his grad students…he was telling her that baseball players aren’t that bright. My man, Joe Girardi, was behind the plate. Bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Northwestern. I took exception to his pompous assedness and gave him a piece of my DieHard mind. “Yeah, right. You wanna keep hanging on this asshole’s every word? He’s full of shit. Girardi - yeah that cute lil wop behind the plate has a degree in electrical engineering from this jerk’s competitor, Northwestern. Listen, honey, it isn’t worth taking up with one of these. He’ll screw ya and flunk ya with the same disregard for you. I went to Chicago and I know. Find yourself a man in the real world.” She was stunned and he was red in the face. Da Neph returned and I acted like a well-behaved auntie.

Oh, and then the fun began. The left field bleacher bums stood up and yelled, “Tastes great!” The right field bums stood up and yelled, “Less filling!” And that went on for a bit. My nephew asked, “You used to sit in the bleachers, right?” “No, left, but yes.” “You never did that.” I nodded my head. He shook his and held it in his hands.

That game continued for something like 12 innings thanks to rain delays, so we gave up and went down the street for pizza. We saw the end of it from there - we split the series, which was nice for both of us.

Da Neph met Lil Linda after he first moved to Chicago and took us on one of the Wrigley tours they have when the Cubs are on the road. Lil Linda and I took a tour guide to task for his hero-worship of Harry Carey. Our guy was Jack Brickhouse. Harry? Harry from the St. Louis Cardinals who took up with Augie Busch’s showgirl wife? Harry who found himself unemployed? Harry who then landed with the Sox? Harry who gets drunk in the booth and starts waxing brilliant about the damn Cards? Harry who again?

And so it is, as the Dawg Days settle in, smothering us in her heat, that we recount our memories and know that in our hearts, there is baseball and then there is that lifetime commitment to the Chicago Cubs. Win or lose, we’ll be fans until our nieces and nephews settle our estates. I’d like to believe that we’ll see an Old Timer’s game in a heavenly Wrigley Field - I know my line-up would include Don Kessinger, Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Fergie Jenkins, Ron Santo and Randy Hundley. I’m willing to bet Lil Linda and Miss Tupelo would add some luminaries to that and that not only would Ernie grin and declare, “It’s a beautiful day for a baseball game! Let’s play two!” but that they would and they’d win. I believe we fans will one day be rewarded.

5 August 2010

When Bk and I joined the Italian American Heritage Club, I had no idea it would progress beyond the monthly potluck supper, annual Christmas party and annual picnic. But then-president Joe had a vision for smaller groups that would bring folks together in their particular areas of interest. A language study group formed, a Keno group was signed up, and then there was the cooking and cookbook group that started as two groups and morphed into one. Obviously, I’m in the latter. If we ever get anyone to organize the bocce group, you can bet your sweet pallino I’ll be in that one!

Anyway, our group meets once a month for a kind of potluck, or a demonstration and lesson. Always we bring recipes to share. Our goal is to create a cookbook that reflects the different regions represented by the members of the club, as well as pictures and remembrances to document our people. As the months have progressed, we find ourselves staying longer and longer to talk. It’s become a wonderful experience for me since my upbringing was so utterly assimilated.

Last month I taught noodle-making and it was a gas! We were crammed into Millie’s kitchen, with four noodle machines clamped onto the four corners of her kitchen table. I brought dough that was ready to be rolled and cut, but had them mix their own in pairs. While their dough rested, we rolled out the pasta I’d brought. The flour was exceptionally dry and the extra large eggs didn’t do the trick. We had to moisten the balls of dough and some of it was really hard to roll out. But it was a good learning experience because that happens from time to time. It also happens that the dough is too soft and more flour is needed. Regardless, we had a lot of fun.

Afterward, we cooked up some of it and had it with a great tomato cream sauce from Marcella Hazan, as well as some home made pesto from Nancy. Millie had made a big salad and Teresa had made bruschetta to get us started before the pasta event. And then there was Sylvia’s spumoni bombe. To die for, I tell ya! We ate and we critiqued, we ate and we talked, we are and we raved about the food, we ate and we talked. It was then that I began to really appreciate just what I’d gotten myself into.

Each summer when school was out, Anna and I would pile into the car and drive to Illinois. I left her in Orland Park with Mimma, her delightful mother, and I went west on I80 to LaSalle. On the return, I got to spend a day or so with her family and that’s where I learned about the true Italian family. What with Anna’s decampment to Rome, that annual injection of ethnic conscious raising has ceased and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until this group gelled.

Not everyone is Italian. Two are married to Italians, but they enjoy cooking Italian food. I’m a half Italian, raised as a WASP, and the others are very much of the vine. What we share is the common experience of cooking and sharing around the table. As women, we have much to talk about. We’re all at the age where we have aged parents, spouses or others for whom we provide care. When we talk, we share insights, tell stories and generally have become closer over the plates and forks.

Today, two of us decided it’s been too hot and sticky and wearing to meet this month. The dog days are upon us and we’re plumb tuckered. Aside from that, she is trying to muster the courage and energy to deal with clearing out her mother’s home. Mama had a freak fall last year and did not survive a broken neck. It’s been so rough because her daughter has been racked with guilt. And so we talked about the experience of caring for elderly parents - ours and that of our friends who are going through it as well. We talked about the feelings of guilt when we don’t do everything just right and the reluctance to let go when it’s time to do so.

When I hung up a few hours later, I realized what we have is a small group ministry. I have no doubt that this group of cooks will rally around when a couple of our older members begin to need help. I have no doubt that any more family tragedies or deaths will be made less lonely by the loving and generous presence of these women. And I know that when we meet in September, we will have a whole lot of catching up to do. This is a fine way to get my Italian mamma fix.

31 July 2010

I think hell has frozen over. BGF has announced on his blog (rossiferous.blogspot.com) that he has forsaken Radio Shack. His reasoning is 100% BGF: they have quit carrying parts.

Parts are an integral piece in the life of a DIYer. I myself have a long history of parts procurement, and we aren’t just talking about those belonging to a formerly live hen. And, no, parts ain’t parts. There are parts and there are parts.

For an electronics nut like BFG, Radio Shack represented the ultimate in his creative experience. As he so cogently pointed out, he’d study the catalog for what he needed and then go to the retail store to see it in person and make sure it was what he wanted. That’s an embellishment of what he actually wrote, but it’s what all DIYers do, if they have the opportunity. Radio Shack offered a legendary tightwad such as himself the quality and value he needed for all his electronic projects. However, some marketing “genius” decided the margin was too low for them to continue to sell parts, and they began to phase them out.

In our current economy when folks are increasingly turning to fixing rather than pitching, it might be a dumb move. I’m no economist, nor an expert on business, but it seems to me that parts would be a really good thing to be selling right about now.

My parts experiences were shaped by the friendly counter guys at Sieg’s. My dad always needed parts, and I’d get to jump in the truck and roar downtown with him. I loved Sieg’s. They had these tall counter stools where the customers perched (all except my dad who was always in a hurry), and immense catalogues through which the counter guys would thumb while they looked up the part number. When I was older and drove, I got sent for parts. I still loved the place…it had the scent of rubber, oil and grease. I would run into my Uncle Tony in there, or other people who would ask me what The Mayor of North LaSalle was up to. The counter guys were very kind - invariably, they were still on the phone with him as I walked in the door and we’d have a good laugh as they rolled their eyes and nodded their heads at me. I might walk out with a couple of cans of Rust-o-Leum or a box of bolts, wiper blades or some oddly shaped pins for holding washers in place. It was an incredible place and it is no more.

So the demise of The Shack’s parts business is sad to me, too. I am feeling BFG’s pain as all the good places that used to cater to DIYers are dwindling. I find that my own parts stores are also getting too upscale and retail-y.

Williams-Sonoma used to offer unique gadgets for the cook. Tools that made certain jobs easier. My rice cooker was a really expensive, but really fabulous find back in the 1980s. Mine looks utterly primitive next to the fabulous fuzzy logic ones I got for my family members a few Christmases ago, but in terms of making rice, it remains the bomb.

I pored over those catalogues and would plan a trip to the store when I visited Chicago each summer. List in hand, I examined all the items I had been lusting after. In some cases, I’d decide against them, but it had been after a thorough examination and a lot of questions asked of the staff. More often than not, it involved walking out with a very large and very full shopping bag of specialty pans or tools. The current catalogues are more “lifestyle” in nature - there is more in the way of decorative stuff than there is in actual stuff with which to cook, and they don’t include recipes to inspire one to buy like they used to.

BFG pointed out that when Sears parted ways with its big, fat catalogue, they pretty much blew it in terms of their business plan. Same went for Monkey Wards. Penney’s seems to be holding their own. When I go to KMart, I’m not looking to buy Craftsman tools or Kenmore appliances, so I resent that particular retail intrusion. I also don’t want to see the same items in either store, such as the patio furniture. KMart isn’t benefiting by the Sears price bracket - it’s supposed to be cheaper.

I know it’s a sign of old age to be mourning the loss of these kinds of things, but I also think it’s a shame that younger people aren’t learning how to rig their own electronics with universal parts. In the long run, they are going to dump a lot more stuff into the landfill - stuff they could have fixed on the cheap.

For now, I’m thinking I should bring him a big Grainger catalogue. I wonder if it would bring him any comfort.

28 July 2010

It’s been a hot, dry July and between running the sprinkler and sorting books, we managed to attend a Unitarian Universalist summer gathering for a week. Afterward, BGP (Best Gal Pal) and I had some time to ourselves to review some recent incidents in our respective lives. There were so many commonalities that it was a bit on the spooky side, but at the same time, it was so validating to have someone else nod vigorously and say out loud, “I know exactly what you mean.” One of the things that I’ve been thinking about since then has to do with how we are perceived within certain circles.

For example, as an employee in the city school division, I know I was perceived as difficult, and probably unmanageable. This in spite of the fact that I always did what I was told and reports were completed thoroughly, on time, and with no runs, drips nor errors. I know I was good at what I did because I was persnickety about conducting pre and post tests to measure the progress of the children. Okay, I can admit to loving the process of diagnosing and correcting reading difficulties, and analyzing the informal reading inventories, and later the additional spelling stage inventory I administered. Thanks to that, I had empirical evidence that I was good, and every year I had the data to show just how good. The longer I did it, the better I got.

But for me to say, in certain circles, that I was damn stellar at the job could come off as arrogant and offensive. Never mind I had the data to back up my claims. It was just the idea that I could sit there, giggle, and say, “Oh, yeah. I’m really good at this. I love doing it, I always get results and if I don’t, it’s because there is a deeper learning issue that requires a different set of teaching skills and knowledge.” My BGP was also exceedingly good at what she did. The unfortunate problem was that she was overshadowed by an ex-husband who was doing the same job, who shifted the balance of work onto her, and then had the nerve to tell others that she didn’t know what she was doing. The woman who followed her in her job can tell you a whole different story, and so can I.

Recently she has been handling a sticky, tricky set of circumstances and with her usual attention to every little detail, she has managed to paint herself into a corner. The thing is, the paint is dry now and she wants to leave the corner. But those with whom she has been attempting to conduct a cooperative working situation don’t hear what she is saying. When she says, “I need to step away from this because the decision needs to be made apart from me,” they hear “I can’t deal with this any more.” That may be partly true, but it isn’t the message. They eliminated the key piece that I just eliminated in recounting the incident, which is, “I’m afraid that [our loved one] is going to base a decision on what [s/he] thinks I want to hear, rather than on what [s/he] really wants. I need to step away and let you all help with this so that I am no longer the issue and you can focus the attention on genuine needs.”  Nowhere in there did she say, “I can’t deal with this.”

I heard her, but that’s because I was listening. Even the sib who questioned her endlessly to be sure there was complete comprehension has some holes in understanding. I’m left to ask, “What the hell is so hard about what she told you?” And yet, I have been in the same boat.

Many years ago, I worked my way through Julie Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.  In the process, I had an epiphany when a buried memory came out. The remark that was made to me was this: Well, you can’t make a living as an artist. It really hurt and instead of getting mean and trying to disprove it, I withdrew and quit doing art during the years when I should have kept it up in order to get better. I concluded I must not have been any good.

In the interim, I have honed my hand work, creating some mighty nice pieces of needlework. It satisfied my urge to create and everyone got lovely handmade gifts over the years. Recently, I recounted the above statement to a woman that I had always looked up to and tried to emulate. She responded, “Well, she knew how hard it was for me to find jobs.”

Same statement, two different interpretations. Then it hit me, I don’t ever recall her trying to do art and have shows or sell it. “Hmmmm,” I thought, “hmmmmm.” I heard, “you aren’t good enough,” and she heard, “it’s just too hard.”

What it all boils down to is that what we say and what we intend may not be what is heard or understood. I made a beautiful card that I sent along. It was designed specifically for that person, and it turned out really well. The response was that it was beautiful, but the added, “we kept looking at it and turning it over because we couldn’t believe you made it” was troublesome. There were two ways to interpret that. One was that they couldn’t believe that I had made such a great thing - in spite of all the fabulous handmade things they’d gotten over the years. The other was that it was so skillfully done it was hard to believe it was handmade.

We live in an age when a carelessly tapped out message in an email can come across as rude and inappropriate, depending on the recipient’s point of view. It’s hard enough to keep on the straight and narrow in face to face conversations, but emails and texts have complicated it far beyond anyone’s comfort zone. Young people are particularly cavalier in these things and they often forget to take into account the recipient of the message. They fail to include words that indicate respect for their elders. Many are the conversations of parents who had had to haul their young’uns up by the short hairs for those kinds of infractions. However, kids learn by what they observe.

Too often their elders are not modeling the kind of behavior they want their children to emulate. The cell phone gets answered at the dinner table, for example. They blab on the phone while they are careening down the interstate and yet they tell their teens they’d better not be doing that. It’s sort of like my mom’s constant statement: don’t do what I do, do what I tell you. Somehow I think I was more easily intimidated by my mother than today’s kids are by theirs!  I didn’t drink until I was 21 and I sure as hell didn’t try smoking.

The lesson in all this is that we need to be mindful of the act of really listening. We need to hear ALL of what we are being told, not just the Cliff Notes. And even then, we must remember that when we speak, our listeners, no matter how assiduously they use their ears, may not hear what we say. “You aren’t good enough” is a lot different from “it’s awfully hard.” When we write, we need to pay attention to our audience. “I can get somebody else” typed to an elder is rude and disrespectful. Type it to a contemporary and it’s a whole different story. It’s all in the eyes and ears of the beholder and no matter how easy it gets to stay connected and to communicate in a nano-second, it still pays to attend to the conventions that make for civilized and respectful communication.

Happy Independence Day!

I was engaging in some uniquely American activities today and one of those gave me a little time to sit still and ponder the nature of a holiday such as this. I’d made some baked beans with root beer from this month’s issue of Bon Appetit, the brats were simmering in Schlitz (the beer that made Milwaukee famous) with onion slices, and I was sitting on the front steps shucking corn. How much more American can you get? Oh, yeah, and I had a glass of iced tea on the table with the Sunday crossword that was July 4th themed.

We also made a run to the hardware store, where there was an entire wall given over to flags, flag poles and the like. The hardware store is definitely an all-American institution, and in spite of loving our large home centers, it is to the hardware store that we head when we have a peculiar problem to fix.  Not only are the people who work there knowledgeable, but there are also the other people in there who have had the same problem and are happy to share their solutions. It is community at its finest.

Anyway, there is no flag flying from our house. Neither of us is into flaunting our patriotism. Big Kitty is a vet, after all. I really don’t think he has anything to prove in that department. But our across the street neighbor has suddenly sprouted a flagpole next to her front stoop, which is rather odd. She doesn’t leave her house - ever - and in all these years, she has never given in to the fad of flying banners that proclaim the household’s college ties, the seasons, or even anything remotely interesting like a custom made flag. Now here is where my pickiness comes into play. I have this thing about people who don’t mind the rules about flag flying.

My next door neighbor - the one with the falling down house and weedlot for a yard - had one that became so utterly tattered and disgusting that I really wanted to rip it down and call the Boy Scouts. I said that one day at work and the other people at the table looked at me like I was crazy. Come to find out, none of them ever paid the slightest bit of attention to the condition of Old Glory, nor did they know you aren’t supposed to fly her at night unless she has a spotlight on her. If she gets frayed, you need to take her down, fold her properly and call the Boy Scouts or the local American Legion to take her for a proper send-off.

So here is my neighbor across the street with a new flagpole with her patriotic symbol gently flapping in the breeze. There is no spotlight and it hasn’t come down at night. She was a young hottie during WWII, so you’d think she’d have some idea. They used to teach this stuff in school, y’know.

Myself, I’ve never gotten into the whole flag-waving thing. My excitement over the Fourth of July is pretty low-key. Besides the opportunity to make brats the way Hare’s Uncle Bob made them at his place on Lake Geneva (that’s Wisconsin, folks), I see this as a day to reflect on what is important about being an American. As I shucked corn, the manna of the Midwest, I thought about fireworks and how as much as I like them, we’ve never gone to see them. One year we saw them from step-father’s window at the hospital, which was a great vantage point. But we’ve never gone to the trouble of packing ourselves off to see them. My darling niece adores fireworks, so whenever we were visiting Dad around the 4th, we were absolutely certain to go to Peru and watch them over the river. Very cool.

Then I got to thinking about why my grandfather insisted that his family speak English, “because we are in America,” and yet he never became a citizen. The grandmother who always talked about The Old Country had naturalized and never missed an opportunity to vote. My father worked in the Navy Yards in Charleston, SC during the war, and then in the Seneca Shipyards in Illinois, where they made tanks. His brother and my mother’s brother served in the Army. One was in the European Theater and the other in the Pacific. Uncle Joe was wounded at Guadalcanal. After reading about it in history class, I was amazed my handsome uncle made it home with only shrapnel in his foot. I often wondered what kind of “shrapnel” disturbed his sleep at night. Uncle Earl served in Korea and is wont to get misty-eyed over that experience. Uncle Cookie served on the U.S.S. Washington as, you guessed it, a cook. He finds it easier to bake cakes for 2500 crewmen than for a family of five!

We all have stories that come from our families’ experiences as Americans. As parts of our country duke it out over immigrants, I become saddened. None of my people came here with any of the folderol we now have. In 1905 there weren’t green cards or visas. People came here, they got miserably low-paying jobs doing the work that the “real Americans” would not be caught dead doing, and they somehow managed to make it economically, even through the Depression. They struggled to learn English and some still spoke their first language at home.

So what’s so different about the people who sneak into our country, look for those low-paying jobs that “real Americans” wouldn’t be caught dead doing, and who contribute positively to our economy? Walk into the Walmart on a Sunday….the people who are neat, clean, and with their families…mother, father and adorable children… are the Latinos, not the “real Americans.” The people who work from morning until late at night are the Asians, not the “real Americans.”

This is Independence Day and the people who come here looking for opportunity know a good thing when they see it. The rest of us should take heed. There is nothing wrong with people who honor their heritage by speaking their first language while they struggle to learn English. Heaven knows, most of them do better at it than the “real Americans” who never bothered to pay attention to subject verb agreement in English class. This is the sort of thing we should be celebrating on a day like today. That we have the kind of country that other people would give anything to be a part of.

It’s time to put the brats on the grill. They can go back into the beer after they’re browned. Yep. All-American food for an Italian-Slovenian-American and a Swedish-Scots Irish-French-American. It’s the U.N. here on Snob Crick and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

22 June 2010

Just when I think the Star City’s council can’t possibly do anything more unbelievable, they prove me wrong. In their latest move, they voted 6 - 1 to allow for a conservation easement of our beloved Mill Mountain, site of the magnificent, tacky and adored neon star. But the option they voted for left out land that could be used for development.

Hizzoner da Mare was the lone dissenting vote, and if the paper and their bias against the poor guy can be believed, he was completely flummoxed by the way the vote went.

If this was Chicago, I would say that he didn’t get the memo that the others got and that the others were on the take.

For those of us who are not in favor of any hint of possible development of that area, their vote was a black mark not to be forgotten at election time. Two of them aren’t returning to council when they begin the new cycle, so they don’t care, but, interestingly enough, those two touted themselves as the conservationists and green to the core.

Well, they lied, didn’t they? The only one who voted the way he said he would vote when he won re-election was the mayor. He didn’t lie.

12 June 2010

It all started out innocently enough. I was gone for a few days and was away from my computer. On the way home, I was thinking about some things I needed to handle and wondered if any further info had come over the wires, so to speak. A day or so later, I was with book group and our leader said she’d been totally unable to log onto her emails account. “Eegad!” I thought.

Then I realized that wasn’t such a tragedy. Not long ago I had ignored the computer for an entire weekend. I’d just done without it for two and a half days and the world did not come crashing around my ears. In the past couple of days, I’d had a thoroughly unsatisfactory email exchange that cause me to go outside and inflict a lot of damage to some hapless noxious weeds. “What, ” I wondered, “would be the harm in doing what others manage to do?” That is, remain out of electronic touch.

Some of us just can’t do it. How many times have you, Dear Reader, had to put up with me railing against blabbing on the phone while driving? I continue to bitch at my best gal pal about her propensity for getting on the phone when she gets behind the wheel. She loses focus badly enough when she’s on terra firma! Poor Shannon, clipping along on a highway and bored, has caught hell from me for the same offense. BGF is an incorrigible repeat offender. The only one with any sense is Big Kitty who will tell the caller he’ll call right back. He then pulls his van to the curb, a lot, or a wide shoulder, puts the van in Park and returns the call. No lie. He gets downright poufy in the tail about blabbing drivers who are a danger on the road.

Why can’t we be out of reach? What is our problem? And what makes us think we can substitute an email for a voice conversation? I think it’s a combination of cowardice and empty-headedness. Cowardice because we mistakenly think we can avoid hearing something we don’t want to hear, and empty-headedness because sometimes we just hit reply to respond, rather than picking up the phone. I’m guilty of both.

In the case of that email exchange, I should have gotten on the phone… at least then I might have forced the other person to engage, rather than facilitating her blowing me off.

So here is my project. I’m going to limit my computer access. No worries about a cell phone. It’s on so seldom that it doesn’t even figure into my addiction. I haven’t yet nailed down my rules, but as my innocent projects tend to go, it’ll probably get out of hand in short order. What I’m curious to discover is how that will happen! I’m rather enjoying the mystery.

And, as ever, if you have suggestions for the rules of the game, send them along. They’ll be posted — eventually!