Herban Sprawl

31 March 2008

A correspondent from Lexington, Kentucky pointed out that he would be much happier if I had a time/date stamp on my posts. In vain I have gone through the options on this particular template and find no way to add it. I am no technogeek. I guess I sacrificed that when I fell in love with the chair in the hayfield!

I have a few other correspondents who have not received passwords from WordPress in spite of multiple attempts to register. If you are a regular reader who has registered, then I have already approved you for comments. If you haven’t gotten the password, please send me an email. (See ‘Contact me’)

In getting ready to do my research for the student I will be teaching soon, I yanked out my 4 inch thick Word Study notebook. It marked a rather interesting event, actually - my office in the basement had just been finished enough for me to use and I spent a lot of time on the futon sofa wrapped up in an afghan, cat on lap, doing my homework. It was winter then, and six years ago. Holy smokes! That means I have been battling a mess down here for six years!

The House Goddess walked in on Friday and nearly fainted. “It has a floor!” She settled into Gran Ruth’s chair and looked around. “Nice. Now where’d you get a computer desk like that?” Well, six years ago in a close-out at Best Buy. Oops. No help there, but I did send some paper out of here when I gave her the Staples office furniture catalog I didn’t mean to acquire!

Today it’s back to the futon, with that enormous notebook, a pad of paper, my lucky pencil and another cup of espresso. I’ve already caressed my lucky edition of The Howard Street Tutoring Manual, so hopefully the reading gods will guide me.

Darrell Morris, my mentor, used to begin his classes with the family tree of reading researchers. I can trace my lineage back to McGuffy himself, and indeed, I have a slice of the McGuffy Ash Tree, planted by the great man himself, that I can wear as a Cavalier Reading Specialist. So, Saints Henderson, Stauffer, Betts, Gray, etc. etc., up and at ‘em! I need your wisdom today! There is important work to do and I need all the magick you can send me!

We had a ball today at the arboretum. The Herb Society threw its second annual Scarborough Faire and it was bigger and better than last year. We had a great line-up of speakers and activities, plus we added vendors who brought herbs and herbal products to sell. As usual, we had refreshments made by all the great cooks in the Society.

A local greenhouse, Walters’ from Franklin County, sent along something like 52 flats of herbs for us to sell with the unbelievably kind deal of splitting the proceeds with us! Scarborough Faire is a completely free event dedicated to education about our favorite plants, so a little fund raiser like that was quite a bonus.

I volunteered to sell herbs, along with my pal Alice, who is responsible for my addiction. Not only did she sell me my first tarragon plants, but then she taught the classes at the community college where I really learned about these great plants. It was also in the greenhouse at the community college (the site of the arboretum) where I had my Zen experience while transplanting inch high basil seedlings into six-pack cells! She’s never let me live it down!

Helping folks select herbs, answering their questions and generally getting them to buy more plants than they intended is always a fun job. And, I made a friend, Ellis, with whom I plan to celebrate the outcome of the November election!

We nearly froze our fannies today, but we were grateful that, unlike last year, we didn’t get rained on. It was warm in the Star City all week - until today. Our members were incredible, hanging in there all day, warming hands on the tea urns and still giggling about how much fun they’d had!
Big Kitty is suffering from a bad throat, but he soldiered through his talk on Chinese Herbs. Tonight he got chicken soup with noodles. In a while, a Chinese concoction of honey and loquat syrup dissolved in hot water. I hand him this stuff and he dutifully drinks it. With any luck the cough will ease up. If not, more Throat Coat tea!
My personal plan is a hot bath (my bubble baths are the stuff of Herb Society legend) and a sleep-over with Charlie. He is the sole tenant of my childhood Beautyrest but tonight he has to share because one of us is lifting the shingles off the roof and the other needs sleep! I’m getting to the climax of a Lovejoy mystery, so the idea of bubbles, jammies and my book is just the bee’s knees.

This morning’s paper had an interesting picture in it. A group of V.M.I. cadets were present for a speech by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was on the Supreme Court bench when it was determined that as a public institution, V.M.I. either had to admit women or go private if they wanted public funding. Most of the cadets in this picture were asleep.

I won’t even bother to couch my utter disregard for V.M.I. as a fraternity playing around in soldier uniforms, where hazing is de rigueur. When the case was first being argued, I got into it, during a University of Virginia graduate course, with a classmate whose husband was a Brother Rat. My contention was pretty much what the court ruled: if you want public money, then you have to play by the rules. If you want to remain segregated, then you have to go private. Interestingly enough, there was enough alumni money available to fight the gender equality issue in court, but not enough to take them private. As I said to my classmate, “Separate is never equal, whether we’re referring to race or gender.”

Our teacher, a former priest, sat back in his chair and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His mentor, the late Edmund Henderson, had bailed him out of the pokey after a campus sit-in. But the twinkle in his eye spoke volumes.

So the rats were asleep in the auditorium, and they were captured on film and it was published for all the world to see. One wonders whether it was a lack of respect for the woman who had voted to make them accept women into their ranks, or just a refusal to listen and learn.

Justice O’Connor could never be accused of being a total conservative. She was as moderate as they come and she understands the equity issue for women because she was a victim of sexism early in her law career. She made it through Stanford. She had to be pretty bright to manage that in her day! But maybe that’s the problem with the cadets. Maybe their attitude toward women is grudgingly respectful at best. Or perhaps they were up too late in a hazing activity. Whatever the case, there is no excuse for their behavior, and there’s no denying what they did.

The irony is that Justice O’Connor was receiving the Harry F. Byrd Class of 1935 Public Service Award. Harry F. Byrd, the Virginia governor who managed a rather scurrilous machine of Democrats opposed to segregation. Byrd was so against the concept that he wrote the Southern Manifesto in which he condemned the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. He led the losing cause all the way to the point of urging Virginia public schools to close, rather than desegregate. My first two years in the teaching profession were spent in a country elementary school that was built during Byrd’s era of “separate but equal.” Thanks to the liberal injection of funding from Title I., our principal had pulled that little school along very nicely.

My late neighbor, The Colonel, was a V.M.I. alumnus and he once ran for the Senate not because he wanted to be a Senator, he told me, but because he believed fervently that the no opportunity to run against the Byrd machine should ever disregarded. We’re talking 1948 here, long before Brown. I wonder what he would have to say about the somnolent cadets, who were, by the way, both black and white and all male (at least for that picture).

The House Tiger and I share a morning ritual. I have my second shot of espresso with him in the living room. He sits regally on the arm of the loveseat and nudges me to give him a nice neck scratch. He also is extremely interested in whatever I might be eating. Not being much of a breakfast person, in the American sense, my compromise is a piece of whatever I might have baked – tea bread, muffin, cookie, toast – He always gets a tiny taste. He hasn’t been impressed with the lemon pecan buttermilk tea bread and was pleased to note there is only one more slice.

Barney Reed Jr. is his proper name. He has nicknames, though. House Tiger, Mr. Four on the Floor (he hates to be picked up) and Barnabus come to mind. He is a very large cat, with a rather dignified manner. He rarely deigns to engage in the petty squabbles of his siblings, but he definitely holds his own in a rumble. He also chooses to exercise his dominance over Charlie in a rather cellblock sort of way.

He doesn’t sit on laps unless that lap is Big Kitty’s, and it must be a jeans lap. Work pants or sweats or pajama bottoms will not do. It has to be a pair of jeans. He despises summer. Shorts are his enemy. The other requirement is that the lap has to be in front of the computer. He has flirted with a television lap, but can’t quite seem to close the deal.

Under that chunky hauteur lies a marshmallow. His feelings get hurt very easily. He mews like a tiny kitten when he gets picked up. His paws go straight out in four directions, his bulk turns to concrete and he squirms furiously to get loose. Big Kitty has to hold him in order for me to give him a pedicure, and heaven forbid he will ever need medicine! When he gets stuffed into the carrier for the annual trek to Dr. Wilson, he cries all the way to her office.

He didn’t give me much affection until The House Goddess and I rearranged the living room, putting the loveseat in front of the windows, and his radiator. At that point, he appropriated the arm, and we’ve had our morning lovefest ever since. It’s as close to a lap as I’m going to get.

What makes this so tough is his flirtatious tendencies. I mean to tell you, this cat has eyes that put a spaniel’s to shame! He does a little dance and he raises a paw to his cheek and just makes you want to pick him up and cuddle him. On the occasions when I decide to upset his chi, he gets really panicky, running to Big Kitty for sympathy when I put him down. He gets none. Big Kitty does it to him, too!

Every household should have a tiger guarding the front windows – quietly, intently watching for marauders - then he’s out of the office from nine to five for his power nap. Nice work, if you can get it.

I am a little leery of posting this today, but it’s going to eat at me until I write about it, so what the heck?

BGF (Best Guy Friend)’s eldest was born with a soupcon of physical disabilities. I haven’t read the file yet, but so far as I can see, she’s not so bad off in the intellect department. In fact, she’s pretty darn bright. She went all through school, spending an extra year in high school, getting all that youngsters with special needs must have in order to become educated members of society. The one thing the schools seemed unable to deliver on was reading.

The school division in which she was educated does not employ reading specialists. They use a “program” to teach reading. It’s characteristic of the community in general that they would consider themselves above such a need, which is really strange given their drive to have a good school system. However, I spent most of my career teaching inner city kids in a school division that not only added reading specialists, but paid for the coursework for classroom teachers to get masters degrees in reading. To say they took it seriously is an understatement.

So, armed with a special diploma, special needs, after all – she goes to the center up the valley where she spent a couple of months learning all sorts of practical skills. They released her and advised that the school division be told they would have to attend to her reading deficiencies. Well, sure, but they don’t have anyone on staff who can teach a young woman with them!

Her dad is no slouch. He’s been grousing about this issue for years, and I’ve patiently waited for the explosive phone call. It finally came. It took me all of two seconds to say of course I’ll work with her! I’d never leave one of my own in the lurch, after all.

So for the past two days, I have been running her through my gamut of tests. This is not without a great deal of trepidation on my part, having left teaching five years ago and having the soon-to-expire certificate to show for it! But it wasn’t long before I got my groove back and today I finished the part where she read and I marked her errors and asked her comprehension questions.

I have two observations to make. The first is that she’s a classic word caller. That’s a person who can read orally, lickety-split, and doesn’t remember a dratted thing about the selection. The second is that her knowledge of word structure is so bad that I don’t understand how she could read the selections I handed her! I’ve even factored in her articulation issues, because she does the best she can and she really worked hard at making sure I could understand her. (That says a lot about her understanding of her own limitations. Mighty important and she hits homers on that kind of pitch.)

And now comes the big, fat question for that school division: Isn’t it time y’all got down off that big damn pedestal y’all done hoisted your sorry butts onto and faced the fact that you are graduating children who cannot read worth a tinker’s damn?

Well, okay, I guess I have another one for them: How can you, in good conscience, ignore The Virginia Studies and why are you so stubborn as to continue to use a canned ‘program’ when you could employ that research to make a pretty good school division nothing short of stellar? I now rest my case - but not before I design an instructional program for her that will make them weep!

There was a piece in yesterday’s paper about a mother who had moved her family out of Washington, D.C. into Maryland so they could go to school without all the distractions of an urban neighborhood. It was a good idea in that her kids liked their new school and were doing well. There was one hitch in the whole plan. Turns out the school and town had some real issues with racism. Suddenly, her daughters, who were churning out good grades and enjoying the extracurricular activities, were the subjects of racial taunting and waving of the Confederate flag. They got kind of subdued after that, but they kept on keeping on. The last straw was when they saw someone outside their house, taking pictures.

The school tried to bring about some peace, but the flag-waving continued. One mother went so far as to declare that the Confederate flag was part of her son’s heritage.

I want it understood up front that my family had no part in that mess from 1860-1864, nor did they have any part in the Jim Crow nonsense. They were busy harvesting olives and grapes in the north of Italy, and growing fruit in the groves of Sicily. They were raising goats and farming in the mountains near Trieste. They didn’t get here until just after the turn of the last century. So what I am about to say is colored by their experience.

When they got here, like other immigrants, they learned quickly that they had to learn to speak English in short order, and in order to not be kept on the bottom rung forever, they had to leave behind their culture.

I want to focus on that idea of leaving behind a culture in order to be able to function in a civilized fashion in a civilized society. My grandfather was in the position of leaving behind a heritage of Tuscan literature, art and science – he could quote Danté and even named my mother for a Danté character. He could sing the entirety of Rigoletto. He left behind the art of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, not to mention the scientific feats of Gallileo and Brunelleschi’s dome. This was the heritage he had to leave behind in order to become Americanized.

The heritage of the Confederate States of America is a much less honorable one, when you look at what it really stood for. There are those who insist it had nothing to do with slavery, but rather states’ rights. Well, yeah, and the states’ rights they particularly wanted to preserve included the use of slaves to run to massive rice plantations, cotton plantations, tobacco farms, sugar cane plantations…

So now you have this group of people who were descended from those too poor to afford slaves defending a heritage that has highly questionable morality, especially in the sense of Christian morality, which is usually part of the argument for some strange reason. From the vantage point of an outside observer, it looks to me like the only heritage those people want to preserve is the tenuous one that helps them believe they are better than their black brethren. Hmm That doesn’t feel very Christ-like to me.

And to help them demonstrate their superiority, and to cling to their heritage, they terrorize a couple of black girls who are going to school, doing their homework, playing in the band, and doing all the things a normal high school kid should be doing.

These are the same people who loudly proclaim that immigrants need to “talk ‘merican.” (I’ll leave the argument for whose English for another time!) They despise bi-lingual signage and complain about welfare for immigrants. Uh, the immigrants I see around town are all gainfully employed, but again, that’s for another time.

Attilio Pisaneschi had to leave behind his heritage of a beautiful language, the art, music, literature and architecture of Italy. Unlike some of the folks whose heritage involves the inability to accept that they lost a war over slavery, he got over it and made sure his kids spoke English correctly and went to school. His grandkids are college graduates.

Sometimes you just have to leave your heritage behind – like the polyester leisure suits, patent leather platform oxfords, Confederate flag belt buckles and Elvis sideburns.

We rolled out of here in short order yesterday morning. Stella had to slosh on a quick coat of nail polish and dump out the ballast in her purse and since Clarice had already had the tanker back up to the Cadillac, we were on our way. It was a lovely day – the fields which General Grant had wanted to trash were green already, and everything was looking fresh. We were at Rocky’s, and I was mourning the loss of the bins of junk flatware as we wandered through the antique section. And then it happened.

I had solemnly informed Clarice that there were only three things that would make me part with my money and planned to return home empty-handed. Unfortunately, that idea went up in smoke when I spied a Wedgwood Lavender on Cream Color teapot with the correct ruffle detail to match my mother’s dishes. I approached the thing with a great deal of fear. A fool for dishes and her money are soon parted, you know.

I slid open the case and gently extricated the filthy thing. I examined it all around. It was large and in spite of its rather sad layer of grime, it was clear it had never brewed tea. There were no discernible stains, chips or cracks. The appliquéd grape vines had some minute breaks, but that was normal with the pattern. It appeared to be just fine and the price was so cheap that I really had to wonder.

I carted it around as we finished touring that part of the complex and then settled up. I was elated! Replacements had wanted four times as much for a smaller teapot!

We tooled down historic Lee Highway, stopping at a shop that had parking in the rear. It also had gardens to die for! The owners had constructed an arbor from architectural salvage like columns and gingerbread. They’d also gussied up a garden dependency in like manner. It was so picturesque that I took a few pictures. Clarice was amused that I declared it had to be the work of a pair of gay antique dealers. No straight people could do such creative work! We went inside. It was a couple all right- a he and she couple, to boot, and Clarice stifled himself nicely. They had primitives and we hied on out of there with dispatch! Neither of us gets excited about primitives.

In Verona, we decided to check out The Factory Antique Mall. It was so huge we gasped! But we sucked it up and did our level best to see most of it. At one point I think we were both in Heisey and Fostoria glass overload. It was time to head back down the pike.

And that’s when we realized that people who drive Tahoe XLs and the like need to have a commercial driver’s license. These people do not know how to handle large trucks and they are completely distracted the whole time they are behind the wheel. The Cadillac is the size of the U.S.S. Washington, to be sure, but it can’t mow over a half dozen Ford Foci like a Sherman tank. We endured two speedy little motorcyclettes with hiphuggered teeny-boppers hanging onto their boyfriends for dear life – we almost overdosed on the testosterone vapor as they veered in and out between the cars only to swerve onto the exit ramp barely five yards later.

Then there was the Buick from Pennsylvania that just had to carve five seconds off his driving time by shooting in front of us, nearly causing a three-car pile-up. There were a number of troopers out there, and they were busy. Too bad they didn’t nail any of the fools we had to contend with.

We took a break, he ran an errand, I scrubbed the teapot with glee and emailed my sister with the good news, and then we met up for dinner. And that’s when Clarice, the best fish godfather of them all, bestowed us with a lavender betta. He’s small and Clarice swears Bud was this size when he first came to live with us, but we aren’t so sure. Big Kitty named him Sal. Salvatore da Betta. I call him Sally. He’s checking out his bowl, hanging in the roots and generally getting acquainted with the new digs. I hope he’s happy - we certainly are! Thanks, Clar!

The Shenandoah Valley is in trouble. Clarice and Stella are hitting the road this morning. The Cadillac will pull up promptly at 9:00 a.m. and The Girls are off on one of their days of infamy.

Clarice heard about a bunch of antique shops up near Verona, and Stella is awfully fond of digging through the reject bins at Rocky’s in Weyer’s Cave. For you non-Va-ians, that’s we’res cave. It’s one of those perplexing pronunciations like Byewna Vista or Pewlaski - Stanton for Staunton isn’t so bad, actually, given some of those others, but you get the idee.

Anyway, Clarice may need to take possession of Stella’s Visa card, but then again, maybe not. Stella’s been looking around her digs and getting awfully tired of so much stuff. The Goodwill box has seen a lot of action since early fall, and now is no time to be backsliding.

Her awfiss/studio, honest-to-Goddess, has a clear floor for the first time in over a year. Well, except for the file box next to her desk and the little bitty pile next to the futon where no one but Barney ever lurks anyway. Still and all, it’s been a big push to get it clean, and the finish line is in sight. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. There is hope.

So what will we be hunting for? Nuttin’ as the Mayor of North LaSalle would say. Consider it something like a museum jaunt. We’re in a recession, after all. We have to do our part to make sure the merchants get real!

And now Stella must go perform her ablutions and spackle and paint her face.

“On the road again…”

Hello. My name is Auntie. I am a Hoarder.

If there was a twelve-step group for pack rats, Big Kitty and I would have to attend. We’re incorrigible. My particular weakness is paper, especially magazine articles, and most especially recipes.

The people who gather around our dining room table have no quibble with my recipe collecting as they are the happy recipients of my experiments, but my dirty little secret is that I have file boxes full of the stuff and no clue as to what I’ve been saving!

As I have begun the agonizingly slow process of sorting through the stuff, I realized how far I’d come as a cook. I also was surprised at the articles I had saved. For instance, one was titled For Peanut Butter Lovers. I hate peanut butter. I hate peanuts. Why on earth would I have saved that? Well, I thought, perhaps there was a recipe for peanut butter ice cream or frozen peanut butter pie. I admit to getting a taste for those once every five years or so. No, the article didn’t even have those. I shrugged and tossed it into the recycle box. The next odd article was one on cheesecake. If I am a guest and cheesecake is the dessert, I smile and accept a mere sliver and I never finish it. Cheesecake doesn’t turn my prop. Why in heaven’s name did I save an article on cheesecake when I have never really liked it? Into the recycle bin…

But what is very telling is how effectively I have, over the years of my periodic weeding out sessions, eliminated the Southern Living recipes. When I first moved to the south, Southern Living was required reading. Then one day I realized it was just chock full of over-stuffed rooms with lots and lots of frou-frou, a bazillion and one Queen Anne or Chippendale dining rooms, and enough floral wallpaper to cover the Pentagon. When my subscription ran out it was a blessing.

Yesterday I discovered a cache of Southern Living recipes. I glanced through them and tossed most of them. Shortening and a lot of gummy stuff in cans were ingredients. We don’t eat that way. I can honestly say I haven’t used a can of that goop known as cream of mushroom soup since the seventies, and that was for beer and cheese soup made in the crockpot. Ick.

The recycle box is getting chubby and my files are thinning. It’s awfully nice. The recipes are fewer, but they are ones that I may eventually make, or ones from which I will steal a basic idea and embellish to suit the way we eat.

It’s good to acknowledge that pack rattiness has some value, but it’s better to realize that it has to be kept under control. Changing tastes and a willingness to eliminate stuff accordingly is huge, but I still need some recipes to help me use up all the buttermilk left over from the soda bread.

There is serendipity in the air. My latest passport came in the mail, followed by my old one. I groused a lot about the waste of two envelopes and the additional postage when they could have sent both in one package and have been done with it. I flipped through the old one – 10-04-98 Fiumicino.

Ten years ago on April 10^th, I followed Anna, mesmerized, through the airport at Rome. And for the next week, I happily walked everywhere, taking in the sights, absorbing the feel of this ancient city and reveling in the fact that although I couldn’t call up enough vocabulary to converse, I was able to understand more than I had expected.

The trip to Firenze sealed the deal. This was the land my grandfather wove stories about as he tended his doves or the grapevines. Firenze was the big city where everything was exquisitely cultured. He sang la donna é nobile as he repaired his children’s shoes or weeded the garden. As I finger my expired passport, I recall that moment in Firenze when I realized I felt so completely at home.

To my grandfather’s generation, the act of assimilation was taken very seriously, and so much so that he forbade the use of his native language in their home. Listening to Florentines speaking, I wondered what he might have sounded like and felt sorry that he found it necessary to leave behind his best means of expression.

The April issue of Gourmet has arrived in the mail. It is devoted entirely to the cuisine and wines of Italy, and not all the usual haunts, either. They traveled to little known nooks and crannies where the food is local and seasonal. That’s the way Italians eat. If artichokes are in season, they make artichoke dishes. When the blood oranges arrive in the market, they eat blood oranges.

Our obsession with eating whatever it is we like, at whatever season it happens to be, is the outgrowth of the period in American history when the robber barons had all manner of out-of-season delicacies shipped by rail to their mansions. The masses aspired to that and the result is food that does not have the intensity of flavor, nor the nutrients for that matter. Our bad habits have bred generations of grocery checkers who haven’t a clue as to the different vegetables or fruits that they pass over the scanner. Few have the gustatory temerity to sample any of these interesting foods, either.

BubbaC’s kids are a prime example: it has to come out of a box or a can. We won’t discuss his aversion to chicken – he has his reasons.

The pages show the Italy that Anna knows. The places that her family took her, the foods they ate as they traveled. Page 17 in my old passport makes me think of a new pair of walking shoes, scores of wooden flats bearing forced bulbs, pots of spring shrubbery and a St. Peter’s Square prepared for the aged and venerated il papa’s Easter mass.

Right now she’s likely enjoying dove cake every morning with her coffee, and I’ll just bet Zia is squeezing blood oranges so Larry gets his vitamin C. I think I’ll put on Roman Holiday this afternoon while I work on a project. I need to say hello to Nonna Fugali, the gray-haired regal-looking extra who walks past the Spanish Steps in the ice cream cone scene.