Photo by Julie Seyler.
Fruit on meat.
The Saturday Blog: Savory
19 Saturday Oct 2013
Posted in Art
Author Archives: Lois DeSocio
Keep Your Passion Hat On …
18 Friday Oct 2013
Posted in Art
Tags
Drawing by Julie Seyler.
While hormones are finite, passion is infinite. Don’t let it get away.
Goodbye Bay Leaf
16 Wednesday Oct 2013
Posted in Food
Gone and forgotten.
Recently, I decided to mom-up and make something nostalgic and yummy for my two sons, who were both expected over for dinner. Bon Appetit’s Chicken Spaghetti from a 1990-something, free little recipe book, was their very, very, most-favorite, spicy, noodley meal since .. forever.
But what evolved into a mini-mishap wasn’t that neither one of them remembered that Chicken Spaghetti was their very, very, most-favorite, spicy, noodley meal since forever. It was that I was out of ingredient number nine – one bay leaf. While part of the fun of cooking for me is putting my own twisted spin and spice on recipes – I tweak and jiggle them as a rule (pretzels for bread crumbs, potatoes for flour, sherry for chicken broth), I’ve never messed with a bay leaf.
Even though there is no discernible flavor, that it hurts to bite it, and all recipes demand that it be removed before serving (I have secretly pummeled a bunch of them and tried to pass them off as oregano, only to spit them out throughout the meal), I figure its inclusion in so many recipes means that it must offer something so subtle, so mysterious, so necessary! that I, as a human, wouldn’t know what the recipe was missing until a bay leaf was missing.
The other ingredients in the recipe must somehow play off the fragrant and floating bay leaf, in a way that is transcendental, mystical, and divine – like God. (There is no substitute.) And to leave out the one bay leaf from Chicken Spaghetti felt shiftless. Indolent. And far, far worse than if I leave out the chicken. Or the spaghetti.
But I took an about-face that night. I didn’t want to run out to the store just because I ran out of bay leaves, as I’ve done in the past. After all, if they are so subtle, why doesn’t its cryptic force amp-up if I throw in seven – or ten? Yes, they smell good, but the smell is immediately usurped by the other stuff in the pot – like tomatoes, meat – lemon! Own up, bay leaf. What’s your point? And why do I need you?
You don’t sweeten, spice or thicken. Are you just a team player? Do you bring out the best in a sprig of thyme? Or a sage leaf? You are a “classic” in a bouquet garni, alongside other fragrant and flavorful herbs, and, I’m guessing, it’s because they are tied and netted to you, that they must also be tossed from the finished sauce.
So in the spirit of being a middle-aged free-to-be, I had decided that night to no longer buckle to the bay leaf. That night, I substituted it with mounds of frozen kale, of which I had pounds stored for weeks in my freezer. I’ve learned that kale can be cooked to death, and those mounds all ultimately boiled down to the size of about three stacked bay leaves. And you can eat it.
So even though my kids had no memory of the Chicken Spaghetti of the past. There were no complaints about no bay leaf.
Billy Crystal’s Book for Boomers: Buy It. You’ll Like It
14 Monday Oct 2013
Posted in Men
I think that one of the aims of this blog should be to point out things that we over-50s are likely to enjoy. Along those lines, Billy Crystal has written a book that I think perfectly captures what life is like after 50. It’s called, “Still Foolin’ ‘Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys?” I recommend it to everyone who, in Crystal’s words, “can still do everything they did at age 30 if only they could remember what those things are.”
If you consider aging Baby Boomers to all be occupants of the same classroom of life, then Billy Crystal is our class clown. He has been the voice of our generation through his memorable years on Saturday Night Live to his classic movies like “City Slickers,” “When Harry Met Sally,” and “Forget Paris,” to his brilliant stints as host of the Academy Awards. Now at age 65, he is the prototypical Baby Boomer – having grown up in the New York suburbs watching Officer Joe Bolton on Channel 11.
Like the writers in this blog, Crystal pulls no punches when discussing the effects of aging. He tells us, “During the past year, things started to grow on me where they shouldn’t. My ass looks like the bottom of a boat.” He says that he still is interested in looking at 20-something women, but now they’re out of focus and, “by the time I get my glasses on, they’re gone.” He laments that these days when he says, “dinner’s on me” he means it literally. He notes that age has made him feel cold most of the time, and he’s starting to think that global warming isn’t such a bad thing.
Billy spends an entire hilarious chapter on senior sex (you’ll have to read the book for details). I’ll just say that he is as candid about this aspect of life after 50 as any other. He also spends some time talking about the after-50 problem of staying awake at the movies or at Broadway shows. Ultimately, I found myself nodding my head in agreement while listening to the audio book. By the way, if you’re into audio books, that is the best way to experience this work because Billy reads it himself and the entire book is like a long stand-up comedy show.
I think the most surprising thing about this book is how well-written it is. It is not hyperbole to compare the writing style with Mark Twain’s. It’s that good. Billy’s line that, “I sleep like a baby. I’m up every two hours,” could have come from the pen of Twain. But ultimately, what makes the book so attractive to the over-50 audience is its sincerity and truth. When Billy talks about his insomnia, it’s something that most of us can relate to. And that’s the key to good humor writing.
For example, Crystal spends a chapter on what he worries about these days. Among many other things, he says, “I worry that someday my kids will look down on me and say: “‘I changed him last time. Now it’s your turn.’”
The truth can sometimes make you wince, but the trick is to always stay positive. We can draw inspiration from one of Billy Crystal’s famous characters. No matter the effects of aging – “You look wonderful!”
My New Kitchen is “Cookin'”
11 Friday Oct 2013
Posted in Concepts
No room for a broom, but aura-aplenty.
I’ve lived long enough to accept that change is assured. Not the kind of change that comes about from restlessness – as it does when we are younger, when we choose change with abandon and ardor – but midlife change that can come with less renewal, and more fallout. Losing the sustaining comfort of familiar to the uneasiness of foreign can now hit with a punch-in-the-gut force that can sideline the most resilient among us. It could be the death of someone you love. Or divorce. Independence and self-reliance can be snuffed out because of illness, or reduced physical capacity. Unwelcome adjustments may have to be made because careers are dwindling and the financial safety net has been pocked.
Midlife is a letting-go part of life. There’s much saying goodbye to familiar.
A month ago yesterday, I moved from my beloved family house to my own apartment. A lot of my familiar has been plucked and tossed since that move. For the first time in 30 years, I’m living in space that is less mine. (I have to share stairways, elevators, walls, floors, a laundry room, the front door … toilet flushes.) In the beginning, time would sometimes stand so still at random moments – I could be driving, walking my dog, sleeping – that I would be jolted into an uneasy awareness at the reality of all that was, and all that is no longer – the familiar was conspicuously absent.
But I am also a lover of change. I will throw myself into the deep end, and find my way up – smiling. So, while my recent move (and accompanying fallout) has been unnerving at times, I’ve been adjusting spectacularly to the new everything …
… except the kitchen. Yes – you can mess with my familiar. Take my marriage! Bye! to my beautiful (big sniff) babies. Who needs a back yard? I no longer need shovels. And privacy is for the dead.
But don’t take my big old kitchen. My old kitchen owned my aura. It was my nimbus – hanging over me with “home.” It’s where my children would rush to after school. It’s where their scraped knees were bandaged, and stomaches nourished. They would do their homework in the kitchen, and recently, as young men, would gather with their friends over a beer. There was a corner the size of a closet for the shoes of a family of four. It’s where the party began, and usually stayed. It could be set aglow with a dozen candelabras on the counters. Holidays, birthdays, summer nights, winter storms – all kitchen-bound.
My new kitchen is the size of my old broom closet. And I’m OK with stacking and piling. I don’t care that my fancy, etched glasses are in the second bedroom armoire. Love my wine rack in the hallway! And so what that my cool, crystal, just-for-party-plates are in my car?
It seems, though, that it’s the little things that have been looming big in loss. I can’t blast music and do my joyful cooking-twirl with my wine in hand without crashing into a wall. There’s room for one stool, and it only fits in the corner, with room for only one elbow on the counter. I can’t gather more than three (I have squooshed five) people in it at once. (We can’t sit down.) I’m the bandaged one these days, because if I leave the cabinets open, I’m pierced in either the head or ankle. To cook and eat and drink requires a lot of turns sideways.
But a month in, I’m beginning to feel huge of heart in my small kitchen with a (newly) big aura. Yes, I can only hang there in bursts of time, instead of hours. And yes, it’s the old oven that burns these days, not candelabras. I’ve left the small square space right outside its doorway furniture-free for my wine-infused cooking-twirls (OK, more like twists). Adjustments, all. But little gems, each, that remind me that letting go means more space for letting in. That living large is about hugging change like your bursting-with-zeal-20-year-old self. My new kitchen may be narrow of space, counter-challenged, and twirl-free. But it’s found its aura. And it’s become familiar.
Christmas Decorations: I Don’t Want to See You in September
08 Tuesday Oct 2013
Too soon to be awash in evergreen and sparkly lights.
OK. Now they’ve gone too far. Christmas advertising this year began in September! Some stores are now beginning the holiday season as soon as they take down their back-to-school decorations. The Hallmark Channel is advertising its Christmas movies already.
Now, I love Christmas as much as anyone, but do we have to celebrate it for the entire fourth quarter of the year? There was a time, not too long ago, when Thanksgiving was the Christmas firewall. Nobody dared begin Christmas advertising until the turkey was cleared from the table. All this pent-up Christmas demand soon erupted into a media-created shopping holiday – Black Friday. And as soon as that became established, it became necessary to advertise the pre-Black-Friday sales beginning just after Halloween.
Halloween held up for many years as the new Christmas advertising firewall. In fact, all the attention that Halloween received as we focused on it as the prelude to the Christmas season transformed it from the kid’s day it used to be to a sort of Fall Carnivale. It’s much more popular as an adult holiday today than it ever was when we were kids.
But now it seems that the Halloween firewall is giving way as well. Oh sure, the Rockettes don’t open their Christmas show until just after Halloween, but especially in the online world, Christmas in October and even September is a reality. Think I’m exaggerating? Have a look.
The commercialization of Christmas is nothing new. In fact, it was the theme of, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” nearly 50 years ago. But what we have today is simply out-of control capitalism.
Religious Christians have long complained that American society has secularized Christmas to the point where it is no longer recognizable as a religious holiday. I think that the fact that many American children of Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist backgrounds hang up stockings and await the visit of Santa Claus every December 25th is a testament to the fact that there is no longer any Christ left in the Great American Christmas. And I think that’s OK – as long as we recognize it for what it is.
American retailers have created a winter holiday that, coincidentally, corresponds with the date of the religious observance of the birth of Christ. It’s not the Christmas of Silent Night – it’s the Christmas of Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Religious Christians have to accept that their holy day has been co-opted. They need to think of their religious Christmas as a separate, parallel-track holiday that they can observe in religious ways separate from the Santa Spectacular.
But even the secular Christmas has to have its limits. Christmas sales are becoming as unseemly as those Going-Out-of-Business sales that last for months. I know that there is no hope of rolling the commercialization back to after Thanksgiving. That ship has sailed. But can’t the honchos of television agree not to show Christmas ads until November? And while we’re at it, can we perhaps not begin the 2016 presidential campaign for a few more months?
Smile! Probing Pictures Are Being Taken from Space
07 Monday Oct 2013
Tags
Bob’s universe. By Julie Seyler.
Sitting at breakfast recently reading a magazine, I came across a photo taken by a NASA spacecraft called the Cassini probe, which since 2004 has been orbiting Saturn, exploring the planet and its moons. The entire upper portion of the photo is dominated by the dark arc of one portion of Saturn, and to the right of that, a greenish-gray swath of the planet’s rings. The tightly concentric black and green-gray lines comprising the rings resemble the grooves on an old vinyl record, except that the rings appear to be glowing gently against the black background of space. That dark expanse dominates the center portion of the photo, and at the bottom there’s a ghostly horizonal white stripe that’s either light from an unseen source to the left, or a distant slice of the Milky Way. The image is majestic, peaceful, and kind of eerie.
The sobering thing is that, as explained in the accompanying article, it’s actually a photo of earth from approximately 900 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) away. I thought, at first, that the object just to the right of center was a fragment of the english muffin I’d been eating. Indeed, a toasty crumb had fallen on the magazine, so I brushed it off to reveal a minuscule white speck – 1/100th the size of my bread crumb. It looked like a nick in the ink, or a dust mote, but I couldn’t wipe it away. According to the article, that irregular speck is the earth and the infinitesmal bulge on its side is the moon, both as seen from Saturn’s orbit.
Two thoughts came to mind: We are nothing. And we are not alone. If an infininte number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters, and an infinite amount of time could eventually write the entire works of Shakspeare, then there must be untold numbers of other planets with Earth-like life forms spread throughout the inconceivable vastness of the universe. I decided to have another fried egg. What the hell.
But the earth photo was nothing compared to the news a few days later, when NASA made the ultimate “Elvis has left the building” announcement: after 36 years of hurtling through the void at 38,000 miles per hour, the Voyager space probe has exited the solar system and entered interstellar space. It’s now nearly 12 billion miles away, and still sends back minute radio signals using a transmitter with about the same amount of power as a refrigerator light bulb. It takes nearly 17 1/2 hours for the signal to reach Earth, and when it arrives, the wattage striking the antenna is only about 1 part in 10 quadrillion. By comparison, it takes 20 billion times more power than that to operate an electronic digital watch.
Aside from studying the planets and the far reaches of our solar system, Voyager also carries a message for any intelligent life that may find it someday: the Golden Record. This 12-inch diameter, gold-plated, copper audiovisual disk includes 115 images and sounds representative of life on Earth as well as musical selections and spoken greetings in 55 languages. Of course, to play the record, you’d first have to build a record/video disk player, speakers, and display screen. I guess they figured that any life form intelligent enough to snatch this probe from its race through space would be able to figure that out. And the NASA engineers were thoughful enough to include a cartridge and needle you could use to play the record once you’d built the machine to play it on – a good idea, since it’s hard even now, right here on Earth, to get needles and cartridges to play old vinyl LPs.
I thought back to the Cassini photo: if the entire planet is a speck from 900 million miles, aren’t we surely invisible from 12 billion and counting? Compared to the universe, our solar system is smaller than an electron oscillating in one molecule of a hair follicle on the ass of a flea. And if we’re invisible and barely detectable, who’s ever going to find us, even if other intelligent beings are out there? And if they really are out there, why haven’t they sent us their Golden LPs, begging for retrieval and playback?
Keep your eyes open, kids. You never know. And let’s just hope that if the aliens send an 8-track tape with information about their planet, they include the whole device because working 8-track players are even scarcer than record needles.
The Saturday Blog: Snapshot
05 Saturday Oct 2013
Posted in Art
Photo by Julie Seyler.
Here’s looking at you, kid … looking at me.
Bad Luck be Damned. I’m Now “Armed” with a Four-Leaf Clover
04 Friday Oct 2013
Posted in Art
This is my inner arm:
This is my inner arm on …:
… not drugs. But upon waking up this morning. See what popped up overnight? It’s a four-leaf clover. On my inner arm. Is a bruise? Is it (Geez!) an age spot? What is it? Keratosis Pilaris? Psoriasis? Stage-One Melanoma? Or even worse – Keratoacanthoma?
None of the above. Because I said so. I don’t know what the scientific term or reason for artwork mysteriously appearing on flesh is, but I’ll take it. My arm is now right up there with that tree stump in Belfast, where an image of Jesus mysteriously appeared, and the infamous apparition of the Virgin Mary in the bush in Philadelphia (which ironically turned 60 this year).
(Plus, see how my arm now matches my ottoman in the background!)
I have had a steady slew (the list is as long as my arm) of bad luck for some time now. But the rough patch has been slowly smoothing – things have been looking up. And now thanks to this recent shot in the arm, I’m metaphorically thick-skinned. Impervious.
I’m not religious. But I am half-Irish. And given my dermatologist’s clinical, yet now prophetic, comment after an exam a few months ago (“You’d be surprised at what can pop up on the skin overnight, once you approach 60”), I am raising my arm up in acknowledgment to whomever – whatever – reverse-tattooed me with a (hopefully) permanent good-luck charm in the dark of night.
Thank you. Because according to Irish lore, the four leaves of the clover each represent the intangibles we live for: Faith. Hope. Love. Luck.
All things, not unlike the four-leaf clover itself, that are hard to find, but pop up when we’re not looking.
It’s a Hit: Baseball, Barbecue, Old Friends
03 Thursday Oct 2013
Posted in Confessional
Revisiting Fenway and old friends. Photo by Margo D. Beller.
I went to college in Boston during the late 1970s. Thanks to the journalism school, and the various dormitories where I lived, I made a lot of good
friends I’ve managed to keep via phone, letter, and now e-mail over the past
three decades. I married one of them – MH.
Thanks to the proximity to Fenway Park, I became a Red Sox fan.
During my time in Boston, the Sox were in World Series contention twice,
but aside from the playoffs, and any series against the division rival New
York Yankees, it was always easy to show up at the ballpark on the day or
night of the game, go to the General Admission window. and buy a
bleacher ticket.
Although MH and I have periodically visited Boston and our friends
over the years, we had not been inside Fenway for 20 years. It
wasn’t for lack of trying. But Red Sox fans are fanatical, and except for one
recent bad year, Fenway and the Sox have enjoyed years of consecutive
sellouts. MH and I have had to keep up via radio, newspaper and the
occasional TV broadcast.
This year, I decided to try one of the online ticket services to combine a
visit with friends, and a visit to the ballpark. Perhaps the owner decided to
go to Martha’s Vineyard for the Labor Day weekend. I was able to get
seven seats together. The house was packed, the Red Sox won and my
friends and their spouses – all more fanatical about the Sox than when we
were in college, thanks to that 2004 World Series win – were very happy.
The next day we had a cookout at the house of one friend. Baseball came up, yes, but so did music, old friends in other parts of the country and the
economy. If the economy is improving, why are there no full-time jobs with
benefits, particularly for those of us who’ve been out there working for 20
years or more? Why were over 100 people cut from one friend’s
employer, their jobs sent to India? Why has another’s cut its contributions
to the 401(k)?
Why do we feel less secure as we get older after growing up hearing from
our first-generation American parents that they were working hard to make
it easier for their kids to get ahead?
None of us had answers, although we all had theories. But as depressing
as the discussion got at times, I was strangely comforted that these
friends have the same fears and concerns. It is a conversation we could
only have face to face.
That is what those who rely solely on Facebook and other services for
“friends” don’t seem to understand – real friends are people you eat with,
share fears with, see your favorite baseball team win with, and laugh with.
Face to face. My old friends have newer “friends” via Facebook, but they
know the difference.
It must be the reason they put up with me.
The Write Side of 59 