Keep the Coffee Comimg

The day is perfectly lovely. It is 80° with a strong breeze from the north. The den is dark and cool. This is a busy week for me with ukulele just about every day, four concerts, practice and a lesson.

I found a book in the back of my bedroom bookcase. Finding it was happenstance as I was looking for something else. The book, Dorothy Lamour and the Haunted Lighthouse, had been a stocking stuffer. What made this book special was its publishing date, 1947, the year I was born. The book was published by Whitman Publishing, the company in which I invested my weekly 50¢ allowance when I bought mystery books like Trixie Belden and Donna Parker. I started reading my find. The book is dated but readable. The pages have yellowed.

My father used to tell us stories. They involved men with hooks instead of hands and things that go bump in the night. I was not so much frightened as wary. A strange noise in the house gave me pause. I listened but nothing ever came of it. The wind banging against the windows had my imagination running wild, andI was alert for one of those things that go bump in the night, but I never saw anything. When I walked home in the dark, my footsteps echoed on the sidewalk, and, just in case, I would check behind me. No one was ever there. At some point, when I was older, I didn’t notice the sounds anymore. I didn’t look for shadows. I stopped being wary.

I still have a strong imagination. My coffee maker is a Black and Decker. You lift up the top to add the coffee grounds and the water. When the top is up, it looks just like Darth Vader’s helmet, black and with the same shape. The good thing is it doesn’t talk or make breathing sounds.

When I asked Alexa the weather around 2 this morning, she told me the rain would start in 11 minutes. She was off by only a few minutes. The rain started quietly. It was still raining, a little more heavily than last night, when I woke up this morning but has since stopped. It is a damp, cloudy 72°.

Sunday has never been my favorite day. When I was a kid, I was stuck. I had to go to mass then hang around the house until Sunday dinner and then maybe, after dinner, travel to my grandparents’ house. With school the next day, I had to go to bed early. I never understood that. Every other weekday night my bedtime was later. I guess my mother figured my routine had been disrupted by later to bed Friday and Saturday nights so I needed to be retrained. Sunday was a ruin of a day.

In grammar school, I had nuns every other grade except both sixth and seventh when I had regular people both years. I had some really good teachers and a couple of bad. My first grade teacher, Sister Redempta, was scary. Nobody talked and nobody moved without permission. Everything was regimented. My classroom was on the first floor of the old school. The room had two doors, giant windows and a cloakroom right outside the classroom. There were so many of us desks filled every available space. You had to walk sideways up and down the aisles. We moved row by row to form a line when we went anywhere like to the bathrooms down in the cellar area, or to the schoolyard for recess or to the cloakroom at the end of the day. Nuns seemed to embrace the line as the best mode of movement.

My eighth grade teacher, Sister Hildegard, was the worst. She was also the oldest, too old for eighth graders. We ran amok. One kid, whose name I think was Luke, used to spill milk in the waste basket, show Sister Hildegard and volunteer to wash the basket. Out he’d go with the sabotaged basket. He’d be gone for an hour. Sister Hildegard never noticed how long it took or that it happened sometimes three times a week. I admit I also took advantage. I’d hide my lunch then leave for lunch. I’d arrive back late. Other times I’d ask permission to leave early telling her I needed to go to the library. She always let me go.

She hated all of us. She told outlandish stories, sort of a nun’s version of Aesop fables. I remember she told us about a couple of kids who skipped out of mass and both were hit by a train. Another story was about a girl who was not a Catholic who stuck her tongue out at the Blessed Sacrament. Her tongue stayed stuck out until she converted. Sister Hildegard told us she was going to write one message on the blackboard in the largest letters she could when we graduated, “Thank God they are gone.”

The rain has finally stopped, but the day is still cloudy and dark. Everything is wet, even my kitchen floor has muddy dog prints. The dogs, meanwhile, are on the couch enjoying their morning nap. They are exhausted after having been awake for an hour and a half. Speaking of dogs, I think Nala has been up to her old tricks. I noticed a mouse had taken up residence in the kitchen. I put down the mouse hotel and kept checking. I caught and relocated said mouse. I reset the hotel and kept checking. On day three the hotel had disappeared; the whole thing was gone. The choices were limited. Either several burly mice had moved it across the kitchen floor and hidden it in another room or a yet to be named culprit saw the mouse in the hotel and carried the whole thing outside. I lean toward the last guess, but the rain has kept me from checking the yard.

When I was a kid, I filled most summer days. I was always busy. The only stop was for lunch, either I went home or ate the sandwich I had brought with me, always bologna on white bread. Sometimes I included cookies with my lunch, always Oreos. Amazingly my taste hasn’t changed since then. I’m quite content with a bologna sandwich but usually on other than squishy white bread and Oreos though now I lean toward double stuffed and lemon. I always consider that lunch the grass roots of my palate.

My mother always cooked hearty foods. For supper, they’d be meat, mashed potatoes and a vegetable. She cooked what she knew we and my father would eat. He was a bit picky. To him, garlic only belonged with shrimp scampi. Mashed potatoes were served straight, no seasonings except salt. He loved canned asparagus, fresh ears of corn and green beans, canned of course. I once served him a pork roast with garlic cloves in slits around the roast, He loved it, but he caught my mother cooking the same dish, and he had her remove the garlic. He wouldn’t eat it he said. It was mind over matter.

When I was in training in Ghana, getting sick was part of the experience. Early on, during the first two weeks, we had so many shots at one time most of us got reactions. I watched a line of red travel up my arm. I had a fever. Diarrhea was common among us trainees because of the different foods we were eating and the water we drank, but I did not get it. I survived six weeks of fairly good health, but then it happened. It was so bad I sat outside the bathroom doors all night as I knew I’d never make it from my room even at a run (pun here). It lasted only a couple of days, but would reappear occasionally during my two years. At no time was the culprit ever identified.

I have an empty dance card today I’m going to stay in my cozies and be comfortable. I have a book I’m reading and a jigsaw puzzle to finish. I am now back in control of my TV. The new remote came yesterday. I do not have to watch Midway again.

The rain started around 2:00 this morning, and it is still raining and will keep raining. It is a dark, menacing day. The temperature is only 67° and it won’t get much warmer. I’ve shut a few windows in what feels like a vain attempt to keep the chill out of the house. I’m wearing long sleeeves.

I have a few errands. I was also adding the dump to my trip, but I’ll wait for a dry day, probably tomorrow. Elsewhere on the home front, My TV remote refuses to remote. It won’t work the TV at all. I am stuck on one channel, and wouldn’t you know, I have seen all the movies it has been airing. Right now it is on round two of those same movies. I tried everything to get it to work but failed so I have ordered a new remote which should arrive today. Meanwhile, I am watching Midway again. I wonder who wins?

Things have changed. Here I am complaining about a remote which doesn’t remote while when I was a kid, I was the remote. If my father wanted the channel changed, one of us would get up and change it. When I was in Ghana, I made do. I didn’t bring anything electric except my cassette player. I had to use a hand opener for cans. The iron was charcoal heated. I had no stove but rather a charcoal burner, sort of like a hibachi but round. I survived all of those and decided I really didn’t need all the electrical appliances. That didn’t last long. The electric can opener came first. I have a microwave, no charcoal necessary. I have an electric coffee pot, no more instant coffee and boiling water for it on the charcoal. I didn’t even have a fan in Ghana. Now I can’t live unless I have my fan and my AC after it gets repaired. I fell into the trap of easy living. It is a pleasant, easy trip. I have no regrets. One thing, though, is the same. My electric can opener died, and I didn’t replace it. I use the silver hand opener the world used to own. I suffer through it.

The day is hot, in the low 80’s, and it will stay hot tonight. That August heat is the reason it is my least favorite summer month. Adding to the misery of the heat is the humidity, thick damp air which just hangs. My father always described it as so thick you could cut it with a knife. Right now it is sunny. but rain is predicted for this evening, an 88% chance of rain.

I never dreaded going back to school. By the end of August, summer had worn down. The playground was already closed, and I was left to my own devices to fill the days. My mother had taken us school shopping with stops for new shoes, a new skirt and blouse for my school uniform and new school supplies. We were just about ready. The last thing was the bath, an out of time bath, a bath on a Tuesday night.

One of the skills I learned in Ghana was how to pluck a chicken. I haven’t plucked one since. One year we bought three or four chickens for Thanksgiving because we could only find one turkey, not enough to share. Someone else dispatched the birds. We put their caucuses in a metal container about the size of a small trough. They didn’t run around without their heads, but a few bodies kept jumping out of the trough. A few even flapped their wings. We knew the biology behind it, but it was creepy nonetheless. After all that activity, we plucked their feathers, pulled off the pinions and got them ready for the fire.

This is the month of the spiders. Even the tiniest of them is weaving webs, but, unlike Charlotte, mine don’t weave messages. I’ve never been afraid of spiders. I think it a bit silly that people scream and run when they see spiders. I save them. Sometimes I have to move a spider from the sink if it gets trapped. I do clear webs as they seem to be everywhere joining anything. One giant web hung down from the ceiling, and others went across the lintels of the wooden doorways. Some of the webs remind me of the end of the movie The Fly, the original movie from 1958. The fly with the head and one arm of the scientist is caught in the web. The spider is inching toward that fly which is screeching, “Help me. Help me.” The spider didn’t look all that real, but the abject fear on the man’s face was horrifying. I can still see it in my mind’s eye.

Yesterday it rained then it stopped then it started again. The rain was so soft I wasn’t sure at first and had to lower the TV to hear it. It was the same this morning. It is not a pretty day. It is a muggy, damp and cloudy day.

We had the entire encyclopedia with the maroon covers when I was a kid. My mother bought a volume a week from the grocery store. I used to pick one book at random, open it and read wherever I landed. I used the books for research for school. I used to mix up the words so my papers wouldn’t seem copied. The grocery store was also where my mother got her dishes, her melmac dishes, the ones decorated with what looked like wheat sheaves, the ones which were indestructible. She used to buy the pieces of the week. My mother also collected green stamps. One of us would lick the backs and place the stamps on the booklet pages. When my mother had enough booklets, she’d go to the green stamp store to redeem them after deciding her sort of prize. The other day I was driving home from a concert in Hyannis. At a red light, while I was idling, my memory drawer opened. The green stamp redemption center had been right beside the road where I was. I could see it in my mind’s eye. A laundromat is there now.

When I moved into my house, I had almost nothing. My aunt gave me a set of pots and a frying pan as a housewarming gift. The outside of the pots was green. I still have one of those pots. I don’t use it anymore. I think of it as a relic of the earliest days of a nearly empty house devoid even of furniture and treat it reverently. When I had the phones installed, the phone man said I seem to be living almost primitively.

This is a slower week for me. I have empty days. I’ll never complain about that.

The weather is ugly. It is dark and damp. Off and on rain is predicted. My concert has been cancelled. The weather is too iffy and too chilly. That gives me another sloth day, my second in a row.

I was born the same day my aunt, my mother’s older sister, was having her wedding. The hospital was in the town where my grandparents and my aunt lived, the same grandparents who would move to East Boston. My father went back and forth from the hospital to their house to give updates and to have coffee. My aunt complained constantly. He was ruining her big day as she needed sleep so my father ended up sitting alone in the maternity waiting room. When the nurse came in and asked if Mr. Ryan would identify himself, my father yelled about being the only one there and who did she think he was. She announced my birth. My father ran to the hall and saw my mother and me just after I had been born. That was my entry into the world.

From this side of my eyes, I feel young. I also feel lucky at having lived an interesting life. When I was growing up, I had hopes, expectations. The last thing I wanted to be was average, part of the crowd, one of many walking in the same direction. I wanted to follow my hopes and experience the world in different ways than anyone I knew. When I was ten, I made an album of my travels. That I hadn’t been anywhere didn’t matter. I cut out pictures from magazines and travel pamphlets. I described where I’d been and what I’d seen. I even had pictures of airplanes taking me to exotic places. I showed the hotel rooms where I’d stayed. I wrote a travel log on each page. I wasn’t dreaming. I was predicting.

The two years I spent in the Peace Corps in Ghana were the two most important years of my life. Even though I was leaving behind everything and everyone I knew, I was excited to go, but at first I was homesick, unhappy being so far away from home. I didn’t expect that, but I held on, and by Christmas of my first year, Ghana had become my home, my safe place, my cherished place. I was fulfilling the hopes of that ten year old who glued pictures of her travels in her scrapbook.

The afternoon is cloudy and sunny and cloudy again. It is a warm 77°. It is a quiet Sunday. I have no plans for today except to do a few things around the house. I did vacuum downstairs yesterday, but I just noticed the Henry hair is again joining forces in the hall. It is making a concerted effort to drive me crazy.

When I was a kid, I always went to mass on Sunday. Most times I went without my parents. My father ushered at the early mass while my mother stayed home with my sisters. I was never devout. I did the sit, reluctantly kneel down and stand up parts of the service. Enthusiasm wasn’t demanded, only attendance. Sometimes I smuggled in a book. I’d hide it the hymn book and read. I sat in the corners or at the back as far as I could get so no one would notice. I’d stand if the pews were filled , but I couldn’t read my book if I stood in the back. I could read the free pamphlets in the rack on the back wall. Sin and repentance were big topics. I was usually among the first, if not the first, to run up the stairs and out.

Because of my travels, I have a well developed palate. The first thing I learned was not to ask what I was eating. My first unknown meal was in Ghana. Dinner was served in a wide bowl. In it was a lump of something gelatinous surrounded by soup and a bony piece of meat. The dinner was just about the same every night, only the soup changed. Curiosity finally overcame my reluctance, and I asked what I was eating. The gelatinous lump was T-Zed, Tuo Zaafi, the main food in northern Ghana. It was made with water and corn and cassava flour then stirred while boiling. It was not meant to be chewed but just swallowed. I didn’t like it first. I thought it tasteless, but I liked the soup. The meat was goat. Okra soup was my favorite though groundnut stew wasn’t far behind. I didn’t even know okra existed before Ghana. Groundnut stew was peanut stew. It was made with thick groundnut butter, peanut butter to us. I used to add peanut oil to it so I’d have a spreadable peanut butter. I ate other strange foods, but I didn’t care what it was. The best chicken broth came from boiling the head and feet of a chicken. They looked disgusting cooking in the roiling water. I tried them, sort of chewed the toes and head. I didn’t like either.

I ate my first curry in Ghana and my first Indian food. I ate Lebanese food like hummus and tabbouleh with pita bread. I stopped asking what I was eating. I stopped caring. I went by taste, not origin. It was the same after Ghana, everywhere I traveled. I remember eating sketchy meat and more unknown lumps. Some of it tasted good, some didn’t, but I didn’t mind. The tasting is always a piece of the journey.

We have been gifted with another lovely morning. It is wear your sunglasses bright with a little breeze from the south keeping the air cool. It is in the low 70’s. The dogs just settled down to take their morning naps. I am getting my second cup of coffee and a couple of pieces of toast. All is well.

My days are pretty much the same, but I delight in each day. I wake up whenever. I get the paper and start reading while the coffee brews. The coffee is always delicious. The toast is perfectly browned and covered with fig jam. I usually finish all three of the word games and puzzles in the paper. I read the comics then start to write Coffee. It takes a while. My muse is not always available, and sometimes I can’t find the right music. This morning the cable went off for a while, but I didn’t even grouse. I just made more coffee. I could wait. I had all day. It came back on after a bit so here I am again.

I loved the sound of the roosters greeting the morning in Ghana. It was the perfect way to start another day in Africa. Goats and sheep wandered freely. At night they slept in the middle of the road. This time of year it rained every day. The fields were green. The millet was high. The market tables were filled with onions, tomatoes and tuber yams, piles of oranges, mangoes, bananas and pineapples. The aunties, the vegetable and fruit sellers, called out to me as I walked by them, but I had my favorite vegetable lady where I always stopped. I went to the egg market. The men sold eggs. They always held the eggs to the light so I could choose the fresh ones. I would smile and buy the eggs, but, in truth, I never saw the shadow of the fresh eggs, but they knew I would never return if the eggs were bad. I wandered up and down the lines of hens looking for a plumb one for dinner. I went to the meat market. I had become inured to the smells, to the dirty aprons of the sellers and to meat just sitting there. I checked out the piles of cloth looking for material for a new dress. I wandered all over. I was a familiar sight, the white lady who taught at the school.

I have a concert tonight.

The weather has shifted the last few days from the heat of last week to cooler days and nights, but that will probably change as August still has a way to go before it gives way to September. Last night was perfect for sleeping at 70° despite two big dogs who don’t respect personal space beside me on the bed.

The morning is quiet and still. It is also quite lovely with a breeze and dappled sunlight shining on the leaves of the oak trees. It is only 73°. I’m in the den, my everything room. It is dark here. The sun moves around the house from front to back. The den is in the back.

Today I need to vacuum the tumbleweeds from the hall and living room. They jump and whirl in the air when I walk by them. They are composed of Henry fur. When I scratch him, white fur piles on his back. I’d brush him, but he is Henry who has a quirky personality, and I know he’d find brushing a personal offense.

When I was a kid, summer seemed endless. I was up and out early. I didn’t want to waste any part of the day. I’d be at the playground for most of the day or exploring on my bike. I remember one ride had me ending up on a main road two towns over. It was a new spot, but I had a sense of where I needed to go to get home. The obstacle was the traffic. I had to move my bike across two lanes of cars so I grabbed the handlebars and ran. I was greeted by not so friendly horns. I think I held my breath until I reached the sidewalk on the other side. When I got home, my mother asked about my day. I didn’t tell her about the traffic and the horns. I told her I had just ridden around which was enough of the truth.

My mother taught me how to tie my sneakers. I remember she was sitting on the living room chair, and I was kneeling beside the arm of the chair. She held the sneaker and slowly showed me how to manipulate the laces to make the bow. I watched a couple of times then she had me try. My first few attempts were unsuccessful. I couldn’t get the looping around and through to make the second part of the bow. I got frustrated and wanted to send my sneaker airborne, but my mother patiently showed me again even slower than before. I finally got it, but I had created the loosest bow known to the civilized world. After a while I did get better at tighter bows. My sneakers eventually stayed on my feet.

My dance card has a concert tonight from 7-9 on Main Street in Hyannis and another tomorrow from 6:30-7:30 in Sandwich. The weather should be perfect.