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“If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.”
January 14, 2012Looking to start the day on the bright side, I’ll note that even though it is only 34° and will go down to the teens and maybe even the single digits tonight, the wind has stopped.
My deck was a mess this morning from all that wind yesterday. The umbrella had fallen, the cover was off the barbecue and another cover was off the table and chairs. I righted everything but complained the whole time though no one listened. Gracie stayed in the house. Nothing dumb about that animal. The dumb one was outside in the cold.
The Patriots play the Broncos tonight. At kickoff it should be around 23° and by the time the game ends, around 19°. Add the wind chill factor and it should feel like 7°. I will cheer my team from the comfort of a warm house, a bathroom close by and snacks at hand. Tom Brady will be wearing his muff. I had one when I was a little girl and I loved my muff. Tom’s, though, has no fake fur the way mine did. I figure utilitarian always beats decorative in football.
I think the best logo belongs to the Baltimore Orioles. The birds on their hats are beautiful. I used to like the old Boston Patriot logo but I’m lukewarm about the new one. The Ducks’ facemask is right out of Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees. The Cardinal bird is pretty. I think red catched the eye. I love the Raiders’ patch. It shows imagination. I think football has the most boring team logos. Baseball has the most colorful. In basketball I think the Raptors are the most imaginative, right out of Jurassic Park.
I’ve been a longtime Red Sox and Celtics fan, started going to their games when I was in grammar school. In those days you didn’t have to re-mortgage your house for a ticket. Bleacher seats were under a $1.00, and I could go by bus and subway to Fenway. I went less to the old Boston Garden where we sat far away, in the cheapest seats. I don’t remember how much they cost back then, but I paid $100.00 2 years ago when last I went.
I try to make at least one game at Fenway each year. Nothing beats sitting in that wonderful ballpark on a nice summer night. As for football, nothing beats sitting and watching in a cozy and warm living room. That’s where you’ll find me tonight.
“For after all the best thing one can do when it is raining, is to let it rain.”
January 12, 2012Miserable is the first adjective which comes to mind in describing today. The rain is constant, and the wind is strong enough to blow the bird feeders back and forth, even the heaviest, the squirrel buster feeder, is swaying. Gracie hasn’t been outside since last night. She never even bothered to stick her head out the door as the rain is loud enough for her to know it’s pouring. Just in case she needs to rush, I’ve left the back door open.
My den is dark. I had the light on earlier when I was reading the papers but I turned if off when I finished. I like the darkness and the sense of being surrounded by rain. Fern and Gracie are with me but both are asleep. Fern is on the back pillow of the couch and Gracie is stretch across it. Every now and then I hear Gracie sigh, but mostly I just hear the rain.
Even when I was a little kid, I loved the sound of the rain. I remember one vacation in Maine when we were all stuck inside on a rainy day. We played games and listened to the radio, but I could take all that closeness only so long so I grabbed my book and headed to the car. Lying on my stomach and reading, I was comfy and dry and could hear the rain on the metal roof and against the windows. I don’t remember how long I stayed there, but I do remember it was one of the best afternoons.
Summer rain is my favorite. When it gently falls, I sit outside on the deck under the umbrella and read. All around me is rain, but I stay dry, and I listen as the rain make its music. I hear it on the deck, and I hear it when it drips off the umbrella.
“Food should be fun.”
January 10, 2012This morning I had to make a quick run to the grocery store to pick up my chili ingredients. My friends are coming over for chili, cornbread and some after dinner games. Right now the chili is happily bubbling ever so slightly on the stove. I’ll make the cornbread later then set the table and put out the fixings. I don’t like beans so my chili has no beans. You purists may cringe but my house, my chili!
I wish it were colder as I always think of chili as one of those warm you up hearty sort of meals. It is 45° and a beautiful day.
We never ate chili when I was a kid. My father was a meat and potatoes guy, and that’s what we ate for dinner most nights though my mother did add a vegetable or two. Spaghetti was about as exotic as my father’s dinner ever got and even that was a bit gross. He ate his spaghetti with stewed tomatoes on top, the way his mother, the worse cook in the world, used to make it. My mother made regular spaghetti with a meat sauce for herself and us. My father also had other strange tastes. He wouldn’t eat garlic except on garlic bread with his shrimp scampi. I used to cook a roast pork and hide the garlic slices in slits on the sides of the roast. He loved it until he caught my mother doing the same thing. She took out the garlic. Once I cooked the potatoes in the same pan as I had mushrooms and decided to leave the small pieces of mushroom to give the potato a different flavor. The mashed potatoes were a bit gray. My dad wanted to know why. I told them they were Eastham potatoes. He accepted my story and ate them happily even though he didn’t like mushrooms.
My father’s eyes served as his taste buds. If it didn’t look good, he wouldn’t eat it. No matter how much coaxing we did, he just wouldn’t try newe foods. I remember once we were eating hommos, and he mentioned it looked like wallpaper paste. Nope, he never did try it.
My uncle had a Korean wife and she cooked once for my family. My father ate only the food which looked a litttle like fried won tons with a filling. That looked familiar to him so he figured it was worth a try. The rest was way out of his comfort zone.
I tried to get my parents to visit me in Ghana. I never thought about the food. I just wanted them to see where I lived and how wonderful Ghana was. Thinking it over now, I guess my father would have been fine at breakfast with his eggs and toast, but he would have had chicken every single night, especially if he had come shopping with me. I’m laughing now at the idea of my father using his hand to pull off a chunk of t-zed, dip it in his soup bowl then eat it. Nope, it never would have happened.
“The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”
January 5, 2012This is the strangest winter. Yesterday was freezing, literally. When I went to the dump, an open area all around, I thought I’d been whisked to the steppes of Russia. The wind was so cold my hands nearly froze when I got out of the car to toss the trash, lots of trash, in the bins, and by the time I got back into the car, my breathing was as heavy as if I’d be plodding through drifts of snow. Right now it is 36° and feels almost balmy. The paper says 40’s today and 49° by the weekend. I don’t quite know what to make of this winter.
My Christmas tree is gone, lying outside waiting for pick-up. I miss its aroma but most of all I miss its colorful lights and decorations. Winter is drab with its dead leaves, bare branches and early darkness. It is only Christmas which gives winter life and color. Now we’re stuck waiting for spring.
I have these weird bursts of energy. The other day I put away the rest of my Christmas decorations, did a load of wash, watered all the plants, dusted the shelves in my room, changed my bed and filled the bird feeders. I felt accomplished. Today, however, is a day of lethargy. I knew it as soon as I woke up. I didn’t have a single concrete thought, and I just stayed a while comfy and warm under the covers. Gracie sensed my mood. She didn’t move; she just stayed asleep at the foot of my bed.
I don’t know why we pick one road over another. I know I seem to have chosen the right ones for me. My life continues to be a good one. I have found the best of friends and have had the most wonderful experiences. I enjoy every single day even the most mundane of them. My former student, Francisca, is religious. She finds great solace and comfort in God and believes it is God who directs our footsteps. She said I had faith that I would find my students when I went to Bolga. It wasn’t, according to her, mere coincidence that Shetu was at my hotel for the first time in a few years the very night I had dinner there, and that we would find each other. Francisca believes it was God’s will. I would never dispute her. Even if I did, she’d laugh and tell me I was wrong. She’d say she knows better.
“New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.”
January 1, 2012Happy New Year!
I remember when I was a kid, I was thrilled when I first stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. It was a struggle, but I made it. New Year’s Day, however, seemed no different from any other day so I didn’t quite understand all the hoopla. Now, each year is another notch in my belt. I stay up without any trouble and watch the ball descend and hope to remember to change the year when I write out checks.
Today is still far too warm for winter at 48°. I remember a few years ago we had a terrific snow storm on New Year’s Eve, but this winter so far has been a bust. We had a sprinkling of flakes one afternoon, but they disappeared when they hit the ground. Mind you, I’m not complaining, wondering is all.
I can vividly bring to mind so many milestones in my life, and each New Year some of those jump out at me, and I remember becoming me.
I remember wanting to be thirteen, a magic number. It was like a giant step moving from twelve to thirteen. All of a sudden I was a teenager. The world was in front of me. I figured I’d have my first kiss, my first boyfriend, first slow dance, high hair-do and nylon stockings, and I got most of them.
After thirteen, I couldn’t wait to be sixteen. I knew all the songs about sweet sixteen, and I had high expectations. Most of those weren’t met, but I was okay. The world was still in front of me. On the horizon was the end of high school and the beginning of college.
I loved college. I loved learning; I loved my friends, and I love the parties. We had a great time just about every weekend. Senior year was the year of Friday happy hour get-togethers at the bar owned by a friend’s father. It was a weekly tradition to be packed in that bar and take turns passing the trays of food over our heads to one another. It was a great way to start to say good-bye.
The Peace Corps was next, a defining time in my life. I had planned on applying since my junior year, and I did in October of my senior year. It wasn’t a long wait. In January I knew I was going to Africa. I couldn’t believe it.
The longest stretch of time in my life was from that January until the Sunday in June when I left for staging. When I arrived in Ghana, I was amazed, mouth opened amazed at everything I saw. My entire experience was like that: a joy, amazement. The two years went far too quickly.
When I came home, I had no job, but I found one and stayed at that same school for 33 years then I retired.
That brings me to now. I can’t find all the right words to say how much I look forward to each day. I wake up, go downstairs, make my coffee and then read the papers. Every day starts the same, but I am never bored.
Today starts another year of being retired, of having the world still in front of me. I can hardly wait.
” I take care of my flowers and my cats. And enjoy food. And that’s living.”
December 31, 2011The sound of the pouring rain woke me up this morning, but it was a quick downpour which had stopped by the time I went to get the papers. The day is mild, in the 50’s, despite the missing sun and the dampness. Gracie and I have a dump run later.
Another year ending. They go quickly now, but this last year I’ll remember. It was a favorite. I finally fulfilled my promise of getting back to Ghana and what a joy that was. I remember being 20 minutes away from landing and getting butterflies. It had been forty years, and I hoped to find pieces of my Ghana, and I did. I fell in love all over again. Finding my students was an amazing part of the journey, but that they remembered me was the most amazing. We spend all but one of my Bolgatanga evenings together eating and drinking and laughing. We shopped in the market and ate goat for lunch. They had so many memories of me, and I cried when they sang Miss Ryan’s song to me my last night in Bolga. They sang Leaving on a Jet Plane perfectly and told me they always sing it when they are together. I hated to leave, and I have promised myself I’ll go back again, and I never go back on a promise.
When I was young, I used to wonder how it would feel to be old. I sort of know, but I think of myself as older, not old. I have to admit, though, nothing works as well as it did. My knees groan and complain, and my back hurts. My hands get stiff. My hair is getting grayer. My word retrieval skills are less than satisfactory, and I hate getting to the kitchen and forgetting why. The one bright spot is I’m retired and have been since the day I turned 57. That means I have had wonderful years of owning every day, of doing whatever I want. I even banished my alarm clock. Every morning is leisurely, and I can spend the whole day reading if I want. I don’t even have to get dressed.
The new year starts tomorrow, and I’m making no resolutions. I’m not very good at keeping them anyway. I’m going to enjoy every day the same as I have been. Maybe that’s a resolution, but for me, it’s just living my life, and I love it.
“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.”
December 30, 2011Today is warm, not your lie on the deck and read sort of warmth, but it is 45°, a long way from yesterday’s 30°. I call this sort of day sweatshirt weather.
One of the fattest gray spawns of Satan I have ever seen drops by each day. I watch him try to manuever around the squirrel protected cage to get at the seeds inside. He holds on to the outside wires and pulls himself around the cage then hangs on from underneath. His last desperate attempt is to try to pry off the top, but he never gets at the seeds. He generally ends up on the deck rail then waddles away. I give a yell of triumph and thrust my arm into the air.
The only time I didn’t wish for snow at Christmas was the year I asked for a bike. The last thing I wanted was not being able to ride it so bare streets were essential. I remember everything about that Christmas. When I came downstairs, the first thing I saw was my bike in all its glory off to the side of the tree leaning on its kickstand. It was blue and had a bell attached to the handle bars and a metal basket in the front. The first thing I did was ring the bell. The next thing I did was try on my bike. I sat on the seat and put one foot on the pedal and balanced the bike with my other foot to the rug. The bike was the perfect height. Right then and there, in my pajamas on a cold Christmas morning, I wanted to take my bike outside and give it a test run. All of the other presents were forgotten. All I could see was that bike and me on the open road riding all over town. My parents said no, maybe later, and reminded me of my other presents so I got to unwrapping, but I kept glancing at that bike hoping later would come sooner.
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