Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

My family always celebrates St. Patrick’s Day. My mother made corned beef and cabbage. She often threw a party which inevitably ended in the kitchen with the crowd singing St. Patrick’s Day songs. That’s how I learned all the words to the songs. I remember my dog Shauna’s first St. Patrick’s Day at my parents. My father gave her a dish of corned beef and cabbage. She ate all of it. She belonged to the clean plate club. She did better than my father who never ate the turnip.

My sister has already started her dinner. She did the corned beef yesterday. I’ll be enjoying my St. Patrick’s Day dinner this evening, and I’ll eat the turnips.

I spent yesterday afternoon in Elysium. The day was pretty with a bright sun which shined from window to window, from the east to the west. I noshed on Effie’s cocoa biscuits and cheddar cheese. They were a perfect combination. On TV I watched old black and white movies which were so bad I loved them. The first was The Earth Dies Screaming with killer robots and resurrected human beings with popped out eyes. Now I’m watching The Hideous Sun Demon in which a scientist exposed to radiation turns into a lizard every time he is in the sun. I’m in heaven with bad actors and cheesy effects. “His appearance has turned into something scaly. He is not taking it too well.”

In Ghana, the two foods I missed the most were coleslaw and root beer. (For convenience sake please just go with root beer as a food.) Cole slaw made sense as I liked cole slaw, but the root beer stymied me. I seldom drank it. That I was missed it was odd.

Ghana had Coke and Fanta. What kind of Fanta you ask? If a Ghanaian ordered a Fanta, he’d get orange, only orange. Coke was just Coke, no lite, no Tab, just Coke, usually warm, except we found a store in town with a fridge and cold Cokes. It was at the end of a row of stores which started on ground level then the row of stores got higher so the last store was reached by climbing steps or walking the whole length of stores. We chose the steps every time. There was an outside table, and we were sitting there the day of the incident, I think it was Bill and me, when we were approached by a white guy or maybe two. I’m not sure. I remember one white guy stopped at our table to talk to us, not unusual in Bolga with few whites. He wanted to know where the bare breasted women were. He had heard they were around Bolga. We were horrified by his question. Why would you even ask that question?  We told him there were no bare-breasted women. We lied. He deserved a lie. He also deserved a punch, but we exercised restraint.

This morning the dogs woke me again. I went downstairs with my eyes barely opened and let them out to the yard. I went back to bed. They joined me a bit later. We slept another hour. Nala woke me up. I gave in and started my day.

It took thirteen minutes to start my day. I timed it this morning. I got downstairs, started the coffee then I went and got the paper and yesterday’s mail. While the coffee was perking, I toasted a bagel. It and the coffee were done at the same time.

The bagel was just a bagel until I spread on the black fig jam. That elevated the bagel from simple to magnificent. I yummed my way through both sides of the bagel while the dogs watched. They were hopeful. I gave each of them a piece, a small piece. I am entirely too generous.

When I was a kid, I learned to ride my bike on the street in front of our house. My mother taught me using the age old method of holding the back of the seat, running along side and offering words of encouragement until she felt comfortable enough to let go secretly. When I realized I was doing the riding myself, I yelled triumphantly. I had been given freedom to anywhere my pedaling would take me. The onyy deterrent was snow.

Ice skates and sleds had limited use as both were so dependent on the weather. Sleds needed snow so my sled stayed in the cellar a good part of the winter. My ice skates just needed cold, below freezing cold, except at the swamp, one of the neatest places of my childhood. It was shallow enough that it froze, even in above freezing weather, all around the front and on the canals, tiny canals, leading from the front to the back of the swamp. The water was clear enough I could see everything below the ice, mostly branches and ferns. I always thought it was kind of neat to have a winter picture of summer places.