Soup is good metaphor

Bringing Up Mommy
By Debra-Lynn B. Hook
Special to McClatchy Newspapers

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Bringing up Mommy: Soup is good metaphor

By DEBRA-LYNN B. HOOK

Last week, my daughter wrecked the family van. The bank stamped our checking account "Overdrawn." The neighbor sent another nasty e-mail about our dog. And my hairdresser took me seriously when I said I was kinda bored with my hair.

This is why I make soup.

"Mom!" my freshman daughter shouts when she comes home from college to find me standing at the cutting board with an apron on. "Are you ...? Is that ...?"

"Soup for dinner tonight!" I answer.

A pot of soup simmering on the stove suggests harmony is in the house, even if it's only in the pot.

Disparate parts are being melded into whole.

Somebody cares enough to chop, simmer, stir and wait.

Everything slows, including Mom, who is home - really home.

My family knows when I make soup, I have given over my laptop, my cell phone, the soccer schedule and fast food on the fly to the veggies in the crisper and the J.A. Henckels knife in my hand. It has to be a good knife. When I am chopping vegetables with a fine knife that fits the palm of my hand, I am a ballerina conjoined with the dance floor. I am timeless. I am ageless. I am Laura Ingalls Wilder, Eleanor Roosevelt. I am a good mother, deftly managing carrots, potatoes, garlic and celery, like a fine glassmaker, for her family.

Studies have been done. The medicinal properties of chicken soup, in particular, have been researched by scientists who know that as early as the 12th century, doctors were prescribing chicken soup for cold and asthma symptoms. Modern research has proven chicken soup to have anti-inflammatory properties. Its amino acids resemble the medications used for respiratory ailments.

What these studies do not necessarily address is the emotional response to homemade soup. Marketing research expert K.C. Blair, who has studied soup in relationship to the consumer, talks about this in his essay, "Why is Soup Good Food?"

"When you are too busy, you do not create or experience enough compassion," says Blair. "When you take a moment to make yourself some tea, hot chocolate or soup, you are showing yourself attention and care. Soup is good food because it helps mom (or, for that matter, dad) serve more attention and care on her loved ones."

I know that for my daughter, seeing her mother slowed to a conscious state of health and well-being, intent on providing sustenance for her and her family, is as good as cuddling in a rocking chair with a family of Care Bears singing "Hush, Little Baby."

Soup is for the receiver.

It is also for the maker.

Making soup is like going home to my mother, to a slower, - or so it seemed - more full-bodied time, when people took time in the kitchen, when the windows were always fogged up with something cooking on the gas stove. Making soup brings me to who I am at my core - the matriarch of my own family now, who feels good when she foregoes the preservatives and makes her family a meal that will, in one bowl, cover all the necessary food groups.

Tonight, as the first snow of the season falls on the leaves outside the kitchen door, as our weekend continues with three soccer events, one concert, a sleepover, a Confirmation class, a business meeting and way too much time working, I quietly slip away to the local co-op, where I buy all the root vegetables I can find - turnips, squashes, carrots, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, onion, garlic.

I peel them. I chop them into chunks. I throw them, along with curry, a little cayenne and several cups of veggie broth, into the soup pot. When all the ingredients are simmered to integration, I puree half of the vegetables and return them to the pot. I add half a cup of peanut butter (yes, peanut butter for both thickening and flavor) and the juice from half a lemon. I splash a little red wine into the pot and some into the glass next to it.

I pull out the special bowls that I use only for soup, and I call out to the scattered family. We come together to the simple, but warm and healthy, meal. And I know in the midst of chaos, I have done one thing well today.

(Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio (www.debralynnhook.com), has been writing about family life since 1988 when she was pregnant with the first of her three children. Read her blog at http://debralynn-bloopbloopotter.blogspot.com/ or e-mail her at dlbhook@yahoo.com.)

Before the snow. Northeast Ohio. November 5, 2010

Soon, green grass will be a distant memory.

Cobblestone streets, wet wirh rain, will be an image from the past...

....As will be leaves on trees.

And it comes.

American politics and the mid-term election landslide. Just sayin'.

‎"We did not put our ideas together. We put our purposes together. And we agreed. Then we decided." -from the Popol Vuh, a sacred book of the Mayans....(Thanks, Renee.) Oh, that our American politicians were each relegated to a cave, alone, for six months with this book. 

Lentil Curry Split Pea Coconut Yum Yum - I Love Soup - Soup

I am back to toying around with being a vegan (is this an oxymoron -- can I really "toy" with something so serious?). And I am looking for good, tasty recipes that will keep me there. Just at this very moment of transition, I run into a new vegan at a party who tells me about this recipe that her daughter will drive an hour to eat. OMG. I am often convinced I will never find one soup better than the last one I fell in love with. And then along comes this one. Thanks, Kelly Gonterro!!

START WITH
1.3/4 cups lentils and split peas with ¼ cup barley and wheat berries
9 cups water
3-4 carrots, coarsely chopped
1 T ginger
1/8 t oregano
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 large bay leaves
Simmer 30 mins.
--
Roast 2 T curry in a pan on medium, stirring constantly 2 mins? 7 mins? Don’t let it burn!
Dump in soup at the 30-minute mark.
Same skillet:
Saute 1 small onion, 2 more T ginger 7 minutes.
Add one can tomato paste. Stir.
Dump in soup.
Simmer another 30 minutes.
Might have to add a little water, but not too much, because pretty soon, you will be further liquefying with:
1 can coconut milk.

OH, I AM ADDICTED TO THIS SOUP.

Bringing Up Mommy: One more trick-or-treat

DEBRA-LYNN HOOK
BRINGING UP MOMMY
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
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Looks like my family might have one more trick-or-treat in its repertoire.

He's 13, he's the youngest of my three, and he wants to be an Avatar.

I don't tell him that visions of the blue people from the 2009 movie have given me a two-Advil headache ever since he announced his choice. Or that I have a co-dependent relationship with Halloween costumes in general.

He needs a bow and arrow, he tells me. No, he needs a spear. He needs his skin to be blue, and kind of glittery in the face. He needs slanted eyes and pointy ears.

He tells me what he needs.

What I need is therapy to find out why I believe Halloween costumes are the measure of a mother's worth. Just as in past years when all three children simultaneously requested the most complicated costumes from my inadequate hands, I still don't know how to sew on a machine. I refuse, like my mother before me, to buy store-bought costumes and masks, or to send my children off to the dress-up box to do-it-yourself.

And yet, I want the perfect costume, the perfect fantasy - the perfect childhood moment - which leaves me every October, and then some, quietly agonizing, then apologizing, while they dream about the number of Reese's Cups they will collect in their pillow cases.

I tell myself this year I'm not going to reach for the stars or even the perfect shade of Avatar blue. I will, in chance moments, saunter around the costume and fabric shops, until I find adequate-enough supplies. I will, in perfect harmony with human limitations, accept my Singer-less self by joyfully, calmly, stitching whatever needs sewing by hand.

Mostly I will find happiness in my intimate attachment to this hallowed of all childhood-pretend days, which threatens to disappear from my repertoire, like sippy cups and tire swings and the blue stool in front of the bathroom sink.

"When did Emily and Chris quit trick-or-treating?" he wanted to know the other day about his older brother and sister, who are 22 and 18.

"I think they were 14 or 15," I said.

I don't really know the answer for sure. But if 14 or 15 will keep him trick-or-treating one more year, that's what I choose to say. That's what I choose to believe, much like I believe I will one day quit being a perfectionist mother.

One more trick-or-treat.

One more fantasy costume in a reality-show world.

One more opportunity for me to enjoy all of Halloween, including the lead-up, including the pure privilege of putting together a costume that means one of my children is just that, my child for whom I am responsible.

One more Oct. 31, patting the ears in place and the blue paint not too thick, then hurrying him out the door to join the Batmen, Dorothys and ghosts of the world.

One more pot of chili simmering on the stove, waiting for him and his friends to come flying back in the door, some of them flying for real on Harry Potter brooms.

One more watching in the living room, while he and his friends dump their candy in separate piles, and then begin trading Milky Ways and Three Musketeers, Mary Janes, candy corn and pennies.

One more year of me sidling into his room midday while he is at school, to steal my favorites from his pillow case, and hope he doesn't notice because, I justify, he has too much anyway.

One more opportunity to hear him, in the still-sweet voice of a boy still young enough to look past the imperfection of his mother: "Thank you, Mom, for doing such a nice job on my costume."

One more childhood moment.

Unless he decides next year that 14 isn't too old either.

And I will gladly be imperfect again.

A tribute. Happy Birthday, Mama.

I wrote this in May 2005, less than a month after my mother's accident and death. She would have been 74 today.

WHEN LOVE PREVAILS

For years, my three sisters and I braced for the call: "Mama fell." "Mama had a stroke." "Something bad happened to Mama."

She was only 68. But my mother had Hepatitis C and had suffered all her life from debilitating depression, which led her to prescription drugs we know not what or how many or whether she was taking them properly. She lived alone, in a tumble-down bungalow in New Orleans, on disability.

And so the call came, but not nearly how I expected.

"Your mother has third-degree burns to her chest," the emergency room nurse at Charity Hospital in New Orleans told me.

Burns to her chest. Was she cooking? Did she fall into a bonfire? My three sisters and I couldn't figure it out. Only one of us talked to her that day, and by then, she was in shock. What we eventually did piece together was part fact, part imagination:

Sitting in the den of her New Orleans house with a whirring fan overhead, Mama had been trying to fill a cheap, 39-cent cigarette lighter with the wrong fluid. Instead of the fluid going into the lighter, though, it had dripped onto her clothes. When she went to flick the lighter, the polyester sweater she was wearing went up like a cheap paper napkin. This beautiful woman, her silky dark hair, her high cheekbones and her full smile -- even in her 60s -- likened to Sophia Loren, had run to the bathroom to strip off her burning clothes in the shower before they burned through to her skin. But it was too late. She'd already suffered third-degree burns to 40 percent of her body and second-degree burns to her face.

That was on a Monday, April 18, 2005, to be exact.

By Tuesday afternoon, 24 hours after her accident, we were all with her. All four of Audrey's daughters left husbands, jobs and children to rush to the Baton Rouge burn unit where she was transferred. We couldn't talk to her; she was in an induced coma, sedated and intubated, and bandaged from her scalp to her knees. But we stood by her bedside as often as they'd let us. And when we couldn’t be with her, we held onto each other in the waiting room. We cried. We also laughed -- a lot actually, at the nuttiness. We tried really hard to make sense of this new suffering.
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My mother had already suffered enough, you see.

Severely abused by her own mother, who threw skillets at my mother's head and wielded belts, who shrieked obscenities when Mama tried to sing, who once clawed my mother’s face because she wrote in her diary that a boy tried to kiss her, my mother had suffered plenty.

Mama tried every way she could to make the suffering go away. At the age of 17, she escaped into marriage, and at 18, motherhood. By the time she was 26, she had four girls under the age of 7.

For the first decade or so, Mama managed to hold off the demons, parenting, as she used to say, "with Dr Spock in one hand and a rosary in the other.”

She threw herself into this role that would save her for awhile, becoming a Girl Scout leader and a volunteer at the little Catholic school where she drove us every day. She made three home-cooked meals a day. She made our Easter dresses. One Christmas, she locked herself in her bedroom with her sewing machine while she made tiny Barbie clothes sets with matching purses and muffs to put under the tree.

Mama believed in family. She also believed in good education, good manners, good teeth and God - especially God. She took us to church on Sundays, sometimes to the only African-American Catholic church in South Carolina, which her rich Lebanese uncle helped build.

And then my father left. And the bottom on the picture frame fell out.

In 1968, at the age of 32, with an absentee ex-husband who refused to pay more than sporadic child support, my mother worked 14-hour days to support girls who were 15, 14, 9 and 7. This was the era of drugs and sex. Post-Vietnam. Woodstock. Self-discovery. Thirty-two years old, vulnerable beautiful and tired, Mama, who'd never had her own adolescence, got swept up in the after-hours.

There were young boyfriends. There was pot, lots of it, and parties. There was neglect, sometimes no food. There was also a lot of moving around, sometimes to sub-standard housing. Once, she moved us all the way to Napa Valley, to a house on the edge of a vineyard, where we lived with a houseful of people whose names I don't remember.

She took us with her into some iffy situations. But she always took us with her, eventually to New Orleans, where her counter-culture soul took root.
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Sometimes back then, life was almost normal. There were, in fact, deep pockets of happiness, joy and even success at times for Mama, who'd managed to earn one nursing degree when she was in her 30s and another in her 50s. Throughout her later years, she found purpose in her nursing work, especially with the downtrodden. By and through her own struggles, she developed an intense empathy and compassion for the poor and the left-behind, which led to her work on the psychiatric unit of Charity Hospital in inner-city New Orleans.

She also found joy in music, becoming a fixture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival every spring where she would hang out, decked out in bling and tank tops with my sister, Susan, and Susan’s musician partner, Charles. Charles was her ticket into New Orleans' inner circle, garnering her introductions to the Neville Brothers, Dave Bartholomew and other greats. She loved being a groupie.

When she was at her happiest, though, was when she was with us, her four girls and our growing families. She loved being with her young grandchildren, who were too young to hurt her, whose love for her was as unconditional as hers for them.

As for her daughters, she viewed us as her best friends, sometimes her only friends. But the road with daughters-as-best-friends is not lined with fairy dust. On our own quest for wholeness and healing, we adult daughters were a pain for her already tortured soul at times, as we delved into the demons of our past: Why, as a child, did she demand I always be happy, while she got to be the sad one? Why exactly did Daddy leave? Did she DO something to MAKE him leave? Why did my older sister and I always have to baby sit the two younger girls so she could go out at night? Why, even now, was her pain always worse than mine, even on her good days?

I remember one conversation in particular, when I asked her to admit that she demanded too much of me and my sisters.

"Just say it, Mama," I said into the phone, 1110 miles away in Ohio.

"But you don't know what my mother did to me to make me that way," she said.

"Yes, I do. Just say it."

"OK," she said. "I demanded too much of you in your sisters."

Her voice was so small, it hurts me deep in my bowels now to recollect.
-----

I remember these difficult conversations.

I also remember the good ones - lively, intelligent talks on her good days, about religion and politics, about Saints football, about my children and their accomplishments. I always said she was the most intelligent woman I knew. She always said, if she'd had a better upbringing, she would have been a lawyer.

I remember good moments, especially the joy on her face as she met each of my children for the first time, all the pain gone, if but for a while.

I remember that one time I came down by myself to New Orleans, without my kids, and stayed for a week. Determined that I was going to get respite from my busy life, she insisted I sleep in her bed while she slept on the couch.

Every night, she’d call out to me, “You OK in there?”

“I’m great,” I’d say.

“Night night,” she’d call out.

“Night night,” I’d say back.

What I remember most, though, is the suffering.

And the depression. After my father, there would be a second marriage, and then a year later, another divorce, and the spiraling down, down, down, always down. Sometimes she was able to work. Sometimes she lived off Food Stamps. Sometimes she had electricity. Sometimes, as I sat in my comfortable home with my husband and children, I knew the electricity company was threatening to turn hers off. Sometimes I'd talk to her on the phone and she'd be my mother. Other times I'd talk to her and she'd be so depressed or doped up, she could hardly say my name. At 49, she had uterine cancer and a hysterectomy. At 57, she was told she had Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion during her cancer surgery. She was branded “permanently disabled.” Unable to continue nursing, always worrying about money, she began to spiral further and further into the haunting of her childhood, the awful reality of a loveless childhood and a wanting for the mother she never had, which would leave her in later years spending hours on her couch or in her bed, with the pillow over her head, unable to get up.

If she was left with a void, we daughters were left with the terrible pain of knowing we could never fill that void, no matter how whole we would become.

No matter how hard I loved her, I couldn't fix her.

I couldn't be her mother.
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And then there were those hours and days with Mama at the hospital.

Four days, she fought, as each of her bodily systems, first her kidneys, then her lungs, and eventually her heart, gave way. They had told us on that first night she wouldn't last 24 hours. It took her four days to leave us.

My sisters and I awaited each visitation like we were awaiting the birth of a new child. Two of us never left the hospital but slept huddled like puppies together on the hard floor of the waiting room next to a Coke machine, waiting for the next time we could see her.

When it was time to go to her room, we would go, two-by-two, rosaries wrapped around our wrists, stuffed animals tucked in our arms, pictures of grandchildren in tow.

We would stand at her bed, stroking the top of her head where her hair poked through the bandages.

We would hold her hands and kiss her feet. Thank God for her hands and feet. While her face was too raw, inflamed and oozing to touch and the rest of her body was wrapped thick with bandages, her feet and hands were blessedly open to our touch and caress.

Sometimes, she’d shake, her whole body would shake, when we were in the room with her. Whether it was because she was trying to tell us something or whether she was simply twitching from all the morphine, we don’t know. I kept wanting to take the sedation down enough so that we could know, so that we could have one last conversation with her. They kept telling me she would be in excruciating pain if we did.

And so, because they said she could hear us and because we needed for her to hear us, we would talk at her. We told her stories about her grandchildren, about our homes, the weather, our jobs. We told her how much we loved her and wanted to take care of her now.

And we sang.

The acoustics in the room favored by angels, on the Thursday night before she died, Audrey's four girls surrounded her bed in the dim light and lifted the voices she let us have. Nurses standing outside her door later told us we brought them to tears, as with Charles accompanying us on guitar, we sang her favorites -- James Taylor, Emmy Lou, Alison Krauss, Bonnie Raitt.

"Now we get to be your mama," I whispered into her ear that night.

A few hours after we sang to her, eight days before Mother's Day 2005, Mama's heart quit. No longer able to maintain her heroic clinging to life, she moved on to that place people keep telling me about.
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Before this happened, I had planned to write a special column for this Mother's Day, about the love that even a wounded mother can inadvertently teach, perhaps by and through her own suffering.

As it turns out, I was busy the day my column was due, delivering one of several tributes at the funeral of this complicated woman, which I capped with a personal note sent to me by a close friend, also a mother, in the tender days just after my mother's death.

"...Although I did not know your mother, I keep feeling that somehow I have glimpsed her, because I have watched you be a mother. It seems to me that in some way, your wonderful and intuitive mothering, though chiefly a testament to you, is also in some ways a testament to her. And I can only think that wherever her spirit is, this fills her with joy."
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"Weeping may endure the night. But joy cometh in the morning." As seen on a holy card taped to the wall over her bed.

Special language all my own

I like words, the kind that are in the dictionary and the kind I make up. There have been several over the years, which I will add to this list as I remember them. For now, here are two:

Bloop bloop – In the year 2005, during some particularly tragic, awful, heinous, unfathomable events in my life (which I will write about One Day), my mind got a little overloaded.

Tired of thinking and trying to come up with words, I began to substitute “bloop bloop” for words I thought I could get away with omitting. For example: While having dinner with my Blood Sisters (BSs), who were likewise gathered around these tragic, awful. heinous and unfathomable events (TAFU-E), I might point to a bag of crawfish on the table and say: “Pass the bloop bloop.”

As time went on, an entire, goofy system was built around bloop bloop. Any time during TAFU-E that any of the BSs didn’t want to say a word or couldn’t think of a word, we started saying “bloop bloop.”

This was eventually disconcerting for others in my life, i.e. my children and my husband, who often get dragged involuntarily into BS, especially when bloop bloop started becoming as common a phrase as bread or water in my head, but it didn't translate well to those around me, as in “Chris, do you want to bloop bloop with me today?” This could mean have lunch, swim or take a zip line from the flour mill to the river.

Meanwhile, my sisters and I, so obviously cut from the same crazy quilt, continue to often and randomly love our "bloop bloop, which we have come to say with a popping, melodic cadence.

BS Susan (BSS)’s partner Charles has even taken to calling me “Bloop Bloop.”

“Is that Bloop Bloop on the phone?” he calls out to BSS.

Otter – Otters are my favorite animal. Hands down. Ever watch them play? They are playful, but they are also smart. They have to be to swim around in water all day long without bumping into each other. And they are loving. They hold hands, to wit this popular utube (14 million hits) from Vancouver Auditorium. www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUk3T2Kfno". Of course, I didn't make up the word, "otter." But I kind of made up its usage: People that I like a lot, I call otters. And puppies. "You're a puppy, a kitty and an otter" is a really good thing.

A blog by any other name

Up until three days ago, this blog was called BloopBloopOtter because I say "bloop-bloop" a lot and I like otters.(See future post on "language" for deeper meaning.)

But it didn't work.

First of all, I just slapped it on there when I created the blog and needed a title. Secondly, nobody knew what it meant. Thirdly, I didn't know what it meant.

For months after the christening of BloopBloopOtter, I considered other names, even as I also considered this blog's reason for being.

I considered "Raison d'Etre."

And "Joie de Vivre."

I thought about "Ambient Light" because I'm all about natural light, photographically and otherwise.

Maybe "Soul Sistah" because I am my mother's daughter?

How about "Synchronicity" -- a play on words?

"Taking the Long Way Around" because that's the angle of my journey?

Or "Daily miracles" because I believe every day has at least one?

Everything was too literal.

And then my children and I came up with the current one. And God it fits.

It sooo fits.

First of all, I love me some funk music.



Secondly, I love me some funk shoes.



Thirdly, I thought of a summer night about three years ago, when, after wayy too much wine, two friends and I started The Passion and Intimacy Club. We didn't really DO anything. We knew we weren’t chartering a real club with membership dues and meetings. We were just making a statement about what was important to us.

Tragically, one of the “members” up and died not so long ago. But the other one is here. And she manages to get up offa that thang every ding dang chance she gets. Does she dance every day like James Brown? Actually, I think some days she curls up in the fetal position, just like the rest of us.

But I do believe she experiences all of life from the middle of the dance floor.

That's what this blog is about: Refusing to sit it out.

Into each life, a little James Brown must fall. Unh.

I do believe this blog will address either directly or indirectly...

---Photography. I have been taking pictures for a very long time, and in the last couple of years have begun taking wedding pics and portraits and soccer pix and landscape pix for people who give me money when I give them my pictures. I. Am. Having. The. Time. Of. My. Life with this newly developing creative expression. Every blog post will include at least one of my pictures, usually more, i.e., as many as I can tastefully cram onto the page.

---Writing. My kids once asked me if I had to choose between writing and photography, which would I choose. I refuse/d to answer. I have been writing as a way of expressing myself since I was 7. I have been a newspaper reporter, a columnist, a blogger and a wanna-be memoirist. I believe every time I put my fingers on the keyboard that an opportunity is before me. I not only love the craft, but the study of it.


---Food. My Lebanese great grandmother had two ovens and two fridges in her kitchen. I ate a lotta grape leaves and raw kibbeh in that kitchen. Add to this: New Orleans. Somewhere along the way, we left SC, where I was born, and we moved to New Orleans. What this means: I love to eat okra in my gumbo and plain yogurt on my fried chicken. And I love to cook it. And take pictures of it.

----Daily miracles. I'm not talking about fishes and loaves. I'm talking about saying yes to a bike ride because your husband asked you, even though your middle-aged knees hurt from yesterday's Latin dance class. And on this bike ride that you didn't really want to take, you encounter on either side of the breeze-blown springtime path, incredible, other-worldly wildflowers you didn't know existed on the planet. I'm talking about everyday daily miracles.

----The human connection. Besides dancing, I believe this, right here, is why we're here. This is what we're put here on Earth for, to say "Good morning" with special vigor to the grocery store clerk who looks like she's having a bad day; to give a piece of jewelry to a stranger because she's just told you she likes it; to stay on the cell phone, long distance, with a Blood Sister while she's having a uterine biopsy. Speaking of women:

----The Sisterhood. By this, I mean women and body image, women and the desire to break out of routine and long-standing rote, women and the power they hold if only they knew how much power. Specifically, I will very often address the aforementioned Blood Sisterhood (BS -- my three sisters, who were all borne of my wild-child Mama, who is an entry all on her own and who taught us about Soul Power way before we ever got to the City of New Orleans. Yeah, you rite:

----New Orleans. Music, food, culture, fire, flood, power and lack of power, people, love, birth and The Rebirth Jazz Band. "Ain't no party like a rebirth party, 'cause a rebirth party don't stop. Unh." This is the city where the aforementioned Mama moved us, when I was 17, from the South Carolina hills (where Mr. James Brown was born). This is the city and state I left when I was 26 after graduating from LSU. This is the city I return to at least once, sometimes four times, a year, because this is where I am most me.

----Motherhood, and the healing power of circular love.

----Therapy and living in the present while integrating a complicated past.

----Theology, philosophy and the never-ending search for Truth, post 60s-Catholic upbringing.

----Death and dying.


I'd like to say I will post daily. That's what the blogger gurus say you SHOULD do. You SHOULD post every day so that people get used to looking you up every day. Should? Should? I hate shoulds. But hm.

Truth-telling and the small-town cop

I have a strong disdain for people who wield power inappropriately. Like the people at the License Bureau. They hate sitting all day on their boot, which they know is widening by the minute. Their kids are messing with Satanic cults, and the big hair on their heads is bringing them down. So they take it out on me. Worst of all: They look happy when they're doing it. "I'm sorry, ma'am," says the clerk, her best Shining smile in place. "But looks like you don't have the right documents. And, oopsy daisy, looks like we're closing. Guess you'll just have to come back tomorrow and stand in line for an hour all over again."

Then there are cops like the guy in Mantua who pulled me over the other day.

Mantua, Ohio, in case you don't know it, is this teeny tiny sweetheart of a town -- pop., 962 -- in the middle of rolling hills and cornfields on the way to Lake Erie. Its claim to fame is the Potato Festival. One year, the town tried to get in the Guinness Book of World Records by using a (clean) cement mixer to make the world's largest pile of mashed potatoes, which the City Council dumped in the middle of the street.

So every now and then I go to Mantua, where there's this great physical therapy practice. I get this funky think in my knee, you see, and the only physical therapist I trust moved her practice from suburban Cleveland to Mantua. And so every now and then, I enjoy the half-hour drive along the two-lane, 45-mph highway, which turns into a 25-mph Main Street for about five seconds. I take a right into Edy Brenner's Physical Therapy, get my fix, then head back out onto the highway.

This time, as I leave Edy's, I hightail it a little too fast, a little too soon for the cop coming at me from the other direction. Soon as I see him, I know I'm in for it. Argh. I didn't have on my seatbelt either, which I quickly fastened as he whipped around and came after me.

Now I had just the night before seen the movie, "Thelma and Louise," which if you haven't seen in awhile, you must see, if for no other reason than looking at Brad Pitt's 23-year-old tush in faded jeans. If you remember, Thelma and Louise, and Brad who hid out for awhile in Louise's bed, were all running from some pretty stinky dudes, including a whole posse of small-town cops.

So this movie is fresh in my mind, as I pull over and start fumbling for all my various official documents while sneak-peaking into my rearview mirror while this cop whips around behind me, gets out of his car and stands up. Middle-aged, paunchy, and BORED, he actually hitches up his pants like they do in the movies. He walks around the back of his cruiser, opens the trunk and pulls out one of those big ranger hats. He pulls it down on his head, adjusting the front of it, like Thelma's would-be captors.

"Oh, God, am I'm doomed," I think, especially because I am guilty.

Like a black cat on Halloween, he sashasys up to my window.

"You know why I pulled you over, ma'am?"

Actually, I do.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"I clocked you going 45 in a 25."

"I know, but I just came out of the physical therapy place, and I saw the sign up ahead that said 45 and that's what I did. I didn't think about that small stretch of highway between the turn into Edy's and the highway."

Then: "Were you wearing your safety device, ma'am?"

Now this is one of those make-it-or-break-it moments. If I tell the truth, I could get two tickets. But if say I was wearing it, then I'll be lying, which I pride myself on never doing. Ever since I lied to my boyfriend, Barry, that time when I was 18, and this other guy, Mark, stole a kiss from me at a party, and Barry asked me, "Did Mark kiss you?" and I said "No", and he said, "I saw Mark kiss you" I decided I would never lie again.

And so I tell the truth, and then some.

"No, sir, I wasn't. I put it on as soon as I saw you. But you know, sir, when I had little kids, I used to put on my seatbelt first thing, because I was teaching them. But now I don't have little kids anymore, and I forget because our generation didn't wear seat belts when we were little. It always takes me about five minutes to get down the road and then I remember."

"You got any priors, ma'am?"

More ouchy truth. But I gotta do it. He's The Man with the power to send me to Death Row.

"There was that one time when I got pulled over for running a stop sign. The police officer said I rolled through it. But I have to tell you I don't think I rolled through it. I think I stopped, but not enough for her. And so when I went to court, they told me I could plead all these different ways and I just went ahead and pled guilty."

"All right, ma'am." (You can be quiet now.) "Stay right here."

I sit for those interminable five minutes when you wonder how you're going to afford a $150 traffic ticket, much less the points that are already racking up with your insurance because you have teenagers. You're watching all the cars passing and rubber-necking to see who the ditz is that got caught going 45 on the 100 yards of road called Main Street. And then he comes back to the window.

"I'm going to tell you something, ma'am. I saw you put on your seat belt when you saw me. If you had lied to me, I was going to give you a ticket. But since you told me the truth, well ma'am, you just slow down a a little bit and make sure you're always wearing your safety device. Have a good day there, ma'am."

I drove off from that cop that morning, feeling proud of both of not just myself for telling the truth, but him, for being a good cop willing to listen to another human being's story. Because of how the police officer treated me, I drove off, not only wanting to be a better driver, but a better person. That is what real authority is all about.

Bringing Up Mommy: Hair dye and the natural woman

I'm one of those women who prides herself on choosing breast over bottle, flip-flops over stiletto and Boca over beef.

I don’t wear polyester or mascara.

Perhaps most significantly, I never did, nor was I ever going to, dye my hair.

Rather, I was going be like my 70-year-old friend, Carol. A beautiful, accomplished and confident professor at a local liberal-college, she wears a proud, gray braid down her back as a badge of defiance against a phony world.

Ah, but every 100-percent-cotton devotee has her day of reckoning. Mine came four years ago, in the fall of 2006, when I went to a snappy, new hairdresser for a little trim in preparation for my niece's wedding.

"See any gray back there?" I asked.

I already knew about the tiniest strands of gray framing my face.
As for the rest of my head, I was prepared for her to say something back-handedly affirming, like "Wow. For as old as you are, it's amazing how little your hair has grayed."

Instead: "I'd say you've got about 50 percent coverage back here."

I grabbed the hand mirror, which lay bare the truth and a mass of glop that was the color of Ohio in February.

My values, my bragging rights and all that talk about Oil of Olay being a racket disintegrated like Obama's presidency. I must have whimpered involuntarily.

"You know we could very easily fix this," she said.

I was too stunned to take in too much of what she said after that, so much prattle about low lights and high lights and permanent vs. semi-permanent. I got out of there as fast as I could, hurrying to gather in the opinions of my village:

• "You'll feel better about yourself if you do,” said the vainest of my blood sisters, whose hair is bottle black.

• "You might feel better about yourself if you don't," said my youngest sister, who makes her own alfalfa sprouts and yogurt.

• "You will be a disgrace to your Southern upbringing if you don't," said my middle sister, who emerged from the womb with a shock of gray in front.

• But the most dramatic, and the most effective, comment came from my then 18-year-old son. "Mom! You have always been your own person! You don't have to be one of 'those women'! You can be who you want to be, just by being you! I like you the way you are! Just be yourself!"

For awhile, my son won. For two more years, in fact, I lived with the gray that was, on the one hand, a public embracing of aging, and on the other hand, beginning to make my particular face look really bad. Some people look really beautiful as they age, their thick black hair framing their face like the contrast button on PhotoShop. My thin, wispy hair, on the other hand, looked like the dirty broom you use in the garage, a crisscross of brown leaves and grit from the car's oil pan.

Much as I was OK with telling people my age, I realized I was not OK with looking like a dead person. I didn't feel old when I looked in the mirror. I felt ugly.

Somewhere along the way, then, I began to mix up this paradigm I’d held so tight.

I came to believe that the personal beauty I'd always refused to be slave to, is valuable, that the search for it doesn’t stop as we age, that wanting to look beautiful is not denying the natural process or the reality of aging.

And so I did it. One sunny day during the summer of 2008, my new hairdresser, who is really a hairdresser/therapist, who totally gets me, painted semi-permanent ash all over my head and blonde highlights on top.

I couldn't believe how pretty I looked when she was done, not just my hair, but my face, my whole being.

And now? Now, two years after that first dye job, I can’t imagine not dyeing my hair. I may one day stray from my hairdresser and do my own henna that my alfalfa sprouts friends keep telling me about. For now, I have come to appreciate the smell of ammonia the morning after.

Synchronicity and artistic pursuit

My No. 1 adviser suggested three lenses for my upgraded photo arsenal. They are lenses I hesitate to name for fear of losing anybody who doesn't talk photo, which I barely do, let me assure. But for people who want to know, J2 suggested the 24-70 mm 2.8 for best-of-show/all-around lens; the 85 mm 1.4 for my No. 1 portrait lens; and the 70-200 mm 2.8 for Jazz Fest, sports pictures and all those shots I can't get when it gets too dark.

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Now we're talking about a lot of money. And we're also talking about carefully choosing from among dozens of options, which I had been researching for weeks, months, years, my whole life. And then today became the day when I HAD to buy SOMETHING, because the main lens I'd been using (an 18-200 mm 3.5) was malfunctioning and I had a job to shoot.

I woke with a plan, to buy that main all-around lens, the 24-70 2.8. But I was still concerned whether this was the right lens or not.

So I walked into Campus Camera, and I asked the one guy in there who is actually nice AND smart (the others are that cocky breed of ego-y yuk that shows up in every artistic venue):

"If you had to pick a No. 1 lens, what would it be?"

Without a single prod of provocation from me, he said "The 24-70 2.8."

Game, set, match.

Herein are the results of my first day shooting with my new sharp and lovely color 24-70 2.8.

Ambient light

"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” --Howard Thurman, American theologian, clergyman and activist, 1900-1981.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have been semi-launching a photography business for several years now. Today is the day when I push forward on the throttle, as I begin plunking down an unholy amount of money on top-of-the-line equipment I have been reviewing for months. This is just as I am getting lots of requests for my pictures.

All good, right?

Ah, but the id or the super ego or the devil, whichever you want to call that naysayer entity that co-exists with your guardian angel, will try to have its way when you are headed toward the light, which is to say away from the dark, which is sometimes more familiar. And here is what the dark was saying to me yesterday as I made final plans for today's spending event:


1. You have never spent this much money at one time. You once bought a new car and a house. But it was WITH your husband. And he signed the papers. How can you possibly make this important decision all by yourself?

2. As soon as you lay out all that cash at Campus Camera, you'd better be prepared to announce in a loud, albeit falsetto, voice: "This is what I want to do. This is how I want to spend my time." And you damned well better be good at it.

3. Will you make back your investment? Or is this really an expensive hobby, a self-induuuuuuulgence, disguised as a business? Wouldn't the Family, and the World, be better served if you instead took all that money and dry-walled the basement, or sent your daughter to a small private college where your daughter really wants to go instead of the cheaper (free because her daddy teaches there), larger public institution here in town? Hm, Mom?

4. Take a look at the Internet and the hundreds upon trillions of wedding and portrait photographers who will always have a bigger lens, a better camera and more tutorials than you. Can you possibly compete?

So yeah. So yesterday, I FB-posted some of these anxieties to Joe Jackson of Rock Hill, SC, an amazing photographer, www.joejackson.zenfolio.com (sorry this blog won't let me hyperlink yet again!) and one of my emerging fav peeps in the world, whose very approach to work and life embraces all that I believe in. His photos are warm. He is warm. His photos are genuine. He is genuine. His photos are generous. He is generous.

I used to work with Joe at The State newspaper in SC where I learned a lot of what I know about photography. I was hired as a words person, a writer, a reporter. But for every story I wrote, I was assigned a photographer. And I watched them with great interest and fascination, perfecting my own understanding of photography, which dates back to when I was 19 and a traveling studio photographer, shooting, believe it or not, Shriners, for Shriner yearbooks.

I learned a lot about form and composition and umbrella lights, shooting large Shriner families in a studio setting. I learned how to handle a 35 from one of the other Shriner photographers, a freelancer who taught me the rudimentaries with a manual Leica and a hand-held meter. I also learned from my photo j classes in journalism school. But, truly, it was these guys at The State newspaper -- Ginger Pinson, Linda Stelter, Anne McQuary, Jeff Amberg and Joe who taught me about getting the picture to match the story, about capturing the moment, about not invading private space while completely invading it, about staying out of the picture, existentially. The picture is not about my ego, but about the subject.

I folded this knowledge into my own creative expression and a few Nikons here and there. And then one day I had an exhibit at Starbucks. And then one day I started landing wedding and portrait jobs. And then one day I began needing new equipment -- and mentors, which everybody, even Mother Teresa, needs. You can be a teacher, even, and still need somebody to teach you. How do you otherwise get better? Ah, but you've got to find the right mentor, somebody who speaks your language, and if s/he doesn't, well you have to keep moving with patience despite your impatience. It's like choosing a therapist, or a husband.

I tried a few before I found Joe. I found a guy in Cleveland online, who promised great tutorials. I drove all the way to the west side of Cleveland in a snow storm. He did know a lot about light. But his photos were way too artificial looking for my tastes. I found a camera store clerk in Aurora who takes wedding photos. I learned some from her, about light, again, always about light, until it became clear that wedding photography for her was a formula. She was burned out. I tried a few others, who were preachy or ego-y or downright mean. They'd been working stiffs for decades. What did I think, that I could pick up a digital camera and start shooting?

And then I saw Joe's stuff online. And here's the thing: People keep telling me what they like about my portraits is how warm they are, how much personality I capture in the photos. I think it's because I like people. Simple as that maybe, and I say this with all humility. This is what I saw when I revisited Joe's pictures online for the first time in 15 years. I could feel Joe's warmth behind the lens. And so I ventured forth. I FBed him a question about one of his pictures and the lens he used. And he answered in 7 paragraphs. And then I asked him another question. And he answered in 10 paragraphs. And I kept asking, even as I apologized for taking up too much of his time, and he kept answering, by telling me he was pleased to help me. He even went so far as to have a phone conversation one day with me on his entire lunch break.

And so yesterday, when I found the Dark Knight sitting on my shoulder, I went to Joe with my anxieties, to which he replied:

"One of the best things about FB (and the internet in general) is that it allows you to see others' work. One of the worst things about FB (and the internet in general) is that it allows you to see others' work.
I am one of the world's worst offenders when it comes to the sin of obsessing over the perceived chasm of "quality" between my pictures and what I see on other photographers' sites. Here's my advice:
1) Step away from the internet. Resist the urge to compare. Feel free to look and ask if the purpose is to increase your own knowledge, but step away once you begin feeling either seriously inferior or superior. Both extremes are fatal to your mental and professional health.
2) (This one is listed at the risk of sounding evangelical, but you asked.) Are you using your God-given technical, personal, and business skills in a way that ultimately reveals the beauty of creation and celebrates our connections to each other? Or put another way - does your art lift people and their spirits, or does it diminish? As long as you're doing your share of the lifting, I'm good with it.
3) Clients come to us asking for pictures, but what we actually have to sell is "the experience." If your client walks away from the session feeling like both of you had a genuinely good time, THAT is what they will remember and share. I know you. So I know for a fact that one reason people come to you is because you make good pictures. But I also know that people come to you because they already know, or have heard, that they will have a good time with some one who will be warm, funny, and engaging.
4) And finally, if one goal is to make money at this - is there a market for what I do? Apparently there is. Regardless of your self-perception, or maybe in spite of it, people like what you do. And they will give you money to do it. Accept it and be happy. If you seriously entertain thoughts of inferiority, those feelings will encroach upon your interactions with your clients. When your personal demons shout "You people are nuts for spending money on me when you should be hiring this other photographer instead," your clients will hear the message loud and clear. Do not give the demons a voice.
Want to expand your technical skills or explore other styles? Fine. Knock yourself out. But do it for your own personal or professional growth, NOT in order to sate a false feeling of inferiority.
So...my assessment is this: you're well-covered on points #2-4. Keep working on #1 to banish the demons, and you'll be great. Or just ask me and I'll remind you."

The dark side is always there, hovering. But the light is where we belong. Thanks for being my light, Joe. And I didn't even need a flash. Campus Camera, here I come.

1st-place photos at the Randloph Portage County Fair

I won my first photo contest, at the Portage County Randloph Fair! Two blue ribbons for Mardi Gras Indian (portrait category) and MudBowl (sports). Fun! And thanks for the $5 prize money!!! A Starbucks latte, and then some!

Deep memories are spurred by the Deep South book, "The Help"

Memories of the drama, of my mother and my father, of the lingering pain and guilt of growing up in the Deep South during the racist 1960s rushed in as I read “The Help,” by Kathyrn Stockett, a book set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the height of the Civil Rights movement.

“The Help” is the tangled, emotionally complex story of African-American maids and their white mistresses, told in the voice of two of the maids and a young white woman who is sympathetic to their plight. Just at the time that Dr. King and Rosa Parks are becoming familiar names in this hotbed racist town, so are some of Jackson’s African-American maids coming to a deepening realization of the irony of their lives: The white women, afraid the Black women carry disease, force their black maids to use a separate toilet in the garage. This -- even as the black women cook the white women's meals and tend their babies. One of those white babies grows up to be sympathetic. And she goes on, with the secret help of these and other maids, to write a book exposing the shame, injustices and degradation suffered by Black women as they raised the families of the very people who hated their race. Even if they didn’t truly hate them deep in their hearts, they had to act like they did. The Junior League and even the governor of Mississippi were watching.

I, too lived in the Deep South in the 1960s – in the little town of Greenville, S.C., in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

I, too, had maids or baby sitters.

There was Velma, who loved to sing Negro spirituals, who had half a dozen children of her own, whose stairs inside her darkened home had rags on them instead of carpet, which we saw when Mama defied Southern culture and took us into her house to pay our respects after she died.

There was Florence with her downcast eyes.

There was another maid, a beautiful young woman with caramel skin, who undid her bra one afternoon in the back yard because me and my sister wanted to see what a breast looked like.

I also had a mother who sympathized and a father who didn't.

My father was from Greenville, Mississippi, not far from Jackson. He was one of nine children, born in 1933 to a father who was a sharecropper and who eventually walked to college so he could be a teacher. My father’s father eventually moved the family to Greenville, S.C., -- Mississippi racism and all.


(My dad, at 16)

I once heard my uncle whispering to the other adults in the living room of my grandmother’s old wrap-around porch house, where they were all sitting after Christmas dinner: “They need to send them n... back to Africa.”

Those words rang in my ears like I'd been slapped – I can still see my uncle stopped in his rocking chair as he made his proclamation.

The words rang strong because of Mama.

In Mama’s view, the “n” word was one of the worst words anybody could utter in anybody’s presence, but especially in the presence of her four daughters. Good Catholic girls she was determined for us to be, we were not allowed to hear or say “shut up,” “butt” or even “hate.” But the worst word of all was the word that started with an “n.”

My mother was half Lebanese and half Deep South, her father born of Lebanese immigrants, her mother of a Seneca County, South Carolina, war lieutenant and a proud Cherokee Indian who never learned to read.

My mother looked more Lebanese than Southern, her hair, dark, her skin, olive-complected.

With black eyes and high cheekbones, she was Sophia-Loren exotic in a community that celebrated lily white.

As immigrants, Mama’s relatives empathized with the minority, so much so that Mama’s family became responsible for starting the three black Catholic churches in South Carolina.

A few years before my godfather, Mama’s uncle and my great uncle, Uncle Jamile died, I called him in South Carolina and asked him to tell me the story of how the bishop commissioned three black Catholic churches, one in Greenville, one in Charleston, and one in Columbia.

Uncle Jamile, who was a real estate developer, who made his money along with the rest of the family starting grocery stores that went on to become the Bi-Lo chain, fanagled a scheme with the bishop: He would secretly buy three pieces of land like he was going to develop it for commercial purposes. He would then turn around and sell each parcel to the Catholic church for 99 cents. The church would turn the parcels into churches for Black people.

This is the good part of my mother we grew up identifying with.

And then there was Essie, my mother's mother, who was also part of Mama, and us.

Essie, herself an abused, angry child who ran away to the orphanage when she was 12, had her own story of pain, which she cast onto my mother like a spiderweb, maybe because she was beautiful and smart and beloved by the Lebanese side of the family.

My mother was Essie’s whipping post. Essie threw cast-iron skillets at my mother’s head and told her she was stupid. When my mother tried to sing, she smirked. “Shut up that mouth! You don’t know how to sing!” Essie, who worked as a nurse at night and slept during the day, made my mother take care of the next three siblings. The siblings were born when my mother was 9, 11, and 14. When she was 17, my mother married my father so, she said, she could escape.

I only saw my grandmother be physically abusive once, when I saw her throw a tub of pimento cheese at my aunt’s head. Otherwise, what I saw of Essie's wrath was psychological. She stomped through the 900-square foot house so that it shook, bellowing at nobody. Her husband, a mouse or smart, who’s to say, never had much of a job, never said anything, but sat glued to a wing-back chair in the living room in front of the TV.

I only knew the stories of abuse because my mother told me.

Our relationship muddied by co-dependency, my mother used these stories too many times when I was young to explain her depression, her misery, and ultimately, her inability to cope with motherhood.

In later years, Essie became the excuse for her explosion. When she was 33, when my sisters and I were 14, 13, 9 and 7, she divorced my father and became a poor role model for responsibility, the willful, wild adolescent she never got to be.

I never saw physical abuse against my mother.

But I caught sight of Essie’s hold on my mother once, when Mama was in her 50s, and I was in my 30s. I was at my grandmother’s house with my mother, sitting on the couch. We were talking, I don’t remember about what. My mother said something Essie didn’t like.

My grandmother turned to my mother and screamed from deep inside her, like the bass of a cello or King Kong. “You better shut up your goddamned mouth, girl!”

It wasn’t so much Essie’s visage or her words that showed me the truth.

It was the way my mother shrank before my eyes, from a grown woman to a small, scared child. “Yes, ma’am,” my mother said, her dark eyes widened in fear, glued to my grandmother’s, her body shaking next to me on the couch.

My mother, her self esteem nil, her depression augmented by the burden of four children at the age of 26, strong, clung to the plight of the downtrodden, as if they were her blood kin.

She was most at home with the small.

When I got invited to a junior high sorority mother-daughter tea in eighth grade, she sat in the piano room with the girls while the other mothers had coffee and cake in the other room.

She was quiet at dinners at my father’s mother’s house, where the table was long and the tea, sweet, where the Southern women would cast long, disgusted eyes at my mother’s dark hair and high cheek bones.

My mother was most of all at home at the Black Catholic church that her family started.

Her rich relatives attended and supported the high-church Catholic church in town, St. Mary’s. They even paid for her to attend St. Mary’s parochial school from first through twelfth grade.

Our own home church, the one my sisters and I attended, was Our Lady of the Rosary, the smaller Catholic church in town, where we also went to school. Mama was always putting on a face there, trying to be like the other mothers.


(This photo is my mother in later years, when she was 61, meeting my youngest child for the first time.)

But where Mama let down her guard, where she was most herself, where I felt like smiling when I was with my Mama, was at St. Anthony’s, at the Black Catholic church named after the man who is the patron saint of lost things and missing persons.

The Black people there would stretch out their hands in greeting to her as if to tell her she was good and strong, and perfect just as she was. And she would outstretch hers. And when it came time to sing, my mama would close her eyes and throw back her head and open her mouth and release her Essie-squelched voice with the people she was most comfortable with.

Although after the divorce, my mother worked 14-hour days at a nursing home, when I was little, my mother only worked one year, as a secretary at the utility company.

That's when she hired the maids. I was 9.

I remember Florence and her downcast eyes, specifically related to two occasions -- once, when I was reading a school book that had the word "bunk" in it, as in "bunk bed."

I didn't know what a "bunk" was and so I showed Florence the word in my book and asked what it meant.

She stopped ironing. “You makin’ fun a me?” she asked.

"No, ma'am, Miss Florence," I said, confused.

On another occasion, she asked me if I wanted “sam-min” for lunch.

"Yes, I love salmon!” I said.

She shook her head and lowered her eyes and wouldn't speak to me.

I didn't understand what happened until I saw her making me a sandwich.

She had been asking me if I wanted a sandwich for lunch, and I thought she said salmon.

I tried to tell her I didn't understand. But I could tell she didn't believe me.

I see now she thought I was trying to shame her.

Of course, I remember the beautiful young woman with her beautiful body, being so brave as to show me her beautiful skin. She was proud and confident.

But who I remember most of all is Velma.

Velma was a very large woman, I remember, who sweat profusely in the Southern summer heat.

The scent of her sweat was rich and deep, nothing I was familiar with.

Her sweat was comforting, a comfort like my own mother never could comfort me.

I have no memory of my Mama, so hardened by Essie, ever taking me in her arms or so much as smoothing a hair on my head.

But I have a vivid memory of Velma on one of those sweltering Southern afternoon summer storms, an electrical storm with its sudden lightning and thunder.

I was frightened.

And big Velma, drenched with sweat in our un-air-conditioned house, stopped ironing and sat down in the rocking chair in the living room.

“Come on,” she said, holding out her slick, sweaty arms to me.

I climbed up onto her ample lap.

She closed her eyes, and her arms around me.

And she rocked and patted my back and held me as she sang.

I think I can can

My great grandmother, Granny White, a millworker who lived in Seneca, S.C., about an hour from where I grew up, could not read. She wore little granny glasses and little black shoes. She lived in a house with an outhouse, dipped snuff, made muscadine wine and slept on mattresses made of duck feathers. The mattresses were so soft that you sunk three feet in the middle when you laid on them. My mother, Granny's granddaughter, used to love to escape her mean mother to go to Granny's duck mattresses.
Granny also canned vegetable soup. It was the best vegetable soup in the entire universe, and every time we drove out to see her, she'd pop open a jar and warm us up some. Okra, tomatoes, green beans and potatoes. Simple. Yum.

I always wanted to learn how to can, too, one of those tasks passed down woman-to-woman in the country. I always wanted to learn, but I'd heard all the bad stories -- exploding pressure cookers, botulism, that kind of life-threatening thing. I needed somebody to teach me, to show me. I am, after all, a visual learner, and a woman who works best in community with others.

Along comes my friend, Kelley P. , a member of an organization called TimeBank, where people give and get services from each other. (Reminder to self: Write about this in a future post). Now Kelley is a level-headed woman, the mother of two really good little girls, who would know all about staving off all the bad things in life. She had just learned to can tart cherry jelly. She told me she would teach me!!

Yesterday, we spent two hours canning and an hour jabbering. In the end, I had 12 jars of cherry jam, no preservatives, made by my hands, with the help of Kelley. I had a good talk, woman-to-woman, to add to the pockets of my soul. Voila!



Next, I want to make blueberry with lime zest. Yum yum yum. And talk some more and more and more with Kelley...

HOW TO CAN THE JELLY WE CANNED ABOVE
4 cups tart cherries in their own juice
1 cup water
2 cups sugar
6 small jars
one pot with heavy bottom and lid
one gallon saucepan
one small saucepan
one box no sugar needed pectin
four tools from Bed Bath and Beyond for 8 bucks: a funnel, a magnet on a stick, a measuring rod, tongs

1. Wash your jars and lids in the dishwasher. You want the water hot.
2. Don't touch the insides of the jars after that, or the insides of the lids. In fact, don't touch anything that will touch your jelly. That's how you seal in bacteria. Wash everything in really hot water. Then wash it again.
3. Fill the biggest pot of water, the one with the heavy bottom, so that when you put the jars in there, they're covered, plus an inch. Using your tongs, put your jars in the cold water. Cover the pot. Bring it to a boil. Once it's boiling, turn down to a simmer.
3. Meanwhile, chop cherries however you want them. Some of us like them whole, others a little pulsed in the food processor, others chopped on a chopping board.
4. Put cherries in the medium pot with the box of pectin. Medium high heat. Bring to boil. Add two cups sugar. Bring to boil again. Set timer for two minutes. When the two minutes are up, your jelly is ready to can.
5. Meanwhile, start the other, littler saucepan with water to boil, enough to cover your lids. Keep them on a simmer til ready to use.
6. Using your tongs, bring out a jar. Use your funnel and pour some jelly in the jar. Use your measuring implement to make sure the jelly is 1/8 to 1/4 inch from the top. Using your magnet on a stick, grab your lid from the simmering pot and pop it on. Using a hot pad, hold the jar, while you twist on the top. Put the jar back into the boiling water.
7. Once all six jars are done, put the lid back on the big pot, bring it back to a boil for ten minutes.
8. Use tongs to get the jars back out. Put them in a quiet place, where they should sit still, setting for 24 hours. You will hear the jars pop over the next half hour, as they seal. Touch the tops after a few hours to make sure there is no give. That means they've sealed.

Jars will store for a year. Opened, they will be good for three weeks.
Yum yum and soo much easier than I thought.......Thanks, Granny and KP!!!

Hard drive crash and the Zen of emptiness

I decided a few months ago that I wanted to enter some of my photos in the county fair competition in August.

Procrastinating as long as I could, I finally plugged in my hard drive a few days ago to begin the arduous task of looking through 40,000 digital pics to find the four I like best.

I turned on the drive.

"Folder is empty," it said.

I turned off the hard drive, turned it back on.

"Folder is empty."

I turned off the computer, turned it back on.

"Folder is empty."

I went downstairs, came back up.

"Folder is empty."



Now here's the deal. Technology is the part that I HATE about today's art world. In order to be a contender, you have to have the right side of the brain working AND the left side. You can't just be good at composition and subject matter. You have to know raw vs. jpeg, tungsten lighting vs. studio light and how to merge layers in PhotoShop. Technology isn't just for the pro shooters, either. Any 22-year with a Mac knows how to do this stuff.

And then there's me. I get panicky when I try to set a clock. But I love to take pictures, and so I take it one step at a time, even as I simultaneously fight the technology, refusing, even, to back up my pictures with a second hard drive.


"I actually think it might be a good thing if my hard drive crashes," I once told Blood Sistah 3. "Maybe a clear hard drive would make me realize the impermanence of life. I could live into the Zen concept of emptiness."

Be careful what you ask for and all that, blah de blah: For the past two days, while the computer gurus at the local shop worked on my hard drive, I wasn't sure whether I would ever see those 40,000 pics again. I did find a few photos on CDs that I had made, enough that I was able to pull together a collection of four for the photo contest. I knew I had a bunch of albums on Facebook that I had culled from my collection. Certainly, I still had all the hard-copy pictures from decades of pre-digital shooting. Meanwhile, all the pictures I took with my Nikon D 80 digital during these past two years, all the weddings I've shot, the New Orleans Jazz Fest shots, the senior high school photos -- those would be gone.


Except they wouldn't be. They would be in my brain.

"I'm actually feeling pretty calm about this," I told Blood Sistah 4 on Day 2. She is a video producer, who works with computers and images, who just lost her own hard drive a few weeks ago. "I think if I lost all my writing, I would be devastated. I couldn't easily conjure that back up. As for my pictures, I am a visual person. Each and every one of those pictures is etched on the hard drive on my brain.

It's true I'd never see them again in high resolution. But truly, it makes me nervous to be so attached to a little black box, like my world would end if it did. What am I going to do with all those pictures anyway?

Then, just a few minutes ago, I got the call from the guy at the computer shop.

"We got all of 'em back. You can pick up your new hard drive later today."

Thank God.