Tied up in knots

It was an 18 hour drive from where we lived outside Chicago to the small Long Island town where my mom had grown up. Once or twice a year we would leave after school and my dad would drive all night. (I know, I can’t imagine how he did that.) It was quite an adventure, I remember waking in the night to see a sign on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for Valley Forge. I would imagine the winter encampment, wonder what it looked like now. (And now I live a short distance away from that exit. Also funny to realized I have no memories at all of the 18 hour drives back to Illinois, which we surely must have done at night as well to minimize the kid boredom and resultant chaos.)  

The bakery on Long Island was close enough to walk to from my grandparent’s house. There were sidewalks! For a girl from rural Illinois (no sidewalks, no shops within walking or biking distance) it was exciting to have such independence. My dad loved the poppy seeded hard rolls from the bakery with his coffee in the morning, fetched fresh each day. When we moved to California, too far for even such infrequent visits, my dad began to try to duplicate the rolls at home. My grandfather would taste test when he came to visit (easier to transfer one elderly parent by plane from East Coast to West than six kids and a dog in Volkswagen van.) He finally settled on a recipe that matched his memories (and got my grandfather’s seal of approval as well). 

When I would visit he would make a batch, timed so they’d just be coming out of the oven when I walked in the door. To be eaten hot, with butter. My dad died in 2019, but the rolls live on. The third generation (both Crash and Math Guy) learned from my dad how to tell when the dough was just right, how to tie the dough into knots and how much egg wash to use to get the right color and those poppy seeds to stick.

A few weeks ago, during the snow storm that left us snow covered and encased in ice (it’s been 3 weeks and the back yard is still under several inches of snow) I made a batch of braised short ribs and my dad’s hard rolls, It was the first time I had tried them since Parkinson’s symptoms had become evident. My head remembers how to tie the knots, but my hands had a hard time complying. A subtle reminder that Parkinson’s always lurks under the surface, the medications only (mostly) mask the symptoms. I eventually got a dozen rolls onto the sheet, and baked. They were not perfect, but they were wonderful, hot from the oven, redolent of yeast and memory.

A Terrific, Delightful, Good, Not Bad-At-All Day

Browsing Facebook this morning I read a friend's post describing a series of delightful interactions that had lit up their day. Nothing earth-shattering, just random, ordinary things on a regular day. It made me smile and I instantly thought, "Well, this is the opposite of an Alexander day!"

Judith Viorst's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day came out when I was in high school, so it's not one of my own childhood favorites. Still, I must have read it to my younger sibs enough to be able to visualize the illustrations and to sympathize with Alexander all these decades later. I do not care for lima beans one bit and get anxious if I'm stuck in a middle seat in a car ride. (#motionSickness) 

Like Alexander, it's not always the big things that throw me into a funk, it's the little stuff, the ordinary, the everyday. Like the printer that printed in the morning but won't print later that afternoon and the app that decided I needed to log in again right before checking in for PT and no, won't fill from my password app, and yes, needs a verification code sent to your email. No, not that email. Not that one either. My bath was too cold, my favorite pair of PJs was in the wash. Some days are just no good days. Even when you're not 7. Even in Bryn Mawr.

So...today I enjoyed exchanging cheery greetings with the young man at the desk at the YMCA, caught five minutes with Math Guy and their puppy, got a sandwich at my favorite food truck and brought one home for Math Man, too. I had an email about a writing project that made me laugh out loud. Some days are not-bad-at-all days. 

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If you need cheering, I can recommend the reading of Alexander above. I adored the purring cat joining the chorus at the end. I appreciate that Alexander's mother doesn't try to cheer him up in the end, just acknowledges there are sometimes not good days. Even in Australia.

Planning Parameters

Math Man has grown into a terrific cook since the pandemic, and it’s been a delight to come home at night and not always have to move directly into getting dinner on the table. Every. Single. Night. It’s been more than a relief to let some of that go, I feel cherished. Still, I have been taking the lead in creating menus and shopping lists, and the rest of what goes into running the kitchen for most of the last decade.

Math Man was a great parenting partner when the kids were small. We could swap at the drop of a hat, he could pack a diaper bag, knew what size shoes the kids wore, and could handle whatever the day threw at us as well as I could. 

Parkinson’s progression is to some extent unpredictable (though this review has some helpful data), and while at the moment I’m not terribly limited in what I can do, the advice is to be pro-active in preparing for a time when I perhaps can do much less. So the broken door lock got replaced with one easier for me to use, and Math Man needs to be able to step in just as he did so long ago. This weekend he started shadowing me on the meal planning. Starting with the week’s menu. Which we keep on a call board thanks to Crash’s pandemic organization.

Math Man: How about French dip sandwiches for dinner Sunday?

Me: How about salmon instead?

Math Man: What are you thinking?

Me: Well, we should have at least one dinner that is built around fish for the protein, and at least one vegetarian dinner. Which nights do we need a quick dinner between work and an evening activity for which a sandwich option would be a better choice?  What are you thinking?

Math Man: How do I figure out a menu that will include tater tots?

Me:

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Also me: Are there any nights one or both of us are out for dinner? what's in the freezer that we can use? What vegetables am I likely to be able to get at the farmer's market? Oh and I’ll be checking the board each morning to see what needs to be defrosted, if anything. 

Lost in translation

 

I am working on a piece on reading chemistry articles in other languages. I am reading "Chemistry Through the Language Barrier," written in the late 1960s when Google translate was science fiction. The advice is practical - how can you wring what you need from a paper written in Czech or Polish or...Russian or Chinese? Well, when it comes to that last, the author's advice is best summed up as "Good luck and godspeed!", but Japanese is not out of reach he assures you.

Exercises are left for the reader, in part so you will believe his methods possible.

Yesterday I was happily ensconced on the divan in my office, a cup of tea on the side table and went to grab my yellow pad to jot notes and thoughts. Argh, it was across the room on my desk. Too lazy to get up, I grabbed the nearest blank writing surface: the next blind date book on my stack.  I happily scrawled away. Now I am trying to transcribe what I wrote into my electronic notes and finding myself at a loss translating sentences where the ink failed to write on the tape.

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Earlier I had been reading the foreward and mentally debating the author. Imagine my shock when I reached the end to discover my father-in-law had written that foreward.

Profound peace

Justice shall flower in his days,
and profound peace, till the moon be no more. — Ps 72:7

“Profound peace” — this is what we prayed for in the psalm for Epiphany.  Not just peace, a simple cessation of hostilities, but a peace so deep, we could not claw our way back to war. Not just peace, tenuously enforced with threats, but a just peace. 

We prayed for that peace, for justice, as the US went in with guns blazing to decapitate the government of Venezuela. It was hard to avoid the irony.

The government would have us believe that this invasion, police action, whatever, is to protect us from fentanyl (which their own data says is not produced or trafficked from Venezuela). Venezuela does traffic some cocaine, but even if every cocaine related overdose in the US could be attributed to this route (and it’s not among the top three sources) the number of cocaine overdose deaths is about the same as the number of people in the US who die from hunger each year. (More than 20,000 people in the US died from malnutrition in 2022.) The current administration didn’t think that suspending SNAP benefits to the hungry last fall was an emergency, so why is this? 

Could it be that feeding the hungry doesn’t make for stirring military videos? 

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For two weeks of the entire US military budget, we could fund a full year of SNAP benefits. 

There hasn’t been much support for addressing drug addiction either.