My Thanksgiving Visitor

 

Hope you have a fine day!

Gift for Grandma

 

Public service:  I’m solving your “what do we get for Grandmother?” problem.  If the old lady uses a cane, you’re all set.  Canes Can Be Fun! and they don’t cost all that much.  I’ve just gone out and bought two more. They’re the right-hand ones in this picture.

Some of you may remember that when I first corralled my canes for a group photo, the black one was missing.  Never did find it, must have left it somewhere.  But on the rare occasions when I dress up, nothing except black seems elegant enough.  For further class, I ordered  it as this sort-of-British-royalty walking stick.  It’s a disappointment.  With no crook it’s difficult to prop up when I get where I’m going, or when I need to use my hands.  Don’t get Grandma a walking stick.  

I make no apology for the other new one.  If you could see it, even you couldn’t resist genuine bamboo, and it’s in a delightful shade of green. 

So what would I recommend for your Grandmother?  As I wrote before, the bright purple one elicits the most comments, so that might be a good place to start.  Little old ladies are supposed to love purple, just as pre-teens do.

While I was wondering whether it was ethical to give you the name of that company I like, I typed in “FashionableCanes.com” and lo and behold!  Out of all their hundreds of canes, the one right there on the home page as the Deal of the Day turns out to be --

Deal of the Day

Vivid Purple Derby Walking Cane With Ash Wood Shaft and Silver Collar

                        $30.56 (You Save $3.40!)

Talk about coincidence!

Intimations of Mortality

So I woke up feeling really rotten, which is unusual. Thought maybe it was a heart attack (I didn’t have chest pain with the other ones, so who knows?) Decided it probably wasn’t, and lay there thinking about death. I don’t have any trouble with the thought – these are bonus years anyhow – really good years, but just bonus. And if I died today, I wouldn’t have to clean out the frig to get ready for Thanksgiving; that’d be a plus.  Found myself thinking that dying may well be an interesting experience.   But how frustrating that I wouldn’t be able to write about it afterwards.

Only illustration I could find.

So I quit thinking and got out of bed.

Menu Excerpt

This from the menu at last Saturday night's excellent restaurant.

I was hoping to show you a photo of some chicken breasts ranging freely, but I can't seem to find one.  You'll have to picture it for yourself. 

Hey, Doris!

The problem is that I live alone – so  I have no one to share with but you when I hit a Hey Doris!.  That,  according to my son the newspaperman, is what one calls the kind of news story that causes the reader to rattle the paper and call out “Hey, Doris – listen to this!”
What I just ran across is not a newspaper article but a  catalog item I absolutely must share,  and there's no one but you to yell to. 
So -- Hey, Doris -- look at this one!  For a reverent way to celebrate the Nativity, buy some stockings for your chair's legs.  

Lost Illusion

Spoiler Alert -- Maybe you shouldn’t read this.
One of the worst things Anna ever did for me:  my actress daughter mentioned that when movies shoot scenes in public places, they often get permission to block off traffic in the early morning hours, before things get busy. Those aren't sunset shadows -- that baseball shot must have been taken around 7 a.m.
Or take that great movie Mystic River.  One of its strong points is that it was shot on location in East Boston, taking over a whole block of Boston three-deckers and bay-window-front houses.  There’s an authentic atmosphere to the streets, the cramped house fronts, the crowded interiors, the bars.  And yet –
Once you’ve heard that bit of information from Anna, it gets a little harder to lose yourself in the story, because you can’t help noticing:  was the boys’ friend really abducted soon after dawn, with the glare of early-morning sun  way in the background?  Did the cop really arrive just an hour later? 


The girl’s first communion is supposedly just over, so why are her parents standing outside with the rising sun in their eyes?  And it looks like Jimmy got up at dawn to pick out that tombstone.

How come Dave and his son are already returning from a Little League game at that hour of the morning?  And in the ironically cheerful parade that ends the picture -- come on -- those shadows are the giveaway.
Hard to ignore once you're aware of it -- does break the illusion.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Shlock and Sillyness

I did think I'd seen the worst when a catalog offered Pride and Prejudice salt-and-pepper shakers in the form of Elizabeth and Darcy. 


Today, though, a different company says that for just $7.00 (plus s&h) I can become the proud possessor of a kit containing 22 assorted Jane Austen temporary tattoos.

Eleven Eleven Eleven

In the 1930s this was known as Armistice Day, and our parents and teachers still had vivid memories of the day in 1918 that ended the nightmare of the Great War -- on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at eleven a.m.

We didn't get the day off, and I remember the bells in the hall started clanging at 11 o'clock.  We stood beside our desks facing the flag, heads bowed, for two minutes of silence.
Then again I remember being out on a sidewalk once – must have been a Saturday -- when church bells started ringing and factory whistles blared.  Cars pulled over, a trolley stopped in the middle of the street, everything went quiet, men took off their hats and held them to their hearts for a full two minutes, then everything started up again.
And a few years ago, visiting in Canada, I was in a gathering in a suburb of Vancouver, standing silent in the rain under a group of umbrellas, as two squadrons of single-engine WWII  planes flew under the  clouds on Remembrance Day.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-a1dsye0YM

Generation Gap

Anna knows I like spaetzle --I have upon occasion made myself one egg’s worth for breakfast-- so she emails me an article about spaetzle from Wednesday’s New York Times. 

Their recipe is almost identical to the one in my 1964 Joy of Cooking.  The only difference is that my recipe doesn’t include the caraway seeds, the cabbage, the leeks, the garlic cloves, the chile flakes, the thyme branch, the apple cider vinegar, the rye flour, the whole milk, the Gruyere or the Emmenthaler cheese. 

I do, however, sneak in a pinch of nutmeg.

 

Election Day

Beautiful sunny day.  Amy and I drove out to Mt. Hope, the Victorian cemetery laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead, to visit the grave.  Found it covered with memorial stones and pebbles; someone had planted two new flags.  Amy left flowers (ribbon is lavender because that was the suffragette's color).

Acronym in Progress

Today, back to the ostensible subject of this blog: being old.

I’m about to tape a checklist to the door that leads to the garage.  Otherwise, I get out to the car and find I’ve brought the wrong set of keys.  This entails a moderately painful get out of the car, unlock that door, fetch the right keys (forget to put the others back where they should go), moderately painful get back in the car.

Or I’m half-way down the driveway and realize I forgot the driving glasses.  (See remedial routine above.)  Or get all the way to the corner before I remember the cell phone (suppose I needed to call 911?).  Or arrive at the doctor’s office without the hearing aids.  Or get the only slot way back in a parking lot and discover I have no cane.  Or arrive at the checkout counter without my wallet.
Airline pilots and – these days – surgeons, use checklists to avoid mistakes, but come to think of it, perhaps I could manage with just an acronym.  I understand they’re routine in med school for things like memorizing the bones in the foot – and many of them are unprintable.  Easy to remember, impossible to forget.
 I can still see my mother standing at the kitchen sink, one day in 1934, telling me how to remember the names of the Great Lakes – HOMES.
And a couple of years before that, cousin Betty giving me my first piano lesson – those lines signify Every Good Boy Doth Finely.  Second thing you learned  – the first was the location of  Middle C -- right?

So what can I do with Keys, Wallet, Hearing aids, Glasses, Cane, Cell phone?

KWHGCC. 
Distinct shortage of vowels there.  What if I make it Eyeglasses and Hearing Aids?

WHACK. 
Wouldn’t you think an E would be simple to fit in?  And that extra C is still a problem.  Maybe I can just call it Phone.

KWHAECP.
PEW-HACK…
Well, work in progress.  At least I don't have to worry about mislaying my purse.  I don't use 'em.

 

Where Was I Then?

Another of those where-were-you-then memories: It must have been scary, for me to recall the scene so vividly after 75 years. 

It had to be Sunday evening, and it had to be later than Jack Benny’s program, because Daddy was listening to Walter Winchell. I can still see him, sitting in Daddy’s Chair next to the big Philco floor radio. That’s the Chair I never could bring myself to sit in, not even 70 years later when it ended up in Anna’s apartment in Manhattan.

Winchell started his rapid-fire news and gossip delivery –  "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press!" –  (yes, I just googled that, because I couldn't remember the border-to-border and coast-to-coast part)  and then he broke in – this was the scary part -- to announce, several times during the program, that “There has been no emergency in New Jersey this evening.”  Or maybe it was “no catastrophe”. 
I  believe Orson Welles said Winchell’s assurance that no Martians had landed only contributed to the panic about Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast that Halloween eve in 1938.
But anyhow -- how come I  wasn’t out trick-or- treating?

                                  
                                   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0K4ApWl4g

Height of foolishness

I just received an e-mail, evidently widely distributed, that contains only these eight words: 

October 30 is Talk Like Jane Austen Day.

Poor Jane!  Nobody trivializes Dickens or Shakespeare that way.  Nor, come to think of it, do I refer to them as Charles or William.  Maybe it’s because she’s a woman?  But we don’t seem to have any Talk Like Charlotte Bronte Days…  At any rate, not to worry.  Jane Austen admitted, in her famous defense-of-the-novel aside in “Northanger Abbey”, that one of her goals was “well-chosen language” and she chose very well indeed.

                                                 Nobody will talk like Jane Austen.

Spoiler Alert, Read the Letter First

 Don't look ahead until you've read this letter, which I just found in an old file. Then let's see if you can figure out why I saved it -- what it reminds you of.

  AustentoWoolf II was evidently the catalog I'd ordered from.  The K. A. Porter was Katherine Anne Porter's own copy of Pride and Prejudice.  I don't have it any more -- in keeping with my current urge to divest, I put it up on eBay a couple of months ago and the man who bought it told me he collects not Austen but Porter; he recognized her signature on the flyleaf so he knew it was genuine.  So do add a comment to let me know if this letter reminded you of the book --

-
-
-
-
84, Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff

and if  you've never read it, I envy you -- you have a treat ahead of you.   

Suburban Adventures

Not up for writing a blog post this morning so I'll share last night's journal entry with you: 

10 pm: About an hour ago, dark out, doorbell, it was the Roof Guy. (Norm always said he was a Nice Guy -- remember? he and his wife have twin Harleys with bluetooth so they can talk to each other in their helmets?) I didn’t recognize him, I think he’s lost weight .  I hadn't heard from him after I left a phone message some weeks ago about tree damage – so I got another guy to repair it, $750.

Roof Guy said "Are you mad at me?" Asked him in. He took off his boots and left them in the hall, sat down in the living room and started rambling. First I thought he was drunk but no smell of liquor, took me a while to realize there’s also the possibility of being stoned. 

Started telling me about his wife, cops, car chase with the lights off, judge, Henry's (?) moved out, "and me in my shorts the whole time", he always did the cooking, order of protection, $3,000 hidden in the cassette in the car, jail, she's had three husbands, he has a nice room, did I read about it, it was in the paper, bail raised to $10,000, suspects she’s sleeping with the neighbor, the ambulance came.  He stopped every now and then, closed his eyes, then stared at me without saying anything, all very disjointed and I got scared.  When he asked to use the bathroom I ducked out, phoned across the street and asked Rex to come over.

Looking back, I think Roof Guy was just looking for work and apologizing for not returning my call. Evidently he had got out of jail (how?-- or was he even in jail?), gone to look over the job and come to give me an estimate – tho how could he when the job’s been all fixed now? Rex finally told him we had some paperwork to do, RG picked up his notebook, put on his boots and went out in the dark peacefully.  Well, I’ve got the security system on. I was pretty sleepy an hour ago, extremely wide awake now.

So I put on the security system, double-checked the door locks, put out the lights, went into my bedroom and the land line phone on my bedside table was playing the William Tell Overture.

I thought I might be going crazy.

Typewriter

Catalog that arrived today offers an authentic  vintage electronic typewriter.  Good grief!  That’s what they call vintage?  Even from here I can see a correction key that automatically erases typos.  I’ll bet it even has a key for the numeral 1.  And I’ll bet one gets to the start of the next line by pressing a button.

     Let me tell you about vintage typewriters.  In 1939 I had to spend a year in the hospital flat on my back, not even allowed to sit up in bed to eat.  Daddy brought me a headphone radio but they made him take it back, “sorry, the rule is no radios on the wards.”  So his reaction was to buy me a portable typewriter, and to build a stand that would hold an open book over my pillow (heavy elastic straps).  The typewriter I got to see only once when he brought it on a visit, but what he left behind was a typing textbook.  I spent the next twelve months practicing on the bedspread – left hand a s d f g, cat fat rat.  When I finally came home, I could touch-type 60 words a minute.

     That Royal portable had no key for the numeral 1 – you used the lower-case L.  I could swear it didn’t have a zero either, with a capital O being used, but there does seem to be a zero here.  Faulty memory.  What does look exactly right, at any rate, is this heavy wooden case.  And the space bar, just waiting for a smart whack with the flat of the left hand.  Leroy Anderson got it right in his "Typewriter Song", though I can’t remember just where the bell came in – at the end of every line?  At the start of every new line?
     Having a typewriter was pretty classy in high school back in the 1940s – a few rich kids had fountain pens, but hardy anyone else had a typewriter.  When I got my first reporting job --at 18--the editor gave me a desk but I had to bring  my own machine -- new ones unavailable with the War on.  Maybe the editor hired me just because I had a typewriter.  And then when I enrolled in freshman journalism at Syracuse, we were told at the first class session that no handwritten work would be accepted.  Hard and fast rule, everything had to be typed.  You should have heard the protests!  Not to worry, we were told, --those who don't have typewriters (War still on) can use the typing lab on the first floor. And four years from now, you can't graduate with a degree in journalism unless you've passed the typing test (40 wpm.)
     What ever happened to that Royal?  I know just when I turned my back on it – 1960.  I was substitute teaching, came in for the high school business ed teacher and saw, in the typing room, that the whole left-hand row of desks had electric typewriters!  I'd never seen one before.  What a moment!  I’d just sold an article to McCall’s (remember McCalls?) about how our son Dov was born at home.  Biggest magazine check I’d ever received -- $500.  First things I bought with it were a typing desk, a whole ream of typing paper (long-time ambition -- you wouldn’t believe how expensive paper used to be) and – an electric portable.  Never looked back.
     These days I’m possessed by this strong urge to divest, getting rid of stuff right and left, and yet –
while I was searching for the right picture on Ebay, I found myself yearning to see that typewriter yet again, just to touch its keys.  I’ve started bidding on Ebay Royals.  My first one cost Daddy three weeks’ salary. Of course they're nowhere near the same dollars now, but the price seems to run about that same amount for these vintage machines.
Nobody on Ebay ever uses the words old or used.
 

If you read it, disregard it

For a bit there in the bleak hours of last night I thought it was time to stop writing the blog – hope this morning's post, which I just deleted, didn’t lose me too many viewers? readers? “eyeballs” they used to say in the early days of Internet sites, and I always wondered if a site that boasted 1,000 eyeballs had 1,000 viewers or 500 viewers (think about it.)

Anyhow, I’ve taken down this morning’s l’envoi because I realized I never got around to writing about my first typewriter.  Don’t touch that dial; we’ll be back in a moment with typewriters.

Disregard the Following

Here's the post I deleted, in case you're interested -- seems a shame to waste the time I spent writing it and stealing the probably-copyrighted illustration.  Always enjoyed that phrase "disregard the following", which I found in Belle What's-her-name's book "Up the Down Staircase" so many years ago.  So please disregard:   

For the past week or so, I've suddenly -- abruptly -- had the feeling that it was time to stop writing this blog.  Couldn't think where the conviction had come from -- just out of the blue.  Woke early this morning, having slept straight through to five o'clock, which is actually pretty exciting, and came out to the office in the dark.  Figured out how to go back and look at the first posts, and to my amazement discovered that the blog started exactly one year ago.  Some sort of subconscious clock that's been ticking off 365 days?

Just turned off the desk lamp because through the window I'm getting sunrise, light spreading behind the willow tree, which, by the way, is bursting out all over in just the few weeks since its amputation.  As I've told you, I identify with that tree.  There's life in the old dame yet.  
  
Just picked up the little camera to get you a picture of the dawn light spreading behind the tree -- but I can't because all it shows is "change the battery pack".  That seems like yet another message --so cheerio, my friends.  Toujours gai!

From My Desk

Just this minute.  Deer watching cat.  Cat watching squirrel.  What squirrel is watching I can't say. 

And people have started asking if I'm ready to leave this house.  How can I?

 

Bugs and Art

So what ever happened to bedbugs?  Or for that matter, to grafitti?  These days the front pages are full of stuff like Government Shutdown and Entangling Foreign Misadventures, but I remember a time when the news was totally absorbed in the threat of bedbugs taking over our world.  So what happened?  Surely bedbugs didn’t just go extinct?  

And – it might have been decades before that – we kept hearing about society's desperate battles against grafitti on buildings, railroad cars, walls, highway signs -- and then disputes about whether we were dealing with eyesores or Art. So did it just vanish?  No grafitti in the Breaking News that streams across our screens these days.
But there is one I do remember fondly from way back in the 40s - and you can still see it today, on the World War II memorial in Washington.

 

Ou sont les Wreaths of Yesteryear?

The other day I was watching a black-and-white movie (okay, confess, it was “Now, Voyager” yet again) . The domineering matriarch, bossy even in her wheelchair, collapses during an argument with daughter Bette Davis.  We are spared any further unpleasantness; the next shot is of a wreath on the mansion’s front door.

     Every 1940s moviegoer gets the message.  Not only does that wreath signify a death in the family, it serves as an invitation to those who want to pay their respects by viewing the body.  “It’s here,” is the message, “She’s lying in state here in the drawing room.”

     I assume it was a black wreath but maybe that’s just because the movie wasn’t in color.  Specific flowers could bave been chosen for their significance.  But what I’m wondering is – when was the last time I saw a funeral door wreath?  The last time anyone did?  Because I do remember them from my childhood.  I even remember some confusion when I first noticed a Christmas wreath on a doorway – oops, wait a minute, there’s a red ribbon so I guess it doesn’t mean someone died.

      You almost never notice the last time you do something.  You notice the first robin in spring but not the last one in fall.  I remember thinking this once when I was rocking an infant grandson to sleep – and that time I had it right, for the rocking chair is 3,000 miles away now and the grandson is out of college.   

Between Banquet and Cookbook

Some months back I posted my suspicion that Facebook knows all about me and targets its ads accordingly (senior residence, wrinkle cream, retiree dating…)  So what do I make of this illustration that appeared on my screen yesterday, positioned in appetizing fashion between a picture of the banquet at the North American Jane Austen weekend
 

 

and a review of cousin Mollie’s new cookbook?

 

They were offering me a free trial of something -- not sure what as I couldn’t bring myself to read the text.

Obsolete Apparel

 So what ever happened to house dresses, those washable cotton garments that needed ironing, never mind a light starch,  that were worn by every housewife when I was a girl? 
My mother and aunts probably didn’t dress them up with necklace and earrings the way June Cleaver did, but if you could see Beaver’s mother full-length, you know the standard kitchen outfit included stockings and heels.

And for that matter, what ever happened to housecoats – those dressed-up floor-length robes you could wear when you didn’t really feel like dressing, and still be decent for answering the door? This pattern could be made either way. I still remember fondly a long green cotton housecoat with little yellow flowers, that zipped all the way up.

And what about playsuits?  They were a sort of one-piece romper for grown-ups, and often came with a matching skirt.   I felt wonderfully dressed-up, the summer I was 14, with a brown-and-white checked gingham playsuit and its button-over skirt. Wish I could find a picture of it.  Wonder what ever happened to it? 

Probably ended up in a braided rug.  

 

Autumn Arrives Anyhow

Here I just completed an eight-week course in Fall Prevention and I must have flunked -- Fall arrived on time today anyhow.

Lake Keuka, 1949 -- weren't Kodachrome slides great?