tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49102045801922793692024-03-14T03:10:56.007-04:00Harriet the Spy's blog“When I grow up I’m going to find out everything about everybody and put it all in a book.”Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-29022278101753466252014-01-01T18:14:00.001-05:002014-01-01T18:14:45.414-05:00New Year's Resolutions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7xVEO5BNVc4/UsShMViJc0I/AAAAAAAAAXE/UMEha68MP14/s1600/Snowy_morning_2_24_2013+006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7xVEO5BNVc4/UsShMViJc0I/AAAAAAAAAXE/UMEha68MP14/s320/Snowy_morning_2_24_2013+006.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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New Year’s Resolutions—mine
are pretty simple this year:</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->1)<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> 1) </span><!--[endif]-->Write, submit, repeat.</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->2)<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> 2) </span><!--[endif]-->Continue my exercise streak. Today is my 635<sup>th</sup>
consecutive day without missing a workout (note that, for this non-competitive,
middle-aged+ mom, “workout” may not mean what it means to you. To me, it means
at least 30-45 minutes of something—walking, hiking, biking, XC skiing, yoga,
swimming—every day). If I can keep it up, next New Year’s Day will be Day 1000.
I didn’t plan that; it just worked out that way, but isn’t it cool?</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->3)<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> 3)</span><span style="font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Continue that teeth-flossing streak I started
back in 2009 or so.</span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->4)<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> 4) </span><!--[endif]-->Consider starting a new streak of some kind…since
that seems to work.</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->5)<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> 5) </span><!--[endif]-->Read at least as many books as in 2013 (50 or
more).</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->6)<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> 6) </span><!--[endif]-->Strive for balance in all things:</div>
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Balance
physical health with mental health (chocolate will forever remain a part of my
life).</div>
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Balance
doing what I have to with doing what I want to (enough housework to keep the
health department away, but not so much that I have to give up something
better, like reading, to do it).</div>
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Balance
being nice with putting up with too much crap (no need to explain that to any
of my female friends who are 50+, right?). </div>
Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-69015797602938506472013-08-19T16:31:00.000-04:002013-08-19T16:31:55.791-04:00What today is...and isn't<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Today, August 19<sup>th</sup>, is the birthday of Frank
McCourt, my daughter Cait’s favorite writer. In addition to his memoirs <i>Angela’s
Ashes, ‘Tis, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and</span><i> Teacher Man, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">he wrote, with his brother Malachy, a really
wonderful two-man play called </span><i>A Couple of Blaguards, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">which we were fortunate enough to catch at the
historic Deertrees Theater this summer (on another big, important day, August
first, Tony and Will’s shared birthday).</span></div>
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Today is also the birthday of former president Bill Clinton,
a longtime crush of my longtime best friend. (I, personally, have never found
him all that attractive, but, love him or hate him, you have to admit that
veganism has been good to Bill.) </div>
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It’s the birthday of Gene Roddenberry, and I wouldn’t be
surprised if my friend Belinda is busy baking a cake to commemorate the special
day of the creator of Star Trek, since Roddenberry’s legacy is, in her opinion,
one of the greatest gifts to humanity ever.</div>
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It’s the birthday of Ogden Nash, who did <i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> write that poem about the purple cow (that was
Gelett Burgess), but did write the inspired words, “I think that I shall never
see a billboard lovely as a tree / Indeed, unless the billboards fall, I’ll
never see a tree at all.”</span></div>
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As you may have begun to suspect, I got most of the above
info by listening to “The Writer’s Almanac” on NPR this morning. (There was
also a great poem by Jim Daniels about American cheese, which was a staple in
my childhood home, as it was in his.) </div>
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Today is Day 500 in my streak of Consecutive Days of
Exercise: at least 30 minutes of walking, hiking, biking, kayaking,
cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, or yoga, every single day since April 7,
2012, without a miss. “That’s so awesome!” said the nurse when I was at the health center
getting my toes stitched up after slicing them on an old metal bed frame back
in June. (I was wondering aloud if I could figure out how to get in and out of
my kayak without getting my foot wet, since weight-bearing exercise would be
out until after the stitches were removed, but I was determined not to break
the streak.) “How much weight have you lost?” (I told her the truth: not one
single pound. It turns out that exercise makes me <i>really hungry. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">I gave her my usual line about my goal of “fat but
fit” and she “mmm-hmmed” without saying much more.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Today is my 24<sup>th</sup> wedding anniversary. Tony and I
had been dating for one day less than eight weeks on August 19, 1989, although
we’d known each other slightly for several years, and I’d been a little
obsessed with him ever since he’d asked me out in the soup aisle of the IGA in
early May. We were married in the backyard of the house in Locke Mills where we
still live, the ten-minute ceremony performed by a justice of the peace named
Bunk, who also sold fish out of his pick-up truck in the mill parking lot on
Saturday mornings. (Our wedding was timed to give him a chance to go home to
Bryant Pond, put away his fish coolers, and shower and change first.) </div>
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Today is not, although it was supposed to be, the day I
returned to work for my fifth school year with the Head Start program. A
combination of budget cuts and restructuring led to the elimination of my
position, and my annual summer layoff became
permanent. I’ve left a lot of jobs in my lifetime—at least ten that I can think
of off the top of my head—but it’s always been my choice to leave. It always
felt a little scary, a little thrilling—maybe a little like closing my eyes and
jumping into the lake from the high ledge at Rock Island (which, I admit, is
not all that high…but--unlike more recent generations--mine was not raised to
think of risk as a positive thing). </div>
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I have to admit that, in contrast, being laid off felt a
little bit like rejection at first. It’s unavoidable, I think, to feel that
way. After all, “it’s not you, it’s us” sounds a lot like the way my high
school boyfriend Tim broke up with me.</div>
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In spite of a rough year last year, I was planning to stay
in my position for the foreseeable future. After four years, I had already been
at this job longer than all but two of my previous ones. I felt committed to
the kids and their families, to the agency’s philosophy (“Helping People;
Changing Lives”), to my wonderful coworkers. </div>
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And I loved (loved, loved, loved!) having the summers off. </div>
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OK, let’s be honest—I probably loved having the summers off
better than anything else about the job. I know I shouldn’t have let myself
think about the end of summer vacation so much, but each year, almost as soon
as school got out in June, my scheduled return date—August 19<sup>th</sup> this
year—was hanging over me like a dark cloud.</div>
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However, once I knew I wouldn’t be going back to the
preschool after all, August 19<sup>th</sup> started to look a lot less like an
end, and a lot more like a beginning. It doesn’t hurt that both Tony and Will,
from the moment they heard about my permanent layoff, have been encouraging me
to “figure out how to be a writer,” that thing I’ve been putting off for the
past…well, all my life.</div>
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It also doesn’t hurt that—working part-time and part-year—I
was making so little money that figuring out how to replace it through creative
endeavors (I’m envisioning some combination of writing and pie-baking) isn’t <i>that</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> daunting. ObamaCare and the health insurance
exchanges are going into effect at just the right time for me, and Tony’s
Medicare birthday was last year. I’ve made a lot of contacts with other writers
recently, including some who are quietly freelancing their way through life,
maybe not making a big splash, but not commuting to a job every day, either.
I’m beginning to see that maybe, just maybe, it can be done.</span></div>
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I’ll just close my eyes, try not to think too much, and
jump.</div>
<br />Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-1746943908897370442013-01-27T17:39:00.000-05:002013-01-27T17:39:22.226-05:00Poetry: Really, it's not that hard! <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Ior0D50MbY/UQWryYpi1HI/AAAAAAAAAV0/jO6n__rCHPQ/s1600/EricCantor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6Ior0D50MbY/UQWryYpi1HI/AAAAAAAAAV0/jO6n__rCHPQ/s320/EricCantor.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For the past couple of years, I've been reading at least one
or two poems nearly every morning. I'm reading an eclectic mix of poets, from
Shakespeare, Whitman, and Longfellow to Ted Kooser, Linda Pastan, and William
Stafford. Through poetry, I'm discovering new worlds, exploring new ways to
express emotion, and developing and fine-tuning my own literary tastes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If all of this sounds complicated and arduous, and makes me
sound impressive and erudite—as if I have an extensive library filled with
leather-bound volumes of verse, where I settle myself ceremonially in an
armchair, switch on my green-shaded brass lamp, and don my reading glasses—let
me dispel that idea. What I have are paperback copies of Garrison Keillor's
three <i>Good Poems</i> anthologies, and I keep them in the one room of the
house I'm certain to visit every morning. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yes, I confess: I read poetry in the bathroom.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(My mother read <i>Time</i> magazine in the
bathroom. In fact, I'm not sure she ever read it anywhere else. Each week, the
new issue was carried into the bathroom as soon as it arrived, and remained
there until it had been read cover to cover. As a result, when I was growing
up, I also read <i>Time</i> almost exclusively in the bathroom. If I visited a
friend's house and saw an issue of <i>Time</i> on the coffee table, it seemed
out of place to me, like a roll of toilet paper left out on the kitchen
counter.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Because I'm partial to the poets of New England—Robert
Frost, of course, and Donald Hall, and Maxine Kumin—I'm surprised to learn how
much poets from other parts of the country have to say, and how their poems
resonate with me. Even though I've never visited the Northwest, the words of
Raymond Carver take me there. When I read Wendell Berry, there I am on a
farmhouse porch in Kentucky at dusk.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But I have a lifelong allegiance to New England, and to
Maine in particular, and the Maine poets—native or adopted—are among my most
revered. Wesley McNair, Stuart Kestenbaum—I've heard and read them, here and
there, for years now. Philip Booth, Alice Persons, and Kristen Lindquist are
new-to-me favorites. (Thanks, Garrison, for performing the introductions.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have to admit, though, that until the Big Announcement
came out a couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Richard Blanco, the poet
chosen to create and read an original poem at the second inauguration of
President Barack Obama. (He doesn't appear in any of the <i>Good Poems</i>
anthologies—the first thing I did when I heard the news was check. I suspect—I
hope!—that will be rectified when Garrison puts together his next anthology.) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As it turns out, Richard Blanco lives in Bethel, the next
town north of mine. “Holy crap!” I yelled, charging into the den to read the
news story to my husband and son. “They've announced the inaugural poet! He's a
gay Cuban-American and he lives in Bethel, Maine!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“There's a poet that famous living in Bethel?” said my
husband. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“There's a gay Cuban-American living in Bethel?” said my
son. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bethel is a town of about 2000 people. Blanco has been
living there for over three years. He's the co-chair of the planning board
there; I'm a selectman here in Greenwood. He apparently gets his hair cut right
around the corner from my house. Wouldn't you think our paths might have crossed
by now? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sadly, no. But that hasn't stopped me from adopting him
wholeheartedly as my new favorite neighbor. Becoming a fan of his Facebook
page. Reading every article and interview I've seen about him since he so
suddenly became famous. Ordering his most recent book, <i>Looking for the Gulf
Motel. </i>Hoping that, once the uproar settles down a bit, he'll do a reading
close to home (and sign his book for me).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A lot of people say they “don't get poetry.” After Richard
Blanco gave his reading at the inauguration last week, there was, predictably,
something of a backlash: people who dismissed poetry in general with a wave of
annoyance and words to this effect: “I don't get poetry, I'll never get poetry,
so poetry is irrelevant and stupid.” (Or this whine, on Twitter: “What ever
happened to a rhyming poem? This poem at the Inauguration doesn't rhyme at all.
It was a glorified term paper.”)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Maybe a lot of people have been unduly traumatized by poetry
in their past. They've been forced to read, or, worse, read and analyze, poems
that actually <i>are</i> complex, obscure, hard to get. When I was in college,
I had to write a paper analyzing Wallace Stevens' poem, “The Emperor of
Ice-Cream.” I wasn't at all sure I was getting the meaning that Stevens
intended, but, fortunately, the poem was enigmatic enough to preclude a “one
right answer” sort of analysis, and my professor probably wasn't any more
confident about it than I was.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Garrison Keillor, in his introduction to <i>Good Poems:
American Places,</i> says, “Americans are impatient with riddles and so they
give poetry a wide berth, knowing from Miss Fernwood's 8<sup>th</sup> grade
English class that a page of writing with an uneven right margin means a series
of jokes with no punch lines, a puzzle with no right answers.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But, like the majority of the poetry I read, Richard Blanco's “One Today” is not a difficult,
inscrutable poem. It is beautiful, heartfelt, and easy to understand. It's very much a “public poem.” If you missed it, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/today-richard-blanco-poem-read-barack-obama-inauguration/story?id=18274653">read it, or listen to it</a>: it's about unity. (There, that wasn't so hard, was it?) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As Blanco himself said in an interview with Joe
Coscarelli for <i>NY Magazine</i>, “I pride myself on creating work that's
accessible....Honestly, I think the poem was even more straight-forward than I
typically write.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That's why I found the knee-jerk I-just-don't-get-it
response particularly annoying. (Even my poetry-baffled husband's reaction was
positive: “I like it. I get it, and I like it.”) And no reaction was more
irritating than Eric Cantor's carefully composed confused expression (and
occasional actual lip-curling sneer) throughout the reading. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don't believe Cantor actually listened to a word of the
poem, because if he did listen to it, and he really <i>didn't</i> get it, then
we should be seriously rethinking how we assess the intelligence of the people
we entrust to run the country. No, instead, I think he had spent the previous
evening practicing in a mirror to perfect his “what is this shit, anyway?”
expression.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Blanco himself was more charitable. Asked about Cantor's
obvious disdain, he said, “Maybe he was just in deep contemplation and
overwhelmed with emotion.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or maybe Cantor has just never gotten over eighth grade
English class.</div>
Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-7099272456238617282013-01-02T23:30:00.000-05:002013-01-12T15:21:57.450-05:00Why introverts love Facebook<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GUpjE1H8guU/UOUJOLBkFpI/AAAAAAAAAVk/ko469n45g8w/s1600/World_Introvert_Day.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="188" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GUpjE1H8guU/UOUJOLBkFpI/AAAAAAAAAVk/ko469n45g8w/s320/World_Introvert_Day.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Today is World Introvert Day, something I didn't learn until
quite late in the day. Too late to throw a big party or anything like that, but not too late to share it on Facebook. I posted a link to <a href="http://www.introvertday.org/">www.introvertday.org</a>,
which garnered some amusing feedback from other introverts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My best friend Lulu (who shared the link with me) said she
wished she could have celebrated World Introvert Day by spending it under her
desk.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Belinda said, “We could have had a party and then found
excuses not to go.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Peggy said <i>that</i> explained why she hadn't wanted to do
anything but curl up on the couch with a book today.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Burns asked if I had read Susan Cain's book <i>Quiet </i>(I
have), prompting a discussion about the book's premise that most of the world
is geared toward extroverts, and about some of the ways introverts have found
to cope (like the college professor who retreats to the same stall in the men's
bathroom for some much-needed alone time after each lecture).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I resurrected and posted a Dilbert cartoon from a few years
ago: </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Nq8bjDROvj4/UOUGR2wY3qI/AAAAAAAAAVE/vscNeD50EZA/s1600/Dilbert_trust_falls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="121" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Nq8bjDROvj4/UOUGR2wY3qI/AAAAAAAAAVE/vscNeD50EZA/s320/Dilbert_trust_falls.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Lulu remarked that World Introvert Day “is more an
'Understand Your Introvert' movement, but introverts already understand each
other and extroverts just think we're no fun.”
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I'll admit it: I love Facebook.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Facebook may have stolen my privacy, my self-respect, and
more precious hours of my time than I care to contemplate, but it has given me
something in return: a way to be connected to other like-minded human beings
that doesn't require me to actually Go Among the People. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don't need to go to parties and have seventeen stilted and
pointless conversations before accidentally discovering that someone shares my
point of view about something. All I need to do is post a photo of turkeys made
from Oreos and malted milk balls, or my adorable cats (let's just admit that
they're the cutest cats in the world, OK?), or a link to EqualityMaine or The
Daily Show, and I discover, almost instantly, who among my acquaintances shares
my passion for “Fun With Food,” or cute cats, or leftist causes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Facebook has allowed me to become a member of not one but
several on-line communities of writers, to chat with other people who believe
Kris Kristofferson is the greatest American singer-songwriter ever (and not
just that old guy who plays Whistler in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blade</i>
movies), to learn more about local history directly from people who have lived
some of it than I ever would have gleaned if I'd had to do the research myself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These people are my “friends.” Yes, Facebook tosses that
term around rather lightly, especially to someone like me who has mostly
subscribed to Henry Brooks Adams' theory that “One friend in a lifetime is
much; two are many; three are hardly possible.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have one hundred and seventy-two Facebook friends. I
rarely, if ever, have exchanges with most of them. But others—some of them
people I've never met, others people I've known “in person” for years but with
whom I'd never really had a meaningful conversation—have revealed themselves,
through the magic of Facebook, to be perceptive, funny, intelligent deep
thinkers. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Many of them are introverts, like me. If we met at the post
office, our conversation would most likely be limited to observations about the
weather, or to inquiring about each other's kids. If we felt we knew each other
well enough, one of us might bring up the Red Sox, but that's about as deep as
it would go.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On Facebook, though, we've engaged in earnest discussions of
politics, gun control, same-sex marriage, cute pets, and how to make a snowman
out of cheese balls. And introversion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I've found that many introverts love Facebook, for the same
reasons I do. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Extroverts use Facebook to reconnect with old friends, and
they post things like, “I’ll be back in town next weekend. Let's get together!” or
“I miss your face—haven't seen you in too long! Gotta fix that!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Introverts, on the other hand, like Facebook because it
gives us our “people fix” without requiring us to actually be around people. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qomiXs92LBI/UOUIi9lkveI/AAAAAAAAAVc/lf5Ns4r333c/s1600/introvert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By the way, extroverts will tell you that this is unhealthy
and everyone should “get out more.” Ignore them. They don't get us. They also
don’t get where they’d be without us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“And let's not forget,” says the website for World Introvert
Day, “that although introverts might be a minority, they are a majority in the
gifted population. Most famous scientists, philosophers, artists and thinkers
are introverted. Introverts shape the world we live in.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No, let's not forget that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oFBnqlLy6bU/UOUIfaVMS4I/AAAAAAAAAVU/w17O1GZiEis/s1600/social_media_introvert_cartoon.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="165" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oFBnqlLy6bU/UOUIfaVMS4I/AAAAAAAAAVU/w17O1GZiEis/s320/social_media_introvert_cartoon.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(I should add that texting, along with Facebook, is an
absolute godsend for introverts. Not only do we now not need to actually see
people to communicate with them, we don't even have to talk to them on the
phone. This is another thing extroverts don't get. Text an extrovert more than
once or twice in a row, and your phone will probably ring and you'll hear, “I
figured I might as well just call.” No, wrong. Don't be offended, but if I wanted
to talk to you, I wouldn't be texting.)</div>
Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-7124230759533349162013-01-01T20:20:00.002-05:002013-01-01T20:20:24.331-05:00'Tis the season...for resolutions<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gAg-8fLsfkw/UOOI5ITOsvI/AAAAAAAAAU0/24O0aAgwvoo/s1600/Butt+in+chair.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gAg-8fLsfkw/UOOI5ITOsvI/AAAAAAAAAU0/24O0aAgwvoo/s320/Butt+in+chair.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I want to be a writer. I want to be a writer more than
anything else in the world. I've wanted to be a writer since I was about six
years old. Sometimes I call myself a writer, just trying it on for size, hoping
it will stick, like an affirmation, the way I might tell myself, “My house is
clean and organized,” “I really only like healthy foods,” or “I am confident
and self-assured.” (None of those have ever actually worked for me, either, but
I keep trying.) </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sometimes other people call me a writer, and when that
happens, it's so exciting and fulfilling that it sometimes makes me giddy for
days at a time. Like when I met Meredith Hall, the author of the best memoir I
have ever read, at a reading at the library, and she signed my copy of her
book, <u>Without A Map</u>, “To Amy, a fellow writer.” Wow! Or when I overheard
the library director tell a patron, “The writers are meeting downstairs this
morning.” That's <i>my</i> writing group, six late-middle-aged women who have
been meeting monthly at the library for nearly two years now to share what
frustrates, exhilarates, hinders, and inspires us in our writing lives. We've
become each other's confidantes, critics, and cheerleaders. We're <i>writers</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I talk about writing, read about writing, think about
writing, dream about writing. I subscribe to two writing magazines and own a
few dozen books about writing. I devour every NPR offering that features a
writer sharing what inspires her, talking about her writing process, reading
from her work. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My desk is cluttered with books of writing prompts, a
thesaurus, a dictionary. My bulletin board features inspirational quotes like,
“[Writing a novel] is like driving a car at night. You never see further than
your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” (E.L. Doctorow), and
“<i>Nulla dies sine linea</i>” (“Not a day without a line”), and “Butt in
chair!”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Writing fires me up, calms me down, challenges me, assures
me that I am good at something. It gives me an outlet for pent-up anxiety and
frustration and anger, as well as a way to express the more tender sentiments I
often struggle to verbalize. Writing connects me to my authentic self: I am most myself when I am writing.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The problem is, I don't actually write much.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The reasons are many. A few of them are even somewhat valid.
I'm busy. I work. I cook from scratch and can't bring myself to do it any other
way. I don't live alone, and I'm very easily distracted. I'm committed to a
daily exercise program and I floss my teeth every single day, and, geez, it's
hard to find time for <i>everything</i>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the biggest problem is probably the way I've always
regarded my writing: as a form of entertainment, a fun thing I can do if I have
time. But who ever has extra time? Writing has been my reward for getting the
floors vacuumed, the dishes done, the laundry caught up, the junk drawer
organized...and if you've ever seen my house, you know the likelihood of those
things actually happening regularly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Obviously, I need to change my thinking. I need to make
writing a priority. Maybe I need to post a new quote, like this one from
Margaret Laurence: “When I say work, I only mean writing. Everything else is
just odd jobs.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, New Year's Resolution #1: I will take my writing at
least as seriously as I take the vacuuming, the dishes, and the laundry. And,
dammit, <i>more</i> seriously than the junk drawer!</div>
Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-25857405787635836822012-11-13T21:01:00.003-05:002012-11-13T21:10:37.254-05:00Last paddle<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6K6NTR_f84E/UKL7TO3DHHI/AAAAAAAAAUY/eZypOGS6Nt4/s1600/Last_paddle_11_12_12+004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6K6NTR_f84E/UKL7TO3DHHI/AAAAAAAAAUY/eZypOGS6Nt4/s400/Last_paddle_11_12_12+004.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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</xml><![endif]--><i>Note: The members of my writing group decided to all write to the same prompt this month ("Last time") and share our writing at tomorrow's meeting.</i><br />
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I change out of my jeans,
into an old pair of shorts that I keep at camp, and my purple flip-flops,
because after a decade of kayaking, I still haven’t been able to figure out how
to get into the boat without getting my feet wet. I’ve seen other people do it
(most of them younger, more flexible and athletic than I) hopping in and out of
kayaks with ease, on beaches, docks, floats, and rocky shores, but whenever
I’ve tried it myself, I’ve been unsuccessful and ungainly, and the attempt has
always resulted in getting far more than just my feet wet. Now, in
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sunny, windless day, the water is far too icy to risk a dunking.<br />
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shrill whine of panic. I had hoped he’d settle down on the couch and sleep, the
way he did in the summer when he was left inside alone, but I’ve underestimated
his powers of reason. He knows we’re not living there anymore, so he’s sure he’s
been abandoned. I relent, and figure I’ll keep close to shore and let him run
along in front of the closed-up camps. I’m a little nervous about being out
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Remy, as it turns out,
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that I worry he’ll become exhausted. So I stay so close to the shore that he
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hemlock branches.<br />
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summer, he barges onto the screened porch through the inward-swinging door,
then finds himself stuck there, unable to get back out. Without even a dish of
cat food for consolation, he begins immediately to bark and howl, and I’m
afraid he’ll plunge through the screening before I can struggle out of the
kayak, splash over the rocks, and clamber up the bank to let him out.<br />
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I decide a ten-minute
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bragging rights. My first paddle of the year was on March 24<sup>th</sup>, the
day after ice-out, and now I can say I kayaked from March til November.<br />
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I replace my paddle and
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screened porch. Inside the chilly camp, I change out of my shorts and
flip-flops and back into jeans and sneakers for the walk out the road to my car.
It’s only four o’clock, but the sun is already slipping down behind the
mountain as I draw the shades down over all the windows. I take a last look
around in the half-light, whistle for the dog, and lock the door behind me.</div>
Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-13111257755509946452012-10-08T21:30:00.000-04:002012-10-08T21:30:41.676-04:00Sitting right here, watching the leaves turn color<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tKPA-DPB-38/UHN8G7citiI/AAAAAAAAATs/DsKLbGcpD8I/s1600/Fall_paddle_10_5_2012+014.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tKPA-DPB-38/UHN8G7citiI/AAAAAAAAATs/DsKLbGcpD8I/s640/Fall_paddle_10_5_2012+014.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
One year, when I was
about thirteen or fourteen, on the evening before we were to leave to return to
Connecticut from Maine at the end of the summer, as we ate our last camp supper
on the screened porch, my mother looked out at the lake and said, in an almost
defiant tone, “Some year, I’m going to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sit
right here and watch the leaves turn color.</i>”</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
I was a
teenager—self-absorbed, unsympathetic, dismissive. I wasn’t thrilled about
leaving camp, either, but hey—at least I’d get to see my friends, and school
might not be too bad this year, and there would probably be some boy on whom to
develop an unrequited crush. It was the end of the summer, not the end of the
world.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aFB6k9LiYRo/UHN8UA_fVkI/AAAAAAAAAT0/q6Z31C6rlVI/s1600/Fall_foliage_10_2_2012+004.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aFB6k9LiYRo/UHN8UA_fVkI/AAAAAAAAAT0/q6Z31C6rlVI/s320/Fall_foliage_10_2_2012+004.jpg" width="320" /></a>A year or two later, as
we were packing up to leave again at the end of another summer, my mother
sighed. “This year was going to be the year when I would get to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sit right here and watch the leaves turn
color.</i>” It must have been 1974, the year my father would have turned 62,
the year he would have planned to retire and move back to Maine. They would
have stayed on at camp as long as they wanted to that fall—sitting right there,
watching the leaves turn color—then relocated for the winter to the snug little
year-round home “on a hill in Bethel” that they had always talked about.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Fate, in the form of
unexpected widowhood, then my (equally unexpected) arrival, intervened. My
mother eventually did retire to Bethel, in 1982, but I don’t think she ever
really did get to “sit right here and watch the leaves turn color.” She plunged
directly into a hectic retirement schedule that included volunteering, church
activities, bridge club, and babysitting (she was “Gramma Wight” to half the families
in Bethel), and by Labor Day it was time to get back to her house in town
before things fell completely apart without her.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Now that I live three
miles away from camp, I’ve been pushing back against the end of summer just a
little harder every year. Last year we moved home from camp on September 29<sup>th</sup>,
and we’ve already beaten that by over a week this year. Of course, we’ve had a
fire going in the woodstove almost steadily for several weeks, and we’ve
probably burned at least two cords of wood that should probably have been
earmarked for heating our “real” house during the “real” heating season. But
when you’re married to a logger, wood seems cheap and plentiful (it’s not,
really) and it doesn’t seem like such a big deal to heat a drafty, uninsulated
summer camp in order to squeeze a couple more weeks from the season. (Next
year, we’re thinking, with some insulation in the roof and walls, we could
target November first. In the more distant future, with new windows, and some
heat tape on the water line, could we make it to Thanksgiving?)</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
We’re planning to move
home this coming weekend—really! I know I’ve been saying that for the past two
or three weeks, but every day I see something—a sunset, a flock of noisy geese,
the full moon reflected in a lake that’s as still as a mirror—that makes me
think, if we had moved home yesterday, we’d have missed this. Life is so much
simpler here that it’s hard to think about leaving.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yfgXUgPuVUE/UHN9v-QtDII/AAAAAAAAAUE/n-r2fTrZo6U/s1600/Blue_moon_setting_8_31_2012+011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yfgXUgPuVUE/UHN9v-QtDII/AAAAAAAAAUE/n-r2fTrZo6U/s200/Blue_moon_setting_8_31_2012+011.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Besides, I’m doing it for
Mom…sitting right here, watching the sun set. And the moon shimmer on the water. And the leaves turn color.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QS2QKNQ57O8/UHN8cZo75LI/AAAAAAAAAT8/esSP4rObnHI/s1600/Sunset_10_8_2012+004.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QS2QKNQ57O8/UHN8cZo75LI/AAAAAAAAAT8/esSP4rObnHI/s320/Sunset_10_8_2012+004.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div>
Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-17748227911461128712012-07-14T14:36:00.000-04:002012-07-14T14:52:00.293-04:00How to bake a blueberry cake like Gramma Wight’s<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tMdQ4-8kiM4/UAG6FdM5ilI/AAAAAAAAATE/jNZ9Cs6cIkw/s1600/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012+003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tMdQ4-8kiM4/UAG6FdM5ilI/AAAAAAAAATE/jNZ9Cs6cIkw/s400/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012+003.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Start with the berries. Go
down to the edge of the lake and pick two cups of berries from the clump of
wild high-bush blueberries that has (without fuss or fertilizer, attention or
interference) been producing berries for pancakes, muffins, and cakes for more
than half a century. </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-w1SP6uygSgU/UAG6Bwt9LRI/AAAAAAAAAS8/XyZzuWJwOrc/s1600/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012+002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-w1SP6uygSgU/UAG6Bwt9LRI/AAAAAAAAAS8/XyZzuWJwOrc/s200/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012+002.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
If you tie a cut-down
plastic milk jug around your waist with a piece of clothesline rope, you’ll be
able to use both hands to pick; this is good.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Go barefoot, and wear
shorts, because to pick the ones on the lake side of the bush you have to stand
in the water. (Gramma Wight did not wear shorts. She wore skirts. I do not wear skirts at camp--or anywhere else, for that matter, if I can help it.)</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
The best time to go is
early in the morning, because if you get there before the sun burns off the
dew, there will be fairy dresses to admire, stretched between the branches of
the bushes and spread out on the little patch of grass behind them.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Use Marjorie Standish’s
Melt-In-Your-Mouth Blueberry Cake recipe, from her first cookbook, <i>Cooking Down East. </i>Marjorie says this is "undoubtedly the most popular recipe ever used in my column." There is good reason for that.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>I modify it with the
addition of a crumb topping, because who doesn’t like a nice crumb topping?</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
You’ll need: two eggs,
separated; a half-cup of shortening (next time I might experiment with using
butter instead, but today I went with Marjorie’s recommendation and used
Crisco); a cup of sugar; a teaspoon of real vanilla; a cup and a half of flour;
a teaspoon of baking powder (I like Rumford brand because it’s aluminum-free—no
weird aftertaste); a quarter of a teaspoon of salt; a third of a cup of milk;
and two cups of blueberries. (I just realized that the recipe actually only
calls for a cup and a half, but I used two because I had them, and it came out
just fine, with a lovely amount of blueberry taste.)</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Separate the eggs and
beat the whites until stiff. It’s best to use your mom’s old Pyrex mixing bowl
for this; the red one should be the right size. Add some of the sugar from the
recipe to the beaten egg whites to keep them stiff, about a quarter of a cup.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Cream the shortening in a
bigger bowl; the yellow Pyrex is perfect. Add the sugar, vanilla, and egg yolks
and beat until nice and fluffy. </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Sift together your dry
ingredients, but first, mix a little of the flour from the recipe with the
berries so they won’t settle to the bottom of your cake; a couple of teaspoons
should be enough. Add your dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Gently
fold in the beaten egg whites and then, even more gently, the blueberries.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Spread the batter in a
greased 8” x 8” pan. Marjorie says to sprinkle the top lightly with granulated
sugar, but I do love a nice crumb topping. So mix half a stick of softened
butter with a quarter cup of brown sugar, a half cup of flour, and a half
teaspoon of cinnamon. Use a pastry blender—that ancient one with the crazily bent
wires that was brought to camp fifty years ago because it wasn’t “good enough”
for home.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Sprinkle the topping onto
the batter and bake it at 350 degrees for 50-60 minutes, or until it springs
back when you press the center.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Put it on a cooling rack
on the table to cool. Add a note so everyone knows you didn’t make it for a
bake sale or something. Don’t let the dog eat it—a friend tells me consuming
blueberries has dire consequences for the canine intestinal tract.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s1zOXZboIiY/UAG6L2HZ1OI/AAAAAAAAATY/IeZCXTaHDuw/s1600/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-s1zOXZboIiY/UAG6L2HZ1OI/AAAAAAAAATY/IeZCXTaHDuw/s320/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
If you’re lucky, there will be a piece left
for you when you get back from your meeting.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rPON5soxdHU/UAG6Iqd7IuI/AAAAAAAAATM/NQ6jWvdVcF8/s1600/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012+005.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rPON5soxdHU/UAG6Iqd7IuI/AAAAAAAAATM/NQ6jWvdVcF8/s320/Blueberry_cake_7_14_2012+005.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-67370509697181900142012-06-29T17:30:00.000-04:002012-06-29T17:30:49.573-04:00Governor LePage should be ashamed of himself<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I started this as a letter to the editor after reading this morning's Lewiston Sun Journal, but (surprise!) it got way too long (250 word maximum? Really? At 250 words, I was just getting warmed up) so I'm posting it here instead. It won't be read by thousands, but just writing it made me feel a little better.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Governor Paul LePage is
an embarrassment to the state of Maine.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Since running for
election less than two years ago, he has thumbed his nose at President Obama
(saying he’d tell him “to go to hell”), at the NAACP (“tell ‘em to kiss my butt”),
at state workers (calling them “about as corrupt as can be”), and, repeatedly,
at the people of Maine.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
He dismissed concerns
over the chemical additive BPA in consumer products, joking that “it gives off
a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little
beards.” </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
He opposed the removal of
the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River, saying, “It’s irresponsible to be
taking out hydro dams,” and refused to attend the ceremony marking its
demolition. This, despite the fact that conservation, recreation, economic, and
energy interests all hailed the agreement that brought about the dam’s historic
removal while providing for power-generation upgrades to other existing dams. </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
He banned the state fire
marshal’s office from testifying at the hearing on lifting the ban on the sale
and use of fireworks in Maine. Apparently he didn’t feel that the concerns of State
Fire Marshal John Dean, who opposed the bill to legalize fireworks on safety
grounds, were relevant to the hearing. </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
He initiated cuts to
child-care subsidies under both TANF and Head Start, as well as cuts to the
home-visiting program under the Fund for a Healthy Maine. These programs
specifically target low-income parents who are working or attending school in
an effort to attain self-sufficiency for their families (i.e., get <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">off</i> of assistance programs), and families
at high risk of child abuse, neglect, and substance abuse.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Now, in a blow that
undermines the incredibly hard work of Maine people, LePage has frozen funding
for the $400,000 matching grant awarded to the town of Norway under the
Communities for Maine’s Future program. This funding (approved by Maine voters
in 2010 as part of a $25 million bond initiative) was earmarked for the
renovation of six storefronts in Norway’s historic Opera House, a $1.1 million
project that was slated to go out to bid in the next couple of weeks.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Is Governor LePage aware
that a group of committed citizens in the Norway area have been working for five
years to bring about this renovation project? </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Is he aware that the purchase
and stabilization of the Opera House—an 1894 structure that is part of the
Norway Historic District, and was, until recently, in imminent danger of collapsing
onto Main Street—was made possible by a $200,000 private donation from
residents Bill and Bea Damon? </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Is he aware of the
tireless fundraising and countless volunteer hours that have gone into helping
to get this project off the ground—and that in service to the endeavor, those
volunteers employed such diverse talents as scrubbing, scouring, trash removal,
staple-pulling, jewelry design, and musical composition? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Is he aware that delaying
the CMF grant funding—which, under state law, he will eventually have to
release—could jeopardize the matching federal and state tax credits, which are
essential to the project and are due to expire next year? </div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Is he aware that this
project is aimed at providing jobs, encouraging new business, and revitalizing
a historic downtown area? Exactly what does the governor think it means to be “open
for business,” anyway?</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
Governor LePage’s
inappropriate behavior and off-the-cuff remarks may be merely an embarrassment
to our state, but his ignorance, obstinacy, and arbitrary heavy-handedness are
a danger to our future. As a friend commented, “One could say that he is a
joke, but this is much more serious than that.”</div>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-72858369973890252862012-06-22T18:18:00.001-04:002012-06-23T16:29:48.062-04:00WWW@100: A Dad’s Legacy<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y94heXQAmYE/T-TqKReYEbI/AAAAAAAAASU/umBXyV2tOGs/s1600/WWW_with_peavey.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rsga6FEkdmM/T-Tp-pYM1tI/AAAAAAAAARk/m_8feKwz5Lo/s1600/WWW_on_snowshoes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h-UfPT-eSDg/T-TqFkWbMrI/AAAAAAAAAR0/t99RlNNVKn8/s1600/WWW_in_tree.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h-UfPT-eSDg/T-TqFkWbMrI/AAAAAAAAAR0/t99RlNNVKn8/s1600/WWW_in_tree.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h-UfPT-eSDg/T-TqFkWbMrI/AAAAAAAAAR0/t99RlNNVKn8/s320/WWW_in_tree.jpg" width="218" /></a>Today is June
22, 2012, and it’s a momentous occasion. Who knows why? If you guessed because
it’s the 76<sup>th</sup> birthday of Kris Kristofferson (the man I consider
absolutely the best American songwriter ever and, yes, the man on whom I’ve had
a serious crush for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">forty years</i>), you’d
be only partly right. Today is also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth
of my dad, William Walton Wight.</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left;">
Dad was an
amazing man. He was talented, smart, and capable. He could build anything, fix
anything, figure anything out. He loved poetry and liked to quote it,
especially Robert Frost, Robert Service, and Holman Day. He was born in
Oquossoc and raised in Bethel and he was the quintessential Mainer—practical, resourceful,
and outdoorsy—until the day he died, even though he spent the last half of his
life living in exile in Connecticut.<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h-UfPT-eSDg/T-TqFkWbMrI/AAAAAAAAAR0/t99RlNNVKn8/s1600/WWW_in_tree.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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He liked
people, and they liked him. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Everyone </i>loved
your father,” my mother once told me, a touch of bemusement in her voice. (No
doubt she felt a bit mystified, a little wistful—the sentiments with which we
introverts regard those Others: the ones who light up a room, whose
personalities draw people to them and effortlessly hold them enthralled.)</div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left;">
My dad worked
hard at his job—he had majored in metallurgical engineering and worked at Pratt
& Whitney Small Tool in West Hartford—and, with a partner, he started his own small metals
heat-treating business on the side which, remarkably, still exists today, more
than 60 years later. (While he was involved with the company, it was very much
a shoestring operation—he used to bring metal rods home and get my mother to
temper them in her oven.) </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p2RS-NUqDM0/T-TqEJI1YeI/AAAAAAAAARs/kPe9FZ7xYkQ/s1600/WWW_with_kids_on_Cadillac_1951.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-p2RS-NUqDM0/T-TqEJI1YeI/AAAAAAAAARs/kPe9FZ7xYkQ/s320/WWW_with_kids_on_Cadillac_1951.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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But as busy as
he was, there was never any question that his first priority was family. He
took my four older siblings hiking, camping, and rockhounding. He helped lead
my brothers’ Boy Scout troop. They all built a wooden boat together from a kit—it,
too, still exists today. They played Scrabble, did jigsaw puzzles, went</div>
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to
church, got a family dog. </div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BIOUlBSxaxw/T-TqGNF30OI/AAAAAAAAAR8/sOzLw02pBu8/s1600/WWW_and_Steve_5_10_1944.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BIOUlBSxaxw/T-TqGNF30OI/AAAAAAAAAR8/sOzLw02pBu8/s320/WWW_and_Steve_5_10_1944.jpg" width="229" /></a></div>
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And he and my
mother brought the kids to Maine as often as possible. They learned the names
of all the trees in the Maine woods and all the Maine minerals they found. In the
mid-1950s they bought a lot on North Pond in Woodstock and then, together, they
built our camp.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E04VDHSxBoQ/T-TqHAuDaeI/AAAAAAAAASE/oQ-kYgbu7nc/s1600/Building_camp.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E04VDHSxBoQ/T-TqHAuDaeI/AAAAAAAAASE/oQ-kYgbu7nc/s400/Building_camp.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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In a way, it’s
remarkable that I know this much about my dad, when you consider that he died
in 1958, more than eight months before I was born. But it’s a testament to his
legacy, to the far-reaching influence he has had on my siblings and, indirectly
but inarguably, on their children and grandchildren as well. </div>
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And on me. I
remember asking my mother once, when I was quite young, “How old was I when
Daddy died?” She looked confused, and explained gently that he had died before
I was ever born. Then it was my turn to be confused. “But I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">remember</i> him,” I insisted. And it seemed
to me that I did. His legacy was to remain a vital part of the family he left
behind, during my childhood and beyond—even now, more than five decades after
his death. </div>
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<br /></div>
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His legacy is
in the wooden boat and the family camp—with his musty suede camp jacket and
plaid wool shirts still hanging in the closets. It’s in the fact that by the
time we went to kindergarten we could all identify feldspar, mica, quartz,
beryl, tourmaline, and—our favorite because we loved the way it rolled off our
tongues—lavender lepidolite. It’s in the way, over the years, we’ve all been
drawn to the state of Maine—three of us to stay—and the way, I think, we all consider
Maine our true spiritual home. It’s in the way we all love the woods, the
water, our kids. It’s in every part of our lives.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rsga6FEkdmM/T-Tp-pYM1tI/AAAAAAAAARk/m_8feKwz5Lo/s1600/WWW_on_snowshoes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="310" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rsga6FEkdmM/T-Tp-pYM1tI/AAAAAAAAARk/m_8feKwz5Lo/s320/WWW_on_snowshoes.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y94heXQAmYE/T-TqKReYEbI/AAAAAAAAASU/umBXyV2tOGs/s1600/WWW_with_peavey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a></div>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-89013153745988718192012-04-06T20:41:00.007-04:002012-04-07T06:16:20.497-04:0070 Years Ago Today...<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vrYxhObxFxw/T3-NT-KtmEI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/kI7iGYXRgdk/s1600/momanddad.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 271px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vrYxhObxFxw/T3-NT-KtmEI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/kI7iGYXRgdk/s400/momanddad.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728452625283520578" border="0" /></a>Seventy years ago today, my parents got married. It was a Monday, at 2:30 in the afternoon. (Why they chose to get married on a Monday is a mystery to me; maybe it wasn't that uncommon back then, or maybe the church was tied up every weekend with all the couples who were rushing to get married before the husbands were sent overseas to fight.)<br /><br />My father was nearly 30, and my mother had just turned 22. Both had graduated from the University of Maine, but they were several years apart and hadn't met there. In fact, although they were both Maine natives, they met, in the summer of 1941, in Connecticut, where my father was working as a metallurgical engineer and my mother was working for the Aetna Life Insurance Company (and living at the "Y" with several other girls from Maine).<br /><br />From all accounts, it was a whirlwind romance; my mother told me once that my father produced an engagement ring on a Labor Day weekend trip home to Maine, barely two months after they had met. "I said, 'Oh, no, Bill, it's too soon,'" she told me, "and I made him keep the ring until Christmas."<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bdah4EbiUOI/T3-RwJ6wMpI/AAAAAAAAARE/Eg2B5MjtVi8/s1600/thayers_inn_1944.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 204px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bdah4EbiUOI/T3-RwJ6wMpI/AAAAAAAAARE/Eg2B5MjtVi8/s320/thayers_inn_1944.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728457507520656018" border="0" /></a></div>They were married just a little more than three months later, in Bangor, where my mother had grown up, and where her father still lived. For their honeymoon, they traveled to Littleton, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains (yes, in early April!), where they stayed at the historic Thayer's Inn, built nearly a century before.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6WY80pnDUEw/T3-S7pml3lI/AAAAAAAAARQ/4NzvKDhnWw4/s1600/Flume.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6WY80pnDUEw/T3-S7pml3lI/AAAAAAAAARQ/4NzvKDhnWw4/s320/Flume.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728458804516216402" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />They snowshoed up the trail to the Flume gorge and took pictures (none of which I am able to find at the moment, but here's a photo of the same place, 70 years later, at approximately the same time of the year, taken recently by my friend Ryan).<br /><br /><br /><br />On their way back from New Hampshire, they stopped in Bethel to see my father's mother and grandmother, who ran a small restaurant (Farwell & Wight's) together. They strapped on their snowshoes again and hiked up a mountain, to the old Farwell homestead (which the women had abandoned nearly two decades earlier, after both lost their husbands the same year, to move to town and go into business together). There, they liberated an old spool bed, already an antique, which was first theirs, then eventually became my sister's, then my niece's, and is now in the guest room at camp.<br /><br />They moved into a tiny, boxlike house in Newington, Connecticut, then, after the kids started coming--four of them in the next seven years--a bigger house with a bigger yard (and a sidewalk running all around it--a racetrack for my brothers' bikes). Eventually they moved to Westfield, New Jersey for my father's job.<br /><br />From my mother's accounts of those years, I think she loved being a young wife, raising her family in a place filled with other young families, baking up a storm ("a pie, a cake, or a batch of cookies, every day"), coffee-klatsching with the other neighborhood wives ("we'd all get together and call in our grocery order, and they'd deliver it to wherever we were having coffee that morning"), taking camping trips in a leaky tent with all the kids and the family's cocker spaniel.<br /><br />Then in the mid-1950s, itching to get back to Maine for at least part of the year, they bought a lot on North Pond in Woodstock and started to build a camp, and that quickly became a major focus of their lives. My parents always knew that one day they would retire together "to a house on a hill in Bethel," and spending their summers on nearby North Pond was a step in the right direction.<br /><br />My mother was married for just over 16 years, and was a widow for nearly 46. (I never knew my father, who died a week shy of his 46th birthday, and more than eight months before I was born.) She wore her rings until the day she died, and I believe she always considered herself still my father's wife. The day after my mother retired, in June of 1982, she left Connecticut for Maine, there to stay for the rest of her life (except for her trips to Alaska and Colorado and England and Scotland and France and Germany and Australia...). 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href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-whXEpj84DZc/T3EqhjZ-RgI/AAAAAAAAAQs/4M4HyWGEntM/s1600/Robert%2BFrost%2Bbook.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-whXEpj84DZc/T3EqhjZ-RgI/AAAAAAAAAQs/4M4HyWGEntM/s400/Robert%2BFrost%2Bbook.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5724403357292840450" border="0" /></a>Today is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Frost. When I was very young, probably no more than three or four, my mother began reading to me from <u>Complete Poems of Robert Frost</u>, a well-worn volume with the poet’s signature embossed in gold on its green cover. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not every night—she read me picture books and fairy tales and, later, <u>Charlotte’s Web</u> and <u>The Secret Garden</u> and <u>Beezus and Ramona</u>. But every now and then, she’d take out the old green book of Robert Frost’s poetry and say, “Let’s read poems tonight.”<br /><br />My mother liked the peaceful, pastoral poems—“The Pasture”—and the searching, reflective ones—“The Road Not Taken.” “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” was her favorite, the one her grandchildren would read in unison at her funeral, forty years later.<br /><br />I liked those poems, too. I memorized them, and when I told my fourth-grade teacher that I knew them by heart, she had me stand up in front of the class and recite them, all three. Then she sent me across the hall to the other fourth grade class to recite them there, too.<br /><br />But my own favorites--too long to memorize, but wonderful to hear read aloud--were the ones that told stories. They were stories of simple rural people, but the stories themselves, far from being simple, were infused with dark undercurrents and complicated emotions. “Home Burial.” “The Housekeeper.” “The Mountain.”<br /><br />By the time I was nine or ten, I was asking her to read and reread “The Death of the Hired Man,” shivering with pleasure and dread through my favorite lines… “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”… “ ‘I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud / Will hit or miss the moon.’ / It hit the moon.”… until she reached the poem’s inevitable conclusion: “ ’Dead,’ was all he answered.”<br /><br />My mother was always taking college courses, working toward her master’s degree in library science, and in one class, Robert Frost’s daughter, Lesley Frost Ballantine was her classmate. (At least, I think that’s how the story goes—she met her somewhere, anyway.) Lesley had just published a children’s book called <u>Really Not Really</u>, and my mother brought me home a signed copy, inscribed “For Amy—Really!” There was a black and white photo in the back of Lesley with her father and her two daughters—this photo, as a matter of fact:<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3KhZOBqmQXI/T3EqORvh5RI/AAAAAAAAAQU/xpT8535-jvk/s1600/Robert%2BFrost%2Bfamily.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 314px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3KhZOBqmQXI/T3EqORvh5RI/AAAAAAAAAQU/xpT8535-jvk/s400/Robert%2BFrost%2Bfamily.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5724403026133902610" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left">I knew Robert Frost had died just a couple of years earlier, and I couldn’t believe I was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">that close</i> to my mother’s literary hero.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left">I think the old green <u>Complete Poems</u> is at camp. And<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> </i>I still have that copy of <u>Really Not Really</u>, as well as a 1939 edition of <u>Collected Poems of Robert Frost</u> with my parents’ surprisingly silly bookplate in the front:<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xB0liBwB-0I/T3EqBEmZ2qI/AAAAAAAAAQI/FD5ALGDMSB8/s1600/bookplate%2B001.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 292px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xB0liBwB-0I/T3EqBEmZ2qI/AAAAAAAAAQI/FD5ALGDMSB8/s400/bookplate%2B001.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5724402799267666594" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left">They must have bought this volume early in their marriage, and I like to think of them reading Robert Frost’s poems aloud to each other and dreaming of their future together.</p>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-65923862543358587322012-03-18T15:26:00.002-04:002012-04-07T09:01:26.134-04:00Camp in March<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GeA5x-zg6B4/T4A6hvm_VkI/AAAAAAAAARc/jNOk2FeyiEY/s1600/Camp1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GeA5x-zg6B4/T4A6hvm_VkI/AAAAAAAAARc/jNOk2FeyiEY/s400/Camp1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728643077405365826" border="0" /></a><br /><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> 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priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif][if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="text-align:left" align="left">Mid-March, and it feels more like late April. Remy and I walk in to camp and find only a few patches of snow left on the road. The ice on the pond has receded from the edges enough to let him wade in for a drink.</p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left">The outside thermometer says it’s in the mid-50s (the sun won’t hit the front of our west-facing camp for several more hours), and the one inside, 38 degrees. I’m hot from trudging a mile on the muddy road, and for once the coolness of the stale, unmoving air inside the camp is welcome.</p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left">I flop down on my mom’s old couch, the same one that she bought for our living room in Connecticut when I was about five. (It’s a Castro Convertible—the original convertible sleeper-sofa—which may explain why it’s still in such good shape, well into its fifth decade, while I’ve already been through several couches in my adult life. It weighs about two tons. They really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">don’t </i>make ‘em like they used to, I guess.)</p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left">The battery-operated clock on the wall says 11:35. I wonder what time it really is; I take out my phone, and am surprised to see that it says…11:35. It seems impossible that time hasn’t come to a standstill here since we moved home from camp, almost six months ago. </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left">I remember arriving in June, usually the day after school was out, when I was little, and waiting impatiently for my mother to unlock the door, pushing past her to be the first to inhale the odd, unmistakable scent—part pine boards, part mothballs, part decaying mouse—that meant we were home for the summer. In those days, the camp had usually been closed up tight for nearly ten months, the electric clock on the wall recording the exact moment when my mother had opened the fuse box, halting the current, the last thing she did before walking out the door and back into our other life.</p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left">I look around at the cobwebbed windows—the ones that don’t open because they’re really just old wooden storm windows (meant, according to my mother, to have been temporary, until she and my father got around to replacing them with double-hung windows with screens)—and dreadful 1960s wood-grain paneling. I think about all of the improvements we will consider, plan, but almost certainly not execute this summer. This is partly because of a lack of funds, of course, but mostly it’s because once we move to camp for the summer, we will be too busy just enjoying it—and by “busy,” I mean “picking blueberries, reading on the deck, kayaking, and napping in the hammock”—to want to take on many projects.</p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left">The walls are covered with bits of memorabilia—pennants from the colleges my four siblings attended (I never spent long enough at any one school in my 31-year pursuit of a degree to add one of my own); old motorboat registrations; newspaper clippings; a random assortment of photos from the past 50 years, slipped under the edges of the door casings. </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left">I briefly consider taking down some of the clutter, tossing it or packing it away, before I invite the members of my writing group, who have never been to camp before, to a day-long writing retreat there in June…but I know I won’t. Like the 1970s-era tubes of Prell shampoo in the bathroom or the 2004 Travelers Insurance calendar in the bedroom (the last of several dozen of these annual gifts my mother received from her friends Betty and Elmer before she died), everything here has a purpose. In its own way, every scrap of paper, every curled photo, every ancient comic strip contributes to making camp what it is: a repository for nearly 60 years of the very best memories. It’s a musty, dusty, ramshackle place, where babies get mosquito bites, toddlers eat dirt, teenagers chase each other in motorboats, and grown-ups who have forgotten how to relax suddenly find they remember after all. </p>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-31574886800474530722012-03-08T21:12:00.004-05:002012-03-08T21:21:08.799-05:00My latest excuse<span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> 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Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endi--><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >In Stephen King’s book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">On Writing</i>, he describes his typical day, which is pretty simple. I can’t remember the specifics, but, at least at the time he was writing about, nearly every single day included a big chunk of time spent reading, a big chunk spent writing, and a big chunk spent walking. These three activities formed the backbone of his day, and regular meals provided the rest of the structure.</span> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Reading, writing, walking, and eating—that’s exactly what I want to do every day—no more, no less. And I am convinced—utterly, completely convinced—that if only I didn’t have to have a “real” job (damn you, health insurance!) that’s exactly how I would spend my days. (I am also convinced that this would lead to my becoming healthy, fit, well-read, and a successful writer. Not to mention well-balanced and self-actualized.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >[A word about self-actualization: in a recent letter from a dear friend and college roommate, she referred to her husband as “the most self-actualized person I know.” I had heard the term, but since it wasn’t one I went around using myself, I looked it up to be sure I knew what she meant. It turns out that self-actualization is nothing more or less than what I’ve recently been calling “living my authentic life,” or what my mother liked to call “living up to your potential” (usually preceded by “If you don’t start…” and pronounced as she was looking at my high school report card or hearing about my plan to drop out of college and work in a hardware store).]</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >One of the worst things about having to go to a real job is that I always seem to get my best ideas when I’m rushing to get ready for work in the morning. Instead of having the leisure to go immediately to the computer and get down to the business of writing, I have to keep getting ready for work, and since I rarely have time to make even the most rudimentary notes, I usually lose the thought completely before I ever get around to writing about it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Yesterday morning I was rushing around to get ready for work, as usual, when it occurred to me that I could write about what it’s like to be always rushing around to get ready for work. But of course I didn’t have time to write anything down before I left the house. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >So as soon as I was in the car, I reached for my miniature voice recorder. Then I remembered that I don’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">have </i>a miniature voice recorder. Well, actually, I do have one, but as soon as I got it, I discovered that talking into it made me feel pathetic or insane or ridiculous, or all three, like a crazy person with no friends or a comically self-important person (this is because I once knew a comically self-important person who carried around a miniature voice recorder to capture all of his brilliant ideas). So I let the batteries run down, and now I don’t even know where it is.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:100%;" >So instead I reached for a pad of paper and a pen and (even though I am death on texting and driving, and, actually, don’t even like to take my hands off the wheel to adjust the radio or the heat), scribbled down, while driving with my elbows (there was no traffic; I promise), a few key words that I thought would remind me of what I had been thinking about writing:</span></p><p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-smzVl3WRVuA/T1loirXVvCI/AAAAAAAAAP8/xqpwp8QeQJE/s1600/Notes%2Bin%2Bthe%2Bcar.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 259px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-smzVl3WRVuA/T1loirXVvCI/AAAAAAAAAP8/xqpwp8QeQJE/s400/Notes%2Bin%2Bthe%2Bcar.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5717716146889014306" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Fortunately, I did not get in an accident; the worst thing that happened was that I placed the pad on the steering wheel and ended up inadvertently honking the horn when I started to write, just as I was coming into the village of Bryant Pond, startling myself and, no doubt, a few sleepy residents. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Unfortunately, when I took out my notes today and tried to recreate the witty prose that was so insistently writing itself in my head as I was driving yesterday, I came up empty. In fact, I had to struggle to remember what I was even thinking when I made my notes. (Maybe it’s time to dig out that recorder again after all. There are probably worse things than appearing comically self-important.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >“Bathroom—PB toast—Ex-husband”? OK, I admit it, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">did</i> take my piece of peanut butter toast into the bathroom with me to finish it while brushing my hair and putting on moisturizer, and this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">is </i>something that would have driven my ex-husband crazy (he had very definite never-the-twain-shall-meet ideas about bathrooms and food, which I can certainly understand, from a hygiene point of view, but sometimes you just have to compromise your ideals in favor of finishing breakfast). But somehow it doesn’t seem as amusing now. Rats.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >“Tony—paper—Kate Braestrup”? Well, Tony <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">was</i> following me around with the newspaper (actually he was standing outside the bathroom door while I was inside eating peanut butter toast), trying to tell me that Kate Braestrup, a Maine writer I greatly admire, was having a book signing in Winthrop. Being followed around seemed particularly annoying to me at the time because a) I hate being talked to through the bathroom door (doesn’t everyone?), b) I had already made it clear that I was late for work and didn’t have a moment to spare, and c) Winthrop is 50 miles away and I’m not likely to be going there for a book signing. But it’s another thing that really doesn’t seem that amusing, or even particularly annoying, today, and I have to admit that he should probably get points for noticing and pointing out an article about a writer I like. (However, we do have to talk about that shouting-through-the-bathroom-door thing.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >“Cadbury Mini-eggs—Ice fishermen.” Oh, yes. I was feeling so frustrated about having to go to work instead of staying home to write all day (something that, in case you’re wondering, wouldn’t have happened anyway—it would have been more like staying home to do laundry and waste time on the computer and think of something unusual to cook, ending up saying to myself in the late afternoon, “Shit! I meant to write today!”) that I thought I would just take along six Cadbury Mini-eggs in a tiny lidded container, and then, after I worked all day, I could savor them in the car on the way home. Except that less than a mile from home I passed a pond where three ice fishermen were checking their traps, and I got so jealous that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">they</i> got to do what they wanted all day instead of going to work that I ate my Cadbury Mini-eggs right then and there. (And yes, as a matter of fact, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">have</i> considered working on my inappropriate use of chocolate to soothe, reward, and brace myself. Maybe right after Cadbury Mini-egg season is over.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >“The Storm at the Door—Moxie—Baby food.” I’ve just started reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Storm at the Door,</i> by Stefan Merrill Block, and when I thought about what I really wanted to be doing (besides writing, of course), it was staying home and reading with my very old cat, Moxie, who is dying, purring on my lap. (I think he’s purring. It could just be that his lungs are filling with fluid, but he still seems happy, especially when he gets to be with me.) Thinking of Moxie reminded me that I wanted to go to the grocery store and get some baby food turkey to see if I could coax him to eat it, so I wrote that down, too, so I wouldn’t forget.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >“GPS—8:10—School bus stops.” I have to be at work at 8:15. When I left the house, my GPS said I would get there at 8:10. I don’t actually need the GPS to find my way to work, but I do need it to tell me whether or not to exceed the speed limit on any given morning, and whether I have the extra two minutes it requires to take the slightly longer route with slightly fewer frost heaves. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >My conclusion: rushing around to get to work on weekday mornings causes me to get stressed and annoyed at home, eat peanut butter toast in the bathroom, do dangerous things while driving, resent innocent ice fishermen, and eat too much chocolate. It does not provide much in the way of inspiration. On the other hand, having a real job, besides providing my family with health insurance, gives me a perfect excuse for not being a published writer.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Times New Roman","serif"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >And in case you’re wondering, I got stuck behind a school bus making frequent stops and arrived at work at 8:14, with myself and my bad attitude intact.</span></p>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-25645462169011939152012-02-12T17:14:00.011-05:002012-02-12T18:46:59.069-05:00Our house was marked for hobosTomorrow, February 13<sup>th</sup>, would have been my mom’s 92<sup>nd</sup> birthday. Here’s a story I had never heard until a couple of years ago. It’s about my mom and her best friend, and it says a lot to me about their kindness and compassion. <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left">My mom and <a href="http://harrietthespysblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/goodbye-to-auntie-bet.html">Betty</a> raised their kids together in Newington, Connecticut in the 1940s and ‘50s, and remained lifelong friends. Betty died a few years after my mom, in 2010. After her funeral, we all went back to the farmhouse in Cumberland, Maine, where she had grown up, to eat and tell stories. Three of my siblings and I were gathered with Betty's three sons when Ben, their youngest, asked if any of us had ever heard the story of “our houses being marked for hobos.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left">None of us had.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left">Then Ben told us about waking up early one morning, before anyone else in the family was up, and going out the front door of their house, onto the tiny closed-in porch. There, he discovered a man, sound asleep. “A smelly man,” he remembered.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left">“I ran and told my mom, ‘There’s a smelly man sleeping on our porch,’” he said. “And she just said, ‘Yes, that’s because our house is marked for hobos.’” He looked at us. “She said your house was marked for hobos, too.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left">Betty told Ben that hobos—homeless men who, ever since the Great Depression, had crisscrossed the country, riding the rails and camping on the outskirts of towns—had a system of marks, usually drawn with chalk, to let others know which houses were inhabited by friendly folks, and which to avoid. She told him that both their house and ours, across the street, bore a mark on the wooden front steps that conveyed “you can get a sandwich here, or a place to sleep protected from the weather.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left">I don’t know if Betty’s husband, Elmer, and my dad were aware that their wives were considered a soft touch by the hobos who passed through Newington. Safety doesn’t seem to have been the concern back then that it would be today. I do know, however—because Ben told us this, too: whenever one of the dads put a new coat of paint on the front steps, the moms would take a piece of chalk and make the mark again.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left">After hearing Ben's story, I was curious about the "hobo marks." Poking around on the internet led me to an article by Erwin Van Swol that appeared in the August, 1960 issue of Coronet Magazine, entitled "The Hoboes' Secret Code." I found the magazine on Ebay (yes, I can be a little obsessive sometimes) and discovered that the mark on our house might have been one of these: </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B9PjIylxS3c/Tzg7QkzvDgI/AAAAAAAAAPY/LDAWrHReKb8/s1600/Hobo%2Bmarks-food%2Bfor%2Bwork.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 273px; height: 229px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B9PjIylxS3c/Tzg7QkzvDgI/AAAAAAAAAPY/LDAWrHReKb8/s320/Hobo%2Bmarks-food%2Bfor%2Bwork.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5708377683636719106" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uTjdv3Fstxg/Tzg7G9qRZPI/AAAAAAAAAPM/esyr9QQ_-DA/s1600/Hobo%2Bmarks-triangles.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 196px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uTjdv3Fstxg/Tzg7G9qRZPI/AAAAAAAAAPM/esyr9QQ_-DA/s320/Hobo%2Bmarks-triangles.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5708377518509221106" border="0" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /></span></p>But, knowing my mom and Betty, I prefer to think this was the mark the hobos drew on their front steps: <br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jDIUNbp8xwU/Tzg-iq3HUEI/AAAAAAAAAPw/7n9KNEHA7CU/s1600/Hobo%2Bmarks-kind%2Bwoman.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 337px; height: 383px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jDIUNbp8xwU/Tzg-iq3HUEI/AAAAAAAAAPw/7n9KNEHA7CU/s400/Hobo%2Bmarks-kind%2Bwoman.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5708381293034033218" border="0" /></a><br />PS: The more things change, the more they stay the same: This 1960 issue of Coronet also contains an article entitled "Can Catholics Ever Accept Birth Control?" 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mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> </p><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Back in 2005, when I was opening a bakery, I looked for a fun, casual typeface for all my signs and labels. I wanted a font that said, “Relax! There is nothing in life so serious and dire that a whoopie pie won’t help to lighten the mood!” I wanted my customers to walk in and say, “Well, here’s a fun little place with great cinnamon rolls in the bakery case, crazy colors on the furniture and walls, and a lovable, funny proprietor in the kitchen!”</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"> </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >I chose a font that seemed to say exactly what I wanted. How was I to know that Comic Sans, which was created in 1994 by then-Microsoft designer Vincent Connare to evoke hand-lettering of the sort most often seen in comic books, was—by the time I stumbled across it and thought, perfect!—the subject of worldwide ridicule?</span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:100%;" >OK, OK, so I understand that the fun, lighthearted Comic Sans is not an appropriate typeface for, say, the resumé you’re sending to Pompous & Stuffy, Inc. Or your Aunt Sally’s gravestone. Or Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2010/07/09/lebron-james-and-the-revenge-of-comic-sans/">angry letter</a> about LeBron James’ betrayal. Or this sign, warning people of the imminent danger of death at an electrical substation:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1dvX1MqDSls/Tw8S0Kc7EiI/AAAAAAAAAOc/seISaKId6cs/s1600/Comic%2BSans%2Binappropriate%2Buse.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 278px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1dvX1MqDSls/Tw8S0Kc7EiI/AAAAAAAAAOc/seISaKId6cs/s320/Comic%2BSans%2Binappropriate%2Buse.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5696792741015130658" border="0" /></a></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >But does this casual, innocent little typeface really deserve the amount of vitriol that has been expended toward it over the past 15+ years? Does it deserve to be the subject of the “Ban Comic Sans” movement that has exploded in articles, blog posts, and even the <a href="http://bancomicsans.com/main/">Ban Comic Sans Official Website</a> (which asserts that using Comic Sans in the wrong context is like wearing a clown costume to a black tie dinner)?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Just because people make mistakes about where and how Comic Sans can be appropriately used, do we really have to blame the font, and call for a total ban?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Google “Comic Sans,” and the first result is the Ban Comic Sans website. Among others near the top: “What’s so wrong with Comic Sans?”, “Comic Sans Criminal: There’s help available for people like you!”, and “Comic Sans: The font everyone loves to hate.”</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Now, because of all of this negative press, when I look back at my “pie lady” logo and the “Amy’s Bakeshop” I so proudly painted on my sign, had embroidered on hats and aprons, and used on every label on every pie, cake, and loaf of bread that left my bakeshop, I’m a little mortified.<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:100%;" >To tell you the truth, it’s not unlike the nagging feeling of doubt I get when I look back at photos</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lFA1YSPsass/Tw8TwPwVkTI/AAAAAAAAAO0/7FDpwkAb0sI/s1600/Amy%2Bat%2BMHS%2Bcropped.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 294px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lFA1YSPsass/Tw8TwPwVkTI/AAAAAAAAAO0/7FDpwkAb0sI/s320/Amy%2Bat%2BMHS%2Bcropped.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5696793773230887218" border="0" /></a></span><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" > of me from high school and realize that maybe (just maybe) farmer’s overalls, flannel shirts, and my father’s gold pocketwatch hanging on a chain around my neck did not combine to create the stylish look I thought they did. Aughh! What other significant aesthetic mistakes have I made in my lifetime? (Don’t answer that, please; I have a feeling they may be too numerous to list.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Holly Combs, who runs the Ban Comic Sans website with her husband, Dave, says, “Comic Sans is in the hands of people that shouldn’t have it. Secretaries and librarians, they don’t use it well.” </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Besides the fact that Ms. Combs’ statement is offensive to secretaries and librarians (implying that if they had access to a clown costume, they wouldn’t have the good sense not to wear it to a black-tie dinner), it’s probably not even true. After all, it wasn’t Dan Gilbert’s secretary who chose Comic Sans for his vitriolic missive—he owns that mistake all by himself. And librarians? Please! Do you really think a segment of the population most often caricatured by horn-rimmed glasses, sensible shoes, and the constant admonition to “Shhh!” is going to suddenly go rogue with a font that has been described as frivolous and irreverent?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >People seem to take their hatred of Comic Sans quite seriously. Comments on the Combs’ website include “It is a disgusting font – immature, frivolous and visually jarring” and “conveys silliness, childish naivete, irreverence.” There is even—I am not making this up—a book, due out in April, titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Thou Shall Not Use Comic Sans.</i></span></p> <p style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:10.0pt;margin-left: 0in"><span style="Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >It all makes me feel kind of sorry for poor Vincent Connare, who undoubtedly has many worthy accomplishments to his credit, but is probably doomed to be best remembered for creating the typeface that font geeks love to hate. He has surely spent a disproportionate amount of time and energy responding to Comic Sans detractors, which is why he has included a page titled “Why Comic Sans?” on his own website, in which he explains that “Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program's interface, the typeface used to communicate the message. There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children when I designed Comic Sans. The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:100%;" >That’s right, Connare was “shocked” when he saw Times New Roman used inappropriately. And I think you’ll agree that Microsoft Bob’s friendly, helpful pup Rover would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">never </i>speak in Times New Roman.<br /></span></p><p style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:10.0pt;margin-left: 0in"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nCyQloFBQs8/Tw8UDXclgxI/AAAAAAAAAPA/_nOaI3bJeWo/s1600/MSbob.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 314px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nCyQloFBQs8/Tw8UDXclgxI/AAAAAAAAAPA/_nOaI3bJeWo/s320/MSbob.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5696794101713044242" border="0" /></a></span></p><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><p style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:10.0pt;margin-left: 0in"><span style="Comic Sans MS"font-family:";font-size:100%;" >Because that would be like showing up to make balloon animals at a kids’ party…in black tie. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:left" align="left"><span style="line-height:115%;font-size:100%;" > </span></p>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-48266336450685883362012-01-01T18:45:00.008-05:002012-01-01T22:02:02.564-05:00Resolved:<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hD6CUQh8jMc/TwEcBpDlRvI/AAAAAAAAAOE/MnViojOagV4/s1600/calvin-and-hobbes.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 303px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hD6CUQh8jMc/TwEcBpDlRvI/AAAAAAAAAOE/MnViojOagV4/s400/calvin-and-hobbes.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692862218499344114" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">Happy New Year! Despite the fact that it comes in the middle of the darkest (and usually the coldest) part of winter, and on the heels of the frenetic pace of the Christmas season, I really like January 1st. I love the concept of making a fresh start for a new year.<br /><br />Although, come to think of it, I would like New Year's Day even better if it came in the spring, which really seems like the most appropriate time to make a fresh start. But maybe it's better this way--if we get dragged down by the long, dark winter and stumble in our resolutions, we can always start over again when the sun gets higher and the days get longer and everyone feels that springtime sense of renewal. My birthday is March 2nd, and I always see that date as a sort of second chance to make all those changes for the better that I promised myself I'd make on New Year's Day.<br /><br />But I have to make those initial promises, or resolutions, or whatever you want to call them, first, just on the chance that they'll actually take the first time.<br /><br />I woke up this morning feeling quite resolute, and thinking about the ways in which I'd like to change my life in 2012. I've decided not to make any resolutions about exercise, weight loss, or healthy eating this year, even though all of those are areas in which, like just about everyone I know, I'd like to make changes. However, if I'm successful in achieving The Big Goal I'm setting for myself this year, I believe it will have a positive impact on every aspect of my life.<br /><br />My Big Goal is simply this: to make measurable progress toward living my Authentic Life.<br /><br />Here's how I envision my Authentic Life: I have very little stress. (There is some research that argues that a certain amount of stress is actually good for you, but I think that argument pertains more to competitive young professionals, or those in military training, than to 50+ women seeking simpler lives. I'm pretty sure I can get by without much stress at all, thank you very much.)<br /><br />In my Authentic Life, I live in a house that is comfortable and homey, with enough well-loved possessions to make me feel comforted, but <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>so many possessions that I feel possessed by them. I don't ask for extreme tidiness, just enough clutter control that I can find things when I go looking for them, and I don't always feel like hiding when someone unexpectedly comes to the door. (Chances are there will be many times when I still feel like hiding from unexpected company, even if my house is clean, and that's OK. Another part of living my Authentic Life involves <a href="http://harrietthespysblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-am-introvertno-really-i-am.html">embracing my introversion</a>.)<br /><br />In my Authentic Life, my family and friends adore me, and marvel at my wonderful sense of humor and my calm, relaxed approach to everything. I do fulfilling work, and earn at least part of my income by writing.<br /><br />That last one is important. It's been the missing piece of the puzzle for me for a long time, and I'm determined to figure it out. One of my writing goals for the new year is to pitch some story ideas to magazines, and, hopefully, to sell at least two stories in 2012. In other words, to get started on the freelance writing career I've been talking about for...oh, decades now.<br /><br />I've made a list of steps I think will get me to my goal. Most of them are about self-discipline--"Write <span style="font-style: italic;">something </span>every day, or almost every day" (I always give myself an out, in case there are days when I wake up paralyzed, or barfing, or just in a terribly foul mood) and "Blog regularly--weekly?" (The weekly part is my daughter's suggestion; I think it may be a little too ambitious, but we'll see.)<br /><br />Many of the steps concern improving my relationship with time. For example, "Recognize how much time tasks actually take to complete." (I procrastinate on simple tasks because I can't seem to get it through my head that washing a sink full of dirty dishes takes 5-10 minutes, while "checking in on Facebook" may take 30-60 minutes--instead of the other way around.)<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;">I will learn to prioritize. When I make a daily to-do list, I'll stop putting "Read?" and "Write?" at the very bottom, as a tentative afterthought to "Clean bathrooms" and "Go to dump," and, instead, schedule time for reading and writing during my most productive and clearheaded hours of the day.</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br />I'm also challenging myself to continue getting up early--I'm targeting 5 a.m., seven days a week--and to use the early morning hours productively. I'm resolving to attend a writing class, workshop, or retreat, and to schedule mini writing retreats throughout the year.<br /><br />Last, I resolve to minimize the time I spend on housekeeping chores by (gasp!) trying to stay on top of them, instead of letting things get to a state of emergency before I grudgingly tackle them. Admitting my particular weakness for horizontal surfaces, I vow to keep the big table in my writing room (a.k.a. the dining room) clear for working on projects (whether writing, paying bills, or folding laundry), and to keep the kitchen table clear for purposes of meal preparation (I don't have much counter space), eating, and just generally keeping the peace.<br /><br />That's it--the steps to my Authentic Life. Time to get started.<br /></span><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yy8Wzp2GSwc/TwEcKgWT7KI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/r6uQcS4Ahwg/s1600/Butt%2Bin%2Bchair.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yy8Wzp2GSwc/TwEcKgWT7KI/AAAAAAAAAOQ/r6uQcS4Ahwg/s400/Butt%2Bin%2Bchair.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692862370780802210" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-66566901450458434472011-03-20T20:25:00.007-04:002011-03-20T20:32:46.857-04:00I am an introvert...no, really, I am!<span style="font-size:85%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_WtPAbcpeOk/TYabO_677OI/AAAAAAAAANg/OO3cWes5glQ/s1600/Introvert%2Bunder%2Bdesk.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px 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unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >People make me tired. This is not to suggest that I’m unfriendly, or that I don’t <i style="">like </i>people (some of them, anyway). But being around them makes me tired.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >It’s been this way all my life. In junior high, when we had about three-quarters of an hour for lunch (divided between the cafeteria and the playground, two places I avoided like the plague, for reasons that would fill a blog post and then some—suffice it to say that we moved to a new school district before seventh grade, and it pretty much ruined my life) I walked home, all by myself, every single day. I may well have been the only student from Mathewson Elementary School who went home for lunch, but, as far as I know, there was no rule against it—at least, no one ever tried to stop me from leaving the school grounds the minute the lunch bell rang. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >By the time I had gotten through a morning of non-stop human interaction, I really needed that break. It was about a ten-minute walk, and since my mother worked, I came home to heat my can of Campbell’s soup in a house that was blissfully silent and empty. I don’t remember what else I did during my solitary lunch breaks, except that I know I talked to myself a lot. But, even though I hated having to go back to school afterward, that 45 minutes of solitude gave me the energy and courage to get through the afternoon.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >For the next 15 years or so, I often felt overwhelmed by too much “people contact.” Sometimes I was able to recognize the signs and carve out some time for myself before I reached the breaking point. But more often than not, thinking I wasn’t “supposed” to <i style="">need </i>time alone—or at least, not so much of it—I ignored the warning signs until I felt like this:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_ksEfLHHbJw/TYabUVpIXZI/AAAAAAAAANo/ZQ0d9fZvMB4/s1600/Woman%2Bthrowing%2Bhead%2Boff%2Bbuilding.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_ksEfLHHbJw/TYabUVpIXZI/AAAAAAAAANo/ZQ0d9fZvMB4/s320/Woman%2Bthrowing%2Bhead%2Boff%2Bbuilding.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5586323161509027218" border="0" /></a></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Then, sometime around the mid-1980s, I got hold of a copy of <u>Please Understand Me</u>, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, which (despite its pathetic, self-indulgent title) was enlightening, mainly because it offered a definition of “introvert” that I had never heard before: someone who draws energy from solitary activities, in contrast to an extrovert (or extravert, the spelling Keirsey and Bates use), who draws energy from being with other people. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >AHA! </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Keirsey and Bates go on to say that when introverts interact with others, “it drains their energy in a way not experienced by extraverts. Introverts need to find quiet places and solitary activities to recharge, while these activities exhaust the extravert.” </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Again, AHA!</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >I also learned that about 75% of the population is extroverted, making extroversion the norm—which explains a lot about why introverts are often regarded as shy, anti-social, selfish, boring, or just plain odd. (I myself am, in fact, all of those things, at least at times, but it’s grossly unfair to attribute those qualities to all introverts just because they need a little solitude and space.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Over the years, I’ve learned to cope pretty well in this extroverted world. In the same way that left-handed people usually become considerably more ambidextrous than right-handers—because of all the times when, dammit, there are just no left-handed scissors available—most introverts learn to spend more time than they would prefer with other people, and to give the appearance of enjoying it more than they actually do.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Sometimes I think I’ve done too good a job of “fitting in,” like when people express surprise that I consider myself very strongly introverted—I get a score of 10-0 on that part of the Keirsey and Bates assessment (or maybe 9-1 if I take the test on a day when I’m feeling especially friendly). </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >People often assume that, like them, I enjoy lots of Fun Group Activities, and invite me to participate, putting me in the position of having to: </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >(a) go along (because, despite being an introvert, I have a nearly pathological need to please people and to be liked) and, very often, end up feeling frazzled and peevish because what I really needed was some alone time; </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >(b) make up a phony pre-existing commitment (and how many times are they going to believe I’m visiting my sister, or that my cat has a vet appointment for a pesky skin condition?); or </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >(c) come up with a clear, honest response that protects my need for solitude without offending anyone.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >When I was younger, I almost always opted for (a), mostly because I had such lousy self-esteem that every time someone asked me to do something, I was stunned into acceptance: Me? You want <i style="">me </i>to come to your Tupperware party? Really? That sounds like <i style="">great </i>fun!</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >More recently, I’ve used (b) quite a bit. The obvious problem with (b), besides my general discomfort with any kind of dishonesty, is that it can lead to all kinds of complications and intrigue: I can’t be seen in the grocery store if I’m supposed to be at my sister’s for the day; I’ll have to remember my story, and anticipate that someone might ask me if the cat’s eczema is clearing up.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Obviously, (c) is the best choice, but it has taken me my whole introverted life even to begin to be able to express my need for down time without apologizing for it. It’s probably only the fact that, as I get older, I need more and more solitude that has made me brave enough to stand up for it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >So I’m developing a repertoire of appropriate responses, all of which seem to have three parts. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >First, they start with some variation of “That sounds like fun, but…” This is the part that I hope people understand to mean “I like you/you are a wonderful person/it means a lot that you thought to ask me.”</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Second, the excuse part. (I know, I know, if I had really good self-esteem and felt entirely comfortable in my introversion, I probably wouldn’t need this part, but I always feel as if people deserve to know that it’s really me, not them, that’s the reason I don’t want to attend the party/go out to dinner with a gang/join a knitting group.) This is usually something like, “I’ve had a busy, overwhelming week and haven’t had much time to myself.” (No matter how the week has gone, for an introvert, this is always absolutely true—we’ve <i style="">always</i> had a busy, overwhelming week, and we’ve <i style="">never</i> had enough time to ourselves.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >Finally, the part where I suggest what I might be doing instead: “I’m really looking forward to just sitting in the recliner with a book this weekend,” or “I’m planning to take the dog for a long walk after work,” or “I’ll have the house all to myself tomorrow and that’s an opportunity I can’t bear to pass up.” My hope is that this type of response helps to dispel any notion people may have that I’m not <i style="">really</i> an introvert, and I must just be waiting to be asked to join the <i style="">next</i> fun group activity.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >And by the way, yesterday, while I was out for a nice, long, solitary walk with the dog (having—politely, I hope— turned down an invitation for a group snowshoe hike), I came up with</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >The Top Ten Signs You May Be an Introvert</span></p> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="10" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if you think organizing your stamp collection is a reasonable excuse for not going out for drinks after work.</span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="9" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if you think Henry Brooks Adams was a genius for knowing that “One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.” </span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="8" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if you’ve ever heard someone use a line like “I’m just not one for crowds” and filed it away in your memory, thinking, <i style="">that’s </i>one I can use!</span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="7" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if the statement, “I never feel lonely, except in a crowd” makes perfect sense to you.</span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="6" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if you secretly (or not so secretly) hate weddings.</span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="5" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if you can’t believe your good fortune when you get home and find no messages on the answering machine. </span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="4" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if you’ve ever had to be bribed to attend a party. (When I was about seven, I refused to attend a friend’s birthday party until my mother told me a secret: <span style=""> </span>the prizes for those ridiculous games like musical chairs and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey were going to be…<i style="">live dime-store turtles! </i>Obviously, this was before the sale of baby turtles was banned due to concerns about salmonella.) </span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="3" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if, in high school, when couples were slipping into supply closets to neck, you were slipping into them <i style="">just to be alone for one goddamned minute!</i></span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="2" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >You may be an introvert if the part of a recent party you enjoyed most was the 30 minutes you spent reading the label on the Listerine bottle in the hostess’ bathroom.</span></li></ol> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="1" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:85%;" >And…the number one sign you may be an introvert: if you’ve ever left a gathering to get something from your car and instead found yourself driving home, leaving your purse, coat, and spouse behind.</span><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sxUJDGEH7bo/TYabYEnL-2I/AAAAAAAAANw/PtuPUqyt-Qw/s1600/Chicken%2Bintrovert.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 318px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sxUJDGEH7bo/TYabYEnL-2I/AAAAAAAAANw/PtuPUqyt-Qw/s320/Chicken%2Bintrovert.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5586323225656949602" border="0" /></a></span></li></ol>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-17454824454696880162011-02-06T14:17:00.009-05:002011-02-07T21:38:58.509-05:00The Last of the Best, or Why I'm Girlcotting Johnson & JohnsonPlease don't say you weren't warned. If you have no desire to read a post about feminine hygiene products (FHPs), stop right now, because that's what this is. Although I will try not to be especially graphic, if you're one of those (mostly male) people who gets queasy at even the thought of FHPs, who blushes when the person ahead of you in the grocery store plunks a box of tampons on the counter, I implore you to stop reading right now. If you insist on continuing, then I ask you, at the very least, to refrain from comments such as, "Ewww...I can't believe you wrote about this!"<br /><br />I've kept my mouth shut about what, to me, is a Very Big Issue for long enough, and it's time to add my voice to those of a few other bloggers to complain, because <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Johnson & Johnson has permanently discontinued production of their o.b. Ultra Tampons!</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">That's right, permanently. As in, never coming back.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Let me tell you about my loyalty to o.b. tampons. Unless I was desperate, I have not bought any other brand of tampons since sometime in the mid-1970s. (That's about 35 years of passionate brand loyalty to a product most of my friends have never even tried. Considering teenage susceptibility to peer pressure and advertising--I'm trying to think if I've ever even seen an ad for o.b.s--I think that's pretty remarkable.) I don't think I can say that about any brand of <span style="font-style: italic;">anything</span> else, except maybe cream of mushroom soup. (Never anything but Campbell's for me, although I still haven't completely forgiven them for that "improvement" some years back that made it less lumpy, more creamy...I didn't realize how much I enjoyed those little phlegm-like lumps until they were gone. But I digress.)<br /><br />There are several reasons for this intense loyalty, the top one, of course, being effectiveness. Since I promised not to get graphic here, all I will say is that, without o.b. Ultras, I never could have made it unscathed through the white-painter's-pants craze of the late '70s, or my year in culinary school (white chef's pants <span style="font-style: italic;">every </span>day). (If you want to read more about why o.b.s are simply the best, there's a good description of how they work in the third paragraph of <a href="http://consumerist.com/2010/12/where-did-all-the-ob-tampons-go.html">this article</a> on The Consumerist--written, incidentally, by a man.)<br /><br />Besides the relative security they gave me, I always liked the fact that there was no applicator to toss in the landfill--we children of the '70s were pretty cutting-edge when it came to being green. (And yes, I know there is a not inconsiderable segment of the female population who thinks an applicator-less tampon is "just gross." To them I say, "Get over it, you spleeny twits.")<br /><br />Then there was the convenience of their compact size--about the same as a Chapstick--which meant I could carry a whole day's supply in the pocket of my jeans (or white painter's pants, or chef pants).<br /><br />So I am incensed that Johnson & Johnson has chosen to reward my loyalty by discontinuing my favorite FHP, and that they don't even have the decency to offer a real explanation. (All they've said is that the temporary absence of all o.b.s in stores was due to a "supply interruption," and the permanent discontinuation of Ultras was "a business decision.")<br /><br />If I had had some advance notice that o.b. Ultras were going to be discontinued, I might well have bought up enough to last me until menopause, although, as my husband points out, I have no idea when that might finally occur. So what? I say--I could have bought, say, 50 boxes of the damn things, and if I didn't need them, I could have made a killing selling them on eBay, where, as of today, they're going for up to $50 for a box of 40, which used to cost about $8 when you could get them in stores. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">If you're not an o.b. user, all of this probably means less than nothing to you, and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">I read in a <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/19/us-johnsonjohnson-tampons-idUSTRE70I63P20110119">Reuters article</a> that o.b. sales account for only a "tiny portion" of the $830-million U.S. tampon market. But I also read, in the same article, that "</span><span id="articleText">o.b. rang up about $38.7 million in sales in the 52 weeks ended December 26, 2010, excluding sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc, club stores such as Costco Wholesale Corp, gas stations and convenience stores" (which, it occurs to me, is a list that seems to exclude most of the places I personally have ever bought them...).<br /><br />So I guess $38.7 million is chump change to Johnson & Johnson.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> But do they really want $38.7 million worth of business going elsewhere? </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Sheesh.<br /><br />Because that's where my business is going: elsewhere. As of December, when I first heard about the discontinuation of o.b. Ultra, I vowed not to buy <span style="font-style: italic;">any </span>Johnson & Johnson products. No Tylenol, Sudafed, Mylanta, or Benadryl. (Not a problem; I never buy brand-name OTC drugs anyway.) I don't anticipate needing to buy an e.p.t. pregnancy test anytime soon. If I ever get any grandkids, they'll live without J&J's baby oil, shampoo, lotion, and powder, at least when they visit Grandma.<br /><br />The toughest part will be going without BandAids. I really like their Flexible Fabric ones; they stay on really well. And I'll be really sad when I use up the last of my Hello Kitty BandAids. But I suppose I could try these <a href="http://www.mcphee.com/shop/products/Jesus-Bandages.html">Jesus bandages</a>, like the ones I got Donna for Christmas ("because what wound couldn't use a little divine intervention?") or maybe these <a href="http://www.mcphee.com/shop/products/Bacon-Bandages.html">bacon ones</a>. Curad makes Curious George and camo bandages. I think I'll be OK.<br /></span><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/TU9GI_HPSZI/AAAAAAAAANQ/wmUqooL4pLI/s1600/Jesus%2Bbandages.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/TU9GI_HPSZI/AAAAAAAAANQ/wmUqooL4pLI/s320/Jesus%2Bbandages.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5570748384275286418" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Even if you ignore the financial aspect, as the article points out, "</span><span id="articleText">O.b. users, many of whom have a cult-like loyalty to the product, said they were outraged when they could not find the brand in stores late last year." Actually, <span style="font-style: italic;">all</span> o.b. tampons were absent from store shelves for a few months; production has since been resumed on all absorbencies except Ultra, which the company says it won't be bringing back.<br /><br />The Ultra absorbency, in particular, was a favorite of women with heavy periods (translation: cranky, angry, desperate women, many of them, like me, in the throes of perimenopause--already sufficiently pissed off from dealing with years of pointless periods and wondering how much longer this sh&% is going to continue, anyway? without adding insult to injury by unceremoniously, without warning, yanking our favorite FHP from the shelves).<br /><br />Seriously, d</span><span style="font-size:100%;">oes Johnson & Johnson really want to contend with the wrath of a legion (OK, so maybe we're a small legion, but boy, can we make some noise) of vengeful consumers?<br /><br />I'm joining with others (well, a few others, anyway) to boycott--no, make that <span style="font-style: italic;">girl</span>cott--Johnson & Johnson, as long as they refuse to bring back the o.b. Ultra.<br /><br />In the meantime, earlier today, I was ecstatic (an emotion that <span style="font-style: italic;">should </span>be all out of proportion to the event) when I discovered, tucked in the very back of the cabinet under my bathroom sink, a forgotten, nearly empty box with <span style="font-style: italic;">two o.b. Ultras </span>left in the bottom! I actually did a little happy dance...but now I'm fretting about whether to use them, or enshrine them.<br /></span><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/TU9G1SoGVxI/AAAAAAAAANY/vHffBnOfOEY/s1600/ob%2B002.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/TU9G1SoGVxI/AAAAAAAAANY/vHffBnOfOEY/s320/ob%2B002.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5570749145427629842" border="0" /></a>P.S.: Please don't confuse Johnson & Johnson with S.C. Johnson, the Wisconsin company that makes things like floor wax, Glade, and Pledge--I'm told that, just like their ads say, SCJ really is "a five-generation family company." No reason to girlcott them!<br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-18916177664031898212010-11-25T11:21:00.005-05:002010-11-25T12:32:19.928-05:00It's not just about the pie<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/TO6NrwQ_DhI/AAAAAAAAANA/vgUeuWaJmUo/s1600/Christmas%2B1967.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 319px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/TO6NrwQ_DhI/AAAAAAAAANA/vgUeuWaJmUo/s400/Christmas%2B1967.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543523974169693714" border="0" /></a><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> 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mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--><br />Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! This will be a short post, since I still have rolls in the oven and squash to warm up before we head out to Steve and Peggy’s for dinner, but I woke up thinking—as I should every day, but seldom take the time—of everything I’m thankful for.<br /><p class="MsoNormal">I’m thankful for Tony and the kids, and for living here in western Maine, exactly where I’ve always wanted to live, and for the 45 years of friendship I’ve shared with Donna, and for all my other wonderful friends, and for a job I like and great coworkers, and for not being cold or hungry, and for a million other things, big and small.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">But today I’m thinking a lot about my birth family, which has expanded over the years from a tight little group of five kids and a widowed mom, figuring out together how to take on the world, to an extended and riotous gang of about four dozen, counting original siblings, kids, step-kids, grandkids, step-grandkids, and grand-dogs.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Even though we live far apart, have busy lives, and don’t get together very often, even though we’re without our original matriarch, even though two of the original five siblings won’t be with us today, whenever I think about the family I was lucky enough to be born into and grow up with, I always feel surrounded by their love, and I always feel blessed.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Now, bring on the pie!<br /></p>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-79835944411294342872010-05-06T07:10:00.007-04:002010-05-06T11:09:29.934-04:00Milk: A Moral Issue?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S-LMVcnDcNI/AAAAAAAAAMg/LFFvmm4RUVA/s1600/Milk.gif"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 305px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S-LMVcnDcNI/AAAAAAAAAMg/LFFvmm4RUVA/s320/Milk.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5468157566410518738" border="0" /></a>This post will not be about deplorable conditions in the dairy industry and why we should all go vegan (sorry, Annie), or about why it's probably not a good thing for the National Dairy Council to have launched a campaign to <a href="http://www.nationaldairycouncil.org/healthandwellness/Pages/HealthandWellnessHome.aspx">promote milk as an aid to maintaining a healthy weight</a> when the actual <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/11/us/11milk.html">data is inconclusive and may even point to the opposite effect</a>, or why we should <a href="http://www.breastfeeding.com/advocacy/advocacy_boycott.html">boycott the makers of baby formul</a>a who push economically disadvantaged mothers to choose formula over breastfeeding. (Those are all valid issues, and if you'd like, you can find out all you ever wanted to know about them from the website <a href="http://www.milksucks.com/">milksucks.com</a>.)<br /><br />No, instead, this post is about a burning question of ethics in my own household: whether or not it is morally acceptable, when selecting a gallon of milk from the dairy case, to dig behind the front row or two of jugs and pull out one from the back which has more time remaining before its "sell by" date.<br /><br />I have always considered myself to be a rather highly ethical person. I've been known to ask the supermarket checker, "Are you sure that rang in?" as she passes an item over the scanner. If I found a wallet, I would return it without thinking twice. I once bought a pair of shorts for $5 in a local second-hand store and discovered a $20 bill in the pocket, so I called the store and tracked down the previous owner of the shorts and gave it back to her. (She was really, really happy about it.)<br /><br />I believe in karma, and I believe in living your life in a way that allows you to sleep well at night, but I have never thought twice about choosing the gallon of milk with the "best date." When my kids were at home I often sent them to the store for milk, always adding, "Make sure it has a good date!" It never occurred to me that I might be leading them down the twisted path of immorality and corruption...until today.<br /><br />Usually, I'm the one who buys our milk at the grocery store, or stops to pick it up on my way home from work. Lately, however, I've been consuming less milk myself--I still use it on cereal, and I cook with it (and I have no intention of giving up ice cream or cheese, two foods without which my world would be a gray and dreary place), but, for whatever reason (probably partly from reading the information on sites like milksucks.com) the idea of drinking a big glass of milk no longer appeals to me, so I've switched to drinking water or iced tea and taking calcium supplements. Since Tony still drinks milk every day (even though [nag, nag, nag] I keep suggesting that he could have a mild [or moderate] intolerance to lactose, and it could be the cause of some of his chronic gastric distress, and I keep reminding him to take the Lactaid tablets I bought for him, just in case they help [they don't seem to]), he's often the one who notices when our milk supply is getting low, and a few times recently he's stopped at a small convenience store and picked up a gallon.<br /><br />This morning I noticed that the partial gallon of milk in the refrigerator is dated May 15th, while the unopened gallon he brought home yesterday is dated May 12th.<br /><br />"Did you notice that this gallon of milk you bought is only dated for May 12th?" I asked.<br /><br />(Today is May 6th, and we'll probably use the new gallon up before May 12th anyway, so, in retrospect, it was probably completely unnecessary for me to say anything about it at all, but the fact that I said it anyway is evidence of the fact that nearly 21 years of marriage have not taught me much.)<br /><br />"Yeah," he said. "I just took the one that was in front. I saw that it had about a week left, so I figured it didn't matter."<br /><br />Didn't matter? <span style="font-style: italic;">Didn't matter?</span> When the possibility exists that just behind this particular gallon of milk was another gallon that was several days fresher? Aughhh! To me, that's like bidding on a job and finding out that there's good news and bad news--you got the bid, but you bid twice as much as the next bidder. Well, OK, maybe it's not <span style="font-style: italic;">exactly</span> like that, but anyway....<br /><br />Well! It turns out that not only does Tony think it "doesn't matter," but he actually thinks there is something morally wrong in digging through the dairy case and helping oneself to the freshest milk! He wouldn't buy milk that was outdated, or only had a couple of days left before its last sale date, he explained, but if there's enough time left before the date to use it up, he "doesn't think it's right" to bypass it in favor of the fresher stuff in the back of the case.<br /><br />This is a revelation to me. And, of course, the dairy case is not the only area of the grocery store where I'm guilty of what Tony would call "high-grading" (which, in logging, is the practice of cutting only the best, most lucrative trees on a woodlot, regardless of which trees need to be harvested for the overall health of the forest)--I regularly sort through rows of those plastic boxes of baby spinach and unstack piles of peppers in the produce department, and pull loaves of bread off the shelf in the bread aisle to get to the fresher ones behind them. (Note: I <span style="font-style: italic;">always</span> put everything back neatly the way I found it, and I never move other fresher stuff to the front for other people to scoop up; I figure anyone who wants the freshest selection should be willing to do the work to get it.)<br /><br />Tony feels this is wrong, because "if you always take the freshest stuff, someone else always has to take the older stuff." I tried to argue with him, but now I'm actually starting to second-guess myself. Is it morally wrong for me to take the freshest milk (bread, peppers, spinach, or whatever) and leave the tired stuff for someone else? Is it unfair to those little old ladies in electric shopping carts who can't reach to the back of the dairy case, or to the top of the pepper pile? To harried grocery-shopping mothers who send their little kids to "grab a gallon of milk and meet me at the check-out"? To the illiterate, mathematically-challenged, and careless shoppers among us? I wonder about this.<br /><br />Anyone who has spent a lot of time in grocery stores knows it's a dog-eat-dog world. Haven't we all heard the phrase "come early for best selection"? One store brags that it has "the freshest meats;" another says it knows that, when it comes to freshness, its customers are "picky, picky, picky" and guarantees they'll be satisfied. If I figure out exactly when my store puts out the freshest produce and time my trip to coincide with that, am I doing anything wrong?<br /><br />And, of course, there have always been jokes and parodies about people who squeeze the fruits and vegetables to check it for quality and ripeness. Remember those old "please don't squeeze the Charmin" commercials? OK, they were ridiculous, but they were obviously based on the idea that grocery shoppers are in relentless pursuit of the best quality, right? My friend Maria's uncle once yelled at Paul Newman (yes, <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> Paul Newman) for squeezing a grapefruit in his market in Bridgeport, Connecticut. (He didn't recognize him, but another customer did, and tried to get Paul to autograph the grapefruit for her. I don't remember if he did it or not.) I personally don't squeeze produce because it falls outside of my moral comfort zone, but I will pick it over pretty carefully and reject anything that's been bruised by someone else's over-zealous handling.<br /><br />But Tony, who I suspect may have an over-developed sense of morality, was pretty serious about the fact that high-grading the dairy case is inconsistent with the Greater Common Good. (When I told him I didn't really think it was, he actually said, "Well, I may just be better than you." Grrr.)<br /><br />I'm actually kind of surprised by the vehemence with which he defended his position, since, when it comes to most of our food, he's something of a freshness fiend. If he grew corn, he'd be one of those people who has to make sure the water is already boiling before he picks it (not that there's anything wrong with that), and he's always asking me "how long things stay good in the freezer." (The answer to that question, I'm sure, falls somewhere between Tony's opinion--"nothing should be frozen for more than a few weeks or it starts to go downhill" and my mother's opinion [which I've largely adopted]--"nothing <span style="font-style: italic;">ever</span> goes bad once you've put it in the freezer! Freezer burn? What freezer burn? Why, I had a hot dog just the other night that was frozen in 1998, and it was just fine!")<br /><br />[Aside: just yesterday, I found a container in my freezer marked "4 cups apple juice for jelly, 11/6/99." (It was most likely liquid I drained off after making a huge pot of apple sauce with overly juicy apples.) I thawed it out, and it still smelled fine--like apples, not like freezer burn, but I dumped it down the drain, not because I don't think it would make perfectly lovely apple jelly, but because if I haven't been moved to make apple jelly any time in the past 10 1/2 years, it's not terribly likely that I will any time soon. My mother would certainly have used it, though, rather than "let it go to waste."]<br /><br />I may not worry much about how long foods will keep once they've been frozen (or canned--we just ate a jar of bread-and-butter pickles that was dated 2004, and they were just fine), but fresh foods are another story, and unless someone is able to convince me otherwise, I'll probably continue to dig around in the back of the dairy case for the freshest gallon of milk. It probably <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S-LZ5QfqTTI/AAAAAAAAAMo/tc8bfayYHfA/s1600/got-sour-milk.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 255px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S-LZ5QfqTTI/AAAAAAAAAMo/tc8bfayYHfA/s320/got-sour-milk.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5468172475284737330" border="0" /></a>won't keep me up at night as much as worrying about the milk souring in the refrigerator before we can use it up.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S-LaIDm3CTI/AAAAAAAAAMw/cJ3T0qV0zHA/s1600/sour-milk.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 280px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S-LaIDm3CTI/AAAAAAAAAMw/cJ3T0qV0zHA/s320/sour-milk.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5468172729523308850" border="0" /></a>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-48506467468932286262010-04-27T20:27:00.013-04:002010-04-27T22:59:52.528-04:00Goodbye to Auntie BetThis morning, my Auntie Bet passed away. She was almost 90. She had had a good, long life, and she was ready to go, as she had been telling her family for a while now.<br /><br />(The tough part is that, just because someone is ready to go, it doesn't mean you're ready for them to leave.)<br /><br />My mother and Betty Baxter met in Connecticut in the 1940s, when they were both young mothers. For many years they lived across the street from each other in Newington, and from the stories my mother told about those days, it always seemed to me as if the two families had raised their collective seven children--Betty and Elmer's three boys and my own parents' three boys and one girl (I didn't come along until later)--as one big brood. As fellow exiled Mainers, these suburban Connecticut parents encouraged (or at least did not discourage) their offspring in such rugged pursuits as camping, hiking, shooting arrows, firing rifles, and trapping muskrats. (Perhaps the kids spent so much time together because no one else in the neighborhood was allowed to play with them? Hmmm.)<br /><br />After my parents bought land on a lake in Maine and began building their camp, the Baxters visited them there in the summer.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S9eJxBQaFbI/AAAAAAAAAMI/l0KLlefGgO4/s1600/Wights%26Baxters.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 371px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S9eJxBQaFbI/AAAAAAAAAMI/l0KLlefGgO4/s400/Wights%26Baxters.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5464988148081235378" border="0" /></a>(1957...that's Greg, my mom, Steve, David, Leddy, and Betty in the back, with Andy and Ben in the front. I'm not sure where Leslie was...she was only seven, but I suppose she could have been behind the camera. Look at my mom and Betty in their skirts...I don't think I've <span style="font-style: italic;">ever</span> worn a skirt at camp, but I guess things were different in 1957.)<br /><br />I suppose it must have been terribly hard on all of them, perhaps most especially my mother and Betty, when my parents moved their family to<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S9eTd17VpgI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/blTqzjk8MAU/s1600/Picnic+table+2.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S9eTd17VpgI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/blTqzjk8MAU/s320/Picnic+table+2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5464998813738837506" border="0" /></a> New Jersey in the mid-50s, but the families stayed friends, visiting as often as they could.<br /><br />Betty's daughter-in-law, Nancy, recently emailed to tell us a story: before they left, my father and Elmer carried our family's picnic table across the street and put it in the Baxters' backyard where, remarkably, it has lasted through more than 50 years of family gatherings. (Steve says that's because of some "old school oil" our father put on it when he built it in 1952.) "At some point," Nancy wrote, "we would like for you to have it if any of you would like to have it back." Later, she reported that Betty "was delighted that the table will be with your family. Her words were something like, 'Good, that's where it belongs.' "<br /><br />After our father died suddenly while the family was living in New Jersey, and after I was born (eight months later), the family moved back to Connecticut. We lived about an hour away from the Baxters, but we went there often, especially on Sunday afternoons. Their house was a wonderful place to visit, because it held so many quirks and treasures--a third-floor attic where the boys slept; a system of buzzers so that Betty, in the kitchen, could communicate, using a special code, "Dinnertime!" or "Time to get up for school!"; a lush, terraced vegetable garden in the backyard, at the bottom of which was the scummiest, most brilliantly green frog pond; a dug-out doghouse cave in one of the garden's terraced hills where Ben's German shepherd, Phantom, slept to keep varmints away from Elmer's vegetables; a tiny dining room that quite comfortably contained--apparently by some trick of spatial geometry--an enormous table, an enormous sideboard, and an enormous upright piano; an upstairs room entirely devoted to Elmer's model trains; a big black-and-white tomcat named Tim; a kitchen drawer full of shoestrings and wooden beads, paper and colored pencils, and tin soldiers; and a startling number of clocks that dinged or bonged or cuckoo-ed every hour.<br /><br />I would spend the afternoon exploring the nooks and crannies and marvels of the Baxters' house and yard, while my mother and Betty, boring old ladies that they were, would be content to do nothing at all but <span style="font-style: italic;">talk.</span><br /><br />When I was six years old, I met Donna and discovered the wonderful concept of Best Friends. We spent all day together at school, and as soon as the bus dropped us off and we had checked in at home, we would get together at either her house or mine for the rest of the afternoon. If for some reason we weren't together, we were on the phone with each other. I remember asking my mom, who worked and cooked and cleaned and went to meetings but never seemed to spend much time with friends, if <span style="font-style: italic;">she </span>had a best friend.<br /><br />"Yes," she answered without hesitation. "Auntie Bet."<br /><br />"But you don't get to see her very much," I mused, thinking of all the time Donna and I spent together.<br /><br />"When you've been friends as long as we have, that doesn't matter," my mom said.<br /><br />In a letter she sent me a year or so after my mother died, Betty concurred: "I do miss your mother!" she wrote. "So often we shared thoughts without even speaking."<br /><br />Last December, after a surprise breakfast birthday party for our uncle in Bangor, Steve and Leslie and I continued on to Bar Harbor to visit Betty and Elmer in their retirement home. They treated us to lunch and we spent a bittersweet afternoon reminiscing, all of us knowing, I think, that it would be our last visit with Betty. I brought a tin of Christmas cookies, and she said, "These are all the kinds your mother used to make!"<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S9egWRaJ16I/AAAAAAAAAMY/AlmhsFekuBQ/s1600/Baxters+1.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S9egWRaJ16I/AAAAAAAAAMY/AlmhsFekuBQ/s320/Baxters+1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5465012977328052130" border="0" /></a>Betty was no-nonsense, outdoorsy, and strong. She was smart, creative, and well-educated--a college graduate (Colby, 1941) at a time when few women were. She was a historian, a writer--she wrote a history of Newington, a real, actual book you could hold in your hands!--and a formidable bridge, cribbage, and Scrabble player. She was a mom, and a surrogate mom--she had three sons but no daughters, so she liked to borrow Leslie and me now and then.<br /><br />She was our mom's very best friend for sixty years.<br /><br />Nancy wrote to us this morning, "Elmer was holding her hand and Joan said she actually heard her laughing and conversing with someone earlier this morning. If she was laughing with anyone, it would have been your mom."Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-27220098883057604362010-03-01T20:43:00.008-05:002010-03-16T22:12:09.614-04:0050,000 words in 30 days<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S6A6XvBsSJI/AAAAAAAAAMA/mdmLWMPD7y4/s1600-h/FrustratedNovelist.jpg"><br /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S6A5-SxknhI/AAAAAAAAAL4/ah3Vnnpu1hI/s1600-h/GirlWriting.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 216px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S6A5-SxknhI/AAAAAAAAAL4/ah3Vnnpu1hI/s320/GirlWriting.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449419291472731666" border="0" /></a><br />Over the past 30 days, I wrote a 50,000-word novel. I'm not saying it's a <span style="font-style: italic;">good</span> novel, or a <span style="font-style: italic;">finished</span> novel. I'm not even saying that it's the sort of novel that a year of rewriting, revising, and redeeming could whip into any sort of presentable shape.<br /><br />But the point is, it's a novel, it's 50,000 words, and I wrote it. In 30 days.<br /><br />Writing a novel in 30 days was not, of course, an idea that originated with me. There's a guy named Chris Baty out in California who came up with it. Back in 1999, he got together with 20 friends who had each decided, for no very sane reason, that they would like to write a novel in a month. Since then, <a href="http://www.nanowrimo.org/">National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo,</a> has spiraled out of control: in 2009, there were upwards of 200,000 participants, with about one in five actually completing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.<br /><br />February is <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> National Novel Writing Month. (It's too short, for one thing, which is why I had to borrow two days from January to get started.) The official National Novel Writing Month is November. I briefly considered signing up last fall and trying to write my novel then, but November is not a good month for me--too much pre-holiday stress, and then there's Thanksgiving to deal with at the end of the month. (Obviously, Chris Baty does not have the weighty responsibility of producing six kinds of pie to interfere with his November noveling.)<br /><br />February, on the other hand, was looking pretty good. If you're not a cold-weather person, February in Maine doesn't have a lot to recommend it, and I'm usually perfectly happy to seek indoor pursuits in the winter anyway. Will was headed back to school at the end of January after five weeks at home, meaning that I would be sharing the house with only one person who might become resentful if I gave up cooking, grocery shopping, and speaking in full sentences for a month. And I had a week of vacation smack in the middle of February, and no plans for it.<br /><br />So, with equal measures of excitement and trepidation, I decided to plunge in. By starting on January 30th and finishing on February 28th, I figured I would get ten weekend days, plus five vacation days, so I wouldn't be working at my real job on half of my allotted 30 days. That made the whole thing sound surprisingly doable. If I could just write 3,000 words a day on each of those 15 days, I'd barely have to write at all on work days. Piece of cake, right?<br /><br />It turns out that writing 3,000 words a day can be far easier than you'd think. On the other hand, writing 3,000 words a day can be far harder than you'd think. It all depends on the day. In the beginning, I actually thought I might "put words in the bank" by writing in the evening after working all day, or by writing more than 3,000 words on some days.<br /><br />I did write in the evenings, and I did write about 4,000 words on one of my early weekend days, which turned out to be a really good thing when I started to slow down toward the end of the month. (Or maybe the only reason I started to slow down toward the end of the month was that I had those extra words in the bank. Hmmm.) But one of the many things I discovered during my month of nearly non-stop noveling is that 3,000 words in a single day is just about my personal limit. After that, I start looking for excuses to take breaks. Wrote a page? Check Facebook. Wrote 100 words? Check my email for the tenth time in an hour. Wrote a paragraph? Make some hot cocoa. Wrote a sentence (or a fragment thereof)? Get a snack. You can see where this is going.<br /><br />However, I did write nearly half of my 50,000 words during the nine-day period that included my vacation and its two book-end weekends. Having that vacation occur during Week 3 of the process turned out to be nearly perfect timing, since by then the story was well enough developed to allow me to (occasionally) reach my peak rate of about 900 words an hour. Most of the time, though, I slogged along at a much slower pace, more like 400-500 words per hours.<br /><br />In the end, I estimate that I spent about 100 hours writing during that 30-day period, not including frequent breaks for stretching, snacking, and maintaining my sanity. One hundred hours to produce 50,000 words seems like a surprisingly tidy figure, but that's about how it worked out.<br /><br />Although I didn't watch much TV, do a lot of cooking, or clean the house much during February, I did manage to catch all I wanted to see of the Olympics. I made mostly passable meals on a fairly regular basis. (I even baked a couple of times.) The Board of Health did not declare my home a health hazard, and we usually had clean clothes for work. Perhaps most amazing, besides writing a novel during February, I also found time to read <span style="font-style: italic;">two</span> 500-page novels (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Cider House Rules </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Grapes of Wrath</span>) during the same period.<br /><br />What that tells me is that, in all of the other months, when I'm <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> writing a 50,000-word novel, I'm obviously somehow spending <span style="font-style: italic;">100 hours</span> of free time doing something else. One hundred hours is being frittered away each and every month! This is a revelation for someone like me, who constantly feels pressured, runs perpetually behind schedule, and frequently bemoans the lack of sufficient time to clean the house, read a magazine, connect with friends, and, of course, read and write as much as I would like.<br /><br />I'm going to have to do some serious thinking about how to harness the wealth of free time I've obviously had all along, and put it to Really Good Use...right after I check Facebook, and email, and maybe fix a snack.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S6A6XvBsSJI/AAAAAAAAAMA/mdmLWMPD7y4/s1600-h/FrustratedNovelist.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S6A6XvBsSJI/AAAAAAAAAMA/mdmLWMPD7y4/s320/FrustratedNovelist.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449419728553265298" border="0" /></a>Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-37408763628388814862010-01-28T21:39:00.003-05:002010-01-28T21:44:40.761-05:00"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing." --J.D. SalingerI'm posting this here, even though it feels a little like cheating, because I'm tired and I have a cold, but I wanted to say something here about the passing of J.D. Salinger, and I remembered this piece I wrote a couple of years ago:<br /><br />“Here is the Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, January first, 2008,” Garrison Keillor says, and he goes on to tell me that it was on this day in 1892 that the Ellis Island Immigrant Station officially opened, and a 15-year-old Irish girl named Annie Moore became the first of more than twelve million immigrants to pass through it. He reminds me that on this day in 1953, country music legend Hank Williams, Sr. died in the backseat of his baby-blue Cadillac, on his way to a concert in Canton, Ohio. And today is the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, in which, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared freedom for all slaves in the southern states.<br /> <br />“It’s the birthday of writer E.M. Forster, born in London, 1879,” Garrison says, and I remember that I mean to read A Passage to India sometime soon. It is also the birthday of J.D. Salinger, born in New York City in 1919. Novelist J.D. Salinger, Garrison calls him, although The Catcher in the Rye is the only novel Salinger has ever published. His three other published books are collections of short stories or novellas, and he has published nothing at all for more than forty years, although, as Garrison says, “his friends and neighbors claim that he still continues to write.”<br /><br />In fact, Salinger is probably famous as much for his reclusive lifestyle as for his published works. He last granted an interview nearly thirty years ago, and is said to rarely leave his New Hampshire home. But The Catcher in the Rye, more than half a century after its publication, continues to sell a quarter of a million copies a year. “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” he told The New York Times in 1974. “I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”<br /><br />Here is how I imagine my life as a writer: On weekdays, Tony will leave the house for work by 8:00 a.m. and the house will be mine. I will look around at my empty house and throw my arms in the air and say, “Whoo-hoo!” because I am a writer, and I know that my muse, and nobody else, is here waiting for me. I will feed the cats. I will finish reading the paper at the kitchen table, and then I will go into my writing room and tune the radio to NPR. I will half-listen to the news while checking my email, dashing off a quick reply to my brother’s short message, but saving my best friend’s longer one to savor later, during a break. I will read my favorite on-line advice column, look up the author of the book I’m reading and scan his bio (he wasn’t published until he was well into his fifties, which I find encouraging), then check out a couple of possible markets for the magazine articles and essays I’ve been working on.<br /><br />Garrison Keillor will come on the radio for the “The Writer’s Almanac,” and I will know it’s 9:00, almost time to get down to business. He’ll run through some highlights of the day in history, briefly profile a writer or two, or some other famous or not-so-famous personage who was born on this day, read a poem, and conclude with his signature, “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”<br /> <br />In my imagined life, my parallel universe, I will close my eyes as Garrison begins to read the poem—one that I probably wouldn’t even enjoy if I read it myself, but that, in his wheezy, Midwestern accented, everyman’s voice, is transformed into something poignant and unique and, somehow, beautiful beyond its ordinary words. I concentrate on the words, the images the poem calls forth, and allow myself to slip into my writer’s skin.<br /><br />“The Writer’s Almanac” will be followed by three hours of classical music, the perfect, unobtrusive background for a morning of productive writing. And I will write! My fingers will fly over the keyboard; words will pour forth—good words, magical words. I will finish an essay, revise an article, begin a poem. I may work on my novel. By noon I will already have done a good day’s work, but I’ll be caught up in the writing, unwilling to leave it for long. So I’ll take a break, go for a walk, fix some lunch—but none of this will break my stride. In early afternoon I’ll be right back at it, the magic unbroken. The mail will bring a check from a major magazine, an acceptance from another, and, perhaps, a rejection or two, but nothing very unexpected, nothing paralyzing, nothing heartbreaking.<br /><br />That is how I imagine my life.<br /><br />This is something more like reality:<br /><br />If it’s a day when I don’t have to go to work, I see the whole long day stretching ahead of me, and I think I’ve got plenty of time to do just a few things before I sit down to write. When I finally get to my computer, the classical music has already started and I haven’t even checked my email. I think maybe I won’t check it just yet, that I’ll resist the urge to go on line at all, that I’ll just open a blank document in Microsoft Word and start to write. I’ve only lost a few minutes of time so far; there’s still plenty of time to get that idea pinned down.<br /><br />An hour later, I’m still staring at a blank screen. I’ve typed a sentence or two, revised it, deleted it, rewritten it, deleted it again. I know I should stop worrying about that first sentence, that requisite “attention-grabbing lead,” and just start writing. By the time I fall into the flow of the piece, that perfect first sentence will write itself, and I’ll go back and replace those uninspiring opening lines.<br /> <br />But that idea that seemed to hover at the edge of my peripheral vision all night apparently flew off with my dreams in the hard-edged morning light. I get up from the computer to stretch and remember the laundry in the washer, so I make the trek to the basement, put it in the dryer, start another load. I get a glass of water and sit back down. I’m hungry and realize that I forgot to eat breakfast, so even though it’s getting close to lunchtime, I go back out to the kitchen and make some toast. A light snow has started falling, and back in my writing room I think about coffee and wish I were a coffee-drinker. I think it would feel cozy to sit at the computer while snow falls outside my window, cradling my favorite mug in both hands and thinking about what to write. I picture a gray-haired children’s author with her “World’s Best Grandma” mug, or a haggard poet, bent over his keyboard, eyes ringed with dark smudges, hands shaking from the caffeine surging through his veins. I wonder if I can really be a writer if I don’t even drink coffee.<br /><br />If, as Salinger says, “there is a marvelous peace in not publishing,” I suppose I should feel very much at peace. So why am I growing more agitated, like the insomniac who lies rigidly on his back, repeating to himself, “I’ve got to get some sleep”? I’d like, at least, an opportunity to know the difference between how it feels to publish and how it feels to not publish. I’d like to be able to make that choice for myself.<br /> <br />But the rest of Salinger’s quote, “I write just for myself and my own pleasure,” makes sense to me. Perhaps I’ve been going about this all wrong, trying to figure out what might sell and then write it, going around in circles, trying to come up with an idea that might capture some editor’s interest.<br /> <br />I return to my blank screen. I set a timer, place my hands lightly on the keyboard, and free-write for five minutes. I pull out a book of writing prompts and open it at random. My instructions are to think about the phrase, “What matters to me today…”—but not to think for too long—and to simply begin writing.<br /><br />By noon I’m actually writing, and by mid-afternoon, I’ve made some headway on a new essay. It’s not the Great Idea that teased me all night, but it’s a start, a few hundred words that I can point to with some measure of satisfaction. It’s a start. It may turn into something.Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4910204580192279369.post-32314330122440106992010-01-03T09:31:00.016-05:002010-01-03T14:43:45.880-05:00Update: Why I Love My KitchenAid (But You May Not Love Yours)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S0DxwDRra9I/AAAAAAAAALw/vmUWL0Avzh0/s1600-h/KitchenAid.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 258px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S0DxwDRra9I/AAAAAAAAALw/vmUWL0Avzh0/s320/KitchenAid.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5422599759169547218" border="0" /></a>
<br />Yesterday I wrote about making bread with my KitchenAid stand mixer, and I mentioned that my mixer, which is 23 years old, is still going strong after mixing an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 loaves of bread, not to mention plenty of cakes and cheesecakes, as well as innumerable batches of cookies (I made over 1,800 cookies for Christmas this year; suffice it to say that I bake a lot).
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<br />However, after receiving a comment from JWD (someone I don't even know, who apparently stumbled across my post only hours after I wrote it, while doing research on--imagine!--the merits of making bread with a bread machine vs. a KitchenAid stand mixer [I have to admit that I get excited all out of proportion to the event whenever someone I don't know finds my blog and leaves a comment, as if it might be the first step on the road to the kind of wild success enjoyed by <span style="font-style: italic;">Julie & Julia</span> author Julie Powell...]), who found my post helpful in her process of deciding which appliance to buy, I felt that perhaps I should post again, this time on the topic of <span style="font-style: italic;">Why I Love My KitchenAid (But You May Not Love Yours)</span>.
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<br />As I mentioned yesterday, my KitchenAid stand mixer was a Christmas gift in 1986. (It was one of the two best inanimate gifts I ever received from my first husband [from whom I also got two wonderful children]. The other was a portable Kenmore sewing machine he gave me for Christmas in 1977, back when they were still made with almost exclusively metal parts. [It was the first year we were dating. I was 18, and my mother seemed concerned when I got it, thinking it was an inappropriately intimate gift.] If it weren't for the time a few years ago when I started to sew while Remy was sleeping under the table, startling him awake and causing him to leap up in a panic, becoming entangled in the electric cord, and yanking the machine off the table so it crashed to the floor, I'd still be using it today. The two newer used machines with which I've attempted to replace it have both been rather fragile and plasticky.)
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<br />My KitchenAid is the model that I think is now called the "Classic," with a 4.5-quart metal bowl and a 250-watt motor. It's a workhorse, but I can only mix two, or possibly three, loaves of bread at a time in it, so in 2005, when I decided to open a bakery, I knew I'd need something bigger. Much bigger.
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<br />I had been lusting after a used 12- to 20-quart Hobart dough mixer, but they were prohibitively expensive for my shoestring operation. Before I found <a href="http://harrietthespysblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/its-on-bread-machine-vs-kitchenaid.html">the used 12-quart Univex pictured in yesterday's post</a>, I bought a brand-new KitchenAid Professional 600, a totally cool-looking machine with a six-quart bowl, a 575-watt motor, and the bowl-lift (rather than the tilting-head) mechanism.
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<br />Here's how the KitchenAid website describes the Professional 600: "The overachiever of the stand mixer family, it has a Flour Power Rating of 14 cups. That means it can mix enough dough for 8 loaves of bread or 13 dozen cookies in a single bowl."
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<br />Excuse me, but this is bullshit. For one thing, 14 cups of flour makes about five loaves of bread. Maybe even six, if they're not too big. But eight loaves? No way.
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<br />However, I was still pretty happy with my Professional 600, because it easily mixed up big batches of cookie dough and cake batter, and four- or five-loaf batches of bread. And I had this really cool antique dough bucket that I used to mix most of my bread dough anyway.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S0DfORfndLI/AAAAAAAAALo/pTDpr8VxLIc/s1600-h/Berthas+mixer.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 309px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Icn1f9Z46uI/S0DfORfndLI/AAAAAAAAALo/pTDpr8VxLIc/s320/Berthas+mixer.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5422579387661251762" border="0" /></a>(I got it from our former neighbor, Aunt Bertha, when she was cleaning out her house, prior to moving out so the state could bulldoze it and reroute the road. I liked using it because it was such a simple, non-electric thing [such as one might find in the awesome <a href="http://www.lehmans.com/">Lehman's catalog</a>--except that I just checked, and they don't have one], and because it made me think of Aunt Bertha, and because I developed some pretty impressive biceps muscles during those first few months in the bakery, turning the crank that turned the paddle that mixed the dough. <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CAmy%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CAmy%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" 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Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --</style>[These are the directions on the lid of the bucket: <span style="font-style: italic;">Put in all liquids first, then flour. Turn 3 minutes. Raise in pail. After raising, turn until dough forms a ball. Take off cross-piece. Lift out dough with kneader. </span>It doesn't get much simpler.])
<br />
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">But</span>...only a month or two after I started using my Professional 600, as I was mixing a batch of dough of a perfectly reasonable size, it started making a funny noise and smelling very hot, and then it just quit. I called the KitchenAid people and they told me it was probably "just overheating" and I should leave it alone until it cooled and try again, but that didn't fix the problem. Every time I turned it on, it would run for a minute or two, smell funny, make a noise, and shut down.
<br />
<br />I consulted my owner's manual for information on their "Hassle-Free Replacement Warranty"--after all, it was practically new. That's when I read this: <span style="font-style: italic;">KitchenAid Will Not Pay For: A) Repairs when Stand Mixer is used in other than normal single family home use.
<br />
<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span></span></span></span>Excuse me?!<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>This mixer--this<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Professional 600 model</span>--is covered under the warranty <span style="font-weight: bold;">only if I don't use it professionally??</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>If that's the case, shouldn't it be called the "Home-baker 600," or the "Big-family 600" instead?<span style="font-style: italic;">
<br /></span>
<br />Having spent $350 for the darned thing only a couple of months previously, I was pretty unhappy. I was unhappy enough to decide to adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy with regard to my conversation with the KitchenAid warranty people. I think all I told them was that I had four kids and I made a lot of bread...which was true. They didn't ask if I had just opened a bakery in the front room of my house, and I didn't mention it, either.
<br />
<br />They sent me a new mixer. And I loved it. I loved it for more than a year, which is to say, until after the warranty expired. (Not that I would have dared to try to get away with the "don't ask, don't tell" thing again, anyway. Probably.) And then it quit. After learning that it would cost me a bundle just to ship it to a repair center and have the problem diagnosed, to say nothing of what it might cost to fix it, I stowed it on a corner of the porch, where it rests to this day. Sigh.
<br />
<br />I moved my old reliable Classic into the bakery and used it when I needed to make small batches of bread, cookies, and cakes. The Univex took care of everything else.
<br />
<br />I thought probably I had just had an isolated case of bad luck with my two Professional 600 models, and, given my wonderful experience with the Classic, I was still prepared to defend KitchenAid's quality. Until, that is, in the process of writing yesterday's post, I spent entirely too much time doing on-line research about KitchenAid mixers, and what I found was pretty interesting.
<br />
<br />It turns out that KitchenAid used to be a brand of the Hobart Corporation. Hobart invented the electric mixer 100 years ago, and their mixers are still the gold standard for the foodservice industry. (They make floor models with bowls of up to 140-quart capacity. It boggles the mind.)
<br />
<br />However, Hobart sold the brand to Whirlpool Corporation <span style="font-style: italic;">in 1986. </span>Remember that I said my KitchenAid Classic was a Christmas gift in 1986? It was apparently one of the last KitchenAids manufactured by Hobart, and I think that probably explains why I've been so happy with it.
<br />
<br />I found several sites where people could rate and review their KitchenAid mixers, and, while the reviews were generally positive, each site had a smattering (maybe 10%) of very negative reviews. Since, in my experience, the majority of people who have fancy kitchens and high-end appliances don't actually use them all that much, I'm guessing that the negative reviews are probably coming from frequent bakers like me (who are the only ones really putting their mixers to the test).
<br />
<br />One Amazon reviewer wrote: "No, KitchenAid is not top-of-the-line anymore. They aren't as high quality as they used to be, they are noiser than earlier models, and have only a third the life expectancy of the old ones." Ouch.
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<br />So, be warned: if you buy a KitchenAid mixer today, you won't be getting the same machine I got for Christmas 23 years ago.
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<br />That leaves me to worry about what I'll do when my 1986 model finally does bite the dust. I guess I should be keeping an eye on eBay to see if anyone is selling a gently-used, quarter-century-old KitchenAid Classic. (Or a late-70s-vintage Kenmore zigzag sewing machine with all metal parts.)
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<br />Harriet the Spyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09775786781485182881noreply@blogger.com7