Now I Understand

When I was a kid my mom always made pigs in the blanket for New Years dinner.  Now I'm not talking about those little sausages wrapped up in Pillsbury dinner rolls.  I'm talking about cabbage rolls made from cabbage leaves and stuffed with meaty goodness.  Mom was still doing that when I moved out of state in my thirties.  As she grew older though, Mom started cutting back.  Pretty soon she was no longer making pigs in the blanket, sour cream cake and cottage cheese rolls for New Years.  Then she started using frozen pies instead of her signature chocolate, apple and lemon meringue.  In the last years of her life she was pretty much down to frozen entrees, pizza and KFC. 

Although my wife is a great cook, I notice that she is no longer real eager to attempt things, like pigs in the blanket, that take awhile to make from scratch.  This year I got really hungry for those cabbage rolls so I decided to make them myself.  It took some effort.  First you have to boil or steam a head of cabbage in order to get the leaves to peel off in one piece.  Even then it was quite a job to get them off intact and I hadn't looked real close when I bought this ginormous head of cabbage so I missed the fact that the first six or eight leaves had holes in them because the harvester or the supermarket produce guy had made a big slice in the head.  That made it even trickier to get the leaves off in decent shape.  While the leaves are steaming you have to get the filling ready.  That means making some rice (easy) and letting it cool.  While that's going on you also have to dice up some onion and bacon and saute them until the bacon is crisp.  Then you mix ground beef and pork together (Mom's recipe calls for meatloaf mix, which you could get at the local supermarket when I was a kid, but they don't have that where I live), add the rice, onions and bacon (drained) and squish all that together with a bit of salt and pepper.  After that you put some of the mixture in each cabbage leaf (which you have already painstakingly peeled off the head of cabbage, trimmed out the tough central rib and cut into pieces that are more or less square, or at least rectangular) and then roll them like little burritos before laying them on top of a bed of sauerkraut that you have previously prepared in a baking dish.  Usually you have to hold them closed with toothpicks.  At least I had to.  I think Mom did that too, but I'm not sure.  If you are really skilled at all this, like Mom was and my wife is, you get nice uniform little rolls that sort of look like egg rolls or dolmas on steroids.  If you are unskilled, like me, you get something like this:

Not real uniform, but sort of folk artish. In any case all that's left to do is to cover the baking dish with tinfoil and bake those little piggies in the oven for two hours at 350 degrees.  Oh, I forgot: you have to preheat the oven before shoving them in there.  Oh, and also, you have to wash out the hundred and forty-seven bowls, knives, spatulas, frying pans and other implements you have used to make them if, like me, you didn't realize that your wife has a dutch oven that could have been used to do the sauteing on top of the stove and baking inside the oven as well.

This was a three-beer-recovery project.  While I was sucking down my second Guinness in front of the Texas-California game in the recovery room my head began to clear and I realized why Mom, and my wife, stopped making pigs in the blanket and why Mom stopped doing the baking as well.  It is a heck of a lot of work to make that stuff from scratch.   I don't know how the hell Mom and my wife got through all that every December because neither of them ever was a drinker.

By the third beer I started thinking about some of the other things that my parents and/or parents-in-law did that used to make my wife and me shake our heads but we find ourselves doing now.  For instance, my mother-in-law and father-in-law used to carry paper towels in their pockets and use them to open and close doors.  They would NOT touch a single doorknob.  Weird, right?  I used to think that; but now my wife and I always carry a bottle of generic Germ-Ex in our pockets and practically wear out the outer layer of skin on our hands un-germifying them whenever we touch doorknobs or menus, pump gas at the local Quickie-Pickie or do anything else that requires our sensitive epidermis to come into contact with anything but air.  Sometimes we use it just because we've walked through an area that makes our skin crawl, even if we haven't touched anything.  I don't even want to tell you what we do when we are faced with eating finger foods while reading a library book. 

And a corollary to the paper towel/Germ-Ex business is the silverware on the table thing.  My inlaws would never put their silverware (or plasticware or whateverware) on the table at a restaurant.  They would unwrap it from the napkin and then hold it up with the butt ends about a quarter of an inch from the table until their plate came and they could put the silverware there.  This used to annoy my wife so much that one time when we were out with her parents and her mother did the silverware totem pole thing, my wife took the utensils out of her mom's hands and rubbed them all over the table.  As soon as the food arrived her mother asked for a new set of silverware.  Of course, here we are twenty-five years later and do we let our silverware touch the table in a restaurant?  Nooooo!

The silverware quirk wasn't the only food-related idiosyncrasy our parents had.  My mom washed eggs before she cracked them.  And my mother-in-law always threw away the ends of a banana.  When my wife and I were young we were never worried about germs on eggs or anything else for that matter.  Nor did we worry about something wicked hiding in the end of a banana.  Of course now we get it.  I did mention the Germ-Ex thing didn't I?

Then there was the window blind routine.  My mom had this habit of closing the blinds as soon as the sun started to sink.  In fact, in later life it seemed as though she started closing them by mid-afternoon.  My wife and I used to get a laugh at that.  Until recently anyway.  Now I find myself closing the blinds as soon as the sun starts to get a peek at the western horizon.  Hey, I don't want to be on display.  Not that anyone would want to see in the house, but I'm just sayin'.

As we age my wife and I find ourselves doing more and more of the things that made us shake our heads when our parents did them.  I guess it's just part of aging.  Or maybe just plain common sense.  I know my Mom would agree with that.

Whatever Happened to ...

My wife and her 90+ father and I were reminiscing about Christmases past the other day when someone mentioned tinsel.  When I was a kid we strung this tinsel on the Christmas tree that looked sort of like it was made out of lead.  Even though it must have been pretty inexpensive we laboriously separated each strand and hung them individually on the tree and then, when the holiday was over, we carefully placed each piece of tinsel back on the card it had been stored on and slipped it into the box so we could reuse it next year.  We started wondering whatever happened to that magical stuff and that led us to wonder about other things from the not so distant past.  For example, another thing we used to do at Christmastime was to dye GlassWax with food coloring and use stencils, that I think came with the GlassWax, to decorate the windows with wreaths, candles and other Christmasy things.  When was the last time you saw that?

One of my favorite Christmas presents was a genuine Hopalong Cassidy cap gun set with two six-shooters, two matching black holsters and a black gun belt with cartridge loops.  I had great fun shooting those cap guns and making the whole house reek of gunsmoke.  The kids in my neighborhood used to love playing cowboys and indians (guess that's not PC these days, but cowboys and native Americans just doesn't have the same ring to it) or cops and robbers with cap guns.  We'd play that for hours, but it just wasn't the same if you ran out of caps.  Another thing you could do with caps was to put a couple in this thing that was shaped sort of like a hammer.  When you pounded it on the sidewalk the caps exploded and shot a thing that looked sort of like a badminton birdie up into the air and, usually, onto the porch roof.  That was fun, especially when you got to crawl out of the bedroom window to retrieve the feathered missile from the roof.  What happened to those rolls off caps?  I guess they don't make them anymore because I can't remember the last time I saw a roll.  And whatever happened to those sort of bull roarer things that had a crepe paper streamer and you could swing it through the air and whirl it around until you were dizzy?  I guess it was the girls who liked those things, but I can't remember the last time I've seen one of those either.  Another toy I liked was slot cars.  When I was in my late teens and early twenties they were as popular with young adults as they were with kids.  You could sink a lot of money into a slot car, which you would then take down to the local hobby store where they had a slot car track set up so you could race them against the cars of other nerds.  They were a lot of fun.  I guess maybe video games have taken their place these days.  They're pretty realistic, but just not the same. You can't smell the rubber and oil like you could with the slot cars and you can't get creative and find ways to make them go faster and hang tighter on the turns.  Oh well, at least Slinkies are still around.  Of course, now they are multi-colored and I think the springs are plastic or something; but at least they aren't extinct yet.

Between the smoke from cap guns and soot from coal-fired furnaces the wallpaper in our house used to get pretty dirty.  So every spring the whole family would be enlisted to clean it with wallpaper cleaner.  That's something I haven't seen in years either.  It was kind of like Play-Doh.  It was usually either pink or green when you started using it.  By the time you finished kneading it and wiping down the wallpaper it was a dirty gray, like the last slushy snow of spring before the sun wins out over Old Man Winter and makes it hibernate for another year.  People still have wallpaper but I guess the fuel we use to heat our houses these days is so clean that there's no need to clean the walls.  Or maybe folks just paint over them when they get dirty.  So bye-bye wallpaper cleaner.

When you wanted to clean yourself after a hard day of scrubbing wallpaper there was always soap-on-a-rope.  Of course you only needed that if you had a shower instead of a bathtub.  Because when I was a kid, at least in my neighborhood, if you had a shower it was something you rigged up yourself in the basement.  Soap-on-a-rope was a bar of soap that had a piece of string or rope through it so that it would hang over the shower head.  That way you didn't have to worry about dropping a slippery bar of soap and then trying to retrieve it from the shower floor.  I guess maybe shower gel has replaced it these days.  In any case, I haven't seen soap-on-a-rope in ages, although I did Google it before I wrote this post and discovered that it's still being made.

A couple of  handy items we used to have were a kitchen matchbox holder and a sink strainer.  Every house had a matchbox holder on the kitchen wall to hold a box of those big wooden safety matches.  You needed them to light the burners on the gas stove after the pilot light crapped out.   Sink strainers are those triangular-shaped, perforated pans that you sat in the corner of the sink.  You put your table scraps in them so that the liquid would drain out before you put the garbage in the trash can.  I haven't seen either one of those items outside of an antique store in so long that I thought they had gone the way of the dodo.  It only took a quick Internet search, though, to reveal that they are still around, though hard to find.

For those who were too busy to bake their own bread or milk their own cow, and couldn't get out to the local A&P to pick up milk and bread, there was home delivery.  The milkman stopped by every other day and dropped your milk off in a specially-designed, divided wooden box on your front porch.  Bet you haven't seen one of those in use in a long time.  The bread man didn't leave his stuff on the porch.  He brought fresh bread and baked goodies right to your door.  But not anymore.  Home delivery of bread and milk is one of those things you only see on old reruns of Mayberry RFD these days.

After dinner you could take some of those baked goodies into the living room and nibble on them while you watched the black and white TV.  In our town there were only three stations and the broadcasts came from different cities that were in different directions from the house.  That meant that the antenna, which was mounted on an aluminum tower on the side of the house (another relic of days gone by) would only pick up a strong signal from one or two stations.  If you wanted a strong signal from the other station, you had to climb up the tower to turn the antenna, or you could buy an Alliance Tenna-Rotor, which let you use a box inside the house to turn the antenna with a little motor at the top of the tower.  State of the art for 1950, but long gone now.

Well, enough whining for now.  Still, I can't help wondering whatever happened to drive-in movies, Topo Gigio, Black Cow candy, fuse boxes, party lines ...

Random Acts of Decoration

This post started out to be a a whiny, “Bah, humbug, Christmas isn't any fun anymore” thing.  I was feeling kind of down thinking about how great it was on Christmases past when our whole family got together for dinner on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and how that has changed as the grandkids got older, jobs took kids out of town and my wife and I often end up kicking around by ourselves on holidays.

So I was all grumbly a few days ago when we took a shortcut down an almost two-lane back road and ran across this little cedar tree that someone had taken the time to dress up for Christmas.  It isn't in anyone's yard or on someone's rural property.  It's just there by the side of the road where it has been struggling to survive the record-breaking drought we've had this year.  It happens like this every Christmas in our neck of the woods.  The Christmas elves sneak out under the cover of darkness and commit random acts of decoration for no other reason than to cheer up holiday grumps like me.

 After we saw the cheery little cedar we started taking note of the Christmas decorations that have been springing up all over our area since Thanksgiving. This old farm truck is sort of an institution on that same back road.  Most of the year  we hardly notice it sitting there and rusting away but I just couldn't keep my grump on when I saw it all dressed up in its holiday finery.

This water tower where Santa has stopped to let his reindeer have a drink before heading out for the big Christmas Eve trip is in front of a storage facility down the road from our house.  Every holiday and change of season brings a new tableau.  I have to admit that my favorite was the one this summer that featured a cowboy taking a dip in the water tower, but I like the Christmas scene too.

Of course all the local stores, hotels and other businesses are getting into the holiday spirit this time of year.  Our grandson performed with his highschool jazz band at a historic hotel in Austin earlier this month.  The main lobby was decorated in Victorian holiday style with a huge Christmas tree and lots of twinkling lights.

Another downtown hotel had a display of gingerbread houses depicting iconic Texas structures.  The houses will be sold to the highest bidder to generate some money that will be used to brighten the holidays for folks who are down on their luck.  Gingerbread houses are everywhere this season.  One of the local libraries had a holiday gingerbread house contest with entries from kids of all ages.

So, even though Central Texas doesn't really have a good environment for growing traditional Christmas trees, we manage to find things to decorate for the holidays.  This huge live oak in a small town a couple of miles from here is one of my favorites.





After seeing all the holiday decorations, whether random or formal, there's just no way to avoid the spirit of the season.  I know I'm enjoying it.  So, no matter what holiday you celebrate this season, I hope you have a happy one; and if you get a chance to engage in a random act of decoration, why, that will just pass the spirit along and put a smile on the face of even a grump like me.

What a drag

The Stones were right.  It is a drag getting old.  You don't sleep as well as you did when you were younger and it seems as though some part of you is always hurting, even when you try to eat right and get regular exercise.  Activities that might have caused temporary discomfort when you were younger now result in permanent aches and pains that drive you to the doctor who sends you out for a whole serious of expensive, torturous and humiliating tests and then tells you that nothing showed up and you're just going to have to live with your problem.  Then  you get to do battle with Medicare and your insurance company to try to get them to pay their share of the mortgage on your doctor's vacation home.  You start to plan your travel routes more carefully to ensure that you're never too far from a clean restroom or out of cell phone range.  You find that a lot of your friends don't want to do anything anymore except sit around and talk about their own aches and pains and hospital visits and who died recently and who is probably going to kick off soon. 

Yeah, old age can be a drag, but the way I see it, it is a hell of a lot better than the alternative.  Sure, you could let yourself get depressed when you realize, like I did recently, that you've probably already lived four-fifths of your life and you're never going to be healthier than you are today.  On the other hand, you could just let that drive you to the realization that, if you don't have a whole lot of time left, you'd better make the most of what you do have.

I see a lot of older people that appear to me to fall into the extremes of the spectrum.  Some seem to be old before their time.  Those folks tend to stay home a lot and they're the ones who want to sit around and talk about all their troubles, complain about Social Security and Medicare and depress you with a long, detailed list of all their ailments and the particulars of every visit they've made to doctors, labs, hospitals and physical therapy facilities.  Others seem to want to pack as many things into their remaining time as they can.  I think of them as bucket-listers.  They volunteer for any outfit that will accept them, travel constantly and try to experience as many things as they can.  It seems to me as though a lot of them get enjoyment out of the individual things they do, but they always seem pretty harried as they try to cram more activities into their lives than there is time to really appreciate them.

My wife and I have taken kind of a moderate approach.  We've decided that we're not going to let aches, pains and chronic problems keep us from doing the things we enjoy, but we do allow ourselves some time to relax and savor the memories of things we do.  So, if we have planned a day trip and one of us has an attack of IBS or we have overdone some physical activity and have an annoying pain to deal with, we suck it up and make the trip anyway.  That might mean we have to opt for the grilled chicken breast sandwich instead of the ancho chile tequila lime shrimp fajitas and micro brewery sampler or maybe just take a picture of the 375 steps to the top of a historic monument instead of making the climb, but at least we made the trip, experienced the flavor of the site and have some neat photos to look over the next week when we are home taking it easy.  It also gives us some good memories to focus on the next time we are trying to keep a hospital gown closed while some nurse or technician installs a port or inserts a probe into an embarrassing place.  So there's that advantage.

A lot of the older folks I've met lately appear to focus on the negative things that might happen if they get out of the house and away from their familiar haunts and do something new.  I guess it's just too much trouble for them to deal with the unfamiliar.  I hear things like “Oh, I don't want to eat at a one-off cafe because I have dietary restrictions and they might not have anything I can eat”  or “I've heard that that town has a lot of crime so I don't want to go there and maybe get mugged” or “I'm not feeling all that well today so I'm just going to stay home and not make the field trip with the club”.  Fortunately neither my wife nor I have ever been the kind of person who viewed life as a spectator sport.  So we're willing to take a little bit of risk in order to have a new experience.  Yeah, sometimes those little one-off cafes end up having lousy food, service and hygiene, but lots of times we run into a really good one and get to meet some interesting local characters there as well.  I have to admit that we do exercise some caution when we are traveling in an area that might be a high-crime area.  Sometimes we don't stop if we get bad vibes about the place or at least we try to maintain a low profile.  Generally, though, we just stay aware of our surroundings and watch out for each other.  When we recently did the grand tour of Texas Independence historical sites, we had to drive through a few neighborhoods that looked pretty unsafe to us.  We bit the bullet and pushed on through to our destinations, although we decided to hold off stopping for lunch until the neighborhoods looked a little safer.  Then we stopped at one-off places and had a great lunch in every one of them.

The point I'm trying to make with this rambling diatribe is this:  If you don't have a heck of a lot of time left compared to the number of years you've been around to date, then it seems to me that you should concentrate on the positive things you can still do and try as much as possible to ignore the negative things and enjoy your golden years.  Sure, you can play it safe and try to hold onto the rest of your remaining years by sitting home and thinking about all of the bad things you're avoiding by not going out; and you can worry about your health and focus on the fact that you can't do the things you'd like to do if you had more money and a younger body.  Or... you can ignore all that negative stuff and make the most of your remaining years by doing what you want to and can still do.  It's easy.  My approach is kind of like the Burt Campbell character on the old sitcom "Soap".  He used to cross his arms, click his fingers and make himself invisible.  I just do that and make all my worries and troubles disappear so I can enjoy life.  You can do that too.  Burt and I grant you that power.  It's yours to use.