Enter the Smartphone

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Okay! Here I am, like Constanze Mozart, making an embarassing confession. I must be one among the last people in the US to switch to a smartphone. On a trip to Atlanta to see a stellar grand-girl graduate High School, I was overwhelmed by family, both kids and grandkids, demanding that I get a "better" phone. So—I caved at last, regaled with all the storied delights that awaited me once I owned such a device.

I returned home with said smartphone tucked inside a pair of socks. We had been too busy with visiting back and forth from one side of Atlanta to the other and hanging out, or attending various graduation festivities to go searching for a case through the always mind-boggling traffic.   I'd figured this would be a good time to make the big change, as there  I’d have two sons, two DILs and a grand girl to instruct me in at least some of the Major Arcana.

I was once considered a tech savvy person, but those days are loooong gone. There’s a certain Luddite pride in still using a genuine IBM keyboard from the 80’s, hitched to 2004's computer. It is, however, getting to be more difficult to lag behind than to “get with the program,” as software (and hardware too) endlessly morph. IMHO, (as I learned to say on AIM) I suspect that all the “updating” is simply an excuse to wring more $$ from us hapless consumers. 

One of my friends has a terrific notion about a kind heart software firm (!) who would build MS65, a program guaranteed to run without chronic episodes of illogic/insanity (could I perhaps be alluding to MS 10??) and not to change or alter in any way for a decade. That’s about the right amount of time for many of us less sophisticated cotton-tops to learn new software.

I’m under no illusions, though, I’ll soon be scrapped and dissembled for the metal value of my components, along with my beloved Wang PC which still crouches sadly in the back of a closet.  Stability is not what software developers are into these days—the more things fail to work properly, I guess, the better it is for IT, or something. Anyway, while I’m griping, what’s with the penchant for hiding the most commonly used operations three or four—or five--pull downs deep? Is it so we have to humiliate ourselves and buy the latest copy of “…For Dummies”? And what’s with that “Search” that leads you into Alice in Wonderland conversations with "Cortana." (And, hell, I'm not fooled. It's just that g-d paperclip tarted up and back in our faces again.   Couldn’t "search" have just searched, as the word indicates that it does?

This morning, I awoke to the sound of chimes—my new phone, of course. I’d set the alarm, hitched it to the wall socket and left it wakeful. Now, I leapt out of bed, and attempted to turn the alarm off without first putting on my glasses. Next thing I knew, I’d taken four blurry pictures of myself--nothing you want to keep, especially those taken first thing in the morning. It took a few minutes before I managed to figure out how to put the camera back to sleep and delete the alarm. 

How did I, whose first and foremost mental image of “phone” remains the graceful black candlestick apparatus in my grandparent’s living room, enter a world where a small slim box in my hand can deposit checks, take pictures, tell time, and connect me to the internet and thence conduct me into untold wonders of consumption?  

~~Juliet Waldron, who just keeps getting older...

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God Speed, John Glenn

 The Right Stuff

It was on February 20, 1962 that John Glenn, a Marine pilot who'd flown 149 missions during World War Two and the Korean War, completed his historic three trips around Planet Earth--as "spam in a can."  It took a heck of a lot more nerve and balls out skill to survive those earlier military assignments, I'm sure, but it was for the orbital flight of the tiny Friendship 7 that he attained fame and a ticker tape parade. Such are the ways of popular culture, but he was the first American to orbit the Earth and the third American in space.

Spam in a Can

John Glenn went on to serve his country in the Senate for many terms, as a Democrat from Ohio 1974-1999. No "come here" politician, Ohio was his home state. He'd been born in Cambridge, Ohio in 1921 and attended Muskingham College, where he studied mathematics. When the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US into World War II, he dropped out of college and enlisted, first in the army and then, after not being called up, as a Navy aviation cadet. He was an old style gentleman, married to his childhood sweetheart for 70+ years, a staunch supporter of the social safety nets for aged and less fortunate Americans, as well as a lifelong advocate of NASA and of first class science education in the kind of well-funded public schools that kick-started his own career.  (Contrast this with the politicians we elect nowadays -- lying, self-dealing confidence artists -- and feel sorry for yourselves.)

I was in boarding school in England when all this happened, so wasn't stateside for the hoopla, although I soon learned about it, from the teachers (mistresses) at tea time when we all sat down together. (Don't get any big ideas about "tea" at 1960's boarding schools. In those days it was brown bread and a single pat of butter, and several cups of hot tea--and that, dear readers, was all there was to eat until morning, where we received the same tea and bread all over again.) At any rate, the news made me happy. It was about time our power house country caught up with those "Ruskies!"

In the '60's, kids like me were called "children of broken homes," and mine certainly had been, with violence and betrayal, via a divorce granted by some southern state which deemed child support unnecessary. Nevertheless, I remained proud of my nation, though my classmates, whose parents remembered the great days of the British Empire, often scoffed. When I heard the news about that orbital flight--me, the solitary "Yank" walking the 45 degree halls of the grand old buildings where we boarders  housed--I experienced a chest puffing moment of national pride!

One evening soon after, I stood, wrapped in my robe, in the top floor hall where three flights of stairs ended. I sang "America the Beautiful" as perfectly as I was able. My voice, of which I was proud, reverberated nicely inside the space. Though I was far away from home, alone, with no support on any side, I was, on that long ago day, proud to be an American and not afraid for anyone to know it.

So, with the passing of John Glenn, another chapter in my own old memory "copybook" closes, one of a more hopeful time. As Scott Carpenter -- now the sole survivor of the Mercury Missions  -- radioed on that day in 1962 -- "God Speed, John Glenn."  

Oldest man to fly in space, John Glenn, October 29, 1998

~ Juliet Waldron

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Green Tomato Pie

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I made my first Green Tomato Pie a very long time ago, back in Connecticut, in the 70's. We lived in the middle of an agricultural area in what would become primarily a commuter town. Today those fields,  needless to say, are filled with tarmac circles and rows of McMansions. Then, though, in a dilapidated 1790's farmhouse, we were surrounded by cornfields and some nearby shade tobacco and potatoes. Those last two required tons of pesticide, and I spent a lot of time gathering in my toddlers, pets, and laundry and closing windows whenever a new application began. There have been long-term health issues from exposure to these aggie cocktails, but that's another story.

We had a super garden there, plowed up the first spring by a local farmer, full of good black Connecticut bottom soil. I was, and still am, a haphazard gardener. Still, we got lots of food out of our plot:  lettuce, chard, spinach, beets, beans, melons (which were often stolen by the even poorer neighbor's kids), winter and summer squash, pumpkins, and of course, tomatoes, and peppers. I inter-planted herbs like basil, oregano, thyme, sage, and flowers, marigolds and nasturtiums, as "protectors."

I was darn proud of this pretty and productive garden and spent time in it daily. Eventually, my husband dug a trench around it and half buried fence to discourage the groundhogs and bunnies who'd zeroed in on all this tasty stuff. I often encountered snakes there, hunting for field mice, bugs and frogs. Once, arms full of produce, and not really looking where I was going, I bare-foot stepped on a lovely long red and white corn snake. He was basking in the path, I think, all hot from the sun. He felt dry and smooth, like warm leather. I screamed, leapt into the air, and dropped the vegetables. He, apparently uninjured, slithered for it, disappearing as fast as he could go into the weeds. Hard to tell who was more scared.

One year, a hard frost hit the valley and my still growing plants hard and left me with buckets of green tomatoes. I set them out along the porch in rows, some wrapped in newspaper to see if they'd ripen. In those days, friends of friends, traveling across country, would sometimes drop in and crash on mattresses on the floor of our mostly empty 13 room house overnight, on their way from the West Coast or the Midwest to colleges/first jobs in NYC or Boston. I was the good housewife who could produce a hot supper with fresh from the garden sides at the drop of a hat. One evening, when we'd had some warning, I decided to produce a pie, but I was nearly out of apples--an unusual occurrence for me, as I'm an apple aficionado. Most autumns there was usually a basket stashed in an unheated room somewhere. Not this time.

I'd heard of green tomato pie, but there was nothing about it in my trusty Joy of Cooking. Determined to go ahead, it was time to punt. I had a single apple, a big sweet Cortland, and lots of tomatoes, so I just went ahead and used an apple pie recipe, only substituting chopped tomatoes. As usual, I put in lemon juice, cinnamon, a dash of nutmeg, some brown sugar and some white, as well as mixture of flour and cornstarch. It smelled good and looked fine.

Somewhere in the middle of the first slice, after supper alongside fresh cups of coffee--the things we didn't worry about doing in those days!--one of the guests said, studying a bite poised on his fork, "Uh, this isn't an apple..."

So, I explained. By that time, however, the weirdness had been overcome by the comforts of sugar, fruitiness, and fresh baked. Everyone finished their portion--even my children, who were initially as alarmed by Mom's revelation as anyone. I was entirely pleased, though, when this same guy asked for seconds.

Now, of course, no one is going to freak out over green tomato pie. You can Google it. It has been blessed by Paula Dean and other cooking show stars, as a real ol' time Southern treat. It has even acquired a certain cache. IMHO, I think it's probably just one of those ideas born of the plain old make-do spirit of a gardener's home cookin'.


~~Juliet Waldron

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THE MOON AND I

It’s hard to recreate a time when there were no words, only feelings.

Moon/Tree/Clouds. These are the first things I remember. Crib slats casting black shadows on a summer smooth sheet. White face through spreading branches. Next, a perfect silver disc lending its sheen to arching branches. The sugar maple that grew behind Grandparents house was enormous.

(Perhaps it had been brought west to Ohio by a homesick Yankee.)

Of course, I knew nothing about it. All I knew was that the maple was good to see, the harmony of black and white, the leafy patterns,somehow created a sound in my head like a clear note.

I was secure. Outside the broad leaves with their sharpened edges barely moved against a velvet sky. Moon face gazed down serene; a cloud edged in rainbow and silver slipped past.

In the next room, women’s voices. They cared for me, two young, one old, getting ready for bed in the spacious bathroom on the other side of the door. It was big enough to accommodate one at the dressing table mirror, a bather in the claw foot tub, one at the sink running water--or, perhaps, even "enthroned." Indoor plumbing was the first improvement Grandpa made after purchasing his house. He had jokingly called the place “a girl’s dorm” for years, and now here I came, the newest female--the one quietly wondering in the room full of moonlight. Sleep was impossible bathed in silver, but it wasn’t frustrating or lonely. Body comfortable, I didn’t need to cry and call them to me. After all, the women were nearby--and so was the Moon.

Met at the Movies

Spent an afternoon at Met at the Movies, a bright new idea by the venerable Metropolitan Opera to cast their net over a wider audience by transmitting their Saturday afternoon matinees into movie theaters around the world. I’ve been going to these ever since I found out about them, three years ago. At our Regal Theater, we’re also able to see a repeat on the Wednesday night following the Saturday afternoon broadcast.

Opera lovers are an odd, and, for the most part, elderly subset of the population, but they are thick enough upon the ground to fill a theater here in Central Pennsylvania. Seats are first come, first serve, so you’ll see the old folks coming early, especially the wheel-chair bound and the oxygen toting group, also carrying in their sandwiches and bottles of water semi-surreptitiously in their totes. At $22 a ticket per Senior, the theater staff has (so far) graciously looked the other way at this otherwise frowned-upon practice. I brought water and a sliced apple to carry me through the recent performance of Don Carlo by Verdi, as it was to last 4 ½ hours.

Young people are arriving more frequently at these performances, brought in by local colleges as part of their musical or humanities education. I’ve been glad to see them attending, and hope that a few of these become converts to this most peculiar Western art form.

I’ve never seen "Don Carlo" before, although I’ve heard it on the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts. It’s dark, even for Verdi, with the usual repressed and emotionally abused heroine—in this case a princess, a pawn played both by father and husband. There is also an on-stage burning of heretics, (a gruesome depiction of fanatical cruelty), betrayals of friendship, and backstabbing, all culminating in the murder of a prince condoned by his kingly father. Lawlessness and violence committed by The Church and by Society are enduring themes in Verdi operas; his music carries the despairing message even more powerfully than his story lines. I usually leave such operas emotionally drained, and Don Carlo was no exception.

It’s interesting to attend these events, for besides the spectacle there are small conversations to be had while waiting for the show to begin. We opera goers have stories to share that can only be appreciated by others of our kind, for instance, reading the Milton Cross Complete Guide to the Stories of the Opera. We talk about listening to the Met Broadcasts on the radio as part of our childhood experience, and perhaps reminisce a little about the person who introduced us to the art. I can still see my mother, lounging on a pink tufted Chenille bed spread, her blonde cocker spaniel tucked beside her. With cigarettes, matches, ash tray, lying on her side with a mostly unread book, she’d have the radio on, listening to Grand Opera from New York City. Oddly, at our house, near Syracuse, we received our Metropolitan Saturday Afternoon performance from a station in Toronto. Through the ether, across Lake Ontario from Canada, Great Art arrived at our snow-bound house in the Finger Lakes. It’s always gray outside that remembered window, and always snowing. The music is the brightest color in the room, especially if I’m lying on the braided wool rug with my toys, being a "good girl" which meant not bothering her by talking, just quietly imagining.

Zombies

I know, the time of year for this has passed—or has it? Zombies today are season-less, rather like basic black, especially to what used to be called “the youth of today.” I haven’t met a kid out of diapers who doesn’t know what a Zombie is, but back in the ‘50’s, this wasn’t so.

Although it might seem amazing to today’s sophisticated mini-consumers of entertainment, Zombies were something I lived without until I was nine. My parents took us on a trip to Bermuda that April, when it was still snowing relentlessly in Upstate NY where we lived. In this vacation spot, I met lots of little city slickers from New York, sophisticated in the darker things, who told me all about Zombies. I think they had more exotic TV in the city, and had perhaps been treated to a Saturday afternoon showing of the Hollywood classic, I Walked with a Zombie, which, beyond the black and white horror film aspect, is a pretty good compendium of basic Zombie lore.

After they’d filled my head with these stories, I had an awful time going to sleep. In those days, some emotion or new concept would get into my head, and I’d experience a freezing, terrifying something akin to a panic attack. I was extremely glad we were on the third floor in that hotel. From what I’d just learned, Zombies weren’t too bright, and so I reasoned they would probably find enough prey to sate their unnatural needs on the two floors below mine.

I was glad I had learned about Zombies when my parents began to travel even farther afield, pretty far, actually for the 1950’s. The winter we spent in Grenada—the stated reason was that my mother had chronic bronchitis—we stayed in a guest house on a point overlooking the bay. There were kids living there with their hotelier parents, a family of four. We played when they got home from school every day. Being proper little West Indians, they knew all about Zombies. I might have lost face worse than I did otherwise if I hadn’t known about them. The creatures the little Grenadians were surprised I’d never heard of were werewolves, which they called Loupe Garou. (I think this is a Haitian expression.) At any rate, they believed that Loupe Garou had first appeared on Haiti, along with the Zombie. It was from that dark birthplace that they’d spread all over the world.

Undeadness is the Zombie’s most repulsive, hackles-raising attribute. As omnivores we should probably forgive their fondness for brains, which are a great source of nutrition. Americans don’t eat them much, but our frugal ancestors did, and most carnivorous animals certainly do. Whenever our well-fed Katter Bob catches a mouse or whatever unlucky rodent, he always begins at the head.

Summer, 1949

Looking over the backseat of a ‘36 Chevy is an early memory I have about cars. I stood, holding onto the back seat and peering over it, across my parents’ shoulders. We were probably on our way to my Grandpa’s house in our small Ohio town, the place where all the family I had still lived. The actual year is cloudy; perhaps it was 1949, just post war. The car had probably been grandpa’s. It was the sort of hand-me-down + all-in-the-family cash-deal that people did a lot of in those days. So many young men were back from the War, and jobs -- and cars -- were hard to get.

“Hold on,” Mother always said. Maybe she’d repeat the story about the inattentive kid who got his teeth bashed out when the car he was riding in stopped suddenly. This reminded me to pay attention to what was going on as we traveled. In 1949, that was good mothering, sufficient unto the day.

We probably never drove faster than 25 mph to get to Grandpa’s because we went through town. With a small thriving college there, the streets were always busy with an odd mix of farmers and students from big Eastern cities.

I remember a tall stick shift protruding from the floor, and the strength it seemed to need to move it. My Mother could manage shifting as well as Daddy, though, a thing which gave her potency in my eyes, even though she was a small woman. She put a cushion in the driver's seat for height, and she drove like a champ. I remember her small, broad saddle-shoed feet stomping on brake or clutch while she shifted with great dispatch and authority.

Even as young as I was, I knew it was bad form to grind the gears, although I heard a lot of others do it. Not my parents! As the car had been Grandpa’s it was probably in perfect shape. My Father, who painted houses and studied to be an engineer, was every bit as good at taking care of things.

It was summer, so I think we might have been going to a picnic at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. They had a big white four-square along wide Xenia Avenue, which still had trolley tracks running down the middle. Behind the house was a spacious red brick patio that Grandpa had laid himself. It was flat and smooth and surrounded the largest, shapeliest sugar maple in town.

It was a lovely shady spot, always cool and filled with birdsong. Sometimes my Aunt Jeanie and her husband, Richard DeWine, would be there with Cousin Michael, who was younger than me, but fun to hang out with anyway. If it was a special occasion, Richard’s parents, George and Alice, might be there, or maybe our Aunt Judy would have come home from Ohio State. Mike and I both liked our lively, attentive Aunt Judy.

A table with a checkered oil cloth waited for whatever was about to be served, a lot, if I’m remembering correctly, of fried chicken with either biscuits or homemade bread. I'm sure there were pickles, coleslaw, potato salad and baked beans, but like most kids, I didn't eat that stuff. For dessert, there was certainly homemade cake or fresh fruit pie. If there wasn’t, the grand finale might have been Grandpa’s ice cream, which was so sublime that even kids knew it didn’t have to be chocolate.

Another Nirvana-like childhood dining experience came the day Grandpa and George DeWine served us morels. These I’ve never had since, but I’ve never forgotten them, either, the Holy Grail of Mushrooms, fresh, fragrant, and lovingly fried in sweet butter.