The recent weather in Atlanta has stirred memories of extreme weather. Georgians, unused to snow and ice were unprepared for the recent winter storm. It happens here occasionally but usually with disastrous effect. Schools close, cars crash, people freeze to death and folks from the north ridicule us. To be fair, the people from Georgia rarely experience heavy winter conditions. Maybe once in four or five years, and at that, maybe three or four days at a time. That's just not often enough or for long enough for people to learn the hazards and how to avoid them.
I spent part of a winter in Minneapolis back in the early 70s. I bought a Chevy Vega station wagon. It had been my father's which he traded in on something else, I don't remember what but we made a deal with the dealer and I good a good deal on his trade-in (I hate repeating words in sentences but this strikes me as aMusing). As winter came on, I had to buy snow tires for the car, a necessity in Minnesota.
In the film Une Homme et une Femme, there are scenes of rallye driving in the snow where drivers set up the angle of the car to make a turn well in advance of the actual curve. On my daily drive to work, there was a long downhill stretch before the intersection to the street the office was on. There was a clear view of the opposite approach too. The roads were often snowy and on days when it was clear I managed to perfect that somewhat sliding diagonal approach to the left-hand turn. I don't think I'd have been able to stop if there was another car coming. Occasionally, I'd slide all the way across nearly to the right-hand curb.
Winter driving in Minneapolis poses some interesting problems. I once found a parking spot on a main road. Main roads get plowed while many other roads do not. When I got back to my car less than an hour later, I had to dig through snow to get my driver's side door open. I'd been "plowed in". It took a lot of jockeying back and forth to crash my way out of that parking spot. Traveling on less than arterial streets could also be difficult. Unplowed streets would build up quite a thick layer of ice. At traffic lights, after a stop it would be difficult to start again. I'd have to put the car in gear and release the clutch then open the door and push until we started rolling then hop back in. To get into a parallel parking space, I'd pull the front of the car in, then, leaving the car in gear, get out and shove the back end in toward the curb. Getting out of that parking space was also a matter of shoving a car that is, technically moving, back and forth until it could be pushed free. At least the exercise mitigated the cold a bit. Speaking of which, Walking out of the lobby of the apartment house in which I lived, the humidity in my nostrils would instantly freeze with the temperature drop of nearly a hundred degrees. Walking in was equally shocking with a near hundred degree temperature jump.
By the end of February, I'd had enough. I was introduced to a young woman (I don't recall her name so I'll call her Jane) who wanted to go to San Francisco and, in thinking about it for a day or two, decided that I wanted head west too. I'm a desert boy, just not cut out for cold weather on a long term basis. Camping in the desert in the winter, it gets below freezing at night but the days can be up in the eighties. I can cope with that. Temperatures at or below zero for months at a time? Not for me. So I put my stuff in the back of the Vega and collected Jane one afternoon and we headed south on I-35 for Des Moines before turning west on I-80. The next evening, we reached Cheyenne, Wyoming and I needed to sleep. We found a movie theater with a parking lot across the street so Jane went in and I took a nap in the back of the car. It was very cold so I had to keep the engine running to keep the car warm. When the movie let out, Jane came back and we were off again to meet a blizzard further west. The driving wasn't too bad but semis on the road were going pretty slowly, ten or fifteen miles per hour slower than I was comfortable with, we still had a long way to go. The trucks blew up huge clouds of snow around them so passing them was difficult. The only way to do that was to pull up along their left sides then, because there was no forward visibility whatever, I had to look out my right window at the side of the truck and judge by my distance from it whether I was going straight or not. At forty five or fifty miles per hour, it was a slow and scary process. I got a bit better and braver about it after the fourth or fifth truck but I never got comfortable with it.
The next morning we were coming into Nevada and looking down a hill on a long straight stretch of Interstate. The right lanes in both directions were scored with the dark impressions of tire treads while the left lanes were pristine white. Those roads weren't very heavily travelled that day. I suppose the blizzard from the day before had dampened a lot of travel plans. Wells, Elko, Winnemucca, Lovelock, Reno all gradually slid behind us until we reached the foot of the Donner pass. The California Highway Patrol was requiring all cars going over the pass to have chains and were making people who weren't carrying them rent them from vendors on the side of the road. We inched along as they were checking car by car. We pulled up to the officer and, noticing my Minnesota license plate, he waved us through before I'd even had time to stop. It seemed odd to me then and still does. The whole interstate had been plowed and it had completely stopped snowing. We passed dozens of cars going painfully slowly both up and down the pass on the other side in an effort to save their tires from chafing from the chains.
As we neared Sacramento, we had to stop and step out of the car for a few moments to savor the wonderful warmth of California. I was sixty degrees out. To us, that was balmy weather after the zero and below temperatures of Minnesota.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Cool Water
Listen to this. I lived this, sort of, once.
I had a jeep. I did not name it Dan. I had a red bandanna, the type that has existed for over sixty years and probably a lot longer than that. I never washed it, at least not in a washing machine or a sink, not with soap or detergent. I did, however rinse away the sizing, softened it, and faded it some by dunking it into every natural spring and stream in Death Valley.
I used to love Death Valley and went there as often as I could, driving directly from work at 5:30 PM on a Friday night until eleven or so when I'd arrive. I'd set up camp at Stovepipe Wells and stay until late Sunday afternoon when I'd have to drive back to Los Angeles to be on time for work on Monday. Occasionally I'd even take a friend or two. On one occasion, I took a girlfriend, Debbie, and a buddy, Mark. Debbie and I had been out there before so she knew what the valley was like. Mark was from the east coast and didn't really understand. Well, he didn't when we arrived, late of a Friday night. At one point driving into Death Valley, I stopped the car and shut off the engine. A breeze was blowing; it had the texture of velvet, enveloping and warm but with a tinge of malice. To one who had never been there before, it was just a nice warm wind. To one who knew, it was as dangerous as it was loving.
I've seen movies where some people are in the desert for whatever reason without water. They act exhausted, depressed, despondent. Whether they are in the American south west, the Sahara, any desert at all without water, when they come across a spring, a well, an oasis, they all go crazy, throwing themselves into the water, jumping about, laughing and acting all idiotic. I never got that. I thought it was dumb. Once, Debbie and I were driving around the valley and we were getting stroppy with each other. I was feeling cranky and depressed and she seemed to be feeling the same. We argued. For some reason I decided we needed water. Now, I knew that it was necessary to carry water when travelling in the desert so there were gallons of it in the back of the car. I stopped and told Debbie to drink some water, I got several quarts from the back of the car and we drank. We drank at least a quart each and suddenly we were giggling, hugging and laughing. Life was suddenly beautiful. It had never occurred to me that levels of hydration could be so affecting.
Mark, on that trip, had no clue. The following day, Mark, Debbie and I drove down the valley and stopped at Bad Water, the lowest point on the north American continent. It's a salt flat. We parked and started to walk, the actual lowest point reputedly a quarter mile or so from the road. Tourists love to trudge deep footprints or drags sticks to make a mark on that salt flat. We were just investigating those. We had been on the flat for an hour or so and I noticed I was feeling fatigued and maybe a bit short of temper. Mark was seeming a little down too. Debbie didn't seem to be feeling any affect so I asked her to hike back to the car and bring a couple quarts of water. Cheerfully, she hopped to it, much to my surprise. Mark's and my spirits continued to flag. To me, it seemed like six hours before Debbie got back but it was more like twenty minutes. She brought us each a quart of water and I told Mark to drink. He took a sip. Then I told him to drink again and he took another sip. So, I told him to drink the whole quart. After some convincing, he did it and before you know it, he was jumping up and down, giggling and cavorting just like those folks in the old movies acting stupid by the oasis. I drank my water and wasn't much more dignified. Debbie, it seems, had drunk her own water back at the car and had calmed down during the walk back out on the salt flat. We'd both been there before. We were not surprised.
The first visitors to Death Valley, well, the Native Americans probably first visited it sometime between 10 and 30 thousand years ago, depending on one's take on when the asian migrants first arrived in North America. So, the first European visitors to Death Vallley had a fairly rough time of it. They were on the way to California but had to stop in Salt Lake City. It was late in the year and the Mormons were gathering quite a crowd of folks who weren't going to be able to make it over the Sierra Nevada until the thaw in 1850. The Mormons didn't have quite enough food to feed themselves for the winter of 1849 let alone enough to feed all the people on the wagon trains who were arriving. Their solution was elegant in what it would produce. The Mormons were having problems with
attrition of the arrivals to their new colony. New converts were being waylaid by the temptations of places like San Francisco. If the Mormons could create a route to Salt Lake City devoid of those temptations, they felt they could gain more converts. If there was a route from Long Beach, near Los Angeles to Salt Lake City where there was less temptation, they would swell their ranks and prosper. The covered wagon imigrants weren't interested in converting to Moronism, they were more interested in making their way to the gold fields of California. So the Mormons selected a guide to lead the imigrants south through what would become Las Vegas and San Bernardo with a view to establishing a trail for future converts. A hundred wagons, four hundred oxen and, say, four or five hundred people on foot will create quite a trail. The would go to the base of the Sierra Nevada and strike out north along the San Juaquin valley to the gold fields. They dubbed themselves the Sand Walking Company.
On the way south, ajacent to what is now known as Death Valley, some Indians turned up and asked what all those folks were doing. Surprised, they said there was a faster way due west so why go past? Most of the company declined but six or eight wagons decided to try it. They followed the pass pointed out and descended down a gentle valley to what is now known as Furnace Creek. I've traveled that route and it's a nice gentle descent. Once they got into the valley, however, there was no obvious exit to the west. Worse, there was little water and no game, not even in winter. The groups divided up, most abandoned their wagons and burned them. They wound up eating their oxen. There are tales of bravery and gallantry that go along with this that I won't go into but if one searches Manly and Death Valley, one could discover some of them. So, back to the first Europeans to set eyes on Death Valley, the people responsible for naming it. As they were leaving, one of the women who was riding in a sort of pouch draped over an Ox's back looked down from high up the pass that would lead them to safety said, "Goodbye you valley of death." Nobody from that group died in Death Valley. At least not from starvation or dehydration but one of them did by falling off a cliff edge along the pass by which they were leaving, probably after she made that statement.
One family, the Nusbaumers did not burn their wagon or eat their oxen. That family struck out to the south and eventually found their way out of the valley. To this day, there is a road that leads south out of Death Valley. I don't know if it is exactly the same route the Nusbaumers took but there is one dirt road that more or less follows thier route. I had driven into and out of Death Valley by every possible route except that one and I wanted to try it. As well, there was a spring that I wanted to dip my bandana in as that was the only one I'd missed out on.
It was summer, I had a few weeks off. I studied the maps and decided to try to enter DV from the south. On the Topographic map I had and perhaps on other literature I had from the monument (in those days it was known as Death Valley National Monument) I knew that that road was patrolled maybe as often as once every two weeks by aircraft. I'd travelled other routes into DV that had similar warnings so I didn't think much of it. The day before I planned to leave, I assembled all my gear ready to pack into my jeep. I had a rack on the back that held a spare tire and two jerry cans. One filled with gasoline, the other, filled with water. I tried, in all my wanderings around that desert to never get further than five gallons away from a gas station and even if I never needed it, I always had five gallons of water. anyway, that night, I went out with friends drinking. The next day, I was a bit hung over but I packed the jeep and headed out. At Baker, along Interstate 15, before I started up the normal paved route to DV, I stopped and bought two or three 2 1/2 gallon bottles of water and ten pounds of ice. I put the ice into my three gallon galvanized igloo water cooler and filled the empty spaces with water. I figured that would last me. By the time I got to the turnoff to the dirt road up the valley, I was feeling like I could use a drink. I got out my powdered Gatorade and put some in my sierra cup. I filled the cup from the Igloo full of cold water and drank. I couldn't believe how warm it was. The ice had completely melted and the water was hot. Did I mention that the temperature that day was probably around 110 or more? And me, hung over which basically means dehydrated? Well, wait. This story gets even better.
So I carried on regardless, up the dirt track that was going to lead me to the spring and, eventually, Furnace Creek. A week or two before this, I'd bought, at a surplus store, two canvas or flaxen water bags. I'd remembered them from my youth where people driving in the hot summers would hang these water bags in front of the grills of their cars to help in keeping their engines cool. That purchase was one of the best purchases I'd ever made.
I found the little spur road that went off to the spring and followed it. The spring was lovely. There were a lot of tall green reed-like things growing around it. I wanted to go soak my bandana, but as I was getting out of the jeep I glanced in the side mirror and saw my face. I wasn't feeling very well at that point but when I saw that my face was bright red, I started to worry a little. The bandana got dipped, but as I made it back to the jeep, only about ten or fifteen feet, I was staggering. I was hot, I had a headache, I was panicking. I took off my shirt and started pacing in a circle next to the car. I wanted to take off my shorts. I kept pacing that circle feeling duller and dimmer with every circuit. A memory dawned in me. What I was doing wasn't right but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Oh, yeah. Recently I'd read about people found dead in the desert, naked, dropped in the circle they had been trudging, only feet away from the water they needed to survive in their RV vehicles. Wait, stop this! Do something. Get water.
All of the water I was carrying was hot. The water from the spring was hot. Everything I did was slow and agonizing. Thinking was difficult. Somewhere along the road, I'd lost one of my canvas water bags but I got the remaining one and filled it from one of the plastic water bottles. I hung it on the arm of my side mirror. I grabbed my shirt and threw it into the back of the jeep and headed off.
after a mile or two, I stopped and took a drink from the water bag. Damn, that water was cold. I poured some over me to cool me down. I did that from time to time until the bag was empty so I stopped to refill it from the plastic water jug. To work properly, the water jug needed to be punctured so I got out my buck knife to puncture it. I had the water jug, the canvas bag and my knife on the front bumper of the jeep. When the bag was full, I hung it on the mirror. I put the water in the back of the jeep and was off again. Gee, I guess I forgot about the knife. I never saw it again. I bet it's still out there, that road gets so little traffic, I don't reckon anyone would spot it.
At one point, I tried soaking my shirt and wearing it to cool me off but I wound up wearing a hot wet shirt. Uncomfortable and no help at all. I was so dopey I had a hard time keeping my foot on the gas pedal so I shifted into FWD low range and pulled out the throttle. In second gear, we were rocketing along at around twelve miles per hour. The road wasn't level at all, dipping and rising like waves in the ocean. I remember my head lolling as I tried to watch the dusty track and steer. At least all I had to do was steer. I refilled the water bag several more times before I got back to the main road that went up the east side of DV. By that point, I was feeling a bit better. Back in two wheel drive, I was moving along at a reasonable 50 mph or so. I passed a big camper with three or four bicyclists following it. Later, I passed a lone bicyclist. I thought the people with the camper were at least reasonably sane. The loner? I thought he was nuts and probably stupid too. More on that, a little later.
Finally, I got to Furnace Creek. I booked a hotel room there and headed off to the bar for a beer. It was too cold to drink. I still had a headache so I left it behind and headed off to my room where I soaked a towel in cold water and wrapped it around my head. I turned the A/C up as high as it would go and fell asleep. Next morning, I felt ok.
Now, in Death Valley, in the summer, sitting still when the humidity is around fifteen percent and the temperature is up around 110, you need up to three gallons of water per hour to replace what you sweat out without realizing you're sweating because it evaporates so fast. The result? Heatstroke and dehydration which I had suffered the previous day. Potentially fatal. I had come so close.
As I was hanging out around Furnace Creek the next day, I met the lone bicyclist I had seen the day before. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was going to be riding out of the valley by way of emigrant pass. I asked him about water and he showed me a quart or so of tea he had strapped to the back of his bike. Tea? With caffeine? That's dehydrating. The pull up out of DV along Emigrant Pass is steep. I never tried it but I'd driven it a lot and I knew it would be a hard slog. I told him that. Oh, by the way, he was from Germany, on a bicycle tour of the United States. It was apparently a big macho deal to bike through Death Valley. In my opinion, considering the day before, it was more like a big macho death. I told him it would be far better to ride out after dark when the temps were possibly below one hundred. He was having none of that. I did what any concerned citizen would do. I went to the nearest ranger station and ratted him out. The next time I saw him, he and his bicycle were in the back of a ranger's pickup. Boy, did he glare at me. Oh, so sorry, I messed up your riding every mile of the 3,000 or so across the country but at least you're gonna live to see Germany again. I don't think he ever understood.
That leads back to the velvety wind. I knew it was lovely and warm but at the same time, I knew it could be equally fatal. Maybe that's what I liked about it.
I continued visiting Death Valley and Saline Valley for years after all of that, maybe a little wiser, maybe not. I never had a near death experience after that though.
A year or two later, after camping in Death Valley in August when the night time temperature was about 100 degrees, I was driving home and going up the mountain to leave the valley I started to get chilly. I had clothes in the car, camping clothes for all seasons so I put on a hoodie. That worked for a bit but I got colder so I rummaged around and found my down vest and put that on too. I had a thermometer attached to the visor above the windshield. I looked at the temperature. It said it was 80 degrees. I was cold all the way back to Los Angeles. People looked at me like I was nuts, sitting in my open jeep with no doors. I was, at least, comfortable.
attrition of the arrivals to their new colony. New converts were being waylaid by the temptations of places like San Francisco. If the Mormons could create a route to Salt Lake City devoid of those temptations, they felt they could gain more converts. If there was a route from Long Beach, near Los Angeles to Salt Lake City where there was less temptation, they would swell their ranks and prosper. The covered wagon imigrants weren't interested in converting to Moronism, they were more interested in making their way to the gold fields of California. So the Mormons selected a guide to lead the imigrants south through what would become Las Vegas and San Bernardo with a view to establishing a trail for future converts. A hundred wagons, four hundred oxen and, say, four or five hundred people on foot will create quite a trail. The would go to the base of the Sierra Nevada and strike out north along the San Juaquin valley to the gold fields. They dubbed themselves the Sand Walking Company.
On the way south, ajacent to what is now known as Death Valley, some Indians turned up and asked what all those folks were doing. Surprised, they said there was a faster way due west so why go past? Most of the company declined but six or eight wagons decided to try it. They followed the pass pointed out and descended down a gentle valley to what is now known as Furnace Creek. I've traveled that route and it's a nice gentle descent. Once they got into the valley, however, there was no obvious exit to the west. Worse, there was little water and no game, not even in winter. The groups divided up, most abandoned their wagons and burned them. They wound up eating their oxen. There are tales of bravery and gallantry that go along with this that I won't go into but if one searches Manly and Death Valley, one could discover some of them. So, back to the first Europeans to set eyes on Death Valley, the people responsible for naming it. As they were leaving, one of the women who was riding in a sort of pouch draped over an Ox's back looked down from high up the pass that would lead them to safety said, "Goodbye you valley of death." Nobody from that group died in Death Valley. At least not from starvation or dehydration but one of them did by falling off a cliff edge along the pass by which they were leaving, probably after she made that statement.
One family, the Nusbaumers did not burn their wagon or eat their oxen. That family struck out to the south and eventually found their way out of the valley. To this day, there is a road that leads south out of Death Valley. I don't know if it is exactly the same route the Nusbaumers took but there is one dirt road that more or less follows thier route. I had driven into and out of Death Valley by every possible route except that one and I wanted to try it. As well, there was a spring that I wanted to dip my bandana in as that was the only one I'd missed out on.
It was summer, I had a few weeks off. I studied the maps and decided to try to enter DV from the south. On the Topographic map I had and perhaps on other literature I had from the monument (in those days it was known as Death Valley National Monument) I knew that that road was patrolled maybe as often as once every two weeks by aircraft. I'd travelled other routes into DV that had similar warnings so I didn't think much of it. The day before I planned to leave, I assembled all my gear ready to pack into my jeep. I had a rack on the back that held a spare tire and two jerry cans. One filled with gasoline, the other, filled with water. I tried, in all my wanderings around that desert to never get further than five gallons away from a gas station and even if I never needed it, I always had five gallons of water. anyway, that night, I went out with friends drinking. The next day, I was a bit hung over but I packed the jeep and headed out. At Baker, along Interstate 15, before I started up the normal paved route to DV, I stopped and bought two or three 2 1/2 gallon bottles of water and ten pounds of ice. I put the ice into my three gallon galvanized igloo water cooler and filled the empty spaces with water. I figured that would last me. By the time I got to the turnoff to the dirt road up the valley, I was feeling like I could use a drink. I got out my powdered Gatorade and put some in my sierra cup. I filled the cup from the Igloo full of cold water and drank. I couldn't believe how warm it was. The ice had completely melted and the water was hot. Did I mention that the temperature that day was probably around 110 or more? And me, hung over which basically means dehydrated? Well, wait. This story gets even better.
So I carried on regardless, up the dirt track that was going to lead me to the spring and, eventually, Furnace Creek. A week or two before this, I'd bought, at a surplus store, two canvas or flaxen water bags. I'd remembered them from my youth where people driving in the hot summers would hang these water bags in front of the grills of their cars to help in keeping their engines cool. That purchase was one of the best purchases I'd ever made.
I found the little spur road that went off to the spring and followed it. The spring was lovely. There were a lot of tall green reed-like things growing around it. I wanted to go soak my bandana, but as I was getting out of the jeep I glanced in the side mirror and saw my face. I wasn't feeling very well at that point but when I saw that my face was bright red, I started to worry a little. The bandana got dipped, but as I made it back to the jeep, only about ten or fifteen feet, I was staggering. I was hot, I had a headache, I was panicking. I took off my shirt and started pacing in a circle next to the car. I wanted to take off my shorts. I kept pacing that circle feeling duller and dimmer with every circuit. A memory dawned in me. What I was doing wasn't right but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Oh, yeah. Recently I'd read about people found dead in the desert, naked, dropped in the circle they had been trudging, only feet away from the water they needed to survive in their RV vehicles. Wait, stop this! Do something. Get water.
All of the water I was carrying was hot. The water from the spring was hot. Everything I did was slow and agonizing. Thinking was difficult. Somewhere along the road, I'd lost one of my canvas water bags but I got the remaining one and filled it from one of the plastic water bottles. I hung it on the arm of my side mirror. I grabbed my shirt and threw it into the back of the jeep and headed off.
after a mile or two, I stopped and took a drink from the water bag. Damn, that water was cold. I poured some over me to cool me down. I did that from time to time until the bag was empty so I stopped to refill it from the plastic water jug. To work properly, the water jug needed to be punctured so I got out my buck knife to puncture it. I had the water jug, the canvas bag and my knife on the front bumper of the jeep. When the bag was full, I hung it on the mirror. I put the water in the back of the jeep and was off again. Gee, I guess I forgot about the knife. I never saw it again. I bet it's still out there, that road gets so little traffic, I don't reckon anyone would spot it.
At one point, I tried soaking my shirt and wearing it to cool me off but I wound up wearing a hot wet shirt. Uncomfortable and no help at all. I was so dopey I had a hard time keeping my foot on the gas pedal so I shifted into FWD low range and pulled out the throttle. In second gear, we were rocketing along at around twelve miles per hour. The road wasn't level at all, dipping and rising like waves in the ocean. I remember my head lolling as I tried to watch the dusty track and steer. At least all I had to do was steer. I refilled the water bag several more times before I got back to the main road that went up the east side of DV. By that point, I was feeling a bit better. Back in two wheel drive, I was moving along at a reasonable 50 mph or so. I passed a big camper with three or four bicyclists following it. Later, I passed a lone bicyclist. I thought the people with the camper were at least reasonably sane. The loner? I thought he was nuts and probably stupid too. More on that, a little later.
Finally, I got to Furnace Creek. I booked a hotel room there and headed off to the bar for a beer. It was too cold to drink. I still had a headache so I left it behind and headed off to my room where I soaked a towel in cold water and wrapped it around my head. I turned the A/C up as high as it would go and fell asleep. Next morning, I felt ok.
Now, in Death Valley, in the summer, sitting still when the humidity is around fifteen percent and the temperature is up around 110, you need up to three gallons of water per hour to replace what you sweat out without realizing you're sweating because it evaporates so fast. The result? Heatstroke and dehydration which I had suffered the previous day. Potentially fatal. I had come so close.
As I was hanging out around Furnace Creek the next day, I met the lone bicyclist I had seen the day before. I asked him what he was doing. He told me he was going to be riding out of the valley by way of emigrant pass. I asked him about water and he showed me a quart or so of tea he had strapped to the back of his bike. Tea? With caffeine? That's dehydrating. The pull up out of DV along Emigrant Pass is steep. I never tried it but I'd driven it a lot and I knew it would be a hard slog. I told him that. Oh, by the way, he was from Germany, on a bicycle tour of the United States. It was apparently a big macho deal to bike through Death Valley. In my opinion, considering the day before, it was more like a big macho death. I told him it would be far better to ride out after dark when the temps were possibly below one hundred. He was having none of that. I did what any concerned citizen would do. I went to the nearest ranger station and ratted him out. The next time I saw him, he and his bicycle were in the back of a ranger's pickup. Boy, did he glare at me. Oh, so sorry, I messed up your riding every mile of the 3,000 or so across the country but at least you're gonna live to see Germany again. I don't think he ever understood.
That leads back to the velvety wind. I knew it was lovely and warm but at the same time, I knew it could be equally fatal. Maybe that's what I liked about it.
I continued visiting Death Valley and Saline Valley for years after all of that, maybe a little wiser, maybe not. I never had a near death experience after that though.
A year or two later, after camping in Death Valley in August when the night time temperature was about 100 degrees, I was driving home and going up the mountain to leave the valley I started to get chilly. I had clothes in the car, camping clothes for all seasons so I put on a hoodie. That worked for a bit but I got colder so I rummaged around and found my down vest and put that on too. I had a thermometer attached to the visor above the windshield. I looked at the temperature. It said it was 80 degrees. I was cold all the way back to Los Angeles. People looked at me like I was nuts, sitting in my open jeep with no doors. I was, at least, comfortable.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Ice Boxes and Wood Ranges
Today I was reminded of some of the oddities of my past, I mean my really distant past, way, way back to the dawning of memory. I think of early childhood as being unconscious and then, slowly coming to, bit by bit until there is a continuity of memory. I recall once spending an hour or two as a four year-old sitting on abstractly flowered brownish linoleum in an empty room and noticing how the rectangle of sunlight coming through the window slid across the floor. I was pondering the nature of day, wondering exactly what one was. I don't think I ever figured it out but I know there was a children's story about tomorrow that went something like:
"Is it tomorrow?"
"No, it's today. Today we are going to the beach. Tomorrow we are going to the zoo."
The next morning at the breakfast table, "Is it tomorrow?"
"No, it's today. Today we are going to the zoo. Tomorrow we are going to visit grandma."
And so on. Yesterday must have figured into that story somehow because yesterday, today and tomorrow was what I was contemplating.
My parents divorced when I was eighteen months old. I don't remember that. My grandfather owned an apartment building in which we were staying. Apparently, when my dad bunked off, grandpa suggested he could stand in case my mother ever got horny. At least that was the gist of it. I didn't learn about this until I was nineteen sitting with my grandfather on the side of an alp near the Matterhorn. It creeped me out. It creeped my mother out too and she up and moved out. The problem was, there was no place to move to. After the war there was something of a housing shortage in Berkeley and landlords were unwilling to take children. The solution was to find someone who boarded children of parents stuck in exactly that situation. So I was shunted off to Walnut Creek to live on a ranch with the Bordens. Every few weeks, my mother would turn up to take me for the weekend. I would be in heaven until Sunday afternoon when it was time to go back. I can recall clinging to newel posts and door jambs, sobbing, in the hope of preventing my return to the ranch. I didn't really hate it there, it's just that I wasn't with my mother.
There were four or five other kids there, maybe more, I don't really recall except that there were both boys and girls. I remember sleeping in a room that had two bunk beds and my crib. I never ever went into the girls' room. I really looked up to the first-graders, they were so mature. The went off to school every day, how important! I lived there for two and a half years. In the winters, we would all assemble in the kitchen for breakfast. That was where the wood range was. All of the cooking was done on that wood range. There was no other cooking stove. That range warmed up the kitchen beautifully. As I recall, there was a narrow door on the left that opened to the fire box where the wood was placed. above it were burner plates with a little square hole on one side. There was a handle with a coiled wire grip to keep it cool that could be poked into the hole so the plate could be lifted. I remember bacon being cooked in a cast iron skillet directly over the flame with the burner lid removed but the most vivid memory is of Mrs. Borden lifting the lid away to drop more wood into the fire. Tongues of flame would flicker up out of the hole. I liked to watch from my high chair when she did that. I remember eating bacon with my fingers. It wasn't cooked all crisp and crumbly as is the current fashion. I remember the bacon being all ripply with translucent fat curling along one side. I liked the feel of that between my fingers and I liked the taste of it. I can picture it as I sit here. The high chair was painted a sky blue and, pressed to the tray top, the bacon fat would take on a hint of blue. I sometimes cook bacon that way to this day as a reminder of that kitchen.
On her own, my mother moved around a fair bit during those two and a half years. I remember staying weekends with her in a variety of places where she had a variety of roommates, young women trying to find better living conditions in the post war economy. One of the places she lived had an honest to goodness ice box. It was all mellow orange wood, varnished and shiny with bright chrome handles. The top compartment held big blocks of ice over a tray to catch the dripping water. I believe that tray had a hole in one corner that allowed the water to drip into a pitcher so there was always cold water to drink. Ice water. My mother kept a water pitcher in the fridge all the time I was growing up. Ice water. Once or twice, when I was staying with her there, the ice man came with a big block of ice in tongs balanced on a pad over his shoulder. He'd open the top compartment, take out the remains of the previous block and chuck it into the sink then he'd put the new block in and shut the door. I guess he had to come on Saturdays because all the girls who lived there worked during the week. The ice man impressed me, he seemed important, maybe I'd grow up to be an ice man. By the time I was ten or so, all the ice men, or most of them had moved on to become something else, perhaps milk men for a while. Another job that hasn't lasted.
I bring all this up because today's NYT Crossword stirred these memories. I don't know many or even any folks who remember wood ranges being cooked on or ice men coming to fill ice boxes. When my mother finally found an apartment that would accept her with me, she came and got me. I remember her showing off the tiny fridge in that apartment that had once been an ice box that was built into the wall. And I remember here showing off the gas range which she lit with a kitchen match. I remember wondering what the big deal was.
"Is it tomorrow?"
"No, it's today. Today we are going to the beach. Tomorrow we are going to the zoo."
The next morning at the breakfast table, "Is it tomorrow?"
"No, it's today. Today we are going to the zoo. Tomorrow we are going to visit grandma."
And so on. Yesterday must have figured into that story somehow because yesterday, today and tomorrow was what I was contemplating.
My parents divorced when I was eighteen months old. I don't remember that. My grandfather owned an apartment building in which we were staying. Apparently, when my dad bunked off, grandpa suggested he could stand in case my mother ever got horny. At least that was the gist of it. I didn't learn about this until I was nineteen sitting with my grandfather on the side of an alp near the Matterhorn. It creeped me out. It creeped my mother out too and she up and moved out. The problem was, there was no place to move to. After the war there was something of a housing shortage in Berkeley and landlords were unwilling to take children. The solution was to find someone who boarded children of parents stuck in exactly that situation. So I was shunted off to Walnut Creek to live on a ranch with the Bordens. Every few weeks, my mother would turn up to take me for the weekend. I would be in heaven until Sunday afternoon when it was time to go back. I can recall clinging to newel posts and door jambs, sobbing, in the hope of preventing my return to the ranch. I didn't really hate it there, it's just that I wasn't with my mother.
There were four or five other kids there, maybe more, I don't really recall except that there were both boys and girls. I remember sleeping in a room that had two bunk beds and my crib. I never ever went into the girls' room. I really looked up to the first-graders, they were so mature. The went off to school every day, how important! I lived there for two and a half years. In the winters, we would all assemble in the kitchen for breakfast. That was where the wood range was. All of the cooking was done on that wood range. There was no other cooking stove. That range warmed up the kitchen beautifully. As I recall, there was a narrow door on the left that opened to the fire box where the wood was placed. above it were burner plates with a little square hole on one side. There was a handle with a coiled wire grip to keep it cool that could be poked into the hole so the plate could be lifted. I remember bacon being cooked in a cast iron skillet directly over the flame with the burner lid removed but the most vivid memory is of Mrs. Borden lifting the lid away to drop more wood into the fire. Tongues of flame would flicker up out of the hole. I liked to watch from my high chair when she did that. I remember eating bacon with my fingers. It wasn't cooked all crisp and crumbly as is the current fashion. I remember the bacon being all ripply with translucent fat curling along one side. I liked the feel of that between my fingers and I liked the taste of it. I can picture it as I sit here. The high chair was painted a sky blue and, pressed to the tray top, the bacon fat would take on a hint of blue. I sometimes cook bacon that way to this day as a reminder of that kitchen.
On her own, my mother moved around a fair bit during those two and a half years. I remember staying weekends with her in a variety of places where she had a variety of roommates, young women trying to find better living conditions in the post war economy. One of the places she lived had an honest to goodness ice box. It was all mellow orange wood, varnished and shiny with bright chrome handles. The top compartment held big blocks of ice over a tray to catch the dripping water. I believe that tray had a hole in one corner that allowed the water to drip into a pitcher so there was always cold water to drink. Ice water. My mother kept a water pitcher in the fridge all the time I was growing up. Ice water. Once or twice, when I was staying with her there, the ice man came with a big block of ice in tongs balanced on a pad over his shoulder. He'd open the top compartment, take out the remains of the previous block and chuck it into the sink then he'd put the new block in and shut the door. I guess he had to come on Saturdays because all the girls who lived there worked during the week. The ice man impressed me, he seemed important, maybe I'd grow up to be an ice man. By the time I was ten or so, all the ice men, or most of them had moved on to become something else, perhaps milk men for a while. Another job that hasn't lasted.
I bring all this up because today's NYT Crossword stirred these memories. I don't know many or even any folks who remember wood ranges being cooked on or ice men coming to fill ice boxes. When my mother finally found an apartment that would accept her with me, she came and got me. I remember her showing off the tiny fridge in that apartment that had once been an ice box that was built into the wall. And I remember here showing off the gas range which she lit with a kitchen match. I remember wondering what the big deal was.
Another copy of a post to Rex Parker
Copy of the comment for the puzzle of Jan. 22nd. I had to post this in two separate pieces because I violated a length limit of 4,000 plus characters.
This was fun. I put ANDERSEN because I couldn't think of anything other than INURE that might fit. ~SONs and ~SeNs are always a problem, or almost always. I don't have any of the complaints that @Rex has. THESWITCH didn't bother me at all, in fact, I think I've seen that movie. The rebuses (rebi?) surprised me because this isn't Thursday but then, who said that all Thursdays have to have rebuses and no other days can have them? Empirically, that's not true at all and I like surprises.
Now, as for @Rex: he's a tad young to be a curmudgeon but nobody will deny that he's the Andy Rooney of Crossworld. Whether he truly believes, in his heart, what he says, he always stirs lively debate and, given the degree to which I digress, he believes, to a fault, in free speech as he's not banned me from his comments. I don't always agree with him but he always gives me something to think about where I may not have thought at all.
And now, I shall digress.
I thought about yesterday's answer, ARTOO. Y'all know the origin of that? I recognized it immediately I heard it thirty-some years ago, Artoodeetoo. In Australia I was a film editor but when I came home and needed to get into the union, my Australian experience didn't qualify me for that job. I needed work and eventually got an offer to be a music editor at Hanna-Barbera.
That's a sound job. Sound FX etc. When we would go to a dub, that's when we'd mix all of the sound tracks down to a single track so it could be married to the image, producing a single cohesive unit called a "movie," we would all, sound FX editors, music editors, foley editors, and dialogue editors would assemble the fruits of our labors on reels to be mixed together. My tracks might be labled R1 Mx1 and R1 Mx2, meaning reel one, music tracks one and two. George Lucas was looking at the tracks for a "dub" and saw R2 D2 and thought that would be a good name for that droid. Reel two, dialogue two. And oh boy, is he chatty, nearly worse than C3PO.
Digression continued:
Okay, so nobody ponied up. Well, I will. @Questinia, I have a breadcrumb recipe. My daughter spent a year studying at the University of New South Wales or, Sydney Uni. While there, she needed to work. Her work experience in the U. S. qualified her for a job at a local Subway. Did you know that there are a ton of Subway franchises in Australia? Anyway she told us about a sandwich they have there that we don't have here but that reminded her of food that I'd cooked and that she enjoyed. Mostly she doesn't like any meat other than chicken and the occasional turkey. The sandwich they have there is a chicken schnitzel subway. I make a wiener schnitzel that she likes which is a surprise. When she described the sandwich to us, we decided to try it. Oh boy, yummy! This won't exactly be a recipe but possibly more a discussion of schnitzel. When I googled schnitzel I discovered that it was a way of cooking, not that it had anything specifically to do with veal. In fact, any meat will do as long as it's cut thin enough.
So, here's schnitzel:
Some meat
Some flour
Some beaten up egg
Some bread crumbs (you can buy bread crumbs or make them. Bread toasted on Monday and used on Tuesday is usually better than freshly toasted bread but it all works. Just toss it in a blender and crunch it all up.)Panko works too
Some oil for frying
Some fresh lemons
Take the meat and, if it's a chicken breast, slice it horizontally into two or three thin pieces, depending on how how sharp your knife is and how good you are using it. With veal, ask the butcher for scalopini slices as thin as possible. You could try slicing horizontally as per above but I'd suggest getting it to nearly freezing first.
Real schnitzel is meant to be paper-thin. I knew of an Austrian guy who would order wiener schnitzel, then hold it up and if he couldn't see light through it, send it back. So, if you can't get it that thin and you want it to be that way, get out the old hammer and beat it to death. I don't care and maybe prefer the meat to be a little thicker. Once you have satisfactory slices, dredge them in some of the flour insuring that they are completely covered. Then dip them into some of the beaten eggs or eggs, again, insuring they are completely wet. Next, dredge them in the breadcrumbs. They may need coaxing to get the bread crumbs to adhere to the entire surface of the meat.
Heat oil in a frying pan or skillet. Olive oil seems best to me but you need a lot. A quarter inch deep in the pan. Squeeze lemon juice onto the schnitzels before you place them, lemoned side down, into the hot oil. They should nearly float. If they don't, you'll peel the bread crumbs off no mater how you try to turn them, tongs, spatula, whatever. Squeeze more lemon juice on the top, un-lemoned side as they cook. Really thin schnitzels don't need much cooking, a couple minutes per side. You be the judge based on the thickness of the meat.
Serve with whatever vegetables you like and quarters or eights of lemon so your guests can add flavor or not.
I'm not fond of chicken though I'll eat it. In my past I had more chickens for dinner than I liked and got fed up with it. Four or five nights a week for years? Gimme a break, I had a lifetime of chicken. Chicken schnitzel? I love it and will make it whenever the occasion arises. But schnitzel can be made with almost any meat. I've made it with beef, veal and chicken. Pork is possible. Buffalo, deer, elk, moose; all are possible. I've even used that precise method cooking sole for another daughter of mine.
So, @Qustinia, bread crumbs are an essential ingredient of one particular style of cooking. Just as fairy tales are an essential ingredient in this particular puzzle.
10:41 PM
This was fun. I put ANDERSEN because I couldn't think of anything other than INURE that might fit. ~SONs and ~SeNs are always a problem, or almost always. I don't have any of the complaints that @Rex has. THESWITCH didn't bother me at all, in fact, I think I've seen that movie. The rebuses (rebi?) surprised me because this isn't Thursday but then, who said that all Thursdays have to have rebuses and no other days can have them? Empirically, that's not true at all and I like surprises.
Now, as for @Rex: he's a tad young to be a curmudgeon but nobody will deny that he's the Andy Rooney of Crossworld. Whether he truly believes, in his heart, what he says, he always stirs lively debate and, given the degree to which I digress, he believes, to a fault, in free speech as he's not banned me from his comments. I don't always agree with him but he always gives me something to think about where I may not have thought at all.
And now, I shall digress.
I thought about yesterday's answer, ARTOO. Y'all know the origin of that? I recognized it immediately I heard it thirty-some years ago, Artoodeetoo. In Australia I was a film editor but when I came home and needed to get into the union, my Australian experience didn't qualify me for that job. I needed work and eventually got an offer to be a music editor at Hanna-Barbera.
That's a sound job. Sound FX etc. When we would go to a dub, that's when we'd mix all of the sound tracks down to a single track so it could be married to the image, producing a single cohesive unit called a "movie," we would all, sound FX editors, music editors, foley editors, and dialogue editors would assemble the fruits of our labors on reels to be mixed together. My tracks might be labled R1 Mx1 and R1 Mx2, meaning reel one, music tracks one and two. George Lucas was looking at the tracks for a "dub" and saw R2 D2 and thought that would be a good name for that droid. Reel two, dialogue two. And oh boy, is he chatty, nearly worse than C3PO.
Digression continued:
Okay, so nobody ponied up. Well, I will. @Questinia, I have a breadcrumb recipe. My daughter spent a year studying at the University of New South Wales or, Sydney Uni. While there, she needed to work. Her work experience in the U. S. qualified her for a job at a local Subway. Did you know that there are a ton of Subway franchises in Australia? Anyway she told us about a sandwich they have there that we don't have here but that reminded her of food that I'd cooked and that she enjoyed. Mostly she doesn't like any meat other than chicken and the occasional turkey. The sandwich they have there is a chicken schnitzel subway. I make a wiener schnitzel that she likes which is a surprise. When she described the sandwich to us, we decided to try it. Oh boy, yummy! This won't exactly be a recipe but possibly more a discussion of schnitzel. When I googled schnitzel I discovered that it was a way of cooking, not that it had anything specifically to do with veal. In fact, any meat will do as long as it's cut thin enough.
So, here's schnitzel:
Some meat
Some flour
Some beaten up egg
Some bread crumbs (you can buy bread crumbs or make them. Bread toasted on Monday and used on Tuesday is usually better than freshly toasted bread but it all works. Just toss it in a blender and crunch it all up.)Panko works too
Some oil for frying
Some fresh lemons
Take the meat and, if it's a chicken breast, slice it horizontally into two or three thin pieces, depending on how how sharp your knife is and how good you are using it. With veal, ask the butcher for scalopini slices as thin as possible. You could try slicing horizontally as per above but I'd suggest getting it to nearly freezing first.
Real schnitzel is meant to be paper-thin. I knew of an Austrian guy who would order wiener schnitzel, then hold it up and if he couldn't see light through it, send it back. So, if you can't get it that thin and you want it to be that way, get out the old hammer and beat it to death. I don't care and maybe prefer the meat to be a little thicker. Once you have satisfactory slices, dredge them in some of the flour insuring that they are completely covered. Then dip them into some of the beaten eggs or eggs, again, insuring they are completely wet. Next, dredge them in the breadcrumbs. They may need coaxing to get the bread crumbs to adhere to the entire surface of the meat.
Heat oil in a frying pan or skillet. Olive oil seems best to me but you need a lot. A quarter inch deep in the pan. Squeeze lemon juice onto the schnitzels before you place them, lemoned side down, into the hot oil. They should nearly float. If they don't, you'll peel the bread crumbs off no mater how you try to turn them, tongs, spatula, whatever. Squeeze more lemon juice on the top, un-lemoned side as they cook. Really thin schnitzels don't need much cooking, a couple minutes per side. You be the judge based on the thickness of the meat.
Serve with whatever vegetables you like and quarters or eights of lemon so your guests can add flavor or not.
I'm not fond of chicken though I'll eat it. In my past I had more chickens for dinner than I liked and got fed up with it. Four or five nights a week for years? Gimme a break, I had a lifetime of chicken. Chicken schnitzel? I love it and will make it whenever the occasion arises. But schnitzel can be made with almost any meat. I've made it with beef, veal and chicken. Pork is possible. Buffalo, deer, elk, moose; all are possible. I've even used that precise method cooking sole for another daughter of mine.
So, @Qustinia, bread crumbs are an essential ingredient of one particular style of cooking. Just as fairy tales are an essential ingredient in this particular puzzle.
10:41 PM
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Rambling
I just feel like rambling.
I wish I could write like Dylan Thomas. I was once told, while studying film in London that cinematically, I was a poet. I've tried my hand at poetry since I was in eighth grade, some of it, from tie to time, has even been reasonably good. but I never had the poetic sensibility of that Welshman. My writing may have more in common with Ernest Hemingway, sparse, concise though I'd say that I'm fonder of a complex sentence than he. Perhaps I have a little leaning toward the style of James Agee though he could write a five hundred word sentence without pausing to blink. One of the beauties of his writing was that he could use every form of punctuation in one sentence as easily as I can burp.
In the mid '60s, when I was experimenting with things like Milltown and dexedrine, I could talk for hours, digressing and digressing until anyone who would listen felt lost. Somehow I would manage to return, layer by layer, finishing each point I'd made until I returned to the original point of my tirade. More than once, my friends whom I'd tortured in that fashion would say things like, "Oh, wow. You made it all the way back."
I'm the oldest person to have ever competed in the National Debate Tournament. aMusingly, it was the 50th NDT and I was 50 years old. Now there's a story: I was at lose ends. The television show I had worked on as music editor for nine years, Smurfs, had ended and the show I'd worked on after that, Midnight Caller, had ended too. Music and sound editing were migrating, because of technology, from the Film Editors Union to the Sound Recordist's Union and I didn't want to make that move. Technology was passing me by. So I went back to college to rediscover myself and in the process, not wanting to take Public Speaking, I took a course at Los Angeles City College in Interpretive Reading (I'd had pretensions of acting in my teens). The first assignment was to read a poem, This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams:
I have eaten
the plums
that were
in the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
I tried my best to sound like a seventy five year old man writing a note to his wife to leave on the refrigerator door; a wife whom he rarely saw and who probably, at this age, slept in a different bedroom. After ten or fifteen of my classmates had done their versions of the poem, it became my turn. After listening to all of them, ideas of how to approach the reading tumbled through my brain. I got up and walked to the podium. I can't believe how my knees shook and my mouth went dry. I read; well, by then, it was memorized so I spoke. My wobbling pins added just a bit of quaver to my voice but my lack of hydration prevented my use of the sibilant whistle like that dirty old man in The Family Guy has. It was over and I sat down, amazingly, not dripping off the chair like a Dali watch. The class ended and as I headed out I found myself walking beside Jean D. the class instructor. She spoke.
"That was very well done. You should join the forensics team. Would you like to come to our office to see what it's all about?"
I didn't have another class just then, and as I was "rediscovering" myself, I said, "Sure."
So, two semesters of interpretive reading competitions and a tiny bit of parliamentary debate at the end of the second semester saw me paired up with a partner for debate competitions the following year. Interestingly, LACC is a member of the NDT. I don't recall why but it is one of a very few of the two year schools that is. The NDT was coming up and there was a competition amongst the applicant schools for selection to the tournament. We fielded two teams against a couple from USC. In the end, my partner, Art, and I won an invitation. At a debate competition at UCLB, their debate coach came up to me and whispered in my ear, "You mother fucker, I never got to go to the NDT." He had, become a friend over the previous year and a half so I took that in the spirit it was meant. Our invitation was our coach's first shot at the NDT too.
We were off to Wake Forest in North Carolina. It was our first year of Debate. We were raw in spite of my having spent two weeks, the previous summer at a debate camp at George Mason University, near McLean, Virginia. While there, I discovered how important reading speed is. Cases can be quite lengthy and it is incumbent on the pro side to state it completely. The first time I heard an NDT standard case read, I was agog. I could barely understand it. Everyone else at the debate camp understood but I was nonplussed. With some practice, after a while, I got my reading speed up to 270 words per minute. John F. Kennedy, who also competed at the NDT still, as far as I know, holds the record at an astounding 500 words per minute.
Art and I came last, not winning a single debate. We were seventy eighth out of seventy eight. Oh well, in every race, someone has to finish last. When we got back to Los Angeles, Art and I were interviewed by the L. A. Times and I provided a comment which I had considered carefully for days. It was misquoted, of course. I told the reporter, "I would rather be the worst of the best than the best of the rest."
On the promise of a debate scholarship, which I never got, I decided to transfer to West Virginia University. I applied and got in. By the time I got there, the coach who had offered me the scholarship had moved on to another university and, after contacting members of the debate team, I learned that they had been expecting me but, sadly, the debate team was full up and didn't require any more members. Oh well. I was enrolled in the Communication Studies program there and was starting to learn the social science of human communication which is vastly broader than the uninitiate might imagine.
A few weeks into the semester, I had occasion to telephone my LACC debate coach and let him know that WVU was trying to turn me into a social scientist. His comment? "Don't let them forget that you are a rhetorician!" My thought after harkening back to my Milltown days? "Dude, you have no idea."
Hemingway reputedly said, "Write drunk, edit sober." I try to take at least half of that advice.
I wish I could write like Dylan Thomas. I was once told, while studying film in London that cinematically, I was a poet. I've tried my hand at poetry since I was in eighth grade, some of it, from tie to time, has even been reasonably good. but I never had the poetic sensibility of that Welshman. My writing may have more in common with Ernest Hemingway, sparse, concise though I'd say that I'm fonder of a complex sentence than he. Perhaps I have a little leaning toward the style of James Agee though he could write a five hundred word sentence without pausing to blink. One of the beauties of his writing was that he could use every form of punctuation in one sentence as easily as I can burp.
In the mid '60s, when I was experimenting with things like Milltown and dexedrine, I could talk for hours, digressing and digressing until anyone who would listen felt lost. Somehow I would manage to return, layer by layer, finishing each point I'd made until I returned to the original point of my tirade. More than once, my friends whom I'd tortured in that fashion would say things like, "Oh, wow. You made it all the way back."
I'm the oldest person to have ever competed in the National Debate Tournament. aMusingly, it was the 50th NDT and I was 50 years old. Now there's a story: I was at lose ends. The television show I had worked on as music editor for nine years, Smurfs, had ended and the show I'd worked on after that, Midnight Caller, had ended too. Music and sound editing were migrating, because of technology, from the Film Editors Union to the Sound Recordist's Union and I didn't want to make that move. Technology was passing me by. So I went back to college to rediscover myself and in the process, not wanting to take Public Speaking, I took a course at Los Angeles City College in Interpretive Reading (I'd had pretensions of acting in my teens). The first assignment was to read a poem, This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams:
I have eaten
the plums
that were
in the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
I tried my best to sound like a seventy five year old man writing a note to his wife to leave on the refrigerator door; a wife whom he rarely saw and who probably, at this age, slept in a different bedroom. After ten or fifteen of my classmates had done their versions of the poem, it became my turn. After listening to all of them, ideas of how to approach the reading tumbled through my brain. I got up and walked to the podium. I can't believe how my knees shook and my mouth went dry. I read; well, by then, it was memorized so I spoke. My wobbling pins added just a bit of quaver to my voice but my lack of hydration prevented my use of the sibilant whistle like that dirty old man in The Family Guy has. It was over and I sat down, amazingly, not dripping off the chair like a Dali watch. The class ended and as I headed out I found myself walking beside Jean D. the class instructor. She spoke.
"That was very well done. You should join the forensics team. Would you like to come to our office to see what it's all about?"
I didn't have another class just then, and as I was "rediscovering" myself, I said, "Sure."
So, two semesters of interpretive reading competitions and a tiny bit of parliamentary debate at the end of the second semester saw me paired up with a partner for debate competitions the following year. Interestingly, LACC is a member of the NDT. I don't recall why but it is one of a very few of the two year schools that is. The NDT was coming up and there was a competition amongst the applicant schools for selection to the tournament. We fielded two teams against a couple from USC. In the end, my partner, Art, and I won an invitation. At a debate competition at UCLB, their debate coach came up to me and whispered in my ear, "You mother fucker, I never got to go to the NDT." He had, become a friend over the previous year and a half so I took that in the spirit it was meant. Our invitation was our coach's first shot at the NDT too.
We were off to Wake Forest in North Carolina. It was our first year of Debate. We were raw in spite of my having spent two weeks, the previous summer at a debate camp at George Mason University, near McLean, Virginia. While there, I discovered how important reading speed is. Cases can be quite lengthy and it is incumbent on the pro side to state it completely. The first time I heard an NDT standard case read, I was agog. I could barely understand it. Everyone else at the debate camp understood but I was nonplussed. With some practice, after a while, I got my reading speed up to 270 words per minute. John F. Kennedy, who also competed at the NDT still, as far as I know, holds the record at an astounding 500 words per minute.
Art and I came last, not winning a single debate. We were seventy eighth out of seventy eight. Oh well, in every race, someone has to finish last. When we got back to Los Angeles, Art and I were interviewed by the L. A. Times and I provided a comment which I had considered carefully for days. It was misquoted, of course. I told the reporter, "I would rather be the worst of the best than the best of the rest."
On the promise of a debate scholarship, which I never got, I decided to transfer to West Virginia University. I applied and got in. By the time I got there, the coach who had offered me the scholarship had moved on to another university and, after contacting members of the debate team, I learned that they had been expecting me but, sadly, the debate team was full up and didn't require any more members. Oh well. I was enrolled in the Communication Studies program there and was starting to learn the social science of human communication which is vastly broader than the uninitiate might imagine.
A few weeks into the semester, I had occasion to telephone my LACC debate coach and let him know that WVU was trying to turn me into a social scientist. His comment? "Don't let them forget that you are a rhetorician!" My thought after harkening back to my Milltown days? "Dude, you have no idea."
Hemingway reputedly said, "Write drunk, edit sober." I try to take at least half of that advice.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
A Reflection
As I thought about my last posting I began to muse on how bread baking may have been discovered. Of course there is no way to actually know but I had a few thoughts.
California aborigines would never have developed farming. They didn't need to because their staple food grew on oak trees. They would peel and grind acorns which they had to leech in order to remove the tannins. For grinding, they would use a mortar and a pestle which was any nearby flat rock. Over time it would develop a nice hollow which kept the "flour" from scattering (I've seen these hollows in the granite several places in the Sierra Nevada as I prowled the mountains in my youth; occasionally they are marked on topographical maps of the area). They also used a mano and metate like the Mexicans used for grinding maize. How grinding grains was discovered is beyond me but I assume European people used the same methods.
I'm guessing here, but I imagine a sort of porridge can be made directly from cereal grains but that can be improved when the grains are hulled. From hulling a grain to grinding flour is only a short hop and it seems that every primitive culture ground "flour" of one sort or another. Mixed with a little water, the flour can be patted into cakes which could be placed on a flat rock supported over the coals of a fire and heated. The early Californians did it that way, Brits were still doing it that way when Alfred defeated the Danes. I assume that was also the origin of tortillas.
So how do we make the jump to leavened bread? Yeast is omnipresent, you might even say it is ineluctable. The spores can even be found on the grain itself. Now, cast your mind back, way back. No, even further back to when you skinned an animal with a blade made from flint or obsidian. There you will see a woman who had just finished grinding her flour and placed it in a bowl or tightly woven reed basket, added some water and is preparing to pat the dough into cakes to bake over the fire. A baby cries, her baby. She jumps up, leaving the basket or bowl right next to the fire and goes off to find her daughter has fallen on a rock and cut her arm rather badly. It takes a while to stop the bleeding and bind up the wound. She then takes her daughter back into the round house or hut or cave and rocks her lovingly until she falls asleep. Then it's back to the fire but, what's this? The dough has grown. There is much more than she had when she was called away. Oh well. She pats the dough into flat cakes anyway and places them on the baking stone. Even though flattened, they puff up as they cook. Intrigued, she picks one up and, shuffling it from hand to hand and blowing on it to cool it, she takes a bite. Oh my, isn't that delicious. When Ogg and Zork get home from a hard day of ploughing and taste the cakes, they agree. Eventually, it occurs to the woman that the difference was leaving the dough near the fire where it was warm for the time it took to tend her injured daughter. The rest might just be history.
I can imagine beer came to be in a similar way. A bowl of grains ready to be cooked for porridge and forgotten for a while, possibly even a few days in the summer when it was warm. Ogg might have been tempted to taste the slightly foamy water and even drink it down. Oh boy, don't he feel nice all of a sudden? Might have to try this again. A lot. Maybe he could open a bar.
I often ponder how things came to be. The marvel of Homo Sapiens discovering how to chip flint or obsidian to make objects helpful to daily life. Who dreamed up rope or baskets or pottery and how? Originally, it was serendipity and the capacity humans have to figure things out from observed phenomena. Our capacity to reason and conceptualize.
I have tried here to conceptualize how Ogg discovered beer and his wife discovered leavened bread. There is no way to actually know but it's fun to imagine.
California aborigines would never have developed farming. They didn't need to because their staple food grew on oak trees. They would peel and grind acorns which they had to leech in order to remove the tannins. For grinding, they would use a mortar and a pestle which was any nearby flat rock. Over time it would develop a nice hollow which kept the "flour" from scattering (I've seen these hollows in the granite several places in the Sierra Nevada as I prowled the mountains in my youth; occasionally they are marked on topographical maps of the area). They also used a mano and metate like the Mexicans used for grinding maize. How grinding grains was discovered is beyond me but I assume European people used the same methods.
I'm guessing here, but I imagine a sort of porridge can be made directly from cereal grains but that can be improved when the grains are hulled. From hulling a grain to grinding flour is only a short hop and it seems that every primitive culture ground "flour" of one sort or another. Mixed with a little water, the flour can be patted into cakes which could be placed on a flat rock supported over the coals of a fire and heated. The early Californians did it that way, Brits were still doing it that way when Alfred defeated the Danes. I assume that was also the origin of tortillas.
So how do we make the jump to leavened bread? Yeast is omnipresent, you might even say it is ineluctable. The spores can even be found on the grain itself. Now, cast your mind back, way back. No, even further back to when you skinned an animal with a blade made from flint or obsidian. There you will see a woman who had just finished grinding her flour and placed it in a bowl or tightly woven reed basket, added some water and is preparing to pat the dough into cakes to bake over the fire. A baby cries, her baby. She jumps up, leaving the basket or bowl right next to the fire and goes off to find her daughter has fallen on a rock and cut her arm rather badly. It takes a while to stop the bleeding and bind up the wound. She then takes her daughter back into the round house or hut or cave and rocks her lovingly until she falls asleep. Then it's back to the fire but, what's this? The dough has grown. There is much more than she had when she was called away. Oh well. She pats the dough into flat cakes anyway and places them on the baking stone. Even though flattened, they puff up as they cook. Intrigued, she picks one up and, shuffling it from hand to hand and blowing on it to cool it, she takes a bite. Oh my, isn't that delicious. When Ogg and Zork get home from a hard day of ploughing and taste the cakes, they agree. Eventually, it occurs to the woman that the difference was leaving the dough near the fire where it was warm for the time it took to tend her injured daughter. The rest might just be history.
I can imagine beer came to be in a similar way. A bowl of grains ready to be cooked for porridge and forgotten for a while, possibly even a few days in the summer when it was warm. Ogg might have been tempted to taste the slightly foamy water and even drink it down. Oh boy, don't he feel nice all of a sudden? Might have to try this again. A lot. Maybe he could open a bar.
I often ponder how things came to be. The marvel of Homo Sapiens discovering how to chip flint or obsidian to make objects helpful to daily life. Who dreamed up rope or baskets or pottery and how? Originally, it was serendipity and the capacity humans have to figure things out from observed phenomena. Our capacity to reason and conceptualize.
I have tried here to conceptualize how Ogg discovered beer and his wife discovered leavened bread. There is no way to actually know but it's fun to imagine.
Today, on the Rex Parker Does the . . . blog, @Ellen S said:
. . . I want to talk about Questinia's bread recipe! I made it last week. What a HOOT!
Her recipe said:
Mix 3 1/2 C warm H2O with 1 TB yeast and 1 TB salt.
Stir in about 6 C flour until no lumps.
Dough will be wet. Let rise an hour or so.
Form as baguettes or boules, let rise additional 15 mins or so.
Bake in quick oven. (that’s 400 degrees. Or 500 degrees – if 500, “15-25 minutes”. Hah.)
Also useful as a pizza dough.
That turned out to be "about" 2# of flour = one bag from Sprouts. And exactly one packet of Active Dry Yeast. So measuring was sure simple. But I used whole wheat flour which might have messed up the whole process. I also didn't let it rise long enough, let it raise another time, maybe a few other things I should have done or not done. But the amazing thing is, I did everything wrong and it still tasted great. I'll play around and let you know if I can get a version that shapes into baguettes.
. . . I want to talk about Questinia's bread recipe! I made it last week. What a HOOT!
Her recipe said:
Mix 3 1/2 C warm H2O with 1 TB yeast and 1 TB salt.
Stir in about 6 C flour until no lumps.
Dough will be wet. Let rise an hour or so.
Form as baguettes or boules, let rise additional 15 mins or so.
Bake in quick oven. (that’s 400 degrees. Or 500 degrees – if 500, “15-25 minutes”. Hah.)
Also useful as a pizza dough.
That turned out to be "about" 2# of flour = one bag from Sprouts. And exactly one packet of Active Dry Yeast. So measuring was sure simple. But I used whole wheat flour which might have messed up the whole process. I also didn't let it rise long enough, let it raise another time, maybe a few other things I should have done or not done. But the amazing thing is, I did everything wrong and it still tasted great. I'll play around and let you know if I can get a version that shapes into baguettes.
I've been baking bread every three or four days now for the past three or four months. I'm still seeking the perfect baguette or batard or boule. Lately I'm happier with my results than I have been.
The bread I baked today.
Some background: In the late 70s when I worked for the Living History Center, the creator of the Renaissance Pleasure Faires and the Dickens Fair in California, I lived with the family of a woman who, among other things, researched and prepared meals from the renaissance period. Every day or so, she would dip her hands into the steel garbage can she kept her flour in and pull out a few double hands full of flour and dump it into a wooden bowl she kept on the table, she'd add water, salt, sugar or honey, and yeast and mix it all up with her hands. She'd knead it for a bit then leave it alone for a while. She'd go back and do things to it every now and again and, after a few hours there would be the wonderful smell of bread baking. Here's the point: bread is a very forgiving thing to make. One can make a lot of mistakes and still get good tasting bread. You need only look at the various recipes for bread that can be found in books or on the internet to realize that there are innumerable variations that will all produce decent bread.
Now, as to Questinia's recipe. To me, that seems like far too much water for that amount of flour. My renaissance friend told me and many many recipes confirm that a good rule of thumb is two cups of water to six cups of flour. A more hydrated dough will produce bigger baguette-like holes in the crumb but a more hydrated dough would come from more like 5 1/2 cups of flour instead of six and that is going to depend on the humidity in your kitchen.
I weigh my flour for accuracy and use grams because I only have an electronic postal scale. I regard one cup of flour as 110 grams and use 660 grams of flour to make two medium baguettes/batards. You used just over 900 grams and I don't think that was even enough. Next, you used whole wheat flour. Because of the germ and other stuff in whole wheat that white flour doesn't have, whole wheat won't rise as much as white flour. I don't remember the exact reason, but that's the gist.
I've been using the recipe for hearth bread from the King Arthur Flour website. I've varied it slightly here and there, mostly in method but occasionally in the sweetening, using honey, syrup, and brown sugar. I've only noticed a significant difference in taste the one time I forgot to add salt. I bought sourdough starter from KAF and went through all of that process and made a couple of loaves but the result was nowhere near what I, having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, would regard as sourdough bread. If I really really want that, I can have it shipped to me. So, to me, sourdough isn't worth the effort required to make it just to save the cost of a packet of yeast.
I use KAF bread flour and would recommend it. I tried using all purpose flour and whole wheat flour but prefer the bread flour. It has more protein and seems to set up better for me.
There is something amazing about doing something humans have been doing for ten thousand years. Bread and beer go hand in hand and it can be argued beer brewing and bread baking developed side by side. No, I don't grind my own wheat but it's magical to take flour and turn that white powder into food. And what wonderful food it is. The Roman army marched on it. A pound of bread per day for each soldier and, if he was lucky, some olive oil to dip it in. Baking bread speaks to me in a primal way. It connects me to my neolithic farming ancestors and all the others through the ages.
My renaissance friend tells a story of her great grandmother baking bread by a camp fire in the morning after it had risen overnight. She then set more dough to rise through the day as she walked beside her covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. Nobody rode the wagons as the added weight taxed the oxen. That night, she baked more bread and then delivered a son. She was hiking again the next day. He got to ride, at least some of the time, in the wagon.
Bread permeates our history as human beings. I hope I'm not preaching to the choir. All of this assumes you are not a seasoned baker. Continuing that assumption, I hope you continue your adventure into bread baking. I'll offer this little bit of advice: find a recipe that suits you and keep with it until you get the results you desire. I can't think of much that's more rewarding than creating food from bland powder except occasionally giving a loaf to a friend or neighbor.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
A Copy of Today's Post to the Rex Parker Blog
A lance corporal might be a U. S. Marine but the clue requested his orgaization, the U. S. Marine Corps. I'm vaguely offended since the abbreviation is, 99.99% of the time USMC. There maybe one saving grace for David however:
"I'm a hayseed,
"My hair is seaweed
"And my ears are made of leather.
"How they flop in rainy weather.
"Gosh all hemlock,
"Tough as a pine knot:
"We're United States Marines!"
Mother taught me that song along with a few others. Near the end of WWII she was a staff sergeant in the Corps, a Link Trainer instructor at the Cherry Point, NC Marine Corps Air Station. One day, she was tasked to instruct Tyrone Power in the skills of instrument flying on the 1944 equivalant of MS Flight Simulator. Another girl, however, rigged the assignment so she would get the movie star. Tough luck but there was a compensation. A tall young pilot, a T3 sgt, who eventually became her husband and my father. CORPS was drilled into me from the age of four. My mom even taught me hospital corners and to bounce a quarter off the blanket of my "rack" (that's USMC for bed). When I was eight or nine, I called my mother a BAM to be funny. She actually slapped me. (Google "bam usmc" and you'll get it).
Ok, so overall, I liked this puzzle. I had to google for three proper nouns though: BATES, IVAR, and SASHAFIERCE. I'm a blues guy, I don't listen to R&B so I don't think I've ever heard anything by Beyonce. Other than those, I enjoyed wrapping my head around the other clues. Loved the [Cannes neighbors] when I finally figured out the clue was meta.
Do I apologise (note 'Anglo-Saxon spelling) for a rant now?
I first came across UGGs in 1968 or 9 in a little shop in Crows Nest, a northern suburb of Sydney. They were fairly dear for those days at A$12.00 but I bought them and loved them almost instantly. Those early forms had only the same sheepskin as the tops for soles. Still, they lasted a decent time before wearing out. @LMS, I hate wearing socks and have done since I was in second grade when I pressured my mother to buy me cowboy boots and the socks would bunch up inside them.
The story of UGGs: a surfer from the northern beaches around Sydney was cold one morning after riding the waves. After walking up the beach to the towels etc. he stood on a sheepskin he and his mates had brought with them to the beach (sheepskins are a common thing to have in Australia) and decided that was comfy and warm so he went home and made the prototype booties. A few days later, he wore them to the beach and one of his mates declared, "Those are Ugly! Will you make me a pair?" UGGs, born of the surfing culture of New South Wales and an icon of Australian foot ware. I owned UGGs the entire time I was in Australia and wore them often in lieu of shoes. I next found them in a large department store with the initial "N" in the mid eighties and I've not been without them since.
I have to thank young David for a 99.44% great puzzle and for pointing out to me that Oprah and I actually have something in common.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, I've spoken three varieties of English in my life and I've done crosswords on three continents. So, as they wear out, I tire of replacing the tyres on my car.
"I'm a hayseed,
"My hair is seaweed
"And my ears are made of leather.
"How they flop in rainy weather.
"Gosh all hemlock,
"Tough as a pine knot:
"We're United States Marines!"
Mother taught me that song along with a few others. Near the end of WWII she was a staff sergeant in the Corps, a Link Trainer instructor at the Cherry Point, NC Marine Corps Air Station. One day, she was tasked to instruct Tyrone Power in the skills of instrument flying on the 1944 equivalant of MS Flight Simulator. Another girl, however, rigged the assignment so she would get the movie star. Tough luck but there was a compensation. A tall young pilot, a T3 sgt, who eventually became her husband and my father. CORPS was drilled into me from the age of four. My mom even taught me hospital corners and to bounce a quarter off the blanket of my "rack" (that's USMC for bed). When I was eight or nine, I called my mother a BAM to be funny. She actually slapped me. (Google "bam usmc" and you'll get it).
Ok, so overall, I liked this puzzle. I had to google for three proper nouns though: BATES, IVAR, and SASHAFIERCE. I'm a blues guy, I don't listen to R&B so I don't think I've ever heard anything by Beyonce. Other than those, I enjoyed wrapping my head around the other clues. Loved the [Cannes neighbors] when I finally figured out the clue was meta.
Do I apologise (note 'Anglo-Saxon spelling) for a rant now?
I first came across UGGs in 1968 or 9 in a little shop in Crows Nest, a northern suburb of Sydney. They were fairly dear for those days at A$12.00 but I bought them and loved them almost instantly. Those early forms had only the same sheepskin as the tops for soles. Still, they lasted a decent time before wearing out. @LMS, I hate wearing socks and have done since I was in second grade when I pressured my mother to buy me cowboy boots and the socks would bunch up inside them.
The story of UGGs: a surfer from the northern beaches around Sydney was cold one morning after riding the waves. After walking up the beach to the towels etc. he stood on a sheepskin he and his mates had brought with them to the beach (sheepskins are a common thing to have in Australia) and decided that was comfy and warm so he went home and made the prototype booties. A few days later, he wore them to the beach and one of his mates declared, "Those are Ugly! Will you make me a pair?" UGGs, born of the surfing culture of New South Wales and an icon of Australian foot ware. I owned UGGs the entire time I was in Australia and wore them often in lieu of shoes. I next found them in a large department store with the initial "N" in the mid eighties and I've not been without them since.
I have to thank young David for a 99.44% great puzzle and for pointing out to me that Oprah and I actually have something in common.
As I pointed out in an earlier post, I've spoken three varieties of English in my life and I've done crosswords on three continents. So, as they wear out, I tire of replacing the tyres on my car.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Today I did a crossword by Bernice Gordon who was one hundred years old a few days ago. This is what I posted on the Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword blog:
I heard or read somewhere that orchestral conductors tended to live longer than people in other occupations. It would seem crossword construction would rival that, or so I have reasoned. Ms Gordon has done what "Life With Father" did, entering into her second century of constructing. Brava, Bernice!
I wonder if puzzles were graded Monday to Saturday in the 50s.
@r.alphbunker, I was in the third grade when that puzzle was published. I might have known balsa and mole but would not have had a hint to the other answers. That was a wonderful puzzle with every word standing on its own with nothing that smacked of "fill," existing only to create a crossing word. Ms. Gordon truly is a NESTOR of constructors!
Again, I say:
Brava, Bernice Gordon, many happy returns!
Third grade. I only have one memory of third grade: hating Mrs. Burns, my third grade teacher.
I grew up on the fourth floor of an apartment building in Berkeley, California. Back then, it was two blocks from the Sather Gate entrance to the campus of the University of California. Years later, that block was razed to build the Student Union, but then, there were book stores and cafes and cigarette shops. I had some latitude as an eight year old and, after all, that urban environment was my back yard, that and the rest of the university campus which I roamed freely. In the book stores, they sold blue books for a few pennies. I had no idea what they were really for but they fascinated me. A little book I could write anything I wanted in. From time to time, with the pennies in my pockets, I bought a few.
I wrote a "play" in one of them and showed it to my mother. She was impressed. I took it to Mrs. Burns and showed it to her. Her response? "So what?" I was crushed.
Ok, so it wasn't really a play, it had no dialogue. It was more of a skit. There was a recreation center near my elementary school which I used to attend after school for something to do. They were mounting a talent show around about that time and I took my "play" there and showed it to them. They liked it and helped me put it on. They imposed changes on me that I wasn't real happy with but, hey, that's Hollywood.
Here's the gist of my third grade script:
There is a model in a bikini holding an apple and sitting on a stool. The artist arranges and rearranges her pose until it's just right. He then begins painting. He stops once or twice to readjust the model's pose and then continues. when he's done, he puts down his palette and brush, shows the painting to the audience and then to the model who grabs it in anger and crashes it over the artist's head. Oh, yeah, the painting was of the apple.
I suppose there was some kind of biblical overtone there but I wouldn't put money on it.
I had to wear a stupid smock and a great big beret. In my grand dramatic vision, I saw Marylin Monroe in a bikini. The reality was a third grader in a poofy flowery 1920s bathing costume, complete with flowery puffed up bathing hat. Nevertheless we still got a laugh.
I heard or read somewhere that orchestral conductors tended to live longer than people in other occupations. It would seem crossword construction would rival that, or so I have reasoned. Ms Gordon has done what "Life With Father" did, entering into her second century of constructing. Brava, Bernice!
I wonder if puzzles were graded Monday to Saturday in the 50s.
@r.alphbunker, I was in the third grade when that puzzle was published. I might have known balsa and mole but would not have had a hint to the other answers. That was a wonderful puzzle with every word standing on its own with nothing that smacked of "fill," existing only to create a crossing word. Ms. Gordon truly is a NESTOR of constructors!
Again, I say:
Brava, Bernice Gordon, many happy returns!
Third grade. I only have one memory of third grade: hating Mrs. Burns, my third grade teacher.
I grew up on the fourth floor of an apartment building in Berkeley, California. Back then, it was two blocks from the Sather Gate entrance to the campus of the University of California. Years later, that block was razed to build the Student Union, but then, there were book stores and cafes and cigarette shops. I had some latitude as an eight year old and, after all, that urban environment was my back yard, that and the rest of the university campus which I roamed freely. In the book stores, they sold blue books for a few pennies. I had no idea what they were really for but they fascinated me. A little book I could write anything I wanted in. From time to time, with the pennies in my pockets, I bought a few.
I wrote a "play" in one of them and showed it to my mother. She was impressed. I took it to Mrs. Burns and showed it to her. Her response? "So what?" I was crushed.
Ok, so it wasn't really a play, it had no dialogue. It was more of a skit. There was a recreation center near my elementary school which I used to attend after school for something to do. They were mounting a talent show around about that time and I took my "play" there and showed it to them. They liked it and helped me put it on. They imposed changes on me that I wasn't real happy with but, hey, that's Hollywood.
Here's the gist of my third grade script:
There is a model in a bikini holding an apple and sitting on a stool. The artist arranges and rearranges her pose until it's just right. He then begins painting. He stops once or twice to readjust the model's pose and then continues. when he's done, he puts down his palette and brush, shows the painting to the audience and then to the model who grabs it in anger and crashes it over the artist's head. Oh, yeah, the painting was of the apple.
I suppose there was some kind of biblical overtone there but I wouldn't put money on it.
I had to wear a stupid smock and a great big beret. In my grand dramatic vision, I saw Marylin Monroe in a bikini. The reality was a third grader in a poofy flowery 1920s bathing costume, complete with flowery puffed up bathing hat. Nevertheless we still got a laugh.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
First Post: as opposed to Last Post, the British equivalent to Taps.
Musing or amusing? I don't know. I hope maybe both.
I wrote about a trip I took to the Grand Canyon with my grandfather when I was 13 on Rex Parker's blog a few days ago. I got some nice comments on it. I've often thought about writing some of my recollections somewhere. It seems I have time on my hands now so, why not try this?
Nothing is burning into my brain right now, but as time passes, I expect I'll have some tales to tell.
I wrote about a trip I took to the Grand Canyon with my grandfather when I was 13 on Rex Parker's blog a few days ago. I got some nice comments on it. I've often thought about writing some of my recollections somewhere. It seems I have time on my hands now so, why not try this?
Nothing is burning into my brain right now, but as time passes, I expect I'll have some tales to tell.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)