" A Christmas Memory"

“A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen, but due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—while not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind, but it is delicate too, finely boned and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the window pane, “it’s fruitcake weather.”

The person she is speaking is Truman Capote as a seven-year-old child. 

Truman Capote writes, “A Christmas Memory” 1956.

The woman he is speaking of is sixty-something, they are cousins, and have lived together since before he can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over the two and frequently make them cry, they are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. The boy and the old lady are each other’s best friend…

Every year I read Truman Capote’s, “A Christmas Memory,”—makes me cry though. The old lady calls Capote “Buddy” after a best friend who died as a child. The old lady is still a child.

With his exquisite manipulation of words Capote tells of taking an old dilapidated baby buggy into the woods to collect windfall pecans for the fruitcakes, and gathering together their year-long savings of $12. 73 to buy “Ha Ha’s moonshine for the cakes…whiskey, that’s the best, and the most expensive.

 “Buddy,” she calls from the next room, and the next instant she is in his room holding a candle. “Well, I can’t sleep a hoot,” she declares. “My mind is jumping like a jack rabbit. Buddy, do you think Mrs. Roosevelt will serve our cake at dinner…”

Well, you just have to read the story…

Truman Capote has a natural gift that makes him a great guest at a dinner party—writes Irving Pen in Truman Capote 1965, “he is always interested in whomever he's talking to. For one thing, he really looks at the person he is with. Most of us see outlines of one another, but Truman is noting skin texture, voice tone, details of clothing.

[...]

One of the reasons that Truman is always interested in people is that he won't allow himself to be bored. He told me that when he meets a truly crashing bore he asks himself, "Why am I so bored? What is it about this person that is making me yawn?" He ponders, "What should this person do that he hasn't done? What does he lack that might intrigue me?"

He catalogues thoughtfully the bore's face, his hair style, his mannerisms, his speech patterns. He tries to imagine how the bore feels about himself, what kind of a wife he might have, what he likes and dislikes. To get the answers, he starts to ask some of these questions aloud. In short, Truman gets so absorbed in finding out why he is bored that he is no longer bored at all.

Can't help laughing...and this blog is about age

Picture, Unknown Victorians laughing

And this blog is about age.

When someone would ask Neil’s mother how old she was she would answer, “I’ll forgive you for asking that personal question.”

I even resent a doctor asking my age. That means he has immediately categorized me.

We do want to be perceived as young—that baby-butt smooth skin, how gorgeous is that? No wonder we want it, but who wants to be judged as slow, awkward, ugly, conservative, stupid, or forgetful—or worse yet, “What age did your parents die?” Horrors.   Even being victims of our DNA  can be changed, so I’ve heard, as genes are constantly turning on or off. Bottom line, we fight to look young, while we ought to be fighting to think young—meaning, of course, forward thinking, innovative, inventive, open to new ideas, and new people. Be a person worth keeping around.

“Look for your mold.”

Scientist Dr. Jonathan Sackner- Bernstein persuades us to “Look for our mold.” He tells the story of one scientist, who daily sorted through his petri- dishes checking specimens—you know where this is going, but the story bears repeating. Dr. Alexander Fleming was 47 when he discovered penicillin. Every day he would check his numerous petri-dishes. If he found that one had turned moldy he chucked it into the trash.  One day, a moldy dish looked a little different from the many others he had thrown away, so he put it aside. Later he noticed that the bacteria around the mold had died--thus Fleming discovered one of the first antibiotics. He called it mold juice—I guess Penicillin sounds more scientific.

Bernstein’s  point was that this scientist, Dr. Alexander Fleming, at age 47, had the years of experience to discern,  the wisdom to trust his intuition, and the training to identify. Unfortunately he was not good at communicating and thus the community didn’t listen to him, even in WWI when he said, accurately, that the antiseptics they were using did more harm than good. He brought in a couple more scientists and eventually the word on penicillin got out.

Too often people use the excuse that they won’t make a difference because they lost their chance, they are too old.

Remember what Richard Back (book Illusions) said, “If you wonder whether your mission on earth is over, if you’re alive, it isn’t.”

Berstein pointed out that even such things as learning to play a musical instrument involves different components than years and years of practice. It involves how you are supported, your attitude, and your innate talent.

 “Go boldly in the direction of your dreams.”

If you’re alive having your dreams come true is still an option.

I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.”

—Alexander Fleming

Angels Beware, a New Kid on the Block

It was over four-score years ago that she sat across the aisle from me in Spanish class. She smiled, I smiled. She invited me for lunch at the Barn at UC Riverside, and thus began a friendship that endured for those forty- some years.

We were both married students, older than some, both of us had a gap in our schooling. We graduated, lived in the same town, then apart, together, apart.

I remember a Christmas Eve in Oregon, when Sylvia and her husband Greg flew in from California, and found themselves unable to maneuver their car on our snow laden hill. I saw them from my kitchen window, trudging up the road dragging their suitcases, laughing and slipping. They joined us for Christmas, and we ate turkey and drank Champagne—one of Sylvia’s favorite things—Champagne and Christmas.

Over the years we have sometimes lived close by, oftentimes far apart, but visited often. The Fourth of July at Coronado Island and eating sea food from Point Loma Seafood, and watching fireworks will always be our favorite fourth of July—she mentioned it every year and wished we were there. 

We endured separations, togetherness, confidences, marital disputes, pregnancies, childbirth, child rearing. She had a little girl when I met her, and 13 years later she gave birth to a little boy. My kids and her little boy took baths together, ran around the Zoo, Disneyland, and Bazaar Del Mundo in San Diego where Sylvia and I drank margaritas, and the kids perused the court yard, and visited the toy store, and were safe and confined while we wiled away the hours.

We wondered about the afterlife together, and when hippies came along we contemplated what that meant, and about the gay movement, and women’s rights.

She liked shocking pink fingernails and toe nails, and flip flops with huge flowers on her toes, and all things bling, but her favorite were jewels of the real variety. Going to an auction stirred her creative juices, as did Interior Decorating.

I still remember those pink fingernails clutching basalt bluffs as Sylvia and I slogged in sandals through the water of Oneonta Canyon in the Columbia River Gorge, then we sat all wet and prickly, but laughing about it, until we changed at Nordstroms before the drive home.

Within this past year she said, “When I lose weight and get in shape I’m getting a pair of skinny jeans with rhinestones on the pockets.”

When you see a short lady with long blond hair, with rhinestones on her butt wandering around heaven—that will be Sylvia

She died December 7, the day after her 83^rd birthday.

Obey Your Whims

“Bon appetite.” Have any of us said that phrase in a normal voice since 1964?

Do you know of anyone who has hosted a TV show and never tried to change themselves?

Apparently Julia Child did not.  

(Above photo Photo of Julia and Paul Child)

With Julia, what you saw was what you got.

I am reading Julia Child Rules, Lessons on Savoring Life, by Karen Karbo, and I was struck by the notion that we have been trained that something is wrong with us, that we need changed, or that at least we ought to be working on ourselves.

More “How–to Books abound that any other. On top of that we need “Life coaches,” because we can’t figure it out for ourselves.  I am guilty of all that myself, having taken more seminars than you can shake a stick at (I never understood why anyone would shake a stick at anything, but it was one of those sayings mother’s perpetrate on their children.)

Most of us want to savor life, but don’t know how.

Apparently savoring life was built in to Julia. There she was a 6 foot 3 inch tall young woman in the 1930’s, too tall to play the damsel in distress in school plays, so instead opted to play the Emperor. Even after shaving three inches off her height she was too tall to be accepted into the WACS or WAVES during wartime, (talk about discrimination), so she because an OSS researcher instead. That was dreary work, typing files, so on a whim she moved to India where she was knee-deep in classified information, and where her organizational skills were appreciated. Julia was not a typical desired young woman to be courted; she was a spinster until age 32, but there in India she met and later married the love of her life Paul Child.

She and Paul were rare birds—mix-matched, he shorter than her by 6 inches, a sophisticated French man of the world, interested in intellectual pursuits and love-affairs—she a giddy free-spirit, and yet they married and lived a forty-eight year love-affair.

Paul introduced Julia to French food. She introduced herself to the Le Cordon Bleu Cooking school, and the rest is history. “How magnificent to find one’s calling at last,” she said. She was thirty-eight years old.

You know after seeing the movie Julie Julia, that publishing her book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was no small feat. After many failures, she decided that writing an 800 page cookbook that didn’t sell, was better than working on an 800 page novel that didn’t sell, for they still needed to eat, she still had the recipes, and she still loved to cook.

When her mayonnaise recipe, one she had successfully made thousands of times, and even made to bolster herself up after a cooking failure, did itself fail, she turned her attention to the scientific interaction of ingredients, or was it the temperature of the bowl or of the eggs?  Julia made so many mayonnaise recipes that Paul finally called a halt to it, and she threw gallons of mayonnaise down the commode. See people do research because they want to know. (I don’t know, though, why her mayonnaise failed, Karbo didn’t say, and I’m not making sixteen gallons of mayonnaise to find out.

When Julia tuned 80, a birthday she would have preferred to ignore, her vast following were in the mood to celebrate her.  And Julia who, according to Karbo, had the stamina of a shed dog at full peak training, attended all 300 birthday bashes. (Some commanding $350 a plate.)

Julia was robust and healthy, except in later life her knees failed her, and she would sometimes cry in pain at the end of the day.

Julia followed her own rules, “Obey Your Whims,” “Live With Abandon, “Be Yourself,” and she became an original. She will long be remembered as The French Chef. (Who was neither a Chef nor French. Don’t you just love it?)

Well, I have a Revere Ware pan in my kitchen, not French standard issue, a travesty by French standards, but it is over 50 years old, I have burned more food in it than I care to count, and I have expended more elbow grease in cleaning it than I care to mention. On top of that I do not have a decent kitchen knife in the house. I'm no French Chef, nor one of any other nationality, but I love watching cooking shows.

Here's butter to you Julia.

Excuse me, I’m going out to eat…