Chaos

I have been addled for three weeks with a lousy root canal topped by a persistent sinus mess. As a result, I thought it was a good idea to go through the do-it-yourself cash out at the grocery store with a full basket of  items that included 10 for $10 large cans of diced tomatoes that could knock out a pony if swung in a sock.  There was another slew of 10 for 10 New England clam chowders, bulk walnuts, bags of on sale popcorn kernels, and a jumble of stuff that I needed right now with a shrink-wrapped rack of toilet paper on top.

If you have ever tried this, you of rational mind, you understand that there is no room on the talking counter for all of this, even though the female voice repeatedly tells you to "Put the item in the bag. Put the item in the bag. Put...".  I was goofy with sinus pressure, end of week decompression, and the joy of finding that this market still carries Campbell's clam chowder, and didn't want to wait for the too long lines at the too few cashiers event occurring around me.  Independent, I can do this, wait, what?

It became a balancing act.  Because I am not as good a bagger as any newly hired teen,  the checkout machine kept getting mad at me and yelled for the Helpful Cashier who watched over us.  She was very nice, and calmed the register down as my piles of groceries began to run out of room.  What could I do but stack the potatoes atop the cans of tomatoes which slid down crashing to the floor, causing the customers waiting their turn to silently groan.  I felt it, I felt the stares and clenched jawlines of the smart people behind me as they watched the dodo overload the cold steel of the robotic-voiced apparatus.  Helpful Cashier came over and said to just put the groceries in the cart, she could override the machine's mentality.  It ended mostly successfully, but altogether was a mishmosh of chaos culminating with a broken plastic bag of canned goods in the parking lot.

Today I talked to my brother.  His cancer has come back and metastasized, mostly in his pelvis so he cannot walk.  Last year, when the cancer was discovered in his thyroid,  the oncologist recommended radiation while the surgeon said it was unnecessary.  My brother went with the surgeon's advice and landed here.  John is six years younger than me and was the Real Boy that my father wished I had been.  This fall of incidence is a larger version of chaos compared to tumbling cans of goods in a grocery, for it is finite, and will take my brother beyond reach.  I am angry, despondent, and scrabbling for some semblance of order, and for christ's sake, how many have fallen like scuttering leaves over a lost and forlorn landscape?  How can I fit everything into a flimsy plastic bag, categorized by weight and shape?

Three of my close friends have been pulled unwilling from this earth in the past two years while the man who was my rotten, rotten father lived to be 85.  None of the three saw sixty, not one deserved the end that came.  My brother and I are not close, but we tolerate each other some and love each other more.  He is lucky to have a solid marriage, two beautiful girls, and if anything, has been more than a good father to them, considering the tumult of his own early life.

This will be a fitful night, snow has come to areas east of our city, it is snowing in Washington, D.C. where my son lives, melting as it hits the ground.  Let me melt, let me become water, fluid, running, seeking the crick, the stream, the river to ocean.  Let me blend with every living thing in a Mobius strip of infinite being, let me grow into a galactic spiral that spreads across years measured by traveling light, let me be the end of time, the stoppage of every tick of past, present, and future. Let night fall, let sleep come in the window, sandman show your wares.

Vegetables: Orange and White

Well it was a soup of desire, I had made a gastronomic pedestal of orange squash, carrots and coconut milk blended with an onion.  Sunset orange.  The carrots recently available at the farmer's stall this late autumn are the sturdy sort with flavor, not the shaped, bleached desperation that haunts manufactured bags of alleged "baby' carrots.  Feh.  No wonder they are served with dressing to dip, they taste like yesterday's socks.  As a kid, we never imagined dipping carrots in anything, you pulled one out of the ground, wiped off the dirt, and got back to work weeding the row.  I think the only thing I didn't eat out in the field was bugs.  

Mom used carrots to feed us between meals rather than apples, which were more expensive and saved for bag lunches.  You hungry?  Bread and butter with cinnamon sugar was sometimes offered, but more likely it was a slice of raw potato, celery stalk, or a carrot all of which lasted longer than a gussied up slice of bread.  Raw carrots were usually large specimens back then, so when I see what are called "horse carrots" at the market these modern days, I bring home a bunch or two to keep me company.

Right now is the turn for orange vegetables: any of the hard squashes, rutabagas, the newer orange cauliflower, carrots, and varieties of pumpkins.  It's easy to round out a supper with one or two, and they keep handily well in the refrigerator.  Mom would drag home a large blue-green Hubbard squash, storing it in the cellar until a roast of some sort was to happen.   Newspapers would be spread onto the cellar floor, and she'd drop the squash, hoping for a good size crack.  What didn't come apart was broken into pieces with a hammer. The woman could beat a squash till one of them was winded, then haul the chunk upstairs to be baked in the oven.

The other color of vegetable that is showing up is the creamy white of cauliflower, pale cabbage, parsnips, and Chippewa potatoes.  Don't be put off by the lack of color, reports are out that those folks who consume the white vegetables show less of an inclination for stroke.  Back in the last mid-century, housewives were advised to mix colors at mealtime, to jolly up the husband from whatever indignation and worry he faced at the workplace.  Having a meal of Wonder bread and butter, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, and boiled chicken was showing poor form; you could at least sprinkle parsley flakes on something, for heaven's sake.  My mom went through more dried parsley than Betty Crocker herself.  

Coming winter is touted as being a hard one, a few starchy vegetables and a squash put by will be welcome in an oven, for baking on a snowy day of short daylight.   Orange reminds us of the sun, of fire, or of a warm squash lava flow on china plates; a happy color, it is most used in advertising because this is so, just walk down a grocery aisle to see how much orange is out there.  The cool night air falls over the remaining fields of last gardens, vines are tangled and brown, stalks are cut and bundled, the harvest is ending.  Get out your slippers, Papa; your lap blanket, Mama.  Children find your flannels, dogs and cats nest in beds.  Cider, chestnuts, pumpkin pie.  Good night.

Exoskelton

This morning, the weather provided entertainment in the shape of hailstones slicing sideways through cold rain, pelting this earthling with atmospheric buckshot as I trotted to the car.  The precipitation shuddered in the wind, erupting in sudden waves of heavy intensity that soaked me by the time I got inside.  It wasn't raining when I got on the elevator to descend; at the ground floor it was furious with temper that abated just as quickly by the time I arrived at destination north of the city.  What caught my eye on the way was the vision of a bundle walking; couldn't tell if it was a man or woman, but this person owned the largest umbrella in town.  They were wrestling against ribs flipping and cloth flapping willy-nilly in the gusts, and because of the immensity of the umbrella, the person appeared to be a small animal surrounded by a shell.  I thought of a snail pulling in, a mollusk trying to shut a door unsuccessfully, of a crab arranging wee business in a disorderly world.

The umbrella was an exoskeleton, a layer of protection and structure against the empyreal elements blasting; an oyster on the half-shell, a clam casino of human under limpet preservation.  We are so soft, our skin so effortlessly damaged that we need clothing, shelter--amendments to our fragile state.  A little brown rabbit lives outside all winter in frigid temperatures, with nothing but his bunny fur and good luck at finding plant life to nibble.  We wouldn't last three days out there, naked.  Sure, rabbits and squirrels go into a semi-hibernation, but imagining something that weighs ten pounds making it is astounding.  I don't understand how birds, whose body temperature is 105 degrees, keep going even with all the metabolic tricks they have.

We humans are able to construct exoskeletons to serve us: medieval armor, automobiles, helmets, sweaters, and buildings.  Thank goodness, because when you come down to it, all the stuff about the human body being beautiful is nonsense.  Rare the individual, brief the moment, when proportion and lumps are even, hair grows in proper places, and the entire article does not look like it needs starch and ironing.  Really, we are awkward.  No adaptations such as sleekness for speed, spots or stripes for camouflage; we build anything we need, paint on colors when we like.  Find me a beautiful human, and it is likely they are made of marble chiseled by Venetians, or flattened on canvas as an idealized odalisque.  Thank heavens for Toulouse, who began painting people as they really are.

The winds still explore every crevice outside, pushing and pulling at branches and loose papers.  I am glad to close windows, bringing closure to the day and silence to evening hours.  Sleep well, the hours are changing soon, pull into your shell and close the operculum.  Tuck under covers, let sleep come in.





 

Automotive Indulgences

Have you ever patted your car?  Like when you're driving and a can rolls in front of your wheels, but by a small maneuver the tires avoid flattening the thing, so then you pat the center of the steering wheel where the horn is?  Atta car.  There are Thanks for Getting Me Home pats; It's Okay, I'm Not as Young as I Used To Be Either So Don't Worry If Everyone is Passing Us pats; and Oh Good, We Didn't Hit It pats.  This might be part of the belief that if the car likes us, it will keep us safer.

What is really keeping us in one piece are the engineering folks at the car plant, but it's way more fun and immediate to demonstrate affection to the ton and a half of metal that just stopped hurtling through physics and successfully stopped.  Easier done than hugging a guy in a lab coat who isn't present for the grateful appreciation.  So lab guys, feel the love.

I named one car, and that was Tony, a 1998 red Cavalier whose demise came too early in a snowstorm.  A semi had crunched into the back end of a Lincoln, followed by a SUV, followed by another semi that buckled across the highway of ice.  I was the eleventh in a series of 22 cars, and learned how big a semi's tire is when your car slides sideways into it.  We bounced and arced in half a circumference, twisting the car frame and folding one tire underneath.  With all the emergency vehicles that were already arriving, the gathering crowd of people involved wondered why didn't anyone stop traffic from feeding into the Skyway?  I lost Tony, and haven't named another car since.

Where did this affinity come from? Why did I feel as if Tony and I were traveling partners?  I have had cars that evoked a warm connection, and others that were cold metal boxes of combustion and exhaust.  The car after Tony was such, maybe I resented the circumstance.  It was another Cavalier, a 1993 blue that after I was able to get another became a benevolent pizza delivery car, maybe still ghosting around the up side of town, dropping off pizzas and bread sticks to families.  A Fairy Godpizza Car.

My current car is again, a red Cavalier which is now 10 years old.  On the way to work, there are many, many people that cross against a light, some hurrying to get to their own jobs, some sauntering in defiance to traffic rules and the fact that you the driver are sitting on upholstery and listening to music in climate-controlled air.  They are hating on you.  If driving into blinding sunrise, this can get dicey really fast; my solution is to go five miles per hour in the two areas where this pedestrian nonsense happens: across from the MetroRail station, and the intersection at the city college.  However, car folderol happens during the same ride to work.

There is a left turn onto a one-way arterial that turns into a race around the corner for some drivers, only to end a short block at a traffic light that is Timed to be Red.  You are stopping soon anyways, you are winning nothing, and everything will be fine except for the honest walkers that tried to cross with the light and almost got hit by these bullies.  A suitable solution is to cross on the south side of the intersection, as no cars are turning right against the one-way, and those that do so reach the sidewalk safely.  However, this isn't the point, a driver shouldn't try to outgun people crossing the street by scaring them with a four-wheeled monster, including the cyclists, baby strollers, and people with boxes of donuts.  These people do not wish to pat your car in neither admiration nor affection, they more likely want to bazooka it and you all the way back to your grandfather.  I don't blame them.

Today I drove to a farmer's market, the usual Saturday foray; my friend and I brought home apples, squash, and cauliflower heads for our families, all trundled home in the back seat of my red car with the one black door.  Rain and wind blew sideways, but I got home with the goods without harm, warm and mostly dry except where the replacement door seal is not tight.  A few drips hurt nothing.  Carrot and squash soup, a beef stew, and a frittata were concocted for the week's menu, thanks to the convenience of being able to haul groceries in the car.

The winds have subsided; here is a short story: a silver bird ornament hangs from a kitchen cupboard and was tinkling like a bell for no apparent reason.  It rings against the wood when the door is opened, but there was no movement except for the shiver of the bird alone, tinging and tanging delicately, musically. Am I losing my mind?  Why is this thing moving?  Grandma? Is that you?

No, it wasn't a visiting ether of Ida Ruth.  The building was swaying because of the high winds, this twelve-story brick monument was giving and bending with the force of wind.  Remarkable, but there I go again, thinking magically when physical fact was at hand.  The realms overlap so much sometimes it's hard to tell, so I will continue to tell my car that it is a good car, and pat, pat, pat.

I know you appreciate the machinations of inanimate objects, the strength of rope, the durability of good winter mittens, the piped in hot water, the turn of a page of flattened wood fiber.  Every night we wrap our tired selves in sheets and blankets, set clocks, and extinguish currents running to lamps.  We have so much to be thankful for, and I think we are.  Children say goodnight to things, do you?  Goodnight wooden dresser that once held my mother's folded things, goodnight shoes that fit just right, goodnight apples in a paper bag that make the place smell like earth and sustenance.  Goodnight, you.  It will be alright, things always work out in spite of unwanted changes.  Hold on.  Life doesn't get easier, it just keeps going and makes places for you to be, in the lives of those that love you.  Night is here, angels fly. Always.

Treasures and Toxins in the Woods

One sunny Saturday, a group of naturalists and I loped through a forest preserve searching for wild fungi.  A parent had brought his young four year old daughter, which for a mushroom hunt can be questionable as the dangers out there are irreversible and slowly fatal.  Emphasize the word slow, for death will pry you from this plane languidly from a meager ingestion of 7 mg of one of the eight known amatoxins for an adult.  If you don't know for Certain, you are far better off going to the grocery where many species have become marketable and are delicious.  Believe and quake reflectively regarding the fact that even a scientifically trained mycologist can be fooled.

Stay away from anything all white, near white, greenish white, or that looks like it might have been white at some point in its short life.  Puffballs are often considered one of the safe, identifiable species, but the white roundness can be the stage in which the Amanitas grow egglike before bursting through the outer veil.  You are to cut the puffball in half to examine for the outlines of a mushroom head and stipe forming inside.  Hell's bells, I have eaten puffballs and frankly, I would rather eat a styrofoam coffee cup; the consistency is flaccid, poofy, tasteless and not worth wasting the butter in the pan.  Perhaps as a survival food, but that would happen only after I ate any chipmunks within rock-throwing range.  Even inside the puffball genus live poisonous Scleroderma, which is another reason for cutting the thing in half, for their centers mature into black, fetid masses of spores.  It won't kill you, but you will be beholden to the porcelain god for days after.

The mushroom foray was sanctioned and fairly formal, held in Reinstein Woods on a beautiful day in late September.  Of course, anything else interesting was celebrated as well, and being a preserve, everything stays left alone, nothing is to be picked or carried out.  A dead mouse, a dead bullfrog, and an almost dead salamander were considered talismans and celebrated with whoops by the young naturalists on this morning walk.  Invasive species from Europe and Asia were pointed out, and apparently the favor has been returned by American poison ivy and our grey squirrels that are currently raising Cain in England and pushing out the cuter, milder ones that Beatrix Potter adored, the red squirrels.

The father of the young girl asked if there was anything in the woods that could harm her if she handled it: absolutely.  Kids shouldn't be fed wild mushrooms at all, some species have toxins that don't bother adults as much as they could a child.  But there are poisonous ones, such as the above-mentioned Amanita that allegedly has a good flavor and often has evidence of animals nibbling at the cap.  Well, let me tell you, within four days whatever has eaten it is now kaput for it destroys the liver via a series of arcane steps.  After a bout with gastrointestinal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, there is resolve and you think you are getting better after this two or three day period; however, the slower-acting toxin has been busy destroying your liver resulting in jaundice, internal bleeding, delirium, seizures, coma and death in about six to sixteen days.  Survivors usually require a liver transplant.  Don't handle Death Caps, don't put them in a basket used for edibles.  Really, stay home and make eggs.

My fascination is that it was something we did as a family when I was younger, and as a result, I took courses at the Museum and then at college in mycology.  Neither plant nor animal, fungi has been named as a separate kingdom amid the animalia, plantae, monera and protists.  I have eaten wild mushrooms, but only the ones I have been sure to be edible.  Shaggy manes, Suillus, Agarics, Boletus edulis, Boletus bicolor, Collybia radicata, Pholiota squarrosa, Craterellus cornucopiodes, Hydnum repandum, Grifola frondosa, Lepiota procera, Leccinum scabrum, Lactarius deliciosus, and Dentinum repandum are not easily mixed up with anything deadly.  Mostly, I am happy with the store bought stuff, and will never serve anything fungal that I've gathered to anyone else.

It was a nice walk in the woods, something I miss doing on a regular basis.  The air in a forest is exceptionally fresh, oxygenated, and energizing, and anchors you to the earth after a life of cars and pavement, buildings and smartphones.  The smell of earth and fallen leaves reminds us of what we've removed from our lives, for the most part, but think of this: pizza.  Without fungus, there is none, for the crust rises with yeast, a fungi; next, add cheese made with fungus-based rennet, suitable for vegans; top this with Agaricus bisporus, the everyday supermarket mushroom, and you have dinner.  Eat mushrooms, for they are some of the strongest anti-cancer fighters science has studied; in fact, in some groceries this month you will find mushrooms packaged in pink cartons, in support of breast cancer awareness.

This post verges on rambling, my apologies.  Maybe it will lull you into that state of brain just before you decide to turn out the lights and hit the hay.  This is it, you think, the downward slide into that lovely, warm stupor of silence and deep unconsciousness, maybe a glass of milk before, brush teeth, one last look in the mirror before dreaming of dark crevices and fallen logs, hopping toads, and Alice, who was advised by caterpillar to try one side or the other of mushroom cap.  Sleep unfettered, walk through dreamtime's pathways, all pine needles and stalked fungi.  Good night, earthling.

Horizontal Hold

Far away and out in the sticks, a lot of what young I learned came from a 16-inch black and white screen.  My family was hardly the sort to glean social skills from, as my mother was painfully shy and my father taught us how to disarm a German in hand-to-hand combat by slugging him in the throat.  I took after my mother, for the most part.

Television was my babysitter of sorts because after a day of tempering machine parts, Dad had no interest in sharing the dinner table with kids who didn't like green beans.  I remember a few suppers at the table in the knotty pine dinette, before which Mom would prep me in behavior, pleading with me not to make faces or complain.  It was difficult at age three, especially since I had already decided that I would like to get rid of the noise in the house and have Mom to myself; I hadn't developed discretion yet.  My father's irritation irritated me, and I would shoot him a look.  We would battle, with it ending in my mother getting yelled at for my moody little self.  Her solution was to turn on the television, spread newspaper on the living room rug, and plop my dinner plate down.  On the floor, I guess as a safety precaution. This was the golden era, with the new tv dinners touted as timesavers for families to watch more programming together instead of mom being stuck in the kitchen; maybe she thought television was a great idea or more likely she was desperate.  It was weirdly isolating, but I soon dissolved into what I thought were real lives on the screen.  I never ate with my family again.

So, what was on at supper?  Two stations, even though the tuner went up to 22 channels, were broadcasting at the time, WGR and WBEN.  A third station eventually started up in 1958, the logo being a rabbit with bent ears supposedly as antennae.  There were plenty of Popeye cartoons with Mike Mearian and Buttons, Three Stooges shorts, and sometimes seasonal shows like A Visit to Santa with Forgetful the Elf; there was a story book show that had puppets who talked very slowly or maybe that was just me.  All of this verified life as I knew it, with Popeye and Bluto beating the brain matter out of each other, or with Bluto choking Olive Oyl for not being his girlfriend and then you would have Christmas.  Sort of like disarming Germans.

Remarkably, for all the encouragement, the only instance in which I behaved badly in a physical manner was when one of my older cousins took a comic book away from me and refused to give it back.  It was showing Catnip the Cat getting hit with a frying pan, making his head match the shape of the pan. We were scooched on the floor, he grabbed the comic, the action of which put his rear end conveniently in my direction; I bit him.  He was my favorite cousin, and how on earth could I do such a thing?  Simple: in my mind, I was mimicking the enlarged choppers of a character in a cartoon, and how was this not a solution, Mom?  I apologized sincerely, once realizing the denouement of my idiocy, helped by my mother who was a gentle soul, supremely embarrassed by her child.  I now have a cat named after that cousin, and his older sister recently told me that he probably deserved getting bit anyways.  No, he didn't.

Cartoons fueled my brain, Saturday mornings gave me a buzz like a bowl of Sugar Pops knocked down with a glass of Nestle's Quik.  I had preferences, being spoiled with the writing and animation of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, and grew a strong distrust of Harvey Cartoons, especially those concerning  Casper the Friendly Ghost.  Fraud!  Deceit!  A friendly ghost doing good deeds and hanging out with woodland animals?  One that got bullied by three nitwits when he had powers of invisibility and flying?  Really, after watching Disney's Fantasia sequence of the Night on Bald Mountain and hiding behind the couch as a result, I knew marshmallow-shaped Casper was just biding his time before pulling out some ghost combat on the unsuspecting animals and children.  Now that I am older, my idea is that the reverse is true, that spirits are mostly a benevolent people that do no harm and maybe do make friends with chipmunks and lost puppies.  Just leave me alone.  Skedaddle.

But how do we get through our lives?  By what degree are they shaped by people around us, by environment, by the current popular culture?  How do we learn to make proper decisions if there aren't many people around to learn from?  Kindness isn't automatic, I subscribe to the notion that we would all be knocking each other over the heads with caveman clubs if left to our own talents, a la Lord of the Flies.  So, what makes us good?  Brain chemistry, sure, but maybe also a hope that we can make things better for others, therefore benefitting ourselves by loving the next living thing as best we can.  Find something and give it some love.  Buy a newspaper, send a letter, donate five bucks to an animal rescue, pick up someone else's wrapper.  Don't just read to a kid, but find an older person who can't anymore.  Keep us going, it's hard work but so needed.  Descent: I climb down from the soap box.

Warm days and cooler nights signal midfall changes in seasons.  Today at the market, large orange globes lit up the areas under wooden tables, no shortage of pumpkins in this area.  The leaves on the city trees are changing to yellows and a few emotional reds; the greens are aged and less vibrant, no longer lush or unmeasured.  We are getting ready, steeling our northern selves for the coming drop in temperature and sun; hardy, tough, determined, that's us.  We sleep fiercely, dream deeply, and abandon ourselves unafraid to the oceans of timeless space between midnight and morning.  Sleep well, sleep in temporal rhythm.  With love.

Contraption

Every night, whether springsummerfallwinter, I wrap myself into the tubing and velcro head straps of a CPAP machine that keeps me breathing through the bouts of sleep apnea.  It's been over a year that I was tested and found to wake 43 times an hour to get air and no wonder I was not remembering in which drawer the car keys were, but how did they get in the fridge?  "Do you snore?", asked the doctor after the umpteenth complaint she heard from me regarding memory and energy loss.  How would I know, the cats never crabbed about it.  I went for an overnight test and Alakazam, the results demonstrated a lack of deep sleep. The machine itself is about the size of a lunchbox, and sits next to the bed.

The tubing is a nuisance, for it flips awkwardly and fills with condensation, causing burbling noises that sound like a dog drinking out of waterbowl.  Not a big deal, you shake out the water and pop it back together.  What my biggest complaint concerns is the plastic bubble part that sits on your face, sealing the jetplane pilot mask part to you, sort of.  If it isn't velcroed down tight enough, the thing slips around and leaks pressurized air, generally right into your eye.  I had started with the smaller mask, as the doctor I visited back then fussed about a full face mask being a danger if you were sick and aspirated vomit.  I have never vomited in my sleep in my life, maybe this is something to look forward to.  Also, with the small size mask I had to tape my mouth shut, or I snored, defeating the purpose.  This size also has tiny outlets for air to be released that fill with enough moisture to whistle like a high-pitched teakettle from hell.  No amount of toweling, cotton, or wicking relieved the whistling. All Night. This was a nuisance, and made my blood pressure pills roll around, laughing.

Opting for the larger mask that covers the mouth and nose was a better choice for me, but there are drawbacks.  The larger bubble separates from your face and produces whoopie cushion noises that do not respond to adjustment unless I took the darn thing off and repositioned straps, mask, blah blah.  Several times a night, this doesn't help the condition and creates a loss of sleep exacerbated by throwing the mask across the room.  Going online, I found what apparently is a solution.

The small box came today, and I am excited to try it out!  Whee!  Fabric triangles patterned to match the mask interface supposedly cushion things, relieving displacement, face farts, and those red marks that make you look like a 3 a.m. victim of a beating, especially on your way to work.  They are called Remzzzs Full Face & Nasal CPAP Mask Liners, and the box says they promote a comfortable, full night of sleep.  Sign me up, bwana.  I realize this is not big news to anyone but me, unless you are within a social orbit that circles my planet and have been waiting for me to do something for you that I said I would, like maybe three years ago but I've been so busy wrestling with apnea masks that a good sleep was sort of an itinerant tinker that stopped by as often as you now see the Fuller Brush Man, which is never.  A shame you don't run into those Fuller Brush people anymore, those brushes outlasted both my parents.

I also have ordered a new type of mask from the interwebs, touted as a lighter, easier to wear invention, as compared to the Star Wars get up donned nightly.  One can hope, for my sleep is better with the inflationary circus than without, but there is awkwardness and noise which makes me search for solutions.  Onward.

Time now to go for a test run with the mask liner, I am optimistic and heartened at the collected responses from Satisfied Customers on the ordering site.  It is Wednesday, a middle of a week day come to evening, sliding quickly into Thursday and Friday.  Stars are out, cats are already curled in favored roosts, and the plecostomus knows his feeding time is now.  His fins are out, like a Cadillac from 1962, his fishy eyes blink into his head, his nose rises to the surface to be rubbed.  Good night fish, good night cats, good night good people; to sleep, to sleep.

Feeling Fine

My tooth has grown wings and flown to heaven, thanks to this afternoon's root canal accomplished neatly by my new dentist.  She loaded me with just enough Kickapoo Joy Juice to nullify the nerve without further consequence, compared to the previous toothmonger who would pound in enough prilocaine to kill seven cats and leave me drooling because the mouth forgot how to close.  It wasn't pretty.  After one of his  forays into local anesthesia I went shopping, unaware that half the lip was dragging behind me, trying to catch up.  I temporarily tucked it into a front pocket, where it had a nap for the rest of the day.  I couldn't say hard consonants for the remainder of the week.  Good bye, Dr. Stabby.

You sometimes don't know how bad things are because you just get used to them; the new dentist seems to be a charm, and I am happy because I was able to eat supper without half of it falling in my lap due to residual mouthflop.  The procedure went well, and seems to have solved the problem.   It's the small things.  Like food staying in your mouth.

I am at the point where most of my doctors are younger than me, and this is a good thing, for they will be around when I need them the most.  When I was younger than my doctors, they would come to the house with a large black satchel full of stethoscopes and wooden tongue depressors.  I had the measles, and Dr. Constantine prescribed darkened rooms, St. Joseph's aspirin, and vitamins; he was a kind man and gave me a sucker.  Once I swallowed a glass bead.

My Grandmother had given me a blue glass bead, faceted and fascinating to me, as I wasn't allowed to have too many girl things.  Nothing fancy here, move along.  It was the Disney years, and I pretended to be an oak tree that chipmunks Chip 'n Dale were storing acorns in.  Oh look, here's an acorn (the bead), put it in the tree (my mouth); take it out, oh, here's another (the same bead), put it in, take it out.  Chipmunk excitement became so frantic that my Neverland brain signaled the top end of the digestive system to *swallow* and boink!  It was down the hatch.

I ran to Mom, who went into emergency crisis mode--she shook me upside down by my legs once when she thought I was choking--and called my eternally angry father who snarled the car home from work in the city out to where we lived in Clarence, New York, and got me in to see the local doctor before the glass bead cut my stomach to shreds or lodged in my appendix.  The doctor was amused, told my parents to feed me bread and lots of water, and five dollars please.  Mom and Dad were hoping for X-rays and surgery, and this man told them bread?  We stopped for a loaf of Wonder on the way home, and I got the sticker of Jiminy Cricket that was on the end of the cellophane wrapper.  "Don't you ever..", I heard for days.  I haven't, but still have a few decades to go.

Quiet night, animals are settled, me too.  It was a fast day.  Cup of tea, moon in first quarter.  Sleep well.

Apple Days

October, O October, how I love you.  Fallen leaves under which last-minute beetles hide from birds, trees reach further for ending rays of sun, and market stalls burst with knobbed squashes as round and creased as the face of a well-fed village alderman; the month sidles up to ending September, and flows abundantly until street urchin November wanders into the solemnity of All Saints Day.  The life and fall colors of October are supplanted by the tangible results from tending summer gardens by row or acre, diligent fingers having crossed for the right amount of rain: this year has been particular good for apples.

At the markets, wooden crates are trucked in, waiting to fill eight-quart baskets (pecks), half-bushels, and bushels full of apples.  Four pecks to a bushel, so that makes for 32 dry quarts.  A good storage apple can last a winter, others dissolve within a month but are worthwhile for processing or quick eating out-of-hand.  Idareds picked at proper maturity can last until June in refrigeration improving in flavor with age, while JerseyMacs go for one month before giving up.  

I have found that the Paula Reds make some of the creamiest applesauce that needs little sugar; Granny Smiths do well for the long cooking that apple butter takes, and retain a nice tang after processing.  Winesaps don't come in until mid-October and are not easy to grow in New York State, but when I find them, the flavor makes it my favorite eating apple in spite of the smaller size.  It will fill your kitchen with a noteworthy aroma, is firm to the bite, and also profoundly juicy, making it an apple especially useful for cider.  And pie.

Pie!  Pie will bring good luck to your door, unite enemies, grow strong children, and relieve the ills of old age.  Timing myself, I could get a homemade pie in the oven in 25 minutes from scratch crust to the twirling ministrations of the clamped-down apple peeler.  If there was a day when it was only 24 minutes, then the choice was apple crisp: layers of apple varieties, at least two, hopefully three, piled under butter crumbs and baked till the bubbling sugars announced: done.  It was easy, healthful, and remains in the memories of once young boys who have grown up tall with kind and honorable hearts, maybe a little because of good apples put together.  

Nightfall has come, bringing the cooler temperatures that turn an apple red and cause people and animals to pull a blanket over a lap.   Dishes done, slippers on, sitting and remembering; round little Tulip is curled in tortoiseshell repose, and the city buildings are blinking lights at their tops to let airplanes see where they end in the dark.  Maybe today everyone had a piece of pie, for it's quiet out there, and few cars are traveling the roadway.  Home, I think, must be where the population is this evening.  Be a human beetle-bug under a fallen leaf blanket.  Dream of flour, butter, and brown sugar; a black dog with running children.  Apple days.  Good night.