Cake as Symbolic

Cake has a deeper meaning than the amount of calories in each slice. Kids grow up with memories of their birthday cakes, brides look fondly upon photos of their wedding cake, young wives of my era were askance about the 'box cakes' that were new to the grocery shelves. "Oh, it is just a box cake," we might say at the coffee after church.

As my children started to read, I encouraged them to make cake when they could read the directions on the box. I handed the cook book to one of my sons when he was a third grader and was almost horrified when he proceed to make cream puffs and boil the vanilla filling. But a promise is a promise and the results were astonishing.

Early American cooks considered cake, especially chocolate cake, a symbol of well-being. A couple of days ago I made a cake with Seven Minute Icing for my beloved. It was a token of love and well-being. I thought it was beautiful.

You Tubers and Birthdays

You Tube has become the insanity of the serious. The questions on last night's debate were as droll and unrealistic as my favorite satire, The Wittenberg Door. This morning's denial by CNN and the Clinton campaign people that they knew nothing about the plant in the audience is as laughable as the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Religious."

The news just kills me. This morning I read that South Dakota has the lowest rate of depression in the US; in the same article their suicide rate is among the highest. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

Today is the birthday of three of my favorite writers, the authors of Little Women, The Chronicles of Narnia, and A Wrinkle in Time. L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

50/50 My Eye

On this day in 1095 Pope Urban II called for the first Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the Turks. According to the Writers Almanac, there was no imminent threat from the Muslims but Urban noticed that Europe was becoming increasingly violent, with low-level knights killing each other over their land rights, and he thought he could bring peace to the Christian world by directing all that violence against an outside enemy. So he made up stories of how Turks in Jerusalem were torturing and killing Christians, and anyone willing to join the fight against them would go to heaven.

I think I have heard the same thing more recently. "We express our determination to bring an end to bloodshed, suffering and decades of conflict between our peoples; to usher in a new era of peace, based on freedom, security, justice, dignity, respect and mutual recognition; to propagate a culture of peace and nonviolence; to confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis." Peace talks in Annapolis, MD.

On a lighter note, the better cook in the house and I made an apple crisp last night. It was very tasty. I love it when we cook together. Actually I love it when we work together at nearly everything except when I am right about how it should be done and he insists that he is. If it comes to the proving, I am almost as chagrined as he, when I am right. I am not very good at celebrating my accuracies. 50/50 my eye.

Helsinki Complaint Choir

Being a consistent watcher of CBS Sunday Morning from my cozy bed is one of my favorite routines. As I told our newly ordained Pastor Jan last night, I am so very thankful for Saturday evening services..but I didn't mention Sunday morning TV in bed. Anyway, their closing clip this morning was the Helsinki Complaint Choir.

It tickled me a couple of years ago when I first discovered it, and in my attempt to share it here this morning, I see the captioning is so small it is nearly worthless. If you really want to know what they are complaining about in Finland get out your magnifying glass. It is the same stuff people complain about everywhere.

I am a hopeless nerd-not. I tried to add a readability test to this blog and couldn't seem to get it to happen. When I tested one of my pages it was high school level, then another one was genius level. I decided it was probably worth what it cost, nothing.

Another Kind of Wonderful

We are going with a different kind of thankful this year. Our predictable dinner was traditional. Dishing up was done while I was stirring gravy, eating was a fast gulp, and the door shut behind the guests 45 minutes after they arrived. Stuff happens. It wasn't good, it wasn't bad, it just was.

I clicked over to Real Live Preacher a few minutes ago and saw the most amazing YouTube Video from Kansas State University. Maybe it is the old librarian in my brain that made me appreciate it so much. It is the flip, flip, flip of the card catalog I occasionally miss...not much though. They produced another one called "The Machine is Us/ing Us." Video for information nerds.

While He Who Must Be OBeyed watched for a shirt tail relative do some rodeoing on TV, I listened to Dr. Ben Carson, from Johns Hopkins Hospital lecture to a group in Baltimore. I have heard him before but the second time around was good again. He said there is no such thing as wasted knowledge; which could make one wonder as we finished "The Exploits of Ben Arnold" by Josephine Waggoner's interview notes.

Is it good to read the words of the scout, who in 1876 rode hard for $200 to deliver the first message of the Custer Massacre (Ed Lemmon's words) on the Greasy Grass from General Reno to the outside world? If you can call General Crook on the Powder River in Montana the outside world. Then there is the other version. Is all knowledge good? Some is a trivial pursuit and questionable.

Dr. Ben Carson is spot on with his wisdom and philosophy.

The Good Life

Our weekend was made happy by the visit of a son and daughter-in-law and another son stopping by to join us for dinner. Having time to sit down with ones grown sons to exchange ideas, viewpoints, opinions and information is the sweet culmination of rearing a house full of little boys. If one can call four sons a houseful of boys. He Who Must Be Obeyed was the fifth of ten, eight of them boys. That is a house full of sons.

Then there is that Finnish research about mothers of sons and the immunosuppressant testosterone that shortens her life. No wonder my real age is 15 years over my calendar age. It is, however, worth it for the hilarity that many sons bring to the dinner table of life. We heard another story that would have horrified us at the time; some hilarity is best saved for parents in their old age.

Today is the day in 1863 that Pres. Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address at the dedication of a new cemetary. His speech followed the two hour keynote speaker. Most watched the photographer set up his equipment and didn't hear a word Lincoln said. His address was ten sentences, just 272 words, and one that the school pupils in my era memorized. This was in the Writer's Almanac today, with Garrison Keillor.

In my inbox was a Tale Spinner story from an e-friend, Zvonko, of how he helped build a new nation of Tito's Yugoslavia. It begins: "I got out of the POW camp on August 15, 1945. I was happy to be back home in Osijek after the most frightening and dreadful four months of my young life. Several weeks passed before I recovered part of my body weight and some strength returned after sleeping many hours in my own bed. Slowly and persistently I succeeded in burying deep in my subconscious all the horrors and humiliations I had been through."

I have one of his books in my "To Read" pile. Joining it is a thoughtful book review from a learned cousin that arrived last night. Life is good.

Russian Thistles

As a barefoot kid I first loved the soft green Russian Thistles that lined the dirt street in front of our house on the west end of Buffalo, SD. The first green leaves were as soft as the fur of a long haired cat. Green of any kind was good and soft was welcome.

Then the lovely roundness of the bushy plant turned on us; and except for the cowboy song,we never called it a tumbling tumbleweed. I found out this morning that the round, bushy, "much branched plant growing 1 to 3 1/2 foot high originally hitched a ride from the steppes of Mongolia with a shipment of grain. The first soft branches fall off and the next set of leaves are short, stiff, spiny and about this time of the year the plant breaks off at the base and winds like we have had in the high plains bring it to life, so to speak.

This week, according to the Rapid City Journal, "The high winds that whipped through the region over the past two days drove hundreds of tumbleweeds into the town (of Fariburn) 30 miles south of Rapid City.

"Tubleweeds now fill the basketball court at the Fairburn Elementary School, clog the ditches, cover the side of at least one house, surround vehicles and cover Tammy Shepherd's backyard. ... The tumbleweeds rolled in Tuesday afternoon with the wind.

"The song was penned in 1934 by Bob Nolan, one of the founding members of the Sons of the Pioneers. Gene Autry sang it in the 1935 movie of the same name, and it was later performed by such noted cowpokes as Diana Ross and the Supremes..."

Personally I don't think the latter were exactly 'cowpokes,' who knows what they were poking. Probably fun at those of us who started wearing shoes when Russian Thistles rolled into town.

The tumbleweed snowman? http://www.dukecityfix.com/index.php?itemid=1282

Armistice Day

Today is Armistice Day, or Veteran's Day here in the US.

Kurt Vonnegut was born Nov. 11, 1922, died this past April. They seldom list his book, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!, which was one of my favorites. Vonnegut explains it thus in the prologue:"This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it "Slapstick" because it is grotesque, situational poetry -- like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago. It is about what life feels like to me." Here is that 'cosmic loneliness' from which I suffer from time to time. No wonder I liked the book.

Right now I am listening to BBC Radio Player's Broadcast on the Radio 3 Night Waves Nov. 8th discussion "Exploring the cultural legacy of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which focuses on the Allied fire bombing of Dresden during WWII.

"On December 14, 1944, Vonnegut was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He was held as a POW in Dresden, a beautiful German city with no major industries or military presence. The bombing of Dresden was unexpected. Vonnegut and the other POWs were some of the only survivors. They waited out the bombing in a meat cellar deep under the slaughterhouse."

While poking about the Web, I discovered this Gradesaver written by Harvard students. I suppose now that I am not concerned about grades, as such, this is a wonderful site. Maybe it is more detailed than the more known CliffsNotes. Cliff was a graduate student in geology and physics at the University of Nebraska in the dirty thirties. Working out of Lincoln, Nebraska, Cliff built the company that produces the most widely used study guides in the world. Cliff's message for students was to use CliffsNotes to better understand literature.

But I digress. He Who Must Be Obeyed has washed all of the windows already this morning, his having gone to church last night. I stayed in my cozy bed, having had one of those new inoculations for shingles yesterday. I asked the pharmacist who drove over to Belleview to get the prescription, what shall I expect. He had no idea as it was so new. That wasn't exactly comforting. I am hoping I don't break out in an elderly version of chicken pox. "Let me know," he requested. And so it goes.

Six Degrees of Separation

Some of the younger generation, who tell me they 'hate history,' might be surprised to learn that this theory was first proposed in 1929, by a Hungarian writer in a short story called "Chains." Then in the 1950's a couple of guys from MIT and IBM set out to prove the theory mathematically.

Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory in 1967, which he called "the small-world problem." Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation." A play, movie and one of the "Ten Best Web Sites of 1996" have followed.

In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, recreated Milgrams experiment on the Internet. Watts' research, and the advent of the computer age, has opened up new areas of inquiry related to six degrees of separation in diverse areas of network theory such as as power grid analysis, disease transmission, graph theory, corporate communication, and computer circuitry.

Is this a bunch of mumbo-jumbo? How did you say you found this blog?

My Aunt Liz

I finally put summer away and have started my latest book project. My Great Aunt Elizabeth was one of those pioneer teachers who was often smaller and probably younger than some of her students.

She told one of her sons that she had to resort to carrying a quirt to school to keep order in one of her soddy school houses. How I loved her; and how I pray I can write her biography with the honor she deserves.

I have a box of her letters, papers and photos beside the computer and I plan to begin the task of compiling them into a lovely little book.

RealAge and an Epiphany

A former neighbor, Sebastian, stopped to say hello as I was pushing the mulching mower around the front yard yesterday. He and his wife invited us over for dinner about 30 years ago to meet his mother from Sicily. She didn't speak English, but people can gather and enjoy one another's company over ethnic food.

During Sebastian's visit, a little flash of clarity hit me. While He Who Must Be Obeyed and I were so terribly busy raising our own five children (BP-Before Pill), taking in needy children for periods of from four to 12 years, trying to get ourselves through the University before we turned 40, and working at our chosen professions; all of those years I always had a dream that when it was completed, there would be 'something wonderful' out there for us.

Up to yesterday, I felt the elusive 'something' was always out of reach, even after 12 years of retirement. Family demands continue their deadly grip; a one way thing; which is, of course, the Heart of Christianity, to quote Marcus Borg.

Sebastian's visit made something click in my head and a glimmer of the epiphany happened. Our life right now is the 'something wonderful,' this hour and today and tomorrow. How simple can that be? Why was it so hard to see? This is all there is and to flip that, this is everything it is! And it is Something Wonderful, sometimes big and sometimes very small...but it IS. Clinton was right, it is "the meaning of IS"

AND THEN...

I have always been a fool for those little tests on the Internet that are designed to tell you everything with 12 questions. Last night there were many more questions and the outcome was dismal. I had better keep my closet clean as it appears that I could slip over the edge any day now.

Seems tricky that I mow and mulch leaves, which I did twice this week, with one foot in the grave. My lifestyle and situational stress is doing me in before I am finished. I had better get busy with my Aunt Liz's biography. All of that work doesn't just jump into the computer by osmosis, no matter how close I keep the box full of letters, papers and photos to my computer. When I finish that task, the grim reaper can have his way with me, but not until I hold those sweet little books in my old arthritic hands.

The results of my RealAge test were "Calendar Age, 72.8, Difference +15.0, RealAge 87.9. If Mehmet Oz has his face on the home page it must be true. Alas.

I do feel like 87+ most days. I wonder how much stock I can take in this seemingly innocuous test? I got an email this morning with "just a few of the RealAge tools that can help me look and feel younger in as few as 90 days." Isn't that swell!