Super Food

 I spoke to the nine year old on the phone the other day.  "Grandma, this is so exciting!  You'll never guess!"

"I expect I won't guess, Sage.  What's up?"

"I scored a hoop from center court yesterday!  The first one I've ever done!"

"Well, that is exciting, Sage.  Good for you.  Are you growing taller?"

"Oh, only a half inch or so.  But then today... I scored two more from center court!"

"Goodness sake, that is exciting, Sage.  Well, you must be growing.  Are you eating lots of eggs and drinking your milk now?"

"Uh... not really," he paused, thinking.  "But I am eating lots of waffles lately!"

Meeting The Spirit

I wanted to tell you of a strange little meeting I had a few weeks ago with The Spirit that inhabits the back of the store next door to the Copper Gecko. I work up there one day every two weeks, not much, but it's sure fun to talk to the tourists who come in. Recently, we've got a writer from Washington DC who is conducting interviews with older Superiorites for the history of Superior he's writing. He interviews them in the rear room of the Copper Gecko. His name is Joaquin. Well, this day, Joaquin came in, asked me if I were Nancy, and got all excited and said that Leslie told him I could talk to ghosts. I said, not exactly.  But he asked if I'd take him next door to meet The Spirit. I said, okay. It was slow and we didn't have any customers. (Plus we have the key to the shop next door. It's empty, except for the model home furniture that's for sale and all the beautiful clothes of the owner's late wife, which I have been buying a lot of, by the way,for she was my size. But that's another story...) Anyway, I led him through the main room, through a small hall in the middle of the room, past the bathroom, where I first felt The Spirit several weeks ago, by way of the clenching in my heart, which I took to mean it had passed of a heart attack. Anyway, we ended up in the back room facing the back door and we turned to face each other. Suddenly, I was 'aware' (psychically aware) of Joaquin's face being slapped repeatedly, excitedly, like The Spirit was saying, "WOW! Look at me, you fool! You're here and I want you to feel me!" I said nothing to Joaquin,but watched his face intently, almost grinning I'm sure because The Sprit was so darned excited to be getting to meet The Writer. "What's wrong?" Joaquin asked suspiciously, "What's going on?" "What are you feeling?" I asked, smirking a bit. Gosh, the dude's left cheek was getting psychically pummeled!! "Uh, he's trying to get your attention by slapping your cheek," I said. "What!" Joaquin's eyes sprang open. "What's he look like?" He looked fearfully over his shoulder and I looked too, half expecting to see The Spirit. "I don't know," I said, "I'm only feeling him. I can't see him. But he sure is trying to get your attention." "I can't feel anything," Joaquin grumped, turning to leave the room. (Yeah, it's kind of silly standing in a darkened room with a total stranger you've only just met, now, isn't it?) Anyway, we made our way toward the front of the building and I stopped briefly by the bathroom, telling Joaquin that was where I'd first felt The Spirit. Joaquin still couldn't feel a darned thing. "I guess I'm just too egotistical," he admitted. "I can't feel anybody else." "Okay," I agreed. "In that case, I bet you'll make a fine spirit yourself someday when you die." We laughed and left the buidling. But it was pretty much an eye opener for me and I wanted to share.

Magi(c) Gifts

One of my favorite Christmas stories growing up was O.Henry's "Gift of the Magi".  It's a turn of the (Nineteenth) century story about a young couple, deeply in love, who are too poor to afford to buy each other a Christmas gift.  So they each take their most treasured object and sell it to buy their beloved a gift that's fit for the other.  Except their treasured objects are, of course, what the other one had sold in order to buy the gift.  She cuts her beautiful long hair (presumably for someone to make into hair jewelry, which was all the rage in the late Nineteenth Century but which never fails to 'cweep me out!' whenever I've seen a piece of it, but  pardon me, THAT'S another story) to buy him a fob for his beautiful pocket watch.  And he, poor thing, sells his beloved pocket watch to buy her a set of ivory combs for her luscious long hair.  Anyway, I love that story because to me it really hits the nail on Giving this time of year.  You try so hard to find something that will be "just the Thing!" that your special someone will want.

And yes, it is what the Gift of the Magi was:  the kings who travelled to bring Baby Jesus the precious items when he was born.  But it's also magic gifts when one connects with those special gifts.  Let me tell you about one of them that happened to me: the recipient.

At the end of the Christmas season 2002, Bill and I paid a visit to our local Harley dealer who always had a good sale going on between Christmas Day and New Year's.  All that expensive Harley ware would be marked down fifty, sixty sometimes even seventy-five percent.  You didn't want to miss that sale!  That year, I found a set of four Harley old-fashion glasses, painted with Christmas trees and Harley logos, marked down from twenty dollars for the set to only five.  I jumped on them and brought them home.  Since it was no longer Christmas, I put them away with the Christmas stuff until the next year.

Christmas 2003 when I was getting things out, here were those gorgeous Christmas Harley glasses.  I hesitated to open them up and put them out.  Bill and I had given up drinking hard liquor seven years before and rarely had a use for something like these.  But still... they were Harley glasses!  I might have guests over.  I could serve Seven-Up in them, without liquor, couldn't I?  They were an indulgence I wanted, nay...Desired!  But... an indulgence just the same.  I should use them as an extra Christmas gift and save some hard earned money.  I vacillated over that unopened box of glasses for a couple of weeks.  As Christmas got closer, my shopping money dwindled away and I still had empty spaces on my gift list.  Yep, you guessed it:  two days before Christmas, I reluctantly wrapped up the beautiful glasses in their thick Harley-logo-ed box and gave them to a couple who rode motorcycles, only not Harleys.  I reasoned that if they couldn't afford to ride a Harley, at least they could enjoy drinking out of one.  And besides, they were beautiful Christmas glasses.  Maybe they could overlook the Harley part of the Christmas decoration.

Christmas 2004 my grandson Charley started kindergarten.  His teacher was a Harley rider and thought it was hilarious that Charley's grandma and grandpa rode Harleys and were active in the local HOG club.  She was always teasing me about it.  The school held an annual Christmas Bazaar where parents made gifts or gave 'lightly used' or even regifted items so that the students can shop and buy their Christmas treasures at a reduced price.  They've done it for years and the prices range between ten cents and five dollars.  My own boys loved the Bazaar and Tad made it a point to never spend more than a dollar for the seven or eight presents he bought each year.  One year, he even managed to only spend sixty-five cents on his  Christmas list.  His brother, Willy, (Charley's dad) gave him a hard time over his 'cheapness', opting to spend upward of three dollars and eighty cents on his gifts.  Either way, our family loved the Bazaar and I was hoping that Charley would get just as big a bang out of his shopping as his dad and uncle had years before.

On Christmas Day, Charley brought me a big clumsily wrapped package and waited at my knee while I carefully unwrapped it.  What would it be?  A picture he'd drawn?  A mug he had made?  No.  What I found inside was the thick padded Harley box with the four Christmas old-fashioned glasses inside that I had given the motorcycle riding couple the previous year.  Evidently, they had re-gifted to the Christmas Bazaar and Charley had seen they were what his Mackey and Boppy really wanted.  And of course, he was right:  It was PERFECT!

What's In A Name?

I ran down to the WalMart in Mesa to gather a bunch of Christmas goodies.  One thing I wanted to find was a small artificial tree.  We've got one for the Church Street house, but I wanted to get one for the Hill Street house too, so it wouldn't feel left out.  (Listen:  you have to keep those spirits happy.  When we returned home, after only having been gone for a week, Somebody-Spirit-Wise had been smoking and moping in the Hill Street house.  I guess THEY thought a week was too long to be alone!)  Anyway, in hopes of keeping the Spirit-Presence happy, I went tree shopping at Wal-Mart.  But I didn't want to spend Big Bucks on a second tree, so I thought Wal-Mart should be able to help me.

Well, in their artificial tree selections (all made in China, of course, where any self respecting artificial tree is made!), I found a six foot imitation fir.  The brand of this tree?  (I kid you not!)  "This Will Do!"  Now, isn't that an apt name for a sensibly priced six foot Christmas tree to be sold in the dark days of this recession?  For twenty bucks, no less.  Yessir, I'll take that one... the "This Will Do!" tree.  It's cheap, it's big enough and I'll still have money leftover to buy the kids some toys.  Definitely, "This Will Do!" tree for me.

So now, that got me to thinking.  Maybe next year, if they want to market it one step farther, they will be selling a tree (artificial of course, so it can be used year after year), this one all lit up with colored bulbs and darn it, let's include all the ornaments too and of course the tree stand and we'll call it (ummmmm....) the "Git 'er Done Tree!" 

Mincemeat Connoisseur

Bill and I drove home last week for a short Christmas visit with our family and friends.  On Sunday night, we had a big dinner for our sons and their families and I made sure there was plenty of dessert. (What's Christmas without sweets?)  I'd made two kinds of fudge and toffee and a carrot cake, iced gingerbread and sugar cookies and a plate of mincemeat tarts.  I let the little boys choose what they wanted to eat.

Seven-year-old Sage loaded up his plate with a couple of tarts and a wedge of cake.  I looked at the heaping plate dubiously.  "Are you sure you'll eat all of that?  Those are mincemeat, you know."

Sage picked up a tart and grinned, licking his lips.  "I KNOW it is!  I LOVE mincemeat!"

"Really?"  I still didn't believe him.  It was from a batch of mincemeat I'd found in the freezer I'd made two years ago.  And rich as it is, mincemeat has the flavor a kid might not like, let alone its powerful spiciness.  But then, Sage is a kid who has highly developed taste buds.  He likes spicy food and had just polished off a Christmas tamale, rubbing his stomach in appreciation but calling for a glass of water as he admitted, "It's a little spice-y!"

"So go ahead, Sage.  Enjoy your tarts," I said, as I watched four-year-old Ronnie chow down onto a lividly green frosted Christmas tree sugar cooky. 

They disappeared into his mouth, one after the other and Sage grinned again, letting Grandma know that there was nothing he couldn't eat.  Good for him!

A bit later, I came back over to the table to find him dawdling over the piece of carrot cake that remained on his plate.  "You take more than you can eat?" I asked.

"Oh no!  I'm going to eat this," he assured me.  His fingers worked at something in the cake and he picked it off and laid it to the side. 

I studied his now mangled piece of carrot cake.  A stack of raisins lay to the side of the buttercream and cake on his plate.  "What are you doing?"

"Oh, it's these raisins, Grandma!  I can't eat them!  I hate raisins.  I never eat them.  So I'm taking them out."  He resumed his task stoicly.

I shook my head.  Should I tell the now finicky eater that the mincemeat comprises three kinds of raisins, dark, sultans and currants?  And that he'd just chomped them down and declared them delicious?  Nope!  Let him find out later.

The Cult of The Island Girls Shirt

The Island Girls Shirt I make for my shirt business SOMETHING FISHY has been a staple for the past nine or ten years.  It's sort of a 'retro' print, with reclining and posing Fifties bathing beauties on a background of blue with big red hibiscus flowers.  It's not a shirt made for quiet men who want to blend into the woodwork.  It's definitely a shirt for a man to be proud to wear and to get comments on.  It has sold very well for me on eBay and this year a strange thing is happening:  I call it The Cult of the Island Girls Shirt.

Back in June, I was delighted to sell my first shirt to a lady in Moscow, Russia (not Idaho).  Yup, the Island Girls shirt.  I marveled at what the shirt would see in  Russia.  Here was a shirt made for wearing to Hawaii and sipping mai tais on the white sand beach under a blazing sun.  Not for sitting in a pea green cafeteria drinking homemade vodka out of Mason jars.  (I don't know!  I've never visited Russia.  But it's my mental picture of how Russians celebrate based on the few Russian novels I've been able to wade through.  Sorry!)  So I bid the poor shirt good-bye, hoping 'my girls' wouldn't freeze and went on with my sewing. 

The shirt, you see, has five fetching beauties in various retro bathing suits, ranging from a strapless to a modest two piece to my favorite (which doesn't show up in the the photo, unfortunately) a red and white halter with white flower blossoms on them.  It reminds me of a suit that I had back in 1978 that was very like that suit that I wore on my very first trip to Hawaii.... oh sorry!  I digress.  Anyway, it's not the type of clothing you would wear if you were packing to go to Russia, you see.  Those swimsuits would probably be the last article of clothes you'd pack to take there.  (Now let me... where's my fur coat and those fleece lined boots?)

Anyway, a month later, in June, darned if I didn't sell the exact same shirt to a fellow in Moscow.  I checked the name, no different fellow.  Different address.  I wondered if old Dimitri had met Olga in some steam filled bar and they'd exchanged information about my Island Girls shirt and he'd found me on eBay.  I could dream!  But I sewed up another one and sent those girls on out to Moscow to warm some chilly fellow's day.

I've been making this shirt, like I said, for ten years now.  At times, the print just lagged in sales.  It was times like those that I wondered if I shouldn't turn the rest of my Island Girl stash into tablecloths, retro for the Fifties kitchens, but just about the time I'd start pondering such a thought, sales would flare up, some new men would discover "The Girls" and I'd sew through what I had and order another bolt.  By the beginning of this year, I had successfully clothed most of my steady customers in Island Girls shirts.  (Look, I have very flashy customers who don't mind wearing scantily clad ladies on their backs.)  Back in 2002, I even made one for the director of our Harley club.  Instead of the requisite black leather all the bikers wore for the meetings, Mel would show up with his Island Girls shirt on and a big grin, trying to start a whole new look.  (It never quite worked for the rest of the bikers.)

Anyway, a week after the second Island Girls shirt was sold to Moscow, a man with a very Russian-y sounding name, bought one and had me send it to  Charleston, South Carolina.  I wondered if he too, might have known  ol' Dimitri and Olga in Moscow and told him when he was visiting Charleston to get Nancy to send him a shirt.  I did, of course.  I also wondered if perhaps I wasn't clothing some parts of the Russian mafia.  Who would think of looking at these folks clad in the retro Hawaiian print?  They certainly wouldn't look ominous.

So then, in August, I sent one of these shirts out to a fellow in the South of France.  And on October 15, one was ordered by a man in a little village in Greece.  At least those girls would get to see the sun now and then!  But a week later, on October 15, another Russian man Sergei (also from Moscow, mind you) ordered an Island Girls.  And a week later, a fellow ordered one from Copenhagen.    As I stuffed these last two shirts into their mailing envelopes, I told the girls not to despair.  I hoped they wouldn't freeze too bad.  I told them to keep smiling and cheer up the fellows who would be warmed by the girls' sunny dispositions.  But it does seem a cruel thing, to send those little beauties into the cold Northern winter. 

Do you think those folks will ever travel to a warm sunny climate and take the girls along to wear?  Or will they be destined to a life spent under sweaters and coats, perhaps layered over thermal underwear when their owner wants to show them off?  Seems sort of cruel to me.  But then.... I've got to order another bolt of Island Girls.  When she's Hot she's Hot!  And those Girls are burning bright right now.

You Can't Hide In A Small Town

Two years ago when we moved to Superior, Bill and I jumped into civic matters in a big way.  We not only wanted to do some "Good" for the town but it was a good way to meet our neighbors and make friends.  Our first foray was to help on the "Crime Free Superior" committee, a bridge between the police and the citizens.  The police department was in the middle of getting restructured and overall, it hadn't had its best rapport with the community, so there was a lot of 'Good' that came with that group, even if we didn't meet all of our lofty goals.  In the middle of organizing the committee, I was asked to serve as an interim secretary by the chairman.  One of the first things we did was to email everybody on the committee each other's email addresses so we could keep in touch if something happened. 

There was a lady in our community who objected to having her email address shared with the rest of the committee and she reacted (or over-reacted, seemed to me) in a big way, saying we'd overstepped our bounds and were going to invite Heaps of Trouble by letting everybody have her email address.  Her letter to the committee seemed especially vile towards me, so at the next meeting, I offered to sever my relations with the committee and not serve any more.  Personally, I felt as if just when the new community door had opened towards me and I'd stepped in, that it was shutting so hard my nose would get hit.  But the others on the committee assured me they didn't share the lady's feelings and please not to quit.  The gist of the matter was that I stayed on to work on the committee; the lady dropped out of attending the meetings; and throughout the course of the next two years my path hasn't crossed hers. 

Until this week-end, however.  Since there are fewer than four thousand people in this town, it is highly unlikely that one could move around and not share the same space at some point, isn't it?  At the Dia de Los Colores art festival this past week-end, I bought a vendor space to sell my SOMETHING FISHY shirts I make.  They set us up in the room with the art show and it was a colorful and lively group that entered to check out the entries in the art show as well as the vendors: we had jewelry, photography, baby clothes, sculpture and pottery as well as my shirts.  Sales were sluggish for me, i.e. to say, I sold nothing but I did talk to a lot of folks and gave out my cards to potential buyers, so it wasn't all bad. 

Towards the end of the day, a lady stopped by and exclaimed over my shirts.  She was wearing a Chamber volunteer badge and said she'd worked the event all day and only then could get in.  She asked if I took plastic and I regretfully told her no, I only took plastic on eBay.  She asked if I had a shirt in a certain size and I regretfully told her no, I didn't have one in the size she wanted but I did have more material and could make her one.  She agreed and opened her purse and pulled out her card.  It was then that I "got it".  YEP!  The same lady who had trounced me in the email two years before for sharing her email address.  But she looked so happy with her potential purchase, I guess she'd forgiven me.  

Until I handed her my card and when she glanced at it, she blinked hard but said nothing.  

I studied her, wondering if my potential sale was going to go down the tubes.  Not then.  She either had forgotten her outburst from two years ago or has deemed it 'water under the bridge'.  Well, if she can, so can I, I thought.  Besides, a potential shirt sale is a potential shirt sale.

So here's my parting shot:  If you live in a small town, and you tend to spout off to people over things you don't like that they do, then you'd best be prepared to re-meet up with those same people at some period in time.  You can pretend you've forgotten all about it (hey, works for some of us Old People) or you can play the Forgive and Forget Scene.  It's your choice... but you can't hide forever!