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!

A Whiff of Roast Beef

Wednesday, the 7th, we had a good trek to the desert with my sister and brother-in-law.  Since it had been nearly a year since our last one, it made it all the more fun.  We celebrate these desert outings with a picnic, going "all out", (meaning: it's so much food you're quite likely not going to be eating another meal that day.)  It was no exception this time.  From a lofty perch on Iron Mountain looking southward towards Picket Post Mountain, we ate turkey and pastrami sandwiches on sourdough, ate fresh salsa with Bill's home grown cherry tomatoes and polished it off with fun sized Halloween candies.  I'd made an apple pie for later, but when we returned home we were much too full to eat pie, so shared it out to eat later in the evening. 

The point was, by four PM Wednesday afternoon, I wasn't hungry.  Should not have been hungry.  Food was probably the last thing I had been thinking about.  But.... passing through the kitchen around that time, I smelled garlic.  Yes:  garlic.  The smell was definitely there.  Not in the sunroom.  Not in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen.  But the the pungent, aromatic smell of garlic was hanging in the kitchen.  As soon as I smelled it, I was assailed by the thought:  roast beef.  I needed a piece of roast beef.  The kind of tender roast beef studded with garlic cloves.  The kind my mother-in-law, Betty, used to make whenever we visited.    How silly!  I'd eaten myself full that noon on a turkey sandwich.  I certainly didn't NEED roast  beef. 

However, the feeling remained.  Every time I'd pass through the house (the kitchen is centrally located, so you have to cross it whenever you go from one end of the house to the other), I'd smell that rich lurking odor of garlic.  I even opened the refrigerator a time or two to make sure there were no peeled garlic cloves sitting inside.  No, there weren't.  I had used several cloves when I made the salsa earlier in the day.  But now the salsa was sitting covered up in the refrigerator.  And still that garlic smell remained with the proviso that it should be studded inside a succulent roast beef, with its warm juices bubbling out into a roaster pan in the oven.  My mouth was watering from the thought.

"Geez, I need some roast beef! " I fumed to Bill.

"Let's have a piece of that apple pie," he offered.  "It's time."

We did.  I warmed it up and it was good apple pie but it didn't do anything to assauge my appetite for that piece of roast beef.  Darned garlic smell!  I went to bed later that night feeling dissatisfied and hungry.  And I shouldn't have been.

Thursday, I decided to do something about it.  I walked up to the post office and stopped in at the grocery store on my way home.  They didn't have any good looking cross rib roasts, but they did have a passable chuck roast, so I bought it and brought it home and put it in a crock pot with lots of garlic and potatoes for some pot roast.  I figured that would take care of the craving. 

It didn't.

At the first bite of the 'okay' pot roast, I knew what I was missing.  "I should have made your mom's garlic roast beef," I told Bill.  "That's what I've been craving.  I thought pot roast would do but it's your mom's roast I'm wanting."

He grinned.  "Yeah, that sure was good.  With those cloves studded in there.  And..." he smiled again, "yesterday was her birthday, you know."

"That's right!  The seventh! Well, did you smell that garlic in the kitchen last night?  It was driving me nuts!"

"I smelled it.  I thought maybe you'd left some out when you made the salsa."

"No, I checked.  But I guess your mother was wanting to remind me of her good garlic roast she used to make.  And since it was her birthday, what better day to do it?"  Tears glistened in our eyes.  It was three years ago in June that Betty died.  "And, of course, your mother knows what store I put in food when it comes to memories.  All of my old memories are tied up with meals.  So of course, she was reminding me of her birthday with the smell of garlic and roast beef!"

Listen:  if my mother-in-law wants to visit us in spirit fashion this way, it's fine with me. I'm just glad nobody in the family spent their days cleaning out septic tanks!

Cacophony

Saturday night was a beautiful night for a walk around town.  We'd made our way uphill to the old section of Pinal to deliver some spicy soup to friends.  There was a fresh slice of quarter moon riding in the sky, the night was warm in the upper eighties, the air almost tangible it had so much body to it, as the rich dusk slid in behind a hasty red sunset.  As we left our friend's home, the dusk had settled to a black velvet, feeling like summer in the desert night.  If you could import that kind of evening to Dillon Beach, you'd have yourself some Tourist Trade, I was thinking!

But as we finished our good-nights at our friend's big wooden gate, the soft desert night was sliced through by strident noise.  At first, I thought it was a teenager's car, windows open, streaming his music through the quiet streets.  No, this didn't move.  It stayed, spraying its message around the neighborhood. 

"What's going on?" I asked Bill.

Our friends just shrugged as if to say, "Gee!  He's at it again," telling us good-night again and shutting their door.  The noise had been obliterated behind their eighteen inch thick adobe walls.  We'd heard nothing while we'd been in their home.

"Jesus, save these sinners!" an old man's shrill voice boomed from a hand held electronic megaphone.  "Jesus.  Jesus.  Jesus."

"A revival?" I asked Bill, struck by the thought on what should be a soft moon velvet night.  The old man's voice cut the velvet darkness to shreds as he sing songed his so-called praise to Jesus and damned the sinners.  "Is that legal?"

"I dunno!  He seems to be doing it."

We glanced across the street to where a family group had been gathered on their patio playing with their grandchildren  when we'd entered our friends' home.  The patio was empty.  You couldn't hear yourself think with that noise going on in the next street.

"He's clearing the streets," I muttered.  We turned and headed down towards Main Street, as the old man's voice gained volume, then stumbled a time or two as he apparently gasped for breath.  He sounded like maybe he might have COPD and was having trouble maintaining his monologue.  I imagined he was a retired miner, intent on spreading the word of God, albeit his methods, while his lungs steadily decreased after decades of working the mines.

But even as his voice stumbled a time or two, it didn't deter his speechmaking.  As we moved up the street, you couldn't hear all his words, but you could tell he was still screeching out the word of God.  I'm sorry to repeat myself, but I just can not believe that this could be legal!  Yes, we've got freedom of speech and yes, we've got freedom of religion, but what kind of freedom are they taking away from me when I'd just as soon enjoy a quiet warm evening....quietly!

We walked the rest of the way up Main Street and turned on Magma to make our way down to the Dari-Queen on Highway 60.  Shouldn't a summer night's walk be finished up with a soft serve ice cream?  Darned right!  But even there, as we sat outside and licked our cones, you could hear the old man's strident demands.  Now, it sounded like he'd moved his act to the South side of town and was probably pissing off the residents on the other side of town.  Nothing like getting everybody Hot and Bothered on a warm night.

Today, I put a call in to the Town Manager, asking if such a thing is legal, or should I have reported it to the cops.  I know the police have better things to do than shush people up, but you know what?  He was intruding on my liberties and I don't think I want a Bible Thumper intruding on my warm fall nights walks!   

Thanks!  I feel better getting this one off my chest!  HA!

Three Little Kittens

Daddy found a nest of newly hatched kittens under the tackle shed in the boat yard. Their eyes were open and they were six weeks old or so. They weren't 'tamed' yet, but their curiosity was getting the better of them and when they heard people approach, they would duck their little black and white faces out from under the shed floor. He asked the boys if they wanted to see some kittens.

"Yes, yes, yes!" they fired in unison. Nine year old Charlie, seven year old Sage and their four year old cousin, Ronnie.

"Well, then, these are still wild cats. So you have to be extremely quiet so you don't scare them," Daddy reminded them.

"We will!" Charlie

"Okay, Let's go!" Sage

"You betcha!" Ronnie

They were jumping with excitement to see the find.

He led them through the back door of the boathouse and across the street into the boatyard, where he paused and bent down. In a low voice, he reminded them, "You have to be extremely quiet not to frighten them. So be quiet and and sit down where I show you."

They nodded excitedly, not saying anything but their excitement was making it hard for them to stop moving.

Daddy led them farther into the boatyard and motioned them to sit down in some tall weeds surrounding the tackle shed. Carefully, each little boy settled on his haunches, ducking their heads to peer under the shed. No cats were visible. Nothing moved.

Heads bobbed up to Daddy, speechless but pleading with him to make the elusive kittens appear. Daddy squatted down among the boys and whispered, "Well, now, all you have to do is to make kitten noises and they'll come out."

Silence for just a moment. Each little boy began mewing and squealing in a kittenish fashion. They paused, then started again.

One by one, three tiny heads poked out from under the shed. Black and white kittens with spikey white whiskers to examine this strange new breed of 'kittens'. The boys were entranced with what they'd produced as each species got to study the other.

Me? I'm standing at the boatyard gate completely enthralled with my son and his kids. What a special moment. Of course, I'd forgotten the video camera.

Crabby Old Lady

For the past month, I have been suffering from a series of misfortunes regarding my sewing machine(s). Just before I left Arizona, Bill asked if I wouldn't be happier taking my Pfaff with me. I love my Pfaff. I sew fast with my Pfaff. I don't have to think about anything when I'm sewing with the Pfaff. Perhaps I've come to be rely too much on my Pfaff. I didn't want to be one of those stodgy old ladies who can't adapt to something new. No, I told him, I'd use the Singer I had at Dillon Beach. I left the Pfaff behind in Superior. I could spend the summer with a different machine. I was still young enough to be adaptable, wasn't I?

Less than three weeks after working with the Singer, it developed a noticeable problem. The presser foot was limp and wouldn't stay up without one hand holding it up. It made sewing a definite Challenge. Each day became harder to even sew a seam, unless I was able to grow another hand just to hold the presser foot up. Thinking it would be easier to get it fixed, I took it into Santa Rosa to the sewing machine fix-it shop. (Thank goodness, in this age of buy-something-new-instead-of-get-it-fixed, there are still sewing machine fix-it shops around.) However, the fix-it man told me it would cost more to fix the ailing Singer than it cost new and he didn't think the fix-it job would hold up. I'd need a new one in no time.

Defeated, I returned home and made a call to my daughter-in-law, also a sewer. She loaned me an old machine that turned out to be my forty-one year old Montgomery Wards machine, I had given to her soon after she was married. It brought tears to my eyes to see the old machine. However, it could only crank out laborious four-part buttonholes, not the fast one step ones of the Pfaff and the Singer. I asked friends and neighbors if I could borrow their machines, so I could use them for the buttonholes. I collected three machines and returned all three.. none could make one step buttonholes. I missed my Pfaff. I was missing it more every day.

As each day unfolded, and a new sewing woe filled my repertorie, I'd relate the newest sad story to Bill. One day, he'd heard enough. "I'm packing up your Pfaff and sending it to you," he announced.

It sounded like a good idea. But.... "But insure it, won't you?" I reminded him. They weren't making my model 7530 any longer but the used ones on eBay were going for a thousand dollars or more.

"I'll insure it for a thousand dollars," Bill said, "and if it doesn't get there, you can buy another one."

When my daughter-in-law heard what he was doing, she worried, "But what if they drop it? Then you'll still have a machine, but a broken one!"

"You worry too much," I told her, trying not to imagine the worst.

Six days later, they delivered it. It was boxed well. There were no unusual rattles in the box. I uncrated it on my day off and set it up. I'd made six shirts by then and they all needed buttonholes. I set to work buttonholing. The machine worked fine. It was flawless. Shipping from Arizona hadn't hurt it a bit. I was on a real High that morning as I buttonholed three shirts. After I'd been sewing for two hours, Chuy announced he had to go outside, so I turned the machine off and took him outside.

I saw Willy and Tad and stopped by to tell them how great the machine was running and then added, "You'll have to tell your wife that she worried for nothing. The machine is running like a top!" Then I ran home to finish up the last three shirts. Suddenly... The Big Nada... the machine wouldn't switch into the buttohole mode. It wouldn't stitch in the normal stitching mode. All it would do was a plodding basting stitch. Nothing else. What in the world was wrong with it? Here I had bad-mouthed my daughter-in-law's worry and now it seemed to have come back to bite me in the butt. The machine was toast. It would not work right. It was time to return to the Fix-It man.

Two days later, I took it in and dropped it off. When I described the problem, the Fix-It Man said it sounded like the circuit board. A major problem. He said they would look at it and call me before they did any repairs. I went back out to the car, sans Pfaff, and burst into tears. My beloved Pfaff.... left to the repair man. Could they save her life? Or would she too have to succomb to the Can't-Fix-It-Pile?

I kept stolidly sewing on the forty-one year old machine and even managed to make some four step buttonholes with it, mainly because I had five shirts to sew for my daughters-in-law and grandsons to wear in the Fourth of July parade. I wasn't proud of the bottonholes and instead of making all four in five minutes, it took about fifteen minutes each, BUT... they were buttonholes. At this point, I was beginning to appreciate ANY sewing machine.

Five days later, the Fix-It Man called and said the bad news was a four hundred and fifty dollar circuit board, plus labor, and it wouldn't be ready for three weeks. What could I do? I agreed. I tried not to think about broken down sewing machines and the pile of unsewn shirts I had cut out and not been able to get sewn. It was taking so long to sew a shirt with the forty-one year old machine. I couldn't zip through one in an hour and a half like I could with the Pfaff. It was taking me the better part of two days to get one finished. What should have been recreation was feeling like WORK! I was not a happy sewer.

A week later, the Fix-It Man called and said the Pfaff was ready. The circuit board was in a warehouse on the West Coast rather than on the East Coast, so it was ready. Along with a six hundred repair bill. I snipped the thread on my Montgomery Ward machine and ran to Santa Rosa to get the Pfaff.

All the way home, I held my breath. Was the Pfaff really fixed? Could I get back to the effortless sewing I used to enjoy? Would the Pfaff go P-ffut again after a few hours of sewing? Well, Yes, and Yes and No, it didn't. Yesterday afternoon, I sewed two and a half shirts. This morning I sewed two more. The sewing is almost effortless. The machine is sewing like a champ.

And me? Guess I won't have to be a Crabby Old Lady any more. And I can actually have something to talk about besides my ailing sewing machine and my huge repair bill. But at this rate, I'll have to sell twenty shirts to pay for the repair bill!

Home Improvements

I am not skilled in home improvements. For forty-one years, I've been married to the best handyman, skilled mechanic, do-it-yourselfer anyone could ever ask for. It's due to Bill's skills that I've never honed any of my own. And maybe it took the luxury of retirement and all that spare time to try my hand. But two months ago, when I took up a paintbrush and started painting the master bedroom of the new house in AZ, it got to be fun. And it was getting intriguing when I began painting the walls of the Great Room in three color stripes. So it was starting to become 'natural' when I returned to the beach this summer and decided to do something about the thirty-seven year old wood paneled walls in the mobile home.

In the Seventies, we were "downtown brown", I'm sure. I felt we were fairly fashionable in 1972 when we moved in. And being a busy mother and working woman, I never found the time to try turning the walls anything other than the brown paneling with Seventies harvest yellow fixtures in them. But now... ah yes, now that I've found this new unused until now skill of painting and re-decorating, well, now the urge is upon me to turn my brown walls into anything but brown walls.

And because I'm a Gemini and we seek Instant Gratification, I decided to start on the smallest bathroom in the house, so that I wouldn't have to wait weeks for the room to be done. The first step after removing all the hardware was to primer the walls and the ceiling a nice matte white. But after the first thick coating of Kilz was spread upon all the surfaces, you could still see layers of brown paneling peeking through the paint. So Willy took a look at it and advised it needed a second coat of primer. I sighed. Apparently, this small bathroom was growing larger each day. It wasn't going to be done in a few days, or even a week. It took me ten days to get all the coats of primer put down on it.

In the meantime, I'd visited Home Depot and settled upon a pretty pale lime green for the walls. It was called "Spirit Whisper" and I think I picked it as much for its color as its name. Someday, when I get really famous, it would be fun to write names for paint. I found a very pale cousin of it in the same hue, only infinitesimally faint called "Green Shimmer" for the ceiling. So one evening while I was waiting for the inspiration to get the second coat of primer on the still dark walls, I gilded the ceiling with the "Green Shimmer". It moved me to continue onwards. My bathroom that I'd been accustomed to for the past thirty seven years appeared to belong to somebody else. It was growing bigger under its nice light coloring.

Over the course of the next ten days, the walls bloomed with the bright "Spirit Whisper" of green coloring. I'd found a pretty cantaloupe-y color called "Delicious Melon" that turned to be much paler than whatever was promised on the paint chip for the trim and the cupboards. Apparently, my cantaloupe was less ripe than the one on the paint chip, but I stuck with it and turned the mirror and door trims and the cupboard doors a pale melon color. The molding trim in the corners and on the floor were harder to paint. I had to locate one of the little boys' paintbrushes and paint tiny strokes on the molding so I didn't ruin the "Spirit Whisper" of the walls. Man... interior decorating was time consuming. I found my nightly sewing not happening and my shirt inventory dwindling while I labored each evening with my new found hobby. I was bordering on the obsessive - I had to finish my bathroom.

Finally, after three weeks, the walls were finished. The cupboards were painted and the doors rehung. (Yes, I'd learned to screw too.) The fixtures were either replaced or rehung. The bathroom was complete. That is-- er -- not exactly. The thirty-seven year old linoleum still glared back from the floor, a blatant harvest yellow pattern in a very Seventies pattern. It didn't exactly "flow" with the room. Pam advised me to check out some very inexpensive peel 'n'stick tiles at Lowe's. For a dollar a square foot (hey, I only had to buy twenty square feet for this tiny room), I got some vinyl tile that looked just like the Italian porcelain tile we'd laid in the AZ kitchen two years ago. It was a pretty cream marble color with a trace of pinkish-melon running through it.

I bought it and brought it home, determined on Tuesday to finish the project. Upon closer inspection, the first thing that needed to be done was to remove all the floor molding. Oh dear! All that time consuming work with the tiny paintbrush on my hands and knees kneeling behind the toilet, painting that melon color... done for! The molding when I finally got it up was in three or more pieces, so into the trash it went. Then I spent an hour giving the old floor a good onceover with sandpaper. Then (I am not proud of this part!) I spent, I kid you not!, the next two and a half hours on my hands and knees sticking tiles, measuring them, cutting them none too expertly with scissors and sticking them down in that tiny bathroom. Cutting around the toilet was not fun and far from perfect. It's a good thing I am NOT a perfectionist or I'd probably want it ripped up and re-done. But I know who would have to rip it up and Re-Do it and I'm not wanting to do that, thank you, so the less than perfect job will have to stand for now.

All that remains is to procure some new molding, measure it, cut it, paint it and nail it down. I'm not good at cutting, but then I wasn't good at measuring or painting or screwing either, was I? And it's getting done. So the next question is, what room shall I start on next?

Chuy the Performer

Charlie's Fourth grade had a Pet Day this week. Each child could bring his pet to school for a ten to fifteen minute time to greet the children and show their pet off. Charlie's cat, who is a grouchy thirteen year old, was less than thrilled to visit a classroom of students so he asked if Chuy could be his pet for the day. I was positive Chuy would appeal to the kids. He did. At first, Charlie had to rein him in, the puppy was so eager to dash into the crowd of kids and lick each and every one of them. So Charlie had his hands full trying to pull Chuy back and still tell his class a bit about Chuy and his breed. Then he took the bag of treats and shook it over his head and asked if anyone wanted to see tricks. There were unaminous shouts of agreement. First Chuy sat and shook paws, then Charlie took a small cup of butter out of his bag and immediately Chuy was up on his hind legs, walking across the room for the smell of butter, oblivious to the fact that he was on two legs and not four. He looked good. One little boy cried out, "He's the Best Trained Dog In The World!" The children cheered. The teacher voiced his approval. Grandma was proud. Chuy went on to do some "Up and Around"s and another big walk for the kids, now more interested in his treats than the many children cheering him on. Charlie finished up taking Chuy in the crowd so the kids could pet Chuy, then we had to go. A little girl appeared with her gray kitten, not more than eight weeks old and suddenly all the attention for the performing dog was centered on "Awwwww!" the cute little kitten.

I took Chuy and his bag of treats and bid Charlie and his class good-bye. Chuy left, but you could tell what he was thinking, "Dumb cat!"

How Do You Explain This?

Ninety-nine blogs ago, I started this Blog with the intent to show Life's Coincidents and what they might mean in our lives. I haven't always had coincidents to write about and have had to make do with the mundane, most of the time. But this is my 100th blog and I've got one of the darnedest, most unexplainable coincidents that's ever happened to me. Maybe one of you-all will have an explanation for it. If you do, by all means, let me hear it. I'm open to it.

Two days ago, I packed up the car and took the animals with me for our Summer Trek back to California. I had the Explorer stuffed with the two kitties in their carriers in the back seat, Sam Bird, the African Gray parrot in his carrier on the floor in the back seat, the trunk was stuffed with four boxes of shirts and fabric waiting to be made into shirts for SOMETHING FISHY and Chuy, the puppy, was snuggled into my lap for the better part of the trip. (Thank goodness he's not bigger than eighteen pounds or he wouldn't have fit behind the wheel!) We left Mr. Bill back in AZ to care for the houses.

I spent the night in Mojave, at a pet friendly motel, after ten hours on the road. Chuy was less than thrilled to share the bed with the cats so spent part of his night on the floor and Spooky the cat, who never shows herself to strangers, spent the better part of her night sitting in the window staring at the lit swimming pool, imagining she was in a Cat Version of Las Vegas, perhaps.

We started out the next morning at six thirty, getting up over the Tehachapis before the wind got very hard. I was trying to stop every hour and a half to two hours so Chuy and I could stretch our legs and he could pee (ditto for me). But there were places in both Arizona and California that the rest stops were closed, so sometimes our rest stops stretched to two hours or more. Well, that's the way it worked yesterday morning. Buttonwillow's rest stop was closed for repairs so we had to drive nearly two and a half hours before we could find a rest stop at Coalinga.

Now, while Chuy is finding the proper spot to expend his pee (believe me, this dog can be a connoisseur of Best Pee Spots!) I'm going to digress for a minute to fill you-all in on some background. One of our best friends in this whole world, named Tom, lives down the road in Apache Junction. Tom was one of our best Harley riding buddies in California and when we bought the house in Superior we convinced him to relocate there for his retirement too and he's been real happy with the riding and the climate down there. But this past year, for reasons not always explainable, we haven't seen too much of Tom. We've only had a couple of rides with him and we probably haven't seen him more than three times since Christmas. We had gotten together a couple of weeks ago to show him the new house and I mentioned that I'd be going back to the beach on the 19th. A week later, he said he was planning a ride to California but hadn't said when. And then, well, nothing. We got busy and that was that.

So now here I am in this rest stop in Coalinga. Chuy finally found a bush worthy to relieve himself in and I'd gone to stand in line at the Ladies. The rest stop was beginning to take more time than I wanted to spend, but since it was doubtful I'd find another rest stop open in the next hour, I decided to claim my place in line. When I finished, I spied a vending machine and spent a few minutes prying quarters out of my pocket to buy a Dr. Pepper.

With the cold soda in hand, I heard a motorcycle roll into the parking lot and I turned to look. I hadn't seen any bikes at all that morning, that I can remember. Pulling up to the curb, not ten feet away from me, just like we were in some dumb movie, is our old friend Tom on his big orange Road Glide.

I gawked, dumbfounded. "Tom! What in the world are you doing here?" I greeted.

"Nancy? Is that you?" He sounded equally surprised.

"Geez! We never get together in Arizona anymore, we have to meet at a rest stop in California?" I teased. But yes, I guess that's what was supposed to happen. I kept wanting to shake my head in wonder at all the coincidences that happened along that would result into us running into each other at the rest stop. What were the odds?

But Chuy's reaction was the best. After Tom and I chatted for a moment, he asked to see Chuy, so we walked over to the car and I let the puppy out. Frantically, he leaped out the car door and into Tom's waiting arms, licking his face thoroughly and squealing ecstatically, as though saying, "Gee, Mommy drove me all this way away from home to this hot place just so I could go potty and see my Uncle Tom and give him some kisses!" So because I don't have a better explanation for running into Tom, I'm going to use Chuy's and just enjoy it. Anybody got a better one?

A Sense of Community

We had a car show in Superior Saturday night. The Chamber put on its second annual "Cruisin' Main" and old cars and (mostly) old people turned up to look at them and get nostalgic. It was a hot day, 104 or so, and was taking a toll on folks. A lot gathered in the shade, but still lingered to check out the old cars. Every once in a while, a group would pull away from the curb and drive showily up Main Street, letting us all get a gawk at what Once Was.

We found Bert out in front of his Toast Bistro, preparing to grill some special bleu cheese and chorizo hamburgers for the supper hour. He'd been open since eight that morning and normally doesn't keep the restaurant open that late on a Saturday. But since this was a special Saturday, he was going to serve supper. We promised to return.

Since Bert opened Toast in December, he's been experimenting with his menu and times he's open. A good deal has to do with his own stamina but it's been a tough five months, opening his new restaurant right at the darkest economic times we've seen in decades. One of the things he's dreamed about was keeping the place open in the evenings for the locals to come in and enjoy some of his offerings and talk and catch up with each other.

Well, he achieved it Saturday night. When we got there at six thirty, all the tables save one were filled. And except for one table, all of them were filled with folks from the community. It was Party Time at Bert's Toast and a spontaneous, easy time was enjoyed by everybody, even the group that had only shown up for the car show. Folks were talking back and forth from the tables and chatting and carrying on, all the while enjoying these hot grilled chorizo burgers melting with bleu cheese and served on Bert's singular artisan rolls.

It was sublime. It was great fun. And it's what a lot of us have envisioned for Superior and thought maybe we'd never see again. A bustling downtown spirit, a place where the locals can dine and hang out and share their opinions and a great sense of community. And it looks like, at least at certain moments like these on Saturday night, that we can achieve that which some thought might never be again. Superior rising from the ashes of what Once Was and regaining her rightful place, as Main Street America.

I'm going to hang around for more!

A STRANGE STORY

Marilu came to visit us last week. She's the lady we purchased the new house from. She's 84 or 85 and we didn't know her well before we bought the house, but now that she's moved away, we keep in touch and it's almost like we gained an elderly aunt as well as a new house to fix up. During her visit, I took her inside to look at the paint and colors we were putting on her once white walls and she approved. She approved the roses and verbena blooming in her once empty flower beds. She told Bill and me she's real happy we bought the house. It feels like it's in good hands to her.

During the course of her visit, I showed her where I was moving aside hundreds of bricks to rebuild a brick patio that had become overrun with grass and weeds. "Watch out for scorpions!" she warned me.

"Scorpions? I haven't seen one, although I've been looking for them," I said. "I don't think there's any around."

"There are too!" She moved her hand in front of my face and massaged a finger on her right hand. "I got bit on this finger a few years ago. A big brown one! I called 9-1-1 and it was three days before I got feeling back in it. Ooohhh! I HATE scorpions!" She shuddered.

"Well, I'll keep my eyes open," I promised. "But I've moved that pile of bricks out there and haven't seen a one."

"Oh, it wasn't in the garden," Marilu exclaimed. "It was in the kitchen. I'd just gotten up and was standing by the sink, running some water for coffee. This big brown scorpion crawled out of the drain and bit my finger. I've ALWAYS checked the drain after that!"

"Strange," I muttered, wondering whether Marilu was mistaken or just telling 'an old lady's tale'. "But I've seen nothing in the drain. I haven't even seen a dead bug in the house."

"They come up through the drain from the sewer," she repeated ominously.

I didn't repeat the story to Bill. Again, I thought it was just a tale she was telling me.

The next day, I was doing some painting in the living room and came into the kitchen to use the sink to rinse out a brush. ( I LOVE water based paints!) As the water was running, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. At the mouth of the drain in the same sink Marilu had warned me about was a fair sized, two and a half inch brown scorpion. It was waving his tail menacingly at me. Like maybe he was trying to catch and sting my finger.

I drew back, sucking my breath in. Yep! Here was Marilu's scorpion, come out of the sewer and into the sink to take a bite of the new owner. Well, lucky for me, I rinsed him back down the sink before he had a chance to put his plan into effect. But I keep my eyes open now and realize it wasn't just a story Marilu was telling me!

Dear President Obama,

Dear President Obama,

I heard you were going to come to Phoenix next week to promote your Stimulus package and I wanted to give you a Heads Up for a Win-Win situation that will get people back to work here in Arizona, be good for both the Arizona and the Federal economy and not cost the government one red cent. Yep, that's the truth! You can use your influence to promote the Southeast Arizona Land Swap bill in Congress that's been kicked around for the past three or four years. What it does is grant some federal land to the Resolution Copper Company in return for them giving some of theirs farther south in Arizona to the Feds. What it will do for them is get the world's second biggest copper mine ready to go and bring in lots of bucks in revenue for both the state of Arizona (which badly needs it, as you know) and the federal government too (and at the rate the federal government is giving away money now, they could use it too!) It's a win-win situation for you because the federal government doesn't have to do a thing except collect the revenue since the mine will be owned and operated by a private company. Oh yes, it's a company that's owned in Great Britain, but aren't we all a global economy now? This is NO TIME to be petty about that! And yes, you're going to hear some grumblings from some left wing groups and whiney environmentalists who have been trying to stop this project for some time now, but when you get down to the nitty gritty, what's more important right now? Starving people in Arizona hoping for a chance to work and make their communities better or an elite group of "We've got ours, they don't need to have theirs!" bunch of whiners. Well, now, I know you fellows who get elected must listen to the Whiners since they fund your elections with their big checks. But I've got to tell you, if you could expedite this Land Exchange so that Resolution Copper can move forward on this thing and we can get people started back to work and striving to improve themselves and they can afford to stay in these small mountain towns east of Phoenix instead of moving back to the inner cities, then these folks are going to sing your praises, Mr. President and who knows how much that brings you in the next election?

I think it's time you started doing what's right for the Little People, Mr. President and move forward on some of these private industry bills that have been stalled too long by so-called "Do-Gooder" environmentalists. We need this copper company to help make things better here in Superior and I bet, if you'd help it get started, you'd see a trickle down effect in the rest of the Copper Corridor. So go ahead... step out and give it your seal of approval. Get those folks like Rep. Raul Grijalva behind it instead of opposing it. We need it NOW not LATER!

Thank you. Your constituent, Nancy Vogler

PS: The picture here is of a sunset of Apache Leap. The new copper mine would be located just east of there.

Setting The Stage

We 'set the stage' pretty good for the new Superior to emerge last week. We didn't get the thousands of people for the Home and Building Tour we thought we might, but we did draw upwards of a thousand over the week-end. The volunteers from the Chamber of Commerce did a real fine job of welcoming the folks and making them feel at home. People were staged in two areas, the Main Street area for the Home and Building Tour and south of town at the grammar school for the Art and Antique Fair. Bill and I spent most of our week-end at the Main Street end, greeting visitors. Tina hadn't given me a specific spot to be in, so I spent the better part of two days parked in front of the Chamber office on Main Street, showing folks where to get their tickets, then helping direct them to start their tour. It took a lot of talking but (ahem! if I do say so myself) I'm good at that!

Sometimes, the people would pull up to the curb and get out of their cars, looking around our old town sort of nervously, like they expected some old miner would ascend on them with a pick and shovel. And I would move toward them, exclaiming what a perfect day they'd picked to visit our town or wasn't that necklace she was wearing "just exquisite!" and show them where to go get their tickets and in that brief moment of me talking, you could just watch their hesitation and anxiety melt away and they'd stride into the Chamber office. Bill spent his days at the old high school directing traffic and helping oldsters ascend the two flights of steps into their bygone school days of a building. On Sunday, he manned a post at the old Magma Club, the social club for miners in the long ago days, answering myriad questions about the town's history.

Just an aside here, yes, I kept my ears open and I learned a lot about the history too. More than I knew before. That during the Teens, Twenties and Thirties and possibly even into the Fifties, there were three (yes, sir... THREE!) houses of ill repute in our Main Street. The most popular one seemed to be the one the town hall is housed in now, because it had two upstairs bedrooms that looked out over Main Street (one room looking east toward Apache Leap and the other looking west toward Pickett Post) and the married men liked this whore house the best because that way they could look out and see if the Little Woman was wandering the streets looking for her man. This is the same building, by the way, that does have an active spirit in it, she's been photographed by some ghosthunters, a grim looking lady dressed in black lace scowling over at the photographer. But gee, now that I know the story, I'm wondering if that grim looking lady might not be one of the cuckolded wives, scowling about the state of affairs she found herself in. Sounds good to me!

Anyway, back to the Home Tour... I digress. After a busy Saturday morning greeting visitors, at one, I hustled over to the bakery/bistro to help out. Bert was short handed and very busy! The brunt of the visitors looked like they had picked his cafe to lunch in. As I headed in, Bert was out in front grilling chicken and sausage and said there'd be no baking but that I could pitch in and wait tables and help make sandwiches.

Now... that's flattering, but let me tell you a secret. For all of my almost sixty years, I have never actually got to wait tables for a living. I've always thought this would be a pretty nifty way to make your keep. Moving around a crowded room of folks eating, feeding them and making them happy. What's not to like about that? Well, as this seems to be my year for making my dreams come true... I got this wish too! The tables were all full, but only half were actually eating. The order taker was also the only waitress and as she flashed her wild eyes at me as I entered to wash up, I could tell this wasn't going to be a 'piece of cake'. Sandwich Girl was up to her elbows slicing rolls and avocado for sandwiches. She looked at me and gasped, "Thank God you're here!" and I looked blankly back, and said simply, "You'll have to tell me what to do. I only bake. I haven't done sandwiches." Waitress Girl came back in and slapped a sheaf of orders at Sandwich Girl and barked, "Get out there and take some orders. Help me out!" I nodded. (I can do this! How hard can this be?) as Pizza Girl came careening out of the back kitchen, barking for a platter for a hot pizza out of the oven.

I approached the first table, a huge smile on my face. There were four ladies sitting there. I remembered them from the morning. They were from Mesa. One of them was wearing a little rhinestone hat with valentines on it. They'd been so cheery and happy when they'd arrived for the Home Tour. "How are you ladies doing?" I cooed, standing at their table. "We want our lunch," Rhinestone Valentine said through clenched teeth. "We've waited an hour for it!" "Oh, my, I'm sorry!" (I was too. I can't fake these things!) "Let me see what the hold up is!" I fled back to the kitchen. Sandwich Girl was slicing through bread and she'd been joined by Pizza Girl who was heaping salad on plates, as Waitress Girl buzzed in and out barking orders and generally looking like she'd rather be anywhere else than where she was. Dishwasher Girl (turns out, it was her first day on the job) stolidly stood at the sink, back to us, washing pots and pans. "There's a group of ladies who said they've waited an hour for their lunch," I told Sandwich Girl. "I know!" she moaned, checking a pan of sandwiches being toasted. "We ran out of bacon and their order got lost. They're nearly done." "Okay," I turned and went back out to the Rhinestone ladies from Mesa. "I'm sorry," I greeted, still smiling, but it wasn't that huge easy to come by smile, I can usually muster. "Your orders are nearly ready. The girls got swamped. It's busy... you know?" "We're not staying!" Rhinestone Valentine stood up, nearly upsetting the table. The other three ladies struggled to their feet. "Waiting an hour for lunch is unforgivable!" "I'm sorry," I repeated. I wondered if she cared to know that I'd now been on my feet for the past five hours and hadn't had a moment all day to even take a sip of water or go pee, let alone sit down. No, I doubted that she'd care about that either. Still, sitting on one's fanny for a whole hour sounded pretty dreamy to me at that point!

So eventually, we got through the lunch crowd. They dwindled off and by two pm, there was only one elderly couple left in the cafe finishing up their lunch. The girls found time to sit at the staff table and share one of Pizza Girl's creations. "I like it better like this!" Waitress Girl announced happily. I looked around the nearly deserted restaurant and the elderly man caught my eye and smiled. I shook my head, "No, you shouldn't," I told her. "It doesn't pay the bills!"

Later on Saturday afternoon, I found Bert, resting his aching back and asked him what he thought of the crowds. "What if we did a really good job getting folks to visit our town, Bert? And this is only the beginning. What if they hit you like this each and every day you were open? Is this how you want to spend the rest of your days?" He grinned and shook his head. "I guess we have to be careful what we ask for, don't we?"

What's This All About?

For the past month (plus), Bill and I have been involved with a Chamber of Commerce fundraiser. It's a home and building tour with an art and antique show of things uniquely Superior. It will take place all across town this next week-end January 31 and February 1. We've got five or six home to tour and seven buildings for folks to see. We're going to have art and antique vendors selling from the local school and I've been in charge of procuring food vendors who will be set up downtown.

It's all coming together well. We've had good publicity from the 'tony' magazines of the Southwest to local television and radio coverage that certainly can't hurt. We hope to attract some of the Snow Birds as well as restless locals from the Phoenix area looking to do something fun. We've even gotten sponsorship from the Arboretum.

What we haven't had, is a lot of volunteers at the local level. That's probably because 1) it's the first time we've had this tour and 2) it does coincide with Super Bowl Sunday and there's a lot of Cardinals fans here. Still, it would be nice if we had a bit more co-operation. One of the buildings we're proposing to show is the old high school. Built sometime in the mid-1920's and operated through the 2000-2001 school year, it's a mammoth two story red brick structure. The school board sold it for a mere pittance several years ago and the poor edifice has been sitting empty and uncared for ever since. The organizers of our Home and Building Tour got permission from the owners to open it up for tours on our two day event, but... (isn't there always a but?) it had to be cleaned first. So the committee members assembled at nine Saturday, armed with brooms and buckets and mops and a couple of vacuum cleaners to clean a few rooms. At least, that was the plan, I thought I'd heard at the meetings we've been attending.

The chairman, who is one of the hardest working ladies in town that promotes our fair town, was uneasy how many folks would give up their Saturday to come out and clean the looming edifice. She kept saying that if just a few showed up, then we'd just clean a few rooms and that's all that would be shown. Seven of us showed up Saturday morning, followed in a few hours by about seven more. Most of these folks (everybody except the chairwoman and her husband and Bill and me) were alumni of the old high school. Now, when room after dusty room was opened up that morning, there were ooh's and ahhh's and "I remember this..." and "Do you know what happened here...?" anecdotes scattered all over. It would have been fun to listen to more of their stories if we hadn't been dealing with so much dirt and dust.

Do you know how much dust can accumulate in eight years in this desert environment? I'll tellya, how much: A BUNCH! It's soft and silty and covers everything! When you sweep it, it flings itself into a cloud over your head and hovers there, making your nose itch and your eyes tear up and pretty soon while you're sweeping, you're sure you're going to expire of Valley Fever! Once you've done cleaning a vast expanse of (once beautiful) hardwood or (really vintage) asbestos tile, you look back over what you've cleaned (yeah, you think you've cleaned it!) only to find another dusty sheen, perhaps not as thick as the original, still remains. Well then, the mop buckets and mops came out. Even as a corner or two got the grime off, buckets would have to be emptied and mops cleaned up for another go at the same stretch of floor. After three attempts over the chemistry room's pale green asbestos tiles, I gave up in disgust as muddy streaks mocked my efforts to abate them. I don't know what might have worked, a good pressure washer, maybe!

By noon, I had physically had it. I felt as if I'd used up every spare bit of energy I might have risen with. I mopped one room three times, swept and dust mopped three more rooms and one hallway and scraped soil and leaves off the front steps. The folks who toiled away were still trying to make the upstairs gymnasium and its vast expanse of polished hardwood presentable and another group was toiling away in the library where shelves had been piled haphazardly. Yet a third building remained untouched until the group got down to that after lunch.

Now, I didn't stay for the afternoon fun. Bill brought me home where I collapsed on the couch for a nap with Chuy nestled beside me. He went back and worked with the others till four-thirty when nobody could stand up any longer. The building will be on the Tour and if you come, I hope you'll stop by and see the old High School, whether you were an alumni or not. I told Bill later, I'm sure glad the rest of the folks who agreed to show their homes and buildings on the Tour didn't need us committee members to come by and clean up their space for them. 'Cause if they did, I bet we wouldn't find any more willing members to do it!

For those in the Phoenix area, come see what I'm talking about: Superior Chamber of Commerce presents their First Annual HOME and BUILDING TOUR with Art and Antique Show, Saturday January 31 and Sunday February 1 from 10 AM to 4 PM. Cost is $10 day of event, or $8 presale. Call Superior Chamber of Commerce 520-689-0200 for more information. And no, we won't make you sweep a floor!

And then some...

The job continues. I baked at Toast, the cafe/bakery, twice this week. Patronage was light due to the Inauguration and a persistent rain, so my Wednesday stint was cancelled. Monday's baking session was grim: the cake donuts were too light and soft to remove easily from the pan (we bake them rather than fry them, which is sort of a sacrilege for a donut, don't you agree?) and instead ended up resolving in a pile of crumbs that got tossed into a waste can. But the same donuts I baked today plopped out of their pans intact and crumbless, ready to be dipped in butter and coated in cinnamon sugar and were sitting on the racks by nine thirty waiting for the customers to come and taste them. The cinnamon rolls I baked today were light and fluffy and dripping with oozy cream cheese buttercream by nine forty just in time to be placed on waiting diner's plates five minutes later. This job makes me happy in ways running the Landing never did. I do like to make folks happy, that's true, but turning out good things to eat is pure fun.

It's not just the food, of course, that's part of the job. There's the people too. Fellow employees are part of the job and getting on with them is part of the fun too. Take the dishwasher, for example. The fellow who made my first day so great by washing up all the bowls I got dirty. The fellow who I thought was going to make this job the Best just because he was washing up behind me. He quit. Well, technically, I guess that's wrong. He didn't quit. But after last Friday, he just neglected to show up to work anymore. Bill and I passed him on the street Sunday when we were walking the dog and he greeted us just fine. So I don't think he had any hard feelings over all the pots and pans I sent his way. I think he just felt that three days washing dishes in the small cafe was enough for him. So he stayed home this week. So, hmmmm, that part of the job wasn't so much fun today. When I needed an extra bowl because I'd messed up too many and here were four sitting dirty and I needed to get a fifth used, then I had to step over to the sink and wash a few out. It humbles the chef a bit, but hey, I've been doing that at home for over forty years. What's new?

The other girls in the cafe are great. Eager young women wanting to do the right thing, rushing to get their jobs done without getting in each other's way. Asking questions of Bert, the baker, about various aspects of recipes or how things should be done. They've got a keen appreciation of trying to do it right the first time. In a way, it's like they are students studying extra hard for that test that's coming up. But when the cafe fills up around noon and there's ten dozen things to do to keep the customers happy and the food moving, these girls hustle and there's no slouching. I have been so impressed to watch how well this young green staff is doing. Makes me proud!

So for anybody in the Superior area that hasn't found Toast yet. It's open 7 AM to 2 PM, Tuesdays through Sunday and is located at 180 Main Street. We serve espressos and lattes and gourmet sandwiches and salads as well as some great chorizo pizza on Wednesdays and Fridays and some of the best Artisan bread in the Phoenix area. And if you are dieting, ask for one of those cinnamon rolls lathered with cream cheese buttercream. That oughta do you for a spell!

Dream Job

The last thing I expected to receive in this depressed economic climate was an invitation to participate in my Dream Job. Actually, the last thing I expected to receive in this depressed economic climate was a chance to work part-time anywhere! I guess that's where Fate steps in and plays a hand for you.



During the busy Christmas season, Bill and I were invited to seven different parties and dinners. Normally, we get to one, so seven was a definite HIGH for us. We met some wonderful new people and at most of these, I would take along a tray of Christmas cookies I'd baked. They were well received and I admit it: I like to hear people rave over my baking. One of our new buddies proclaimed them to be, "The Best Cookies!" he'd ever tasted. So yeah, next party invite, here's Nancy in the kitchen baking up another tray of goodies to bestow on the group.



I guess you could say those cookies were my resume into this dream job. One of the participants was a man from Petaluma (go figure!) who was opening a new bakery/bistro in town. He remarked one evening that it would be a good thing for me to come into the shop one day a week to bake cookies for him. I laughingly agreed, figuring it was probably just 'party talk'. But what a lark that would be I thought, since secretly, I've dreamed of either working in a bakery or a restaurant and making folks happy through their bellies with my food!



This week, when I stopped by for a loaf of his extremely great Artisan bread, he asked me for my phone number and asked me if I was serious about baking for him. I told him of course I was! Next day, his partner and G.M. calls and asks if I could come in on Friday to 'watch her' bake for four hours. If it worked out, then she'd let me bake on Monday and Tuesday and several days a week I could go in and bake her signature baked goods. Heart pounding, I agreed (whole heartedly!).



The bakery/bistro is open from five to two and besides fresh bread and pastries sells coffees and sandwiches and salads for lunch. The day I got there, there were two brand new employees getting trained, one who was there for her second day and two others who've been there about a week, plus Mary and Bert, the seasoned owners. We got blitzed with the biggest day so far.



The first half hour, Mary was able to show me where a number of the products were stored and the location of the ovens, work center and utensils. She pulled out a sheaf of recipes and said even though the bakery was only in its third week, there were signature dishes that were expected to be on the shelves: notably the cinnamon rolls and the Magma Cake. So those two things I would be watching her bake that day.



We had barely begun the double batch of cinnamon rolls, when the gal who was making sandwiches came in with a strange look on her face. They had just received an order for twenty two sandwiches and had forty five minutes to assemble them. Without missing a beat, Mary told me I was on my own since she'd be hustling to help get the orders ready.



'Normally,' (I mean in my own kitchen), I don't always read a recipe completely through before assembing it. Today, I was, although a pounding excitement kept filling me up as I could sense the staff's urgency as the lunch crowd started arriving ( as soon as eleven, I might add.) I take this to be because in Arizona, folks go to work earlier in the day because of the heat, so naturally would want to eat lunch sooner. The restaurant is located in an old building downtown with fifteen foot ceilings and the acoustics are raw. From my post in back, stirring up a copious quantity of dough, I could hear a woman's high pitched laugh rocketing off the rafters. It sounded like a party going on out in front and this new staff was hustling, even if some of us had no idea where everything was!



So here I was, trying to follow the recipe as best as it was written. If it said to mix the eggs and milk and butter in a separate bowl, before adding it to the dry ingredients, so be it, I was! At home, I'd tend to just dump them into the bowl of dry ingredients and save myself an extra bowl to wash. AH HA! That's where the beauty of the bakery/kitchen comes into play. We had us here, A DISHWASHER to take care of that pesky extra bowl. I don't mean a mechanical-you-load-it-you-clean-it-out sort of dishwasher. I mean, a real blood and bones fellow named Bernie who washed, rinsed, sanitized and put them back in your own workstation so you could get them out and get them dirty all over again!!! I tellya after two hours of this, I felt like I'd died and gone to heaven!

When my first tray of liberally iced with cream cheese frosting cinnamon rolls hit the shelves, I started to relax a fraction. When the Magma Cake finally came out of the oven to cool and didn't fall or look mis-shapen, I relaxed even more, but by then it was time to call it a day. I didn't realize until I got home how totally worn out I was. It was a wild ride to find one's way around a strange kitchen and hustle to get everything done plus try to turn out a product that pleased the customers as well as the owners, but I think I managed. It's not everybody who gets to start their dream job the same year they are pushing sixty. But I think it can be done and I'm going to try real hard to prove I'm a good baker.

I purchased a couple of cinnamon rolls and brought them home for our breakfast this morning. They were pretty good. But Bill was still laughing that I had to go off to bed by eight o'clock last night. Evidently, a year of being retired had its effect on me and after only four hours of being a baker, I was pooped out quite a bit!