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!