Of Readers, Used Book Stores, and Mark Twain

Today is the birthday of Samuel Clemens a.k.a. Mark Twain. I confess freely: I have not read everything the great man wrote, but in my own defense, what I have read I have read fifty or sixty times. If I have nothing else to read, I’ll pick up Life on the Mississippi or his autobiography. I have large portions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer memorized, not because I wanted to, but because rereading has embedded his marvelous prose in my brain. Maybe I think his genius will rub off on me.

I found a new used bookstore Saturday – one with lots of free parking. In the D.C. area one plans a trip thus: where shall we go? Then: can we park there? What I love about this little bookstore (It’s called Wonder Books, and how they manage to fit so many volumes in so little space is a wonder indeed) is its convenience and free parking. It’s easy to visit, and it’s only when you visit often that you have a chance at the good stuff.

I love used bookstores because they are filled with people who love to read. We talk about the decline of reading in this country, but in this shop the line for the cashier stretched along the counter and half-way down one aisle, and nearly everyone had more than one book. Somebody loves books and somebody is reading. There are more of us than I thought, but we’re all so busy reading we don’t get to know each other.

I wrote last week about the two non-readers who regarded me with “thinly disguised contempt.” Readers, are we embarrassed to be who we are? I believe we should start a movement. We could call it the MVR: Militant Voracious Readers. I think it might work.

All People Need People, not Just the Lucky Ones

I have been told that a lady’s name appears in the news three times: when she is born, when she is married, and when she dies. I would add, in these enlightened times – when she has made an accomplishment.

Michaele (who can’t spell her own name) and her husband Tareq, the Salahis, were the couple who crashed the White House state dinner in order to become reality TV stars. The newspaper said she was a “glamorous blonde.” I see a very ordinary looking woman, who, even after spending seven hours in a posh Georgetown salon, still looks ordinary – not even pretty.

Am I envious? Hardly. I’m appalled. These two are just like the trashy people on Jerry Springer. And Larry King, the trash-chasing guy with the suspenders, will interview them.

When is America going to tire of people like this? Why do we gobble this stuff up?

I believe these reality dramas have replaced gossip. In order to gossip, you have to know someone to talk about and have someone to talk to. Reality TV replaces real people talking about mutual acquaintances. Gossip is not the right word here: it has negative connotations. I’m talking about conversations people have about each other; human beings are endlessly interesting.

The late Jack Finney, the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, wrote a story “Of Missing Persons.” In this fantasy, the mission people go to a beautiful earth-like planet where people gather for coffee every morning before work and make their own entertainment.

These people did not need reality TV. They had reality. It’s much better.

Nick Hornby is a Kindred Spirit

I hope you find time this long Thanksgiving weekend to read some books. Reading, as far as I’m concerned, is like breathing. You just do it.
I’ve known many people who don’t read, but two who bragged about not reading were school teachers. These teachers were considered to be excellent, or excellent by the current definition of excellence in education, but I’m not going to get on that soap box now; I'll save it for another post.
I know these two didn’t read because they were laughing about not ever having read a book cover to cover. I was there. And lest you assume these teachers were in Backward, Alabama, they teach in a huge system which is supposedly one of the best in the country. When I said, “I read at least fifty books this summer,” they looked at me with thinly disguised contempt.
Those two will never read Nick Hornby, and it’s a shame. If your response is “Who?” it’s because he is not as appreciated over here as he is in England. Remember the movie, with About a Boy, with Hugh Grant? Hornby wrote the book upon which the movie was based (the book was better.) Actually, he’s written several books. I have yet to read them all, but I’m doing my best.
On my nightstand right now are Not a Star (one of the funniest books I have ever read), Slam, his young adult novel, and two collections of essays he wrote for a magazine called The Believer, a magazine for book addicts (me).
I’m glad his columns were collected, since he doesn’t write them any more. In each essay he began by listing the books he had bought and the books he had read. The column is his commentary on these books. His nonfiction is warm and funny, just like his fiction.
That’s it for the essay collection. I’ve already told you Not a Star was hilarious. Slam is ostensibly for young adults, but adults will enjoy it too. I certainly did. The narrator, Sam, is a teenage boy who learns that five minutes of stupid can knock a lifetime of common sense flat. Sam gets his girlfriend pregnant; Hornby tells Sam’s story as a cautionary tale which is never preachy, but sympathetic and darkly humorous. I wish all teenage boys would read this book, but I am pessimistic. In my experience teen age boys, if they read at all, choose literature (I use the term loosely) with more pictures than words—car magazines, graphic novels, and the like. (Even I, naive as I am, know they don’t read the girlie magazines.)
Of Hornby’s other books, I recommend A Long Way Down and How to be Good. I’ve read all the Hornby on my nightstand. It’s time to go back to Southern Storm
by Noah Andre Trudeau, about Sherman’s march to Atlanta, and the latest Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna.
Read, relax, eat turkey, and be well.
(If anyone of you know how to put italics in a post, please tell me. Until then, consider all the above titles italicized.)

Turkey Pardons

Today I saw President Obama pardoning a turkey. The whole ceremony seemed rather silly. What had the turkey done? And when did this pardoning start? I couldn't see George Washington pardoning a turkey. Can you imagine the father of our country indulging in such an undignified ceremony?

According to Infoplease.com, the President has received a turkey from the National Turkey Federation and the Poultry and Egg National Board since 1947. The turkeys were eaten, with one exception. In 1963, when JFK received the turkey, he said, "Let's just keep him." It wasn't until 1989 that a turkey was pardoned by Bush I. Sounds like a photo op to me.

Again according to Infoplease, the pardoned turkeys aren't eaten. Until 2004, the turkeys went to Kidwell Farm, a petting zoo in Herndon, Virginia, located in Frying Pan Park. Really -- Frying Pan Park. In 2005 and 2006, the turkeys were flown to California, where they served as grand marshals for Disneyland's Thanksgiving Day Parade. After the parade, they were taken to a Disneyland ranch -- sort of an Old Turkey's Home.

Only in America.

Dressing, not Stuffing

A few days ago one of my friends said her daughter-in-law had asked her to bring dressing for Thanksgiving. I immediately thought of salad, and told her so. “Bite your tongue!” she said. I’ve lived “up North” for too long.

In Southern-speak, dressing means what everyone else calls “stuffing.” But stuffing, as I understand it, is put inside the bird, with maybe another pan full as well. Whatever you call it, everybody likes it.

In the South we don’t bother to stuff the bird. We just make lots and lots.
Usually I used my Aunt Ida’s recipe (yes, the same Ida my dog is named for). The problem is, there is no real “recipe.” She just made dressing. I have some vague directions my mother wrote on a card, but somehow my dressing never tastes as good as hers did.

She loaded it with sage and hot pepper, but otherwise it was a typical dressing: onions, an egg or two, and cornbread. The cornbread HAD TO BE Southern cornbread, that is, made with white cornmeal and WITHOUT sugar.

Sugar is not for bread! Sugar goes in the tea, iced tea. I was surprised to find, when I moved north, that iced tea is considered a seasonal drink. Why? You drink cold sodas all year round; you drink cold water, why not iced tea? I was so grateful to McDonald’s when they introduced their sweet tea (although it’s too sweet). It is real tea, made fresh, with the sugar added while the water is still hot enough to dissolve the sugar. A cold glass of tea and a packet of sugar is, in my opinion, a mockery. And these canned teas? An abomination.

Oh yes. And sweet potatoes might go in a casserole (without marshmallows), but this is only because Southerners never miss a chance to eat something sweet and pretend it’s something good for them. The green something on the table, for example, will probably be lime Jell-O fruit salad. We believe sweet potatoes go in pies. The other pie will be pecan.

But nothing I can cook will be as good as what I had at the kids’ table, sitting with my cousins and telling knock knock jokes.

My Intellectual Dog

My dog is named Ida Jane, after my favorite aunt. Like my Aunt Ida, she is resourceful, creative, and very, very clever. She’s a plain old dawg dog, a mutt from the shelter. I don’t know if she was not fed enough before she came to us, or whether she is just greedy, but she is always nosing about looking for something to eat. She unzipped my son’s backpack and ate his drumstick. She nosed into a drawer and ate a pair of socks. After that I always closed the door to the bedroom and made my son hang his backpack on the hook. While she stole food off the counter at every opportunity, she hadn’t opened anything in a long time. I thought she was reformed, sort of, until the refrigerator.

Ida Jane had never shown any interest in our old refrigerator. The freezer was on the bottom, and perhaps she didn’t smell anything delicious in it. It was old, scratched, and had a large rust spot shaped like Australia just above the handle. It still kept food cold, but it was an energy waster. Besides, it didn’t have an icemaker.

It took a long time to find a fridge that would fit in the niche where the old one had been, but we finally found a shiny new model with glass shelves, an icemaker, and—the freezer on the top.

There wasn’t much food to put in the fridge. We had a few pieces of cheese, some pickles, and an unopened package of pastrami. I left to get groceries, and I know
I closed the refrigerator door.

When I came home the door was standing open and the pastrami was gone. The first place I looked was in Ida Jane’s doggie bed, and sure enough, there was the pastrami wrapper.

No one can watch a dog all the time, and as time went by she helped herself to pork chops, cheese, and –her favorite—cat food. Something had to be done. A child-proof lock proved to not be Ida-proof. Finally I made a low-tech doggie lock:
I hooked one bungee cord to the door handle, another to the grate on the back, and hooked them together. It worked, but only if everyone remembered to hook the cords when they closed the refrigerator door. I needed a more permanent solution.

If she associated a loud noise with the refrigerator, I thought, she would be scared and stay away from it. I put a can of pennies on the counter and hooked the cords to the can and the refrigerator door. When she opened the door, the can would crash to the floor and a rain of pennies would come down on her head. Supposedly she would associate the fridge with the noise and avoid it forever. “That will fix you,” I said to Ida Jane. This was going to be fun. I set the trap and left the kitchen. Less than a minute later – CRASH! I found Ida Jane away, guilty but not scared in the least.

Oh well. Back to the bungee cords.

One of my favorite childhood memories is making potholders. Remember those metal looms and nylon loops? I bought loops and loom this week, and sat down to achieve inner peace and serenity by weaving, even if my loom was only ten inches square and the material felt like cut up pantyhose. I remember the craft being easy and quick; it suited me; I am not a patient person, but I like to imagine myself making crafts , even if I don’t actually make them. (See yesterday’s post.) As for my potholders, I remembered making dozens of neatly woven bright squares, beautiful and useful, unlike most cross stitch, for example. I like to cross stitch, but I know I'm just making a new dustcatcher. I'm not a cross stitch addict. They are the people who are always looking for a bare spot: a wall, a refrigerator, a shelf. One addict, having run out of room above the chair rail in her dining room, took to hanging her productions below the rail. I didn’t see this; I only heard about it. Maybe it worked. Maybe she made an edgy decorating statement. How should I know? My idea of edgy decorating is, well, I guess I don’t have a clue what edgy decorating is and I might as well admit it. Back to the potholder. The loops were, well, shorter than I remembered. It was difficult to hook the loop over opposite pegs because the darn things kept slipping off and flying through the air. It was even harder to weave the horizontal loops through the vertical loops. When I finally had every peg filled, I couldn’t remember how to finish the edges, something about loop over loop over loop...but my hands remembered. It was like riding a bicycle; you take a few tumbles if you haven't ridden in a while, but the spinal cord eventually remembers, and off you go. The finished piece was no more than six inches by six inches: much too small for a potholder. Even though it is too small and hideously ugly, I can't bring myself to throw it away. I'll use it for something. Maybe it's a coaster...

Welcome to my contrary world!

It’s that time again: here come the holidays with the usual recipe deluge. Have you ever wondered how many recipes exist on Earth this minute? And more are created every day. Have you tried one tenth of one percent of the recipes in your file right now? Of course you haven’t. And yet someone out there is creating more recipes as I speak. But I do read recipes, even if I never cook them. For example, The Washington Post has its usual Wednesday cooking section with the most complicated recipe for turkey I have ever seen. It looks delicious, all right, but this recipe has four (really, four!) different components, four sub-recipes, as it were. For those of you who are among the fortunate fewer and fewer who have a paper copy of the Post, the recipe I’m describing is in section E on page six. Before you start actually following this four-pronged recipe, you must bone the turkey. For those of you who don’t cook, bone really means debone. You don’t have to put bones in the turkey, you have to take them out, immersing yourself up to the elbows in cold bloody turkey innards. If you are brave enough (or foolish enough) to try this recipe, good luck to you. You’ll need it. I am a big fan of do-ahead recipes. In the same issue is a recipe for James Beard’s sweet potato rolls. These rolls, the recipe says, can be made ahead and frozen. On turkey day, you pop them in the oven for five minutes. I might attempt sweet potato rolls. Initially, they are quite a bit of work, but by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, I will have forgotten the work part, and thus can enjoy the eating part. I have no idea what I’m going to put on the table on the big day. I get tired just thinking about it. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.