Anticipation

Assisting with fourth grade homework, I saw the elementary school menu. Among the information printed on it was an announcement of a dance for fifth and sixth graders. I pointed out that next year, he'd be able to attend those dances. He was instantly interested in the idea, and asked if that was the type of dance where the boys asked the girls to dance. I said it could be and he asked what if he asked a girl to dance and she said no.

Really?

So I'm supposed to go to Rite Aid and make my selection from a "pegged bag" or a "laydown bag?" That sounds like talk of the trade to me. WTH---too much trouble to translate into consumer terms?

The Chute

The walls look weathered, and worn with time,

But still sturdy enough to do their job.

The force of life surges through,

Always in motion,

Though the pace and the goals are set

With different outcomes in mind.

Some deliberate, hesitating slightly

Before moving forward,

Trusting that they have a choice.

Others plunge ahead, reckless,

No thought, go with the flow.

The course is longer than expected

And with some alterations, and

Narrow channels branching off.

But the walls are always there,

Fading paint and unyielding structure.

The passers-through make their selection,

Each opting for their own direction.

Pulsing forward, seeking what comes next.

But all will find at the end of the run

That common truths prevail:

There is no stepping backward,

And, as diverse as the forward path is,

The exit is the same.

Gobble-de-Gook

I have now roasted my 44th Thanksgiving turkey. It's a good thing I didn't keep them all, because it would take a lot of scratch feed and cracked corn to feed that size flock.

Literal Comfort--Ignore the idiom.

When we were really little, a few houses before we moved to Valley Falls, my mother would leave us in the house while she did chores. One of those chores was milking and caring for a cow. In their early married years, my parents lived on a dairy farm, one of the most upscale and well cared for in the area. My mother, always an animal lover, would go to the barns to watch the milking. Before milking machines, cows were milked by hand into open buckets. Those buckets were a magnet for flies, and even at that well-tended dairy farm, one of the steps in processing the milk was to strain it to separate out the flies. My mother was appalled at the thought of feeding her babies fly-strained milk, and so had bought a family cow, over which she had more environmental control: she could shoo the flies away before they fell into the pail. Hand milking, and I suppose shooing flies, took a long time, and so we kids were in the house by ourselves and left alone. Well, not really alone, because our Uncle Joe lived with us in an upstairs room. By then, he had lost his wife to cancer, his only child to drowning and his left arm to an accident at the Powder Mills. Thinking back, it's no wonder that he, forced to live with his younger brother's family, had pretty much withdrawn from family life, and lived as independently as possible. He was always very kind to us kids though, and seemed to welcome our company when we followed him around outside. So when Ma was gone for what seemed an eternity, and when the house seemed empty and lonely with only my brother and sister, I would call up into the grate in the ceiling, "Joe, are you up there?" "Yes," he would answer, as he would walk around his room. "Can't you hear me--I'm walking the floor over you." Those were the words to a popular song at the time, which carried quite a different meaning, but I was reassured to hear his voice , and his footsteps overhead.

In Bloom

I brought most of Dorothy's plants to my house this summer, though not until after a period of neglect had occurred. One was a cactus, but we were not sure what kind until last week, when it burst into bloom just as a Thanksgiving Cactus should. The blossoms are a rosy peach color and there are 47 of them so far. I counted them.

Innocence Lost

The teacher in me tries to make every event a learning experience, so when the third grader showed me his report card, and one of the comment categories was "strives to do his best," I asked if he knew the meaning of strive. He and his brother figured out the meaning from context, so I used another commenton the report that "he is coming out of his shell" to illustrate idioms, which we'd previously talked about. They worked that one out, and the brother says he knew another idiom kind of like that,"coming out of the closet."

Steps and Stairs

A series of inconsequential events:
About a dozen years ago, my job took me to a family who lived in a trailer home, kind of set into a hillside. A deck had been added to the front entrance, which you reached by climbing 7 0r 8 steps. I think the father of the family might have built it. It was a quite well-constructed deck and stairway; I knew he had re-built an entire set of second-story stairs in another home the family had lived in. Anyway, on a day in late November, I had an appointment to help the 3 kids with their homework. As usual, I parked my car at the bottom of the driveway, climbed the hill to the trailer, walked up the stairs to the deck, and found the door open. I called into the open door: no one was at home. With my pocketbook in one hand and my bag of tutoring materials in the other, I left to return to my car, intending to wait for a while to see if they showed up. When I walked to the end of the deck, and started to take the first step down, my feet flew out from under me on the slipperiest bare wood I'd ever encountered. I slid down all of the 7 or so steps as if on a ski slope. There at the bottom of the flight of steps, the builder had erected a substantial post. I latched on to that post, hugging it for dear life even as I was still in downhill motion, and saved myself, not even dropping my bags in the process. A little shaken, I went to my car to collect my thoughts. I'd no sooner sat down, when a furnace repair truck pulled up, the workers got out, and one called over to me, "Hey, if you're going in that house, watch out on the stairs-----they're really slippery." Oh, thanks, I answered; I was so glad no one had witnessed my swan dive.

Another near step to disaster:
This was an old trailer, recently plopped in the middle of a field, a distance from the farm where the family worked. They were new to me on this day when I parked my car and climbed a quite steep set of stairs that were attached to the front door of the trailer. Or so I thought. As soon as I left the ground and put my feet on the first step, the whole flight of steps reared back like a bucking bronco-------they weren't attached to the trailer at all. As it turned out, the family didn't even use that front door---the steps were apparently just for decoration, or more probably a mandated "safety requirement." Fortunately that was in the years before my knees betrayed me, and I didn''t get hurt that time either.
Even earlier, I worked at an old school in South Troy, where a young member of our staff had set up the tutoring schedule, and then had left this employment for greener pastures. I took over her job, and so her schedule. There were 6 students at our program in the school and the school had 3 floors. My predecessor was young, agile, and must have been into running track, because she had scheduled back-to-back sessions on: Floor#3, then Floor #2, again to Floor #1, back to Floor #3, and then of course back down stairs. One of the kinder teachers, knowing the route I took, suggested that I take the elevator, but I declined. Its use was intended only for the handicapped, you had to get a key, and at the time I was still vital enough that I didn't want to appear old. Besides, that was the year a young criminal had tampered with the outside fire escape, then caused a disturbance to call the principal out there, which caused him to fall with the disabled fire escape and to become permanently paralyzed. (That youth later murdered the aunt he lived with.)

For Rent

525,000 minutes since last year,

That is the sum of the moments so dear

525, 600 minutes, since I cooked the Thanksgiving

turkey last year.

And how do you measure, measure those dinners

Sometimes touched with laughter, sometimes with a tear?

In guests fed, in Grace said,

By portions, by fortunes,

In wishes or dishes on which we were fed?

525, 600 minutes

Of everyone armed with a fork and a knife,

Is that how you measure a year in the life,

In preparing dressing,

Or pre-mealtime stressing

The measure of joy

Or the specter of life?

Well, how about

15, 840 minutes of cooking,

88 drumsticks to serve to the crowd,

The time's now to sing out

The answer is coming,

The waited-for answer

So clear and so loud.

In heartbreak, in cheesecake,

The journeys we must take,

It all comes together,

The way that we feel.

In snowfalls, in wishbones,

In calls made from cellphones,

with meal cost and souls lost,

The measure of life is

Played out on a reel.

How about that?

Checkers and Compliments

If I try really hard, I think I can come up with a total of about 11 compliments that I've received in my life. One of them had to do with checkers. Back in those days, so hard for even today's poor to comprehend, people did not buy things, except for basic necessities. My father decided we were old enough to learn the game of checkers, but we had neither checkers nor a checker board. I remember he took an old broom handle, marked it into 24 even sections, sawed them through, and painted half of them red, leaving the other 12 their natural color. He probably used cardboard or maybe a piece of plywood for the checkerboard; I can't say I remember. I do remember his sitting in his usual chair by the window, with the checker game laid out on the footstool in front of him, and me sitting on the floor learning to play, and then playing the game. It's odd I don't remember Joe or Dorothy playing; I'm sure they did. I only know I loved to play, and remember plotting advance strategies in my head, what man I would move if he made that move, and alternately what I would do if he moved there. My father played seriously, with deliberation, so I had plenty of time to plot out several different scenarios depending on where he made his move. I know it was before we had television so I was probably 9 or 10 years old at the most. I must have gotten pretty good at the game because one day my father paid me what I thought was the utmost compliment. He said I was as good as, no, even better than, some of the regulars who used to meet and play checkers at the railroad station. My father had evidently done that in his earlier days, possibly only 10 or 15 years previously, and while I would have realized that, and I did know where the train station was and knew that nothing much happened there anymore, I was still young enough to imagine myself walking into that train station and beating a path of victory through all those seasoned checker tournament contenders. All hail the child checker champion! Who said fame doesn't go to your head.

Top Ten List

Top Ten List of Things That Could Have Become Family Traditions, But Didn't

10) Evening walks through the village with my mother

9) Playing checkers after supper with my father

8) Attending the Schaghticoke Fair in one fell swoop--everybody, all day,one day only

7) Family trip to Borden's to get apples and cider

6) Memorial Day visits to cemeteries, later adapted to stopping at Stewart's for ice cream cones

5) Spending the time waiting for Christmas Eve Midnight Mass (always at midnight) by a family card game---Whatever happened to "Pit?"

4) Driving around the area with friends looking at Christmas lights

3) Easter corsages or buttonaires for everybody!

2) Sending Christmas cards by the dozens to practically everybody we knew

and

1) Cooking the Thanksgiving Turkey----------Hey, wait! I'm still trying, Damn it.

Have a ccokte....

I remember this story being related by my father more than my having a vivid memory of it, though I can conjure up some memory of it. When Joseph was about three years old, he would play at handing out imaginary cookies. "Here, have a cookie," he'd offer, and give a pretend cookie to my parents, and probably me. ( Dorothy was probably not yet born, as almost 4 years separated them.) I gather Joseph would act out this little routine on a regular basis, after supper time. My father had what I guess would be called a rather dry sense of humor, though probably not much opportunity for humor existed in life back then. One evening, when Joseph offered my father the imaginary cookie, my father, instead of pretending to eat the non-existent cookie in keeping with the unwritten rule of the game, opened his hand to reveal a real cookie that he had bought and hidden til then, and proceeded to eat it. "Yum, this is a good cookie." I don't remember the child's reaction, but I do recall my father's thinking it was a great prank, so I assume he must have given cookies to all present. Could that have been the end of the game for Joseph: I guess that's a question only he can answer.

The Shortcut

When we were kids, we walked to school. From our house, we took the shortcut. We did not use the sidewalk in front of our house, but we would leave by the back door, follow a path along the back of the then deserted stone building next door to us, and then pass by the 3 garbage can/ burn barrels under the huge double cottonwood tree behind the Valley Inn. From there we would make our way through the back yard of the corner building that was then the Post Office. The ground floor tenants then were Norah and Tom McMahon, and he kept a very tidy and well maintained back yard with plantings and flower gardens, the only blot on the landscape being the worn trail which we and other kids followed on our shortcut path. There was a driveway then on the south side of the building which was used by the mail personnel, mainly Bill O'Neill. (An added treat was that he would discard pennies on the gravel, for us kids to find. Especially the silver pennies, which were out of favor because they could so easily be confused with dimes. ) We would follow that driveway out to the village sidewalk. There, at least when we were little, before we began the uphill section of our walk, we would turn and wave to our mother, who would wave back to us from the kitchen window. I remember feeling comforted seeing her standing there, tall and in her house dress; we knew she'd be there when we got home. She never let us know she was worried about our encountering any dangers, but I always thought that was because she knew we were cautious enough to avoid any trouble. She may have been a little concerned, though, because the son of the couple who ran the Valley Inn, where we trespassed daily with no thought of repercussions, was "not quite right." The way you could tell was that he walked vey fast and swung his arms vigorously as he walked, and he always wore a fresh white shirt, rolled up at the elbows. He would also pick up scraps of paper as he walked, maybe because his duties at the Valley Inn conssisted of keeping the grounds neat. He certainly never interfered with any of us kids, though I seem to have a vague memory of some problem or irregularity involving him. I would have heard this only from listening to "big people talk" so it would have had no bearing on us kids. It seems strange now, but as kids we had no regard for property lines--we took the shortest distance to where we wanted to go, and no one seemed to mind, not then.

Promises

How many promises have I made in my lifetime and how many have I kept? My answer to the first part would be probably not very many, and to the second part probably most of them. Im sure some were forgotten promises, and others had faded into oblivion before they ever came to be realized, but I do remember the first serious promise I ever made, and it was to a goat. She was a brown goat, and so her name may have been Brownie: it's hard to recall her name, out of the many goats that have passed through my life. I was no more than 10 years old, and the goat had once belonged to us, but my mother had given the goat to her sister, who lived with my grandmother a distance away, on a ten acre or so plot of land. Plenty of room for a little goat, one would think. But the matriarch, born and raised on lesser acreage in Ireland, had her own firm ideas of how animals should be controlled, and confined. She dictated that Brownie be hobbled, as well as tied to the chain when she was staked out to graze. I was horrified at the sight, Brownie, legs imprisoned, being unable to gambol about, as she was accustomed to do, within the periphery of her tether. Of course I had no power or even a voice, during those times. The best I could do was go to the shed at the end of the afternoon, where Brownie was stabled. So I made a solemn vow to the goat that I would somehow free her from her hobbled life. Now I don't know if you've ever looked deep into the eyes of a nanny goat with your own eyes full of tears, and promised a reprieve, but I can tell you that it's a memorable experience

First of all, a goat's pupils are not round, but are little rectangles. Secondly, I was not sure if I was supposed to be taking an oath on behalf of a goat. And of course I had not the slightest idea how I could carry out my promise to bring the goat back home. As it turned out, the promise was kept, though not because I had anything to do with it. I never told a soul. But my mother, evidently feeling much the same as I, did reclaim the goat, not right away, acting more out of diplomacy than urgency. The goat was unshackled and my first oath to a goat was upheld.

Semantics

When people say they are "starting their own traditions," they are by definition incorrect. It is not possible to start a tradition: you can begin a practice which may eventually become a tradition, but the derivation of the word is from the Latin "to hand over," ie. the handing down of elements of a culture from generation to generation---an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thoughts, actions or behaviors. The term "new tradition" is an oxymoron. Attention must be paid.

ANTICIPATION STAGNATION

My agenda, and I do have one,

Always is set the night before.

In the mid-night, I search my mind,

Sorting out the things to do

That will order my life, a little.

The list grows long, but possible,

I'm impatient for day to break

So I can start the process--

Make that call, update my files,

Clean this, shop for that,

Throw something away,

Pack something else for another time---

And here's where plans go awry:

Too early in the week to call,

Or too early in the day,

Too near lunchtime, then closing time.

Too chilly inside yet to shower,

Too chilly to go outside yet.

A box of letters or photos, or personal papers

Too difficult yet to go through.

I check my calendar---days unblocked,

Plenty of time later, so it seems.

I begin to plan, sort of,

For still another day--Hurry sunset,

So a new day can begin.

Clean like crazy

If a parent, let's focus on the mother, neglects her children because she spends too much time drinking, gambling, smoking or otherwise partying, she is guilty and charged, right? She is held responsible for her kids' care, even if she has an addiction, a habit, a compulsion or other mental affliction. But if a mother forgets to even feed her young children because she has a compulsion to keep cleaning the house, no red flags go up. Cleanliness is good. (I only know what I read in the papers.)

April 27, 1953

Where were you on this day? Not yet born, or outside playing in the spring rain? On that day, an RPI professor and his class detected unusually high levels of radiation in the area, and in the water of the Tomhannock Reservoir, and thus Troy's drinking water. Two days before, nuclear test "Simon" was conducted in Nevada, and the fallout followed a path leading into Troy up to southern Vermont, or right up Route 40. I remember a teacher who lived in Melrose was interested in a study that was done (unofficially, I presume) in relation to unusually high incidences of cancer in the Melrose area. The study was doomed to failure because the testing was ruled classified. The government did reassure the worried, though, by saying the amounts of radiation, though measurably higher than ordinary, posed no health threat. Unfortunately and ironically, that teacher, his wife and young son who lived in Melrose for years, all developed cancer, the teacher dying from it. Of course, we'll never know what if any, cancer threat that incident posed, but we do know that something causes cancer, and the medical community has no clear answer as to what the cause or causes may be. A book by Bill Heller addresses the incident: "A Good Day Has No Rain: The Truth about How Nuclear Test Fallout Contaminated Upstate New York." An excerpt from "Secret Fallout--Low Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island" by Dr. Ernest Sternglass is titled THE TROY INCIDENT. It can be read online http:www.ratical.com/radiation/SecretFallout/

And the doctor said...

While he didn't precisely tell me to put a lime in the coconut, he may as well have. He, pleased with the results of my cholesterol and other blood tests, advised me to keep doing exactly what I'd been doing. So I'll just have to continue my diet of Klondike bars, Butterfinger Crunch candy bars, frozen yogurt with peanut butter cups, supplemented by oatmeal with cranberries and walnuts, and Freschetti's pineapple and Canadian bacon topped pizza. I figure that must somehow fit into the new food pyramid.

Burgled #2

In November of 1997, I had attended the Migrant Conference in Syracuse. That was the only year I didn't drive, riding with Valerie, another tutor, who had picked me up at my house, and drove me home on a Wednesday afternoon. My car had been parked in my driveway during my 3 days in Syracuse. The next morning, I drove to Salem where I spent most of the day tutoring at the school and then the home of a family I worked with. I drove home to my empty house---Dave was at work and Danny at St. Lawrence----to find we'd been burgled again, 10 years after the first burglary where 3 guys (And I think I knew who, but of course no one was ever charged) had kicked in the front door, and made off with our computer, TV, stereo with speakers, and some loose cash. Again the door had been kicked in, and this time havoc reigned. Pretty much everything of value had been stolen----electronics, a new shop vac, and this time a lot of cash that I had not yet deposited. The thieves had removed the pillowcases from our beds, and emptied the contents of the dresser drawers into the empty cases. My drawer had held a collection of my jewelry, some of it quite valuable, some of it nostalgic, including items that had belonged to my mother. The investigating trooper said it seemed professional, but how much brains does it take to do that, if you've watched even one crime show. Besides, the trooper told me they'd catch the thieves, and of course that didn't happen. Somewhere I have a list of all our missing property, all our valuables. I do recall feeling some resentment that the only thing left this time was our living room TV, too old and outdated for them to bother with. I know it was 10 years old because we'd had to replace it after the first burglary. All the rooms had been turned upside down. I remember the trooper asked me if things usually looked like that, and I felt insulted--of courde not! I also remember Rosemary coming up with Joe and her being in tears. At first that surprised me: I don't think the impact had registered yet. Investigation had proved fruitless, but I do believe I know who did it. Because of the time I'd been gone, the break-in had to have occurred between 11 and 3, when I got home. That day was garbage day, and pick-up was usually at noon. The garbage collector was new, perhaps this was only his second week: at the time pick-up was twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Dave asked the driver next time, if he'd noticed anything, and he said no. To me, this is the evidence: there had been snow on the ground, and a set of tire tracks had led from our driveway area out across our adjoining lot onto the highway. Someone had driven out onto the road bypassing our driveway, which had been free of our cars--empty. So something must have been blocking the driveway---something like a large garbage truck. Serving as a barrier so no one could see a bunch of stuff being hauled out of our house on a busy road in broad daylight. Stuff like a oomputer, televisions, a shop vac, a large , and new, carpet shampooer, and bags full of our personal belongings. That new garbage hauler didn't stay on the job very long after that, as I recall, probably having made enough money to set himself up in business. And they say crime doesn't pay.

NOW HEAR THIS

Eyes furtively seeking at first a route of escape,

Then like a captured wild creature

The fixed gaze, resigned to its prison:

I'm here for you now is the message.

Air your opinion, state your case,

But, please, not too many details.

Life does go on, you know.

Cold Feet

I read somewhere a long time ago an article that said something like this: native Tibetans are well suited to serve as mountain guides in adverse weather conditions because they acclimate to the cold weather. Their feet don't freeze while they sleep in their tents because the blood supply to their feet is short circuited, thus reducing the need for active blood circulation and the resultant pain as the body attempts to keep the feet warm. Over the years, I've tried, or at least wished, to develop the Tibetan trait, but so far no such luck. Sometimes, even when sleeping conditions are not particularly cold, my feet get so cold I can't sleep. Regardless of how many blankets are on the bed, no matter how hard I try to wrap the blankets and even the comforter snugly around each foot, my feet still stay cold, and prevent sleep. Those are the times I try to channel those Sherpa guides, but all in vain. Worse, and as a testament to my laziness, I know what the perfect solution is: all I need to do is get out of bed and put on a pair of socks.

"Say the secret word and a ....."

Andrew, age 4, had the beginnings of a cold. While playing with his toys, he'd coughed a few times and then sneezed. His grandfather was watching TV, pretty much oblivious to what was going on around him. He heard Andrew ask him if he knew the Password. Papa guessed: "Is it Shazam?" No, said Andrew. Papa tried again: "Abracadabra? Open Sesame?" "No, that's not it," corrected Andrew. "When somebody sneezes, you're supposed to say the password, God bless you."

Importance of Literacy---Irony of Ironies

There was a lengthy letter published in the "Pulse of the People" section of today's Record. I was tempted to pass over it, but then wondered why anyone would write such a long article, and why the publisher would print it. I read it and found it had apparently been an assignment of some sort written by a student at Tech Valley High School, whose student body comprises the best and brightest of the area. I hope the students are technologically gifted because the letter is a distinctly horrible literary example. I don't want to criticize the student who wrote it, but I question why, if she had submitted it to her mentor for a class assignment, as it seems, why that mentor would not have addressed some of the glaring issues that make the work a nonsensical exercise in redundancy, circular reasoning, and poor writing. Some of the language is distorted: "This just comes to show how necessary is in everyday life so that people can hold up a job..." Goes to show and hold down a job are accepted idioms. "It is very important for men, women and children to be literate because it helps them an immense amount in the 21st century just to take control of their life and make other things much simpler." That immense amount is sure to help all, and after control of life is established, what other things are to be made simpler? "Along with slavery being very unconstitutional (For shame!) and most of the time a cruel act, (so they say) it impacted the voting rights that slaves had because that, along with most if not all of their other rights were taken away from them." This sentence is a grammatical monstrosity, and does not parse. "Adults at the lowest levels of literacy earn about $230 to $240 per week, work only 18 to 19 hours each year..." The writer has used a number of inserted footnotes, but the effect is muddied. "Many struggles are made in society for those who cannot read for apparent reasons and the ones stated with the above statistics." WHAT? "The shocking facts, statements, and statistics stated here are more than enough information ...." The reader should be the judge of that. "Relating this to the past with unfortunate actions taken place during the time of slavery can help us to appreciate how lucky those of us who can read and write (though not very well) should be. " (Those unfortunate time of slavery actions!) Saving the best for last, "With the fast paced changes that occur in literacy in the times we live in, (What are these fast changes and we do live in the times) it is hard to predict what literacy requirements will be later on in the mid-21st century." Yes, my child, you do need a concluding sentence for your essay, but it should tie in with your thesis: you addressed neither fast paced changes nor predictions. But your final point is well taken, and unfortunately I think I can predict what the literacy requirements are fated to be, and yes, the mid-21st century is "later on." ******* If Ms Brandenberg received an A on this paper, as she is evidently proud of it, she and others may have been dealt a grave injustice.

Horoscopes

I never have believed there is any truth in horoscopes.

There are too many people to be divided into too few groups

For there to be any significance.

But I read them anyway, two each day.

Seconds after I've read them, I don't recall what they said.

I never read my husband's, though I know he's a Leo;

I seldom read my childrens's, each a different sign:

Taurus, Libra, Aquarius. And even more rarely,

Do I scan the horoscopes of my grandchildren.

But she, in the spirit of her life, for a time,

Thought they held some truth, and believed a little,

Or pretended to, which amounts to the same thing,

So I keep reading them, as hope-less as ever.

To Seed or Not to Seed

I bought some red grapes at the store the other day. Biting into one---they were jumbo grapes--I felt the crunch of seeds. I'm not used to that, but thinking back, I seem to recall they were advertised as "seeded grapes." That didn't register with me at all when I bought them, so I guess I have no cause to complain. But thinking about it, the word "seeded" meaning seeds are present strikes me as wrong. "Peeled" potatoes do not have the peels on them, "cored" apples have had the cores removed, "shelled" peas are no longer in the shell, and someone has pulled the husks off "husked" corn. Moreover, if used in referring to food, the words mashed, diced, chopped, baked, fried, pureed, floured, coated, battered, scrambled, etc. all indicate that something has been done to the food by somebody, not something left in its natural state. That's what the past tense, the "ed" ending means. You can buy free range turkeys and you can buy eviscerated turkeys, but the latter are definitely not in their natural state. Seedless grapes I can understand; Luther Burbank may be proud. Seeded grapes makes me wonder what genius took the trouble to stick all those little seeds into each grape.

Wish Fulfillment

It was here---as promised. Green Ice Cream! It must have been near St. Patrick's Day, and I was about 7 years old. Sealtest Ice Cream had promised a new flavor and it had finally arrived. And the store was right next door, attached to our very house. The posted signs showed the delicious looking scoops of pale green ice cream. I wanted it so badly; it looked like no ice cream I'd ever seen, and I loved ice cream. I was not in the habit of begging my parents for anything, or even asking, because all of us kids pretty much knew that only our basic needs were filled; in that time period, there were few extras. But I was so eager to try that green ice cream, I must have made my feeling known because I remember my mother's trying to scrape together enough money to buy that pint of ice cream. The price was 37 Cents. The 3 of us kids put together our money, my father added what was in his pocket, my mother delved down into her pocketbook. Still not enough money, until the last desperate digging down below the sofa cushions finally came up with the grand sum. I remember holding the money in my hand and running out the front door across the porch into Sara's Store. (Actually at the time it was still called Jack's Confectionery Store.) I paid for the pint of ice cream, and ran back into the huse, excited to experience the taste of that brand new flavor. My mother did as she customarily did, laying flat the pint carton, and slicing the little brick into 5 even pieces. I grabbed my dish and tasted----the green ice cream was pistachio and I hated it. Still do

Day of the Dead

"The world of dead exceeds the living one."

There were 46 names on the Remembrance list of Transfiguration Parish's All Souls Liturgy. So members of the 46 families remembered their dead with prayers, a rose and an inscription of the name of their loved one, permanently written in a book for all time. The living assume to know about permanence, but only the dead can know what everlasting means. Our concept of eternity has one end rooted in life and the other end stretched out into the numbness of the unknown. The dead, though, are already at that terminal which has no other end. Maybe that's why, as in the lore of All Souls' Day, they return out of hunger and passion for the life they remembered to haunt, or at least occupy for a single night, the warmth of the living. Graves grow cold in November.

Feet Position

The cat is lying on the living room floor in the sun spot, with its feet extended, paws up. If mice liked to do that, perhaps Cheney and a few others would have taken the easy way out, and saved us all from a lot of misery.