CABBAGE, A WAY

I’m drifting along the library stacks, nothing special on my mind. Just looking at book spines. Wondering what might catch my eye. Writing guides? I’ve given up on learning to write. Poetry? Rarely does it make sense. Shakespeare? Ha! He made up too many non-words to fit his use of iambic pentameter, whatever that is. Willy boy is simply incomprehensible. Twain? Naw, too deep for me. What’s this? Tapply? I haven’t seen that name in three decades! “Trout Eyes” by William Tapply. I snatch the book off the shelf and head for checkout.

Tapply turns out to be the son of a writer I seldom bothered to read back in the days of beating waters with fishing lines or shredding the air with lead shot and instant thunder. I’m curious as to why I picked out this book. It’s been at least ten years since I’ve bothered to buy a fishing license and then I skipped the trout stamp, so it wasn’t the title that intrigued me. Well, I guess I’ll open the book and see what the universe is trying to tell me. Not that I’m feeling witty enough to catch a clue, but something obvious must be within the covers.

I let go a muffled groan as I find the first chapter, “Virtual Angling”? Gods save me from the “virtual” world! And they do, save me that is. Tapply isn’t writing about video fishing games, or computer anythings. He’s going on about-

Damn. I suddenly have a clue to something that’s been bugging me for years. The answer to how we deal with the drug problem in this burg is right before me, so simple, so complete, so… So sadly beyond my ability to communicate to anyone else that I set about forgetting it so it will leave me alone. Tapply’s book goes back to the library, unread.

When I struggled to learn the craft of writing (a craft I eventually realized is beyond my limited ability), I read somewhere that a thought not written down never existed. So why do some thoughts linger beyond those first moments after birth? Why do they keep haunting, niggling, returning unbidden when more pleasant and useful thoughts, once banished, fail to return?

The drug problem keeps circling me. I hear the pols on the radio offering the same non-solutions of “we’re studying the problem” “we’re funding programs” “we’re suggesting this or that” anything but what will actually work. I shrug and do my best to forget their babble. Then I run into people who’ve been through the hell of opiate addiction, or medicinal dependency, and survived, or are struggling to survive without the blessed drug.

“Why did you stop writing about the drug problem?” They demand of me.

My answers do not appease them and they press upon me the obligation to get in the battle, to offer a solution if I’ve found one, to point the way to help, to hope.

No. I do not have the obligation, nor do I accept it.

How many teachers, masters, rabbis, philosophers have tramped the dust of human history attempting to bring enlightenment to us? How many times have the talking apes ridiculed, harassed, even murdered their messiahs for daring step out of the crushing mass and offer an idea the collective bleated for, but didn’t actually want?

Too many people are wed to the current situation. They depend on it for their livelihoods. I’ll pick some other battle less likely to bring harm upon me and mine.

Like growing the perfect cabbage. Indeed, learning to grow a cabbage at all seems more useful and productive than beating my head ag’in the mass of cud chewing humanity. Why, an ape could spend a lifetime, or several, tending a cabbage row, comparing varieties, crossing them, blending desired features from dozens of parents into one offspring and trialing the resulting seeds, stabilizing a new variety.

While learning to grow the perfect cabbage I’d have to learn what to do with it once I have it. A high priority would be perfecting, to my needs, Ivan’s brine pickled whole heads of cabbage recipe (as taught to me by his gracious daughter.) So tasty are the mundane cabbages we’ve fermented in brine that the mere thought of a flavorful cabbage done up in the manner of that East-European family’s way sets me to drooling! (Brining whole cabbages is also much quicker than shredding them for sauerkraut! Plus, the whole leaves can be used for rolling, or chopped for stews and stir-fries, or shredded if needs be.)

Another usage goal would be perfecting a corned beef and cabbage dish. Such a dish would require the perfect piece of corned beef, which would, in a perfect world, require I grow a perfect cow and learn the perfect recipe for turning the perfect cut of beef into… Well this could go on forever.

While I’m so close to beef though, growing the cabbages would require feeding the cabbage bed compost. Compost, made with various animal and green manures as well as most anything that would rot. Naturally, I’d want to have the animals I’d need for the various recipes as close to perfect as possible. I’m not sure that cows eat cabbages, but pigs and chickens love them, so all my experiments that didn’t end up going down my gullet would be enjoyed by the animals, which would eventually find their way through my pie hole. (So, in Nature’s own circular way, I’d still eat the cabbages that didn’t suit my arbitrary, idiot’s standard.)

When I step back and look, actually look at all the interwoven threads necessary to building of a perfect cabbage, (at least as I perceive such a thing) I realize I’d not have time for lesser pursuits, such as drinking myself into oblivion, snorting powders up my nose or sticking needles in my arms. Hell. I almost get angry at all the years and dollars I wasted getting to this point: this realization that growing a freakin’ cabbage is the point of my existence! If I choose to make it so.

(sigh)

The ENJ editor (who never saw this column) nudges, or pushes, (depending on the density of a particular contributor) for each column to end on some positive and/or helpful note. To that end, I offer some small hope to those ready to grasp at it- Dr. Christine of this place.

If her help isn’t what’s needed I might be persuaded to offer some help of my own. A large, electronic dog collar hooked to a heavy chain attached to a tar-paper hovel near the cabbage bed. A garden to weed, fresh produce for sup and commiseration as the pain-filled withdrawal commences. Oh, and the compost pile, should the treatment fail.

I strongly suggest calling Doc Christine first. She’s not only easier to gaze upon; she actually cares what happens to other people. Not that I don’t care, I just have different priorities. Like feeding the soil that feeds the cabbages.

GOOD ENGOUGH

Here I sat all content with the best bacon we’ve found in decades (Stoney Point Farm Market’s smoked bacon) and along comes the evil woman (that homesteader, Diane) telling me about salt cured meats. Diane has acquired a few pigs and taken up turning them into roasts, chops and sausages the like of which can’t be found, at a price we can afford, around here without raising the critters ourselves. Her German-Italian partner in homesteading has challenged her to attempt an American version of Tyrolean Speck, a cured meat from his native land. Both of them are urging me to take up the art of curing meats. I believe the French call the craft charcuterie? I’ve come to call it a gift from the gods! Done properly, the flavors and mouth feel are divine, and done wrong, a spoiled meat will take you to Hell, possibly in fact as well as in perception.

I’ve yet to stray far into this world of savory meats. Being a well-conditioned little sheep, I’m scared to step out of the FDA and USDA guidelines for food safety. Not that having poisoned myself a time or two hasn’t had a role in my being cautious. (Do NOT eat mayonnaise that has turned brown! DW can’t believe I did that more than once.) A couple of the safer traditional sausages Diane recommended, to get me addicted, were my first mistakes. Oh my, the breakfast sausage recipe she sent me was so good DW, Raiza and younger Jack asked me to make it again.

Having stepped into the charcuterie highway, I was sideswiped by a truck, a metaphorical pig truck. Diane suggested a nice, safe bacon recipe for my first attempt as salt curing pig fat. I hemmed and hawed, procrastinated and whined until the smoked bacon we adore went from $5 a pound (on sale) to $7. I’d been buying leaf fat and rendering lard from that at $1 a pound. What is bacon but fat and a bit of meat? Pork bellies shouldn’t be too expensive. Turns out pork bellies fetch $4 a pound. Hmmm $4 or $7?

DW said, “Why don’t you try curing bacon.”

She wasn’t pleased when I ordered a slab of pig belly for nearly $40, but she didn’t bang her head ag’in a wall either.

I had the butcher cut the belly into three, more or less, equal sized pieces and froze two of them while I sort of followed a recipe Diane found at saveur.com (I’ll be rooting through their recipe collection for more than bacon recipes!) I didn’t grind the spices and herbs as required, just crushed them. Odd, how much a difference that makes in the final product.

Even with the belly meat safely in the fridge, I hesitated to begin the cure. The recipe called for kosher salt, not the pink salt (sodium nitrite and/or sodium nitrate) the FDA and USDA recommends for curing meats. Diane  reminded me that humans have been curing meat for thousands of years without the government approved pink salt. I sighed and mixed the cure after several people with doctorates in medicine assured me a week in a dry cure wasn’t going to bring about a case of botulism unless the meat was tainted to begin with. (Gods! Dad and Mom’s elders are roiling in their graves over the ignorant, cowardly thing that descended from them. I half expected Dad to leave his grave in Florida and come here to have another talk with me. The last time he visited started me on the long road to sobriety, which I’ve yet to reach the end of.)

The first chunk of cured bacon was interesting, but not the delight I’d half expected. I didn’t care for it sliced and fried at all. DW wasn’t wild about it either and seemed a bit perturbed by the thought of two more chunks of pig in the freezer being wasted if I continued with the recipe I had. I told her I had everything under control. To show her faith in me she only banged her head ag’in the wall a couple of times.

That first attempt at home cured bacon was cut into small pieces and dumped into a pot of pinto beans. Voila! Best beans and pork I ever made and I’ve made some fine pots of them over the years! Middle Brother used to slam through the door and declare, “I smelled the beans cooking and drove from Florida for a bowl of them! Got any onions?” (I doubt he actually knew I was cooking beans and pork, but he did turn up without warning every time I set a pot to simmering back in the alcohol haze days. Except that one time him and Dad were lost in Texas.)

The next two chunks of pig belly were cured at the same time, using the ground herbs and spices called for. One with sugar, one without. Not that I meant to leave out the sugar, I simply forgot to add it. Though I’m not one for sweet meats, I now see the reason for using sugar in curing. Duh. Both bacons turned out beyond my greatest expectations! Saveur indeed!

Everyone who sampled the cured slabs asked how I’d made them and all were surprised I hadn’t smoked the bacon. When I explained how easy this home cure was and how anyone could do it I got that look I’ve come to expect, followed by the words that depress me. “I don’t have the time. But I’ll buy…” the bacon, mead, bread, wine, or whatever it is I’m playing at.

While hanging around butcher shops waiting for my “unusual” order to be filled I get to talking to the elders, mostly men who use to cure various meats on their farms. While they all encourage me to learn the art of curing, they have given it up for “good enough” as they refer to the meats the butcher shops offer these days.

Having tasted the possibilities opening before me, as I gingerly step into the world of handcrafted foods, I’m having trouble understanding this attitude of “good enough”. Fortunately, there are evil women around here, also elders, who seem delighted some young gray beard is taking up the art of good food. They wink at me. “It isn’t that difficult is it?”

Well no, and yes, it is. Learning to make good bread and sippable wine left me wanting something to eat with them of as good, or better a quality as they were. That would not be what I find in the supermarkets, which means I have to grow it or create it myself. Having moved from curing bacon to corning beef I now need a dead hog and a cow to work with!

Diane laughs as she sends me pictures of the pigs she recently butchered and is curing or making sausages from. “Jack, you can also brine fish, duck and turkey as well as cabbages, cucumbers, turnips- Well just about everything you eat. You’ve just got to try kimchee! Hurry little one. You’re still so far behind.”

“And no. Store bought foods are not ‘good enough’.”

"Jack"

I tell myself I’m not actually hearing my name across a parking lot. No, this is in my head. (It happens now and again, my hearing music or voices no one else does.) She isn’t manifesting in the here-and-now. I’m tired. I don’t want a visit from Her. But I know that voice, though I haven’t heard it in years. Thirty? Thirty-two? Mother, what game are you playing now? I turn to see.

“Do you know who I am?”

I think I smile. It wouldn’t be polite to burst out laughing as if I’d lost my mind, which I’m close to doing. I focus on the face that used to occupy all my waking moments and most of my semi-unconscious ones. (I didn’t sleep much when this particular aspect of the Universe opened the gates in my mind and let the suppressed come out to play with a Muse.) I tell myself that she (the human she) is no longer a young woman. I am no longer a smitten drunk hell-bent to accomplish a suicidal binge. (Buck up boy. You can survive this.) The cages in my head rattle. The Suppressed would still worship this one, just to punish me for caging them.

I allow I know her, though I doubt “the her” looking at me through dark sunglasses has any idea how many “hers” I actually see. There is the young woman flickering in and out of the mature woman’s hesitant smile. She is obviously present, and the Muse. I want to run away, but I’m too slow witted to escape. The suppressed in my head are howling now. Their laughter should be heard across the parking lot, but she (the flesh and blood she) just smiles and says she has some poems I wrote. Do I remember them? Would I like to have them back?

And Her trap closes. I feel the hook pierce. I’m aware now of the game and not so easily played. Trapped? Yes. But I don’t have to play. I know what’s up and I can escape. Only I don’t. Gods what an idiot I am! I want to read those sheets she/She offers me. I want to see if memory comes even close to the pain that drove me then! The Suppressed are gibbering manically now. Their laughter and cage clanging helping to seal my fate. (I hate the things in my head. That’s why I have them caged.)

I’m not sure when I began suppressing aspects of myself. Likely, I’ve been at it since becoming aware. Dad was big, loud (if angry) and scary. I never saw him hurl a lightening bolt, but his voice shook houses with its commanding rumble. It was best not to draw his attention. Mom was easier to be a kid around, though she was more likely to spank me if I was too much a boy. By the time I started school I was thought to be shy. Hardly. I had long since learned to suppress the more out-going, boisterous aspects of myself, especially in public. By the time I hit high school, and had learned to bank the anger building in me, I was very much in control of my caged self. And then I found alcohol.

The altered states following alcohol consumption were a revelation. I became aware of, under its influence, just what I had caged. Trapped within me were people who occasionally slipped their constraints while I was intoxicated. A dancer, furious that I denied him the training to dance like Fred Astaire.

A gentleman, who politely suggested I cut my hair, buy a suit, or at least casual clothes and allow him to make a presentable man of me. Someone that might have been suave and debonair with the ladies, had I not choked him into submission.

And a poet; some shriveled aspect of the want-to-be writer I kicked and stomped until it whimpered and fell silent.

Those and others welled up in me, fought for a place in the frontal lobe and with enough alcohol, fell into babbling contention and the dominate “me” won out as the collective “we” crashed, yet again, in drunken stupor. Yee haw for the bully!

She (I was unaware of Her in those days, having yet to meet and sit among the Pagans) had long played me with a Muse aspect of Herself. I’ve lost count of the sleepless hours I’ve sat scribbling, or pecking words on paper, or computer monitor as my mind raced beyond my fingers with story upon story, frustration upon frustration, as I screamed at myself for not knowing grammar, hell, even correct spelling! I was aware of the Muse, but not the Other, or Her games.

We were at Edgewood Lanes along the Old Emmitsburg Road in PA for some reason (for the life of me I can’t remember why) when a young woman I thought might someday become a friend reached out and playfully tugged on my beard. To this day I remember a “click” sounding in my head as if a light had come on, or cage doors had been opened. Everything changed.

Her face burnt into my mind, her voice embedded deeply so I knew it 30 some years later. Everything I had spent years suppressing and caging came stampeding full-blown into my mind. Thankfully, most of the aspects of myself had atrophied so badly they were mere shells as I stood there slack jawed. I’d beaten them, or denied them for so long they had power only to niggle me, but not take over. Except the poet. He had lain so quietly dormant I’d forgotten him. The Muse, freakin’ harpy that she can be, grabbed hold of the poet and slammed all my defenses down, stomped them deep into the mud that was my mind and took advantage of the alcohol haze to punish me, seemingly without end.

The poet, the shambling wreck I’d made of him, rose up and took his revenge. Lacking an education, lacking anything but a desire to speak and punish, he tormented me without mercy. Doggerel. Pages upon pages of rhyming doggerel spewed out of me onto paper. The Muse whispered in my ear, the poet shrieked at me. It got so bad I began to think in rhyme! It took a conscious effort not to speak in rhyme!

I regret dragging the innocent beard tugger into my nightmare. That she kept some of the doggerel rhymes all these years surprised me. That She is manipulating me with them does not. Reading those long ago lines produces a mild sense of the misery I wallowed in then, but stirs nothing I have lived in fear of. Mostly I laugh at my feeble efforts at rhyme. (The want-to-be poet had his fling; he’ll not get out again this turn of the Wheel.)

My mind eased of that particular burden; I raise a glass in thanks to Her, the young woman and the Muse. Now I need to figure out what I’m supposed to do next. I know damned well She didn’t set this in motion so I could sleep better!

Knowing When to be Quiet

I stand behind the firing line as the IWLA (Izaak Walton League of America) kids sling arrows at paper plates. I don’t know the names of most of these kids though I’ve been watching over them and occasionally coaching some them for more than two years now. (It took me 5 years of standing on the line to learn the names of the kids from that club who first won the Maryland Youth Hunter Education Challenge and later the national title!) The kids tend to come and go every year and I just don’t remember them if they don’t stick around beyond two years. Even then, I need to see them at each practice if I’m going to remember their names. I rarely remember their parents’ names no matter how many years they hang around. (If someone didn’t say “Coach Jack” every time we meet to practice, I’d forget why I’m there.)

 So I look around the archery area and see a girl standing alone, as stoic as I’ve ever seen a kid look. There are other adults watching the line and the kids know enough now that I can look away for a moment. I ask the Stoic if she wants to shoot. She gives me a blank look and says softly, “No. Not right now.”

I glance at the firing line. The shooters have finished so I give the okay to pull their arrows. As they hang their bows and walk down range to the targets, I turn back to the Stoic.

“You aren’t interested in all this are you?”

Her face becomes animated, a rare occurrence for this child. She turns and actually meets my eye. I have to lean closer to hear her.

“No, I’m not. My brother is the one who wants to do this.”

I nod. Been down this road before and saw things get ugly quickly. Teenaged girls being forced to do “hunting” things because their brothers want to is not good. I don’t want kids on my line who aren’t “into it”. Kids who might be angry about being forced to participate set off alarms! I hate having to tell a kid to step off the line and hang up their bow because they are angry, usually with a parent who is forcing them to shoot. I tend to stand close and speak softly to the kid until I either calm them or see that anger is ruling them. If they can’t get control of themselves, I tell them to take a break. Sadly, the parents occasionally object and I have to order the kid off my line and explain to the parent I will not have an angry shooter on the line. (When I think of the things I’ve done in anger I feel sick to my stomach. I don’t want anyone on my watch feeling guilty years down the road.)

This girl doesn’t appear angry. She’s simply enduring. Having done that most of my life I can sympathize with her. I tell her she doesn’t have to shoot if she doesn’t want to. I get a very surprised glance from her. Evidently she’s not use to being given an option. She nods a “thank you” and sits down to watch the other kids shoot for more than an hour.

Later I notice one of the other female type shooters has joined the Stoic. They are talking teenage girl stuff: school, boys, clothes, boys, music and boys. I suspect the girl shooter is having more influence than I’ll ever manage so I leave them be and watch the line.

Every now and again I get a kid who has no interest in hunting, but wants to learn to shoot a bow, just because. Having never killed anything with a bow (I don’t count a chipmunk I shot once, and I don’t tell that story often) I feel more of a connection with the nonhunters and have had to think about ways to keep them interested in the sport of arrow slinging when the other kids start showing up with pictures of the deer they’ve killed with a bow. I think about why I set arrow to string and let fly. And I think about how I might explain that to a kid, especially a girl kid.

Like most things I attempt, it took decades for me to realize why I sling arrows. Obviously because it seldom requires me to throw, hit, kick or catch a ball. (Thank the gods!) I don’t have to run, jump or climb. Nor do I have to join a team, or a club to shoot a bow. In fact, I can buy an attachment for my bow and shoot indoors, with my eyes closed, and never worry about damaging anything or anyone! I don’t have to hunt, or even paper shoot to enjoy using a bow. Such a cool tool to train myself with!

There are times I deeply regret not sticking with my education so I’d have learned how to teach. How do I talk to a kid about philosophy when they probably haven’t heard the word let alone know its meaning? (Though I’ve had a few of the IWLA kids give me a Socratic butt whoopin’ on occasion and they knew what they were doing! Damn home schoolers!) How do I explain archery isn’t just about hitting a mark, be it a kill point on a deer or a spot on a sheet of paper?

I’ve stood alone on the line and slammed three arrows so tightly together in a bull’s eye I was amazed I hadn’t ruined at least one of the arrows. Hanging my bow, I asked the kids to pull my arrows. They couldn’t. I asked them how I’d managed to shoot them so accurately. “Magic.” Someone said. So one time I got to explain how magic works. I think some of the parents caught it, but I doubt any of the kids did.

I mauled over how to explain archery to the Stoic during the two weeks we didn’t have a practice. I’d pretty much worked out what I’d say to her when we met on the range again, but was almost disappointed to find her geared up to shoot and waiting for me to take control of the range. I let her get off a few arrows and walked down range with her as she retrieved them.

“What changed your mind about doing this?” I’m such a curious creature, some days.

“Oh, Gabrielle told me why she enjoys shooting and how it’s helped her in other things she does. She told me I don’t have to hunt to be an archer.” She paused and smiled a little. “It is fun now that I know I don’t have to kill anything.”

While I might not be formally trained as an educator, I have learned enough over the years to know when to nod in agreement and keep my mouth shut.

Memory Wires

Memory wires tripping, things percolating to the surface of the trash pit I suppose passes for a mind.

It’s 1982. I’m attempting suicide by alcohol. A three-tour Vietnam vet, a discharged Army Ranger sitting next to me in a bar, turns and asks if he can ask a personal question. I sort of sober immediately, questions require thinking and I’m getting drunk to stop thinking. But I respect this guy who’s told me stories that cause his nightmares so I allow I’ll answer him honestly.

“Are you gay?”

He said no one he’d talked to could ever remember me dating a girl, or spending much time talking to one.

I laughed and explained that I’m an incompetent creature barely able to focus on breathing and walking at the same time. Somewhere along the lifeline I’d decided it was best for me to do one thing well in my life and at that moment being a drunk took all my attention and most of my meager income (tobacco and books took what little was left of my cash.) I assured him I liked females and at some point would probably sober up and turn my attention toward one of them, or fishing, archery, gardening, marijuana or something other than alcohol.

The Ranger, having once been surrounded by 5,000 NVA and living to tell me about it, eyed me thoughtfully then suggested I was either the smartest man he’d ever met, or the craziest. I suggested we go with crazy as it would be easier for both of us. We left it at that, only the memory of that moment has other plans.

Out of the alcohol haze days drift faces, females who somehow made impressions on me in spite of my efforts to ignore them. The Dancer (because I remember that most about her- a cute blond, petite, lost in a tune, eyes closed, swaying and spinning, possessed by the music) approached me as I sat on an ice chest alongside a river. I don’t recall how I got there, but the beer was cold, the music rocking and the crowd mostly people I got along with. The Dancer was not someone I had exchanged a dozen words with prior to that day; though she was usually at whatever gathering I turned up in. She was a friend’s squeeze, easily ignored if she wasn’t dancing.

She surprised me when she asked if she could sit next to me. Befuddled, there were plenty of lawn chairs and logs to sit on, I squoched over (squoched is one of DW’s hillisms) and she sat down. While I was still struggling with the idea such a woman would want to sit beside me she asked me where I was from.

At that time I’d been a good 15 years trying to be like everyone around here (well, not everyone, just those my own age. And not everyone my age, just the less respectable ones.) I’d lost most of my proper pronunciation of English words, had taken to the local slang and alcohol with a vengeance. How the hell did she know I was from elsewhere? She said she’d seen me with a book. She hadn’t seen anyone else from here reading a book. (Damned books! I haven’t been able to shake their obsession with me.)

So she starts asking me where I’m from and how I got to this place. The storyteller got hold of my alcohol-loosened tongue and away I went. She giggled, “oo”ed and “ahh”ed in the wrong places, but I was on a roll and figured she’d had as much to drink as I. When I finally wound down and opened another beer she giggled as she stood up.

“My boyfriend was right.”

I gave her a puzzled look (my usual look when dealing with people, women in particular.)

“He said if I was going to take a hit of LSD I should get you to talk to me. ‘Jack is one hell of a trip.’ He said. He was soo right! Thank you.”

I’ve yet to fully grasp the reason why that memory keeps pestering me.

The Daughter (her father was a West Virginia coal miner in the 1940s and 50s) still puzzles me to no end. Was she bored, lonely, checking to see if I was human, or challenged to strike up a conversation with me? She was another friend’s squeeze that I’d avoided talking to. I don’t know how she got by the “mad dog” vibes that radiated from me when I was seated at my table in a crowded bar seeking some release in what would eventually be the emptying of the thirtieth beer bottle of the night. The bikers of that time had dubbed me Madman (something related to my having eaten beer bottles) and left me in peace. Why was this female interrupting my sloshing into the haze?

I sighed and nodded when she asked if she could sit at my table. The bar was packed three or four deep and I had the only table that wasn’t fully occupied. She introduced herself with a smile and I promptly told her she’d just wasted her breath as I’d not remember her name because she was of no interest to me. “Me” being on a downhill slide and not sure I wanted to slow, let alone stop for anyone foolish enough to step in front of me.

 Her smile broadened as she suggested she might make an impression on me if I’d give her a chance. I shrugged. “Have at it if you’ve the time to waste.”

Ga! We must have talked for three, four hours. She started out with the music the band was playing, Steppenwolf, which most of the younger bar crowd did not recognize and moved on to her journey from a coal town to this place. I learned more about life in a coal company town (from a girl child’s perspective) than I have in any of the books on the subject I’ve picked up before or since meeting the Daughter. She held my attention so well my beer bottles kept getting warm before I could empty them.

When I spoke of standing in a schoolyard waiting for the approaching Air Force jet to break the sound barrier as it passed overhead she talked in turn of sitting on a hillside overlooking the mine entrance, counting the white faces as the men trooped into the hole as the sun was rising. Later she returned to the hillside to count the black men who emerged into the light of the dying day.

“Do you know how it feels to count 25 men walking in and only 24 walking out? To sit in panic as you look for some detail that identifies your daddy? To cry in relief to see him among the living and to sob with your friend when it’s her dad who will never walk again?”

“We were all on welfare. But cash money wasn’t allowed in the company town. No, the government assistance came in the form of sacks of flour and such. Cash money would allow us to escape. We were slaves. There is no other word for it. The company owned us and the government let them.”

She told me of the first real mattress she ever slept on. “It was so comfortable I could barely close my eyes for the pleasure of it.” It was the front seat of a company car the mine owners had had winched up the mountain so they could tour their holdings. It was also the first car she’d ever seen. Her daddy pulled the seat out of it and gave it to her after the owners had abandoned it; it not being worth the expense to ease back down the mountain and no one in town having cash for gas, or any place worth driving it to.

When I asked how she’d gotten out of the town she sat up and looked at me as if bracing for some form of condemnation. “I saw how things were going. The girls getting pregnant before they were fifteen. Marrying boys who had no choice but to go down in the hole. I didn’t want to end up like that. I manage to avoid becoming a mother until a hiker, an outsider, came walking through the town. I was seventeen when I seduced him and got pregnant. He took me off the mountain.”

It was two weeks before I saw the Daughter again. We happened to pass in a grocery store. She nodded and said “Hello Jack.” I nodded in turn and said her name. We each walked several steps before we stopped and turned to face each other. She burst into laughter.

“I must have made an impression. You remembered my name.”

I smiled, a rarity in those days. “I guess you did.”

I can’t recall ever talking to either woman after those conversations. I often wonder what became of them.

The Wall

Few people get past our front door. It isn’t that we don’t like visitors, we don’t like rearranging our dust, animal hair and clutter so the visitors can safely visit. If someone does visit, it’s not unusual for DW to hiss, “There’s one crossing the kitchen.” Which prompts me to leave a guest while I stomp a rolling mass of animal hair, thick with dust, as it streaks from the back rooms determined to engulf the visitor.

If the condition of our dwelling doesn’t convince a visitor they have entered a madhouse, (barking, jumping, slobbering dogs tend to welcome visitors as they step through the door) the lack of a television usually does. The clincher, as far as discomfort goes, seems to be the wall where books are stacked. Books are piled on any flat surface: chairs, tables, counters, a dog crate. (The cat won’t tolerate his crate being piled with books he’s not interested in reading.) Books occasionally overflow onto the floor.

Sometimes a visitor will approach the wall to scan the titles. There are bread books, cookbooks, food preservation books, wine making books, archery books, fishing books. Books on barnyard livestock, horse breeds and their care, and nature in general. Books on writing, embroidery, gardening, mead making, organic orchards, drawing, painting, aquarium fishes and histories. A longer glance reveals tomes on mushrooms, Christianity, Paganism, guns, herbs, art, Shakespeare, O’Henry, Plato, Fantasy & Science Fiction art, Maps of War and “green” witchcraft.)

I’m at a loss when someone turns from the wall and asks, “Do you play golf?”

I don’t, too much hand/eye coordination required. They want to know why I have a copy of “The Encyclopedia of Golf”. How do I explain that? Or the three books on flying gliders and airplanes, or the copy of “Morals and Dogma, a Freemason book of rites”? I don’t fly and I’m not a Mason, free or otherwise. In all honesty, I have no idea what all is on that wall, or piled along it. I usually shrug. Why do I have these books?

I haven’t read most of them, have barely skimmed the bulk of them and probably have forgotten the ones I have read. There must be a reason for my buying them, for coating them with years of dust. It can’t be that I want to impress someone as so few people have been in the room with them. Maybe I hope to someday get around to reading them? (Not likely. I can’t keep up with the few books I want to read now.) More likely, I think they contain information I’ll need someday and I don’t trust the library, or the digital age, to keep them safe and handy against the day I need them? (I know this isn’t some midlife crisis crap. I’ve been a book hoarder since the 5^th grade!)

When I have no musical group I’m obsessing over, or audio book I can listen to at work, I listen to “talk radio”, sometimes even local “talk radio”. With the election of a more conservative county government, I’ve been hearing talk of cutting funding to the county’s public library system, or incorporating it into the public school system. The latter idea would pretty much end my using the library as anything more than a pickup/drop off point. (Which would probably be a relief to those patrons who’ve endured my endless rants and boring stories when I visit the library as it is today.)

One of the local radio talking heads recently suggested that we no longer have need of libraries. We all have access to the internet and everything anyone could possibly need to know is stored there. I pondered that statement from one of the county’s wise and considered that I don’t have a cell phone let alone a smart phone, which led me to wonder how I’d identify a cabbage-munching bug while in the garden without access to the In’ernet? A paper book field guide to insects of course. Then I got to thinking about my being able to find everything I need to know online.

I’m evidently out of the main stream (who’da guessed?), as I often can’t find even a hint of what I want to know via the Net. Maybe if I had a “smart” phone the Net would cough up what I want to know? I’ve gone through as many as 23 Google search pages without finding what I was looking for. (Statistically, most people seldom look beyond the first 3 or 4 listed sites Google kicks out. Which might explain why people sometimes look at me oddly when I try to explain something I’ve read off the Net. They never get that far!)

After spending hours, sometimes days, searching the Net I finally give up and go to the library. I usually find what I need a few minutes after talking to a librarian who happens to be trained in finding information. While the librarian might use a computer and even search Google, it is usually a book sitting on a library’s shelf somewhere in the state of Maryland that turns out to contain the knowledge I’m seeking, not some website.

I understand the need to cut government spending in the county, the state and the country in general. I applaud and vote for those who claim their goal is fiscal sanity. And I understand one of the few taxpayer funded institutions I have any use for might be the one to get cut the most.

So I’ve taken to building a private library, often from books discarded by the local libraries. I learned a couple years ago that a handful of other readers and a few churches (most of them better educated and all of them smarter than me) are building their own libraries. I’m not the only one who isn’t finding what I need online. Nor am I the only one thinking it’s going to be needful to have real books at hand some day, possibly soon.

What bothers me most is having better educated, more experienced people than I, asking me to create things they think will prove useful in the near future. Like a recent request for a tutorial on arrow making. While I understand the reason for a tutorial, I’m not the person to create it. So I head for the library, which it turns out, does NOT have a book on such. Nor could I find one via the state’s library search engine. While I suggested the county library acquire several books on making archery equipment, I’ll not hold my breath waiting to see them in the card catalog. Nor will I whine and complain when I’m told such books aren’t of interest to enough patrons to justify shelving them. (The latest teen vampire romance novels have the top funding slot after all.) I’ll buy the archery books sooner than later as they need be on the wall.

Those of us with private libraries need to start locating each other. Perhaps cataloging what we have and arranging to share among ourselves should need arise?

I need to blow the dust off my books first.

The Holy Days

Man, I’ve come to hate the Xmas crap DW insists I endure each year. Xmas is supposed to be Christmas, a religious holiday I don’t participate in because I’m not an Xian let alone a Christian. Having to be part of the commercial bull crap that her family (and damned near everyone else) demands each year rubs my cantankerous self in every wrong way.

I’ve mostly given up explaining that Scrooge was a miser and I’m anything but. Money flows through my fingers faster than an ATM can read a magnetic strip! I love giving gifts for no reason other than I can. And I love gifting any day of the year but Xmas. Explaining things to emotional, close-minded people is a waste of time and energy. So when DW says “Take me to a store, I need to buy Xmas crap (she doesn’t quite say it that way, that’s how I hear it) I carp and grumble as I drive to wherever she’s going to torment me with questions like “Do you think blah blah would like this? Or should we get blah blah this?”

My, “What’s this WE crap? Leave me the hell out of this!” get’s me the one eyed squint and I wander off to look at hammers and contemplate the murder of commercial Xmas.

The last few years we’ve begun a tradition of a New Year’s Day feast that brings a handful of people to our table for steamed shrimp and whatever else we feel like cooking for those who gather. Because we spend a lot more than we can afford on the New Year’s vittles I tend to keep my anger over Xmas to a low grumble. We have to begin buying shrimp in September in order to have close to 20 pounds by the first of January. If I irritate DW too much with my Xmas rants she’ll balk at my shrimp buying.

The 2013 feast was almost cancelled due to my not wanting to clean and rearrange our house to accommodate the seven or so guests that usually turn up. My being so grouchy about Xmas that year didn’t inspire feelings of sharing either. Simona spent a hour lecturing me about our feast being the one day of the year she does not have to prepare a meal and serve us! She allowed I owed her that one day of her being a guest!

I snarled and snapped (I hate being trapped) and pleaded that getting the house in order was simply too much work! She came back with not caring about the condition of our house; she would endure that to be a guest at our table. “This is the day I look forward to all year! Do not take this away from me! Your family, and this day, is as close to being with my family as I can get in this country!”

Damn. So we rearranged and cleaned, and gathered foods, and prepared. And Simona, and several other invited guests came down with a flu.

This year we prepared the unoccupied upstairs apartment for the feast. Twenty-two pounds of shrimp were steamed, four loaves of bread baked. Oxtail mushroom gravy, chicken Alfredo, roasted veggies and buttered egg noodles were set out. A roasted chicken and a duck were dissected and presented. Wine bottles were open, jugs of tea offered. DW brought out her broccoli salad, Harvey Wallbanger cake and gluten-free brownies.

Simona, a better cook than I on any day, tasted everything and offered that I had outdone myself. She would have to turn the table on me and show me up with some feast of her own! I argued that everything I offered was more accident than planned. Considering how much had gone wrong over the 3 days of meal prepping I’m surprised anything turned out edible! The Mad One did not care! I had set a table that impressed her and she took that as a challenge!

Simona turned from her plate and smiled. “This is all very good. How will you do better next year?”

“I’m already planning next year’s feast.” I said without a smile. She frowned and said something about outdoing me in the meantime. Cousin Luke rolled his eyes and groaned. He muttered something about “Here we go, a food war.”

Out of nowhere, the Mad One asks about the cabbages. “How are they doing?”

I don’t know if she was hoping I’d made a mess of them as I had two years ago, but I thought they were doing well enough so I took her to the back room to see the ferment bucket. (Because most people think fermenting cabbages stink I have to keep the bucket out of DW’s parts of the house.) Simona lifted the lid from the bucket and commented the scum that bubbled across the surface meant the ferment was ongoing. A good sign.

She stuck her finger into the brine and stuck the scum-covered digit into her mouth. He eyes expanded as she dashed out of the room for the sink. I caught something like “How did you do this?” She rushed back in with a cup, dipped brine from the bucket, and began sipping it as if I’d introduced her to a wine I was making!

“This is so good! This is so much better than my cabbages. What did you do?”

I’m confused by this time. “What did I do? Hell, I did what you told me to do!”

“Then why is yours so much better than mine? Oh, the dill comes through nicely and the horseradish undertones assert themselves after the wonderful salty dill fades away. This is SO good! How did you do this?”

“I followed the recipe you got from you dad.”

We return to the feast where people look at us as if we’re nuts. We’re talking about why the brine is saltier than her dad’s when we’ve followed his instructions. (She decides he makes a 55-gallon barrel of fermented cabbages while we’re working with two or three heads that can only absorb so much salt.) I’m explaining that I’ve found seeds for cabbages breed for just what we’re doing. I don’t tell her that next year’s garden is part of my next New Year’s Day feast plan.

Most everything DW and I prepared and set before the guests came from a supermarket. Some of it we assembled from boxed mixes, some came about as blends of whole foods and canned. Other than the garlic I roasted with the taters, celery, carrots and onions nothing was grown by us. Next year I plan to change as much of that as proves possible.

Should the garden come close to what we have planned, should we have laying hens and feeder lambs, perhaps a deer in the freezer, I intend to set a table fit for a Bulgarian foodie!

I’m going to have to learn to cook first. And there will have to be a tradeoff to my having to learn something I’m not wild about. Those who gather are going to have to feast on my holiday and that ain’t New Year’s Day. It’s the day of the Winter Solstice.