The every-other-year trip to sunny Oklahoma to visit with Grandma (great-grandma to my grandkids) was quite the stressful situation this year, which is the year my hubby’s and my sole remaining parent turns 87. She was hospitalized for ten days a couple of months ago with a terrible case of food poisoning – we don’t buy the ‘flu’ excuse, it wasn’t flu – and we flew our daughter out there to stay with her when she got out because we couldn’t take the time off. Daughter made arrangements for home health care, which she needs because she lives alone in a too-big house. The one her mother bought just off Main Street, which survived the tornado that took out the hotel a block in front and the Presbyterian Church a block behind. Back when my hubby was 8 years old and Norma and Clint ran the hotel.

She has also lost sight in one eye, so needed someone to take her car keys away for public safety’s sake. This also makes her depth perception non-existent, and has led to a series of nasty falls that have us and her other son’s family who lives about 45 minutes away most paranoid. Her friends and neighbors love her, but don’t want to be the ones to discover her dead one day alone in that big house, but she’s stubbornly clung to her independence since her husband of 50 years died over a decade ago.

Luckily she has very tough bones, product no doubt of her youthful career as a Rodeo Queen – champion barrel racer – and the number of times she’d been bucked off her horse. But it’s inevitable that one of these days she’s going to break something, and all her choices will be gone. That would be a very sad end to a wonderfully storied life, and not something we would ever wish upon her. So our job was to unite with the rest of the family and try hard to convince her that she should go into a nice assisted living facility less than a minute away from #2 son.

Her mind is going, at least the short term memory part. She often repeats herself, and tells the same long-ago stories over and over again to anyone there to listen. I figure the assisted living crowd will love her greatly, and never tire of her stories because their memories are bad enough that they’ll always be fresh! Plus there’s bingo, Bible study her son the Baptist minister teaches, good meals served to her in her apartment or at a table in the great-room (with the big screen TV), and the staff is there to make sure all her meds are current and given on time, which prevents those overdoses or underdoses elderly people are so prone to.

Plus, we bought her a nice mini tape recorder so she could go ahead and tell those stories for posterity, write that wonderful book about her life that we’ve wanted her to write for years. Something about her hard-earned wisdom of getting right back on that horse no matter how much it hurts after you get thrown. So pertinent to dealing with the nasty curve balls life throws at us all if we live long enough, and at which she is a certifiable expert.

She lost a husband in WW-II, then married my hubby’s father because he insisted. Loved her the moment he met her, despite her strong independent and rebellious streak. They lived those 50 years in a love story that has been a never-ending inspiration to me, Clint was the best man I’ve ever known apart from his #1 son. She is lonely now, and vulnerable. The boys and sister-in-law pressured her pretty heavily for the change in her circumstances, as of course they had to do because they’re her boys and the love her and they worry endlessly about her.

I had a different job. She got me when I was just 18, and we’ve had the most amazing relationship all the years since. More like best friends or twins from birth, we’ve always been completely honest with each other and aren’t afraid to criticize or generally bitch, or laugh at the silliest or raciest things, as if we shared a private joke.

So I was totally honest. We know we’re going to lose her if we don’t get hit by a bus any time soon, and it doesn’t matter all that much to me how or when. I’m still going to wail and cry and miss her terribly. So will her sons. I respect her independence, and am not going to insist or cajole or push in any other way for her to commit herself to an assisted living facility, but I will say it’s a nice place, nice people, plenty of company and they’ve never heard her stories! It could literally add years to her life, though she is like me in dreading the thought of living to be 100. Yet she might, so she should make arrangements accordingly.

Norma Jean is already the last one standing of her family and friends from childhood, so that’s not a wish she can still dread like I do. So I told her something she’s told us a million times, her way of dealing with the patients of the Gould Farm facility she volunteered for through her church after Clint died. When they asked her advice – and they always did because they considered her their grandma too – she’d always tell them they already knew the choice they would make, so they didn’t need her to tell them otherwise or to support that choice.

That’s what I told my beloved Norma. She already knows what she must do, and she does. She has put it off long enough, and will make the move. I told her we’d do nothing with her house and all her nice things. Not sell it (I might need it someday!) or rent it out, just seal it up and let the bank keep on paying the bills and Brinks to keep it safe. Then, I said, if she ends up hating the place, we’ll just take her home again. I think that helped.

While I’d love to be in a position for her to live here on the mountain with us and let me care for her until it’s over, she’s deathly allergic to animals and nature these days. Plus, my only bathroom is in the basement and the only spare room in the loft. It cannot be. I could leave my family here and move into that big house with her, but she really could live to be 100. What about my life and my kids and grandkids and such? Totally impractical, and there’s no more work in Oklahoma for a 58-year old man like my hubby than there is here. Where he has a job he likes and pays the bills, letting us stay here in our beautiful retreat from the wider world.

But I’ve volunteered for a mission too. She’ll send me the tapes of the stories, I’ve promised to transcribe and send back, she can edit and add, I’ll get the final manuscript all typed up. And then I’ll find a publisher and get it published. Real history, wonderfully funny and exciting and sadder-than-sad stories that may help others well beyond her own lifetime. She owes that to the world, and I aim to make it happen.

I love you most sincerely, Norma Jean. You’ve always been my heroine!

In true Rainbow Traveling Show style, there was much fireside sitting, heavy binge drinking, tearful goodbyes and storytelling belly-laughs at Papa Dollar’s Memorial and Wake in sunny Florida on Wednesday, February 25, 2009. With just about every one of the ‘usual suspects’ up to no good from start to finish.

Not the least of which was when the heir-apparent put my daughter Tash in charge of the blank-book in which we were all supposed to write something pithy about our old friend’s multi-storied life and times. She asked him what day it was so she could use her beautiful calligraphic skills to etch the title page, and he told her it was February 29, 2009. She (not paying attention to dates much) believed him. And now the precious family keepsake is forever dated Leap-Day in an Odd Year, something that’s never once actually occurred in the entire history of date-keeping!

But the best – better even than the formal Medicine Show eulogies – was the balloon launch, something Ras Papa was internationally infamous for. For this one it had been decided to launch Papa’s ratty old hat with the balloons. Which the 120 or so people present had to shuttle from his front porch helium tank to the mower polo field so they could be tied together into a freeform… thing. The animal balloons had sat in the sun too long, mostly exploded before they could be filled, but we did get a few. People drew or wrote things on the regular balloons with Sharpees before filling them, each with a personal note or charicature that related to Papa’s life.

As the old-timers and Jason built the construction, Odin the aero-engineer kept trying to tell them that they had to move to the other side of the field in order to launch, or they’d end up in the power lines. But NOOOOOO… mass of shape-shifting balloon sculpture and a ratty old hat finally was let loose, only to become hopelessly entangled in the power lines in record time. I was almost rolling on the grass with laughter, this was something Papa would have been absolutely livid about.

Not to be undone by grief-induced dumb-ness, the perps almost immediately decided to shoot it down so they could start over with fresh balloons from a more reliable vantage point. As we backed up in awe, they began setting off major fireworks right smack dab underneath the trapped balloons, missing them badly while causing the crowd to flee in panic (if they weren’t laughing too hard to move). Once it became apparent that the big boomers weren’t doing the trick, someone brought out the Roman candles. The sheer audacity of the cross-fire was amazing, considering nobody got hit!

More of us fell laughing to the ground, it was just too too funny. Eventually they managed to pop or deflate all but one of the balloons, but the mess was still firmly attached to the power line with a sad and ragged hat dangling forlornly underneath. It’ll be there for at least 20 years, I figure. Or until the next time the power company turns up. The face drawn on that last balloon standing was a tragic clown. Perfectly cosmically correct.

Back to the fire and more revelry, and everything went great until someone (who shall remain judiciously unnamed) set off a box of leftover fireworks on the bar of Papa’s Cantina. I figured it would burn down (and some of us were still sober enough to do a bucket brigade from the hot tub out front), but somehow it survived. The visual of major fireworks secondary boomers coming out from all directions as people were running and ducking is one that’ll stay with me forever. Not cosmically correct, but definitely cosmically incorrect enough to go down in history!

We’ll miss you being in the world every day for the rest of our lives, old friend. But you’ll never be far from our fond (and/or slightly singed) memories. Wooly Bully, Amen.

Three of my kids who will not be here for Thanksgiving have called in the past week to ask me what to do with the turkey carcass once everybody’s done eating the Big Dinner. So while there are about a million things you can do with the leftover chunks and slices of turkey meat (turkey sandwiches, turkey & gravy on a shingle, etc.), not that many young people these days know what to do with all those bones and the gelled goo and the fat and skin and stray bits of possible meat that may cling, other than to put the whole mess into a plastic garbage bag and toss it into the dumpster. Or bury it in the back yard. Heck, even the cats won’t clean it off well enough to bleach any bones, and you sure shouldn’t feed it to the dogs!

So here’s the basics to brew yourself up some good turkey broth from this leftover yuck, which in turn can be used to make future gravy, future soups (any kind), or just poured over the dry dog food and mixed to give Fido a feeling that s/he has a feasting holiday too. It’s not hard, you just need a stock pot (or canner) big enough to hold all the ‘stuff’ scraped off the platter and roasting pan.

1. Scrape the carcass, loose bones and leavings off the platter and roasting pan into the pot. Add enough water barely cover.

2. If you’ve leftover crudités (carrot and celery sticks, roasted garlic cloves, etc.) put them in the water too. If you’re planning future soup broth, chunk up an onion and put it in with the rest, along with ~2 teaspoons of salt. Also add 2 bay leaves, some rubbed (or fresh sage), rosemary if you like it, and 1/4 teaspoon of white pepper.

3. Let ‘er boil, turning the bones occasionally, for at least an hour. Add water if necessary.

4. Lift out the bones and bits, package for disposal. Strain the broth into jars and refrigerate. Use within a month or so, for whatever dishes need gravy or broth. This can include collards/kale, hopping john and other dishes you’re likely to cook for the rest of the holidays, make a white gravy with some broth for breakfast biscuits. If you’re just planning to use the broth to flavor up dry dog and cat food, leave out the salt, pepper, herbs and onion, but do include the carrots and celery.

See how easy that is? Sure, it’s a project, but worth it not to waste anything from your big feast. And don’t forget as we move into flu season that Mom’s Turkey Soup is every bit as soothing and phlem-clearing (this is true, look it up!) as Mom’s Chicken Soup. In fact, every time we get a whole chicken around here I do the same thing, and use the broth for soup.

As the world financial situation looks to be bad and getting worse, there may not be much consumerist excess for Christmas this year. So the traditional feasting and other such food goodies are going to be even more appreciated than usual. My mother’s generation lived through the Great Depression by not wasting anything, and the better able our generations today are to do much the same things, the better we’ll survive intact. When you can’t just jump into the SUV and drive to the store for a single item, your best bet is to process your own items from what you’ve got, then USE them.

Turkey Broth and Other Leftover Turkey Recipes

At least 56 people died in violent spring storms across the eastern midsection of America on February 5th, the day of “Super Tuesday” voting in primaries across the country. Including Tennessee, which bore the brunt of the storms and lost the most people. Hundreds were injured. Oddly (or not), I had dreamed about tornadoes Monday night. The kind of dream where I’m standing on a rise in “big sky” country watching tornadoes off in the distance. I’m one of those people who seldom remembers dreams, but the ones I do remember tend to be weird premonitions.

My son had it too, informed us all one day when he was four that he’d dreamed something that sure enough happened just like he said it would just hours later. “I’m a psycho,” he told us quite seriously. “We know these things.” Though we of course laughed at his alliteration, this was coming from a guy who’d spent the first weeks of his life in the storm cellar – standard for April in Oklahoma. We weren’t too surprised.

Dream interpretors link tornadoes to big changes coming, though in this case it might just have been forewarning of the next day’s storms. They’re a little early this year, season doesn’t usually start until March, or get really hairy until April. But there are some big changes coming. My new granddaughter should be officially welcomed to the world by this time next month (though her Mom is really hoping for a Leap-Baby on February 29). A Democrat will win the Presidential election in November, finally ending the Cheney reign of terror. The transition from winter to spring is always turbulent, with its storms and wind. Birth can be tumultuous.

Since my state doesn’t get to vote in the primaries until May, of course it was the weather that caught my attention – there’s just something a little synchronicity-like about a tornado hitting Clinton, Arkansas while Democrats there were voting for a Clinton. The best overview of it all is on Jeff Masters’ Blog on Weather Underground. Only one other killer outbreak hit so early in the year – the January 3, 1949 storm in Warren, Arkansas that killed 60.

My husband’s most vivid childhood memory is of when a tornado ripped through his small eastern Oklahoma town when he was eight. His parents managed the downtown hotel, his grandma lived just a block behind. Told me that he went outside to pick up softball-sized hailstones to put in the freezer after the first wave of severe weather passed, thinking it was over. Then, over the hill on the south side of town, it came. Nearly a mile wide, and black as night.

Instead of talking about some “freight train” sound, he said it was deathly quiet until the world fell apart. His Dad hid under the kitchen table with his little brother, his Mom hid in a closet, and he hid under a bed on top of a hotel guest. Who, when the wind died down, was dead (along with 80 other people in the little town). The hotel was destroyed, only one wall still standing. He said the weirdest thing was that a pair of jeans was sticking right through it, the seat inside the lobby and the legs outside the building.

I think it’s terribly sad that so many died on Super Tuesday. I don’t know how many of them knew it was coming, might have been saved. Tennessee is just over the ridge to the west of us, but we somehow dodged the bullet on Tuesday that destroyed so much in our neighbor state. There is no warning system here, no sirens to go off right at dinnertime like in Oklahoma. And here in the mountains the sky’s not big – we’d never see it coming until it was here. Yet in order to hit the house it would have to be aiming for us – drop down straight on top of us – and one thing I learned growing up in Tornado Alley was that if it’s got your name on it, it’ll find you no matter where you hide. If it doesn’t, you can stand on the porch and calmly watch it go on by. That’s pretty fatalistic, I know, but it’s true nonetheless.

Still, people do love to talk about the weather. Every bit as much, they say, as people love to talk politics. So for all the big changes coming, this will be the historic year that the two topics of conversation became one for a day. I’m a psycho. We know these things!

Newsweek Magazine published an article on its web page last week entitled Top Seven Health Myths, citing a study that demonstrated even doctors often fall prey to common medical misconceptions. And they do, too, sometimes for the basest of self-interested reasons.

I recall sitting at the breakfast table with my Mother-in-Law one morning back in the early 1980s, reading the daily newspaper. I came across an article about a formal position statement from the American Medical Association’s annual enclave, which stated as clearly and simply as possible that…

There Is No Evidence That Diet Is Related To Health.

Mom of course denied it vehemently even as I handed her the story on page whatever, in her own favorite newspaper. She’d been a medical transcriptionist all her working life, spent her days around doctors and medical laboratories and test results and autopsy reports and diagnostic conferences, so she knew a lot about doctors and a hefty amount about medicine. She simply couldn’t believe the AMA would make such an outrageous statement denying something that “Every Mother Knows.”

I tried to explain to her the political affiliations of the AMA as a professional lobby with ties to some notorious and insidious industries – pharmaceuticals, Big Tobacco and the increasingly monopolistic food/drink processing conglomerates peddling nutritional garbage to our children. To make the industry lobbyists happy, those doctors would swear on a stack of Bibles that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, that drugs are good for you, and that your diet has nothing to do with your health. You’ve just gotta take all lobbying organizations with a large grain of salt, because their political back-room dealings often completely contradict what their individual members know for a fact to be true.

Let’s face it… the primary health care provider in this world is mostly Mom. Grandmas, Aunts and even wise nurse-ly neighbors can help, but Mom is who mostly gets to kiss the boo-boos, bandage the cuts and scrapes, dish out the medicine and try to balance the family’s diet so they can be as healthy as possible while avoiding gross obesity or other nutritional deficits that lead to disease. Thus any Mom would have laughed (or indignantly sputtered) about the AMA’s ridiculously self-serving lie that year. And by the next year’s enclave the position was completely reversed based on rank-and-file objections to the lie.

The study Newsweek focuses upon was published in the British Medical Journal in December. It identifies the top medical myths and reports that a surprising (to them) number of practicing physicians believe in those myths…

Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight. This one has very little scientific support. It can cause temporary eyestrain, but that disappears quickly in the presence of bright light.

Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death. Nope. After death the skin begins to contract, which gives an illusion that hair and nails are growing. They are not.

We only use 10% of our brains. This one really is the product of snake-oil salesmen peddling magical elixirs of life from the back of wagons in the early 20th century. That supposed 90% of useless brain has never been identified by neuroscientists, who find our brains tend to be active no matter where they look.

Using cell phones in hospitals is dangerous. Despite the fact that hospitals have almost universally bought into this myth, studies have shown that normal cell phone use has little to no interference effect with medical devices. In 2007 a study using 300 tests in 75 different treatment rooms found exactly zero interference from cell phones.

You should drink at least 8 glasses of water per day. Actually, we get an ample supply of fluid in a typical daily diet including juice, milk and even coffee or soda. Drinking too much water can cause severe electrolyte imbalance and has been known to cause death. If you’re thirsty, drink. If you’re not, don’t worry about it.

Shaved hair grows back faster and coarser. Oddly enough, I found this one surprising. But research does show that the texture, color and growth habits of hair – even on ladies’ legs! – doesn’t change when it’s cut, shaved, waxed or chemically removed.

So there you have it. Old Wives’ Tales we can go ahead and leave behind us. Happy mothering!

Taking a bit of a break from All Baby, All The Time, thought I’d do a little strolling through human history to see what there is to see about the institution of marriage. I’ve been wondering why some people want to cling to exclusive cultural frames at a time when about half of traditional marriages end in divorce and the benefits of marriage are being denied to whole segments of the population altogether. Maybe understanding something of the history and traditions associated with the institution could help our society to figure out what marriage is in the modern world and who may claim the right to *be* married.

I was inspired to go looking by an op-ed by Stephanie Coontz in the New York Times entitled Taking Marriage Private [Nov. 26]. She begins the article with a question, and a historical observation:

WHY do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

Now, marriage seems an odd institution if you look at it dispassionately. Almost as if it became an issue only when humans invented a patriarchal type of society where men claimed the power to make all relevant decisions about everything, probably testosterone talking (not to mention sheer size). I mean, everybody always knows who the mother of a particular baby is – who would dream of questioning who gets her stuff when she dies?

Deal is, confidence of paternity isn’t such a ‘Duh’. Unless that baby looks so much like Elmo that only Elmo could be his father, there’s no real way to know – before the advent of modern blood and DNA testing, that is. So various cultures all over the world developed all sorts of odd rules, regulations and customs related to marriage and responsibilities in private households and private families. Some were quite weird by modern estimation.

When Christianity took over the church (which was the state) decided it had the power to decide who was married and who was not. Suddenly the parents didn’t matter anymore – their approval was not required. Oddly enough, for much of the 1600 years of church rule, the priest didn’t count either! Any male-female couple could claim to be married so long as they both agreed that they’d exchanged vows of some sort.

In 1215, nearly a thousand years after taking over, the church defined a “licit” marriage as one where the exchanging of vows happened in the church in front of witnesses. This made their children “legitimate,” as if any child could be considered an “illegitimate” person, which is total hooey. Still, people who didn’t get married in a church had the same rights – their children were legitimate, the wife could inherit, and prohibitions against divorce applied to them too.

States didn’t get involved until the 1600s, mostly by requiring that marriages be registered by the government. It started out as a way to prevent couples whose parents disapproved of the match from getting married, but there was no way for states to stop couples from eloping regardless of what the parents thought. States also had to recognize cohabitation as “common law” marriage for the legal rights inherent.

In the US the government got particularly ambitious to regulate citizen’s rights to marry whom they chose during the last part of the 19th century and this unbridled power-grab continued through the 20th century (and now the 21st century). in the 1920s there were 38 states that prohibited interracial or intercultural marriages. 18 states prohibited remarriage after divorce. Most of these laws were stricken in the latter part of the 20th century, even as the government began relying more and more on the legal marriage license to mete out resources to couples and decide who is a dependent of whom and who could access official records deemed “private” (like medical records).

In some cultures people were not allowed to be married (by whatever definition the culture provided on the rights and responsibilities end) until they’d proven themselves fertile. In other words, the woman had to be pregnant. Pregnancy has traditionally been a good excuse for marriage, and it’s the one my husband and I used back in 1969 when we eloped. Our parents were dead set against the match, so we just showed my belly to a judge and he waived requirements for parental consent.

That was the last of the “good old days” way of doing things, apparently. In this first decade of the 21st century a full 40% of children are born to unmarried people. Half of marriages end in divorce, spreading dependency, responsibilities and rights over several households. Nearly half of fathers never provide any support for any of their children through women they don’t live with. And it’s not strange at all anymore for couples to divorce because one or the other of them decides s/he is gay. Which means that lots of children have two fathers or two mothers in at least one of their homes.

In fact, things on the marriage front are so weird lately that I think the government would do best to just get out of the business of deciding who “deserves” basic human rights or contractual rights. Why should they care who partners up to buy a house or start a business (or family)? Shouldn’t the testimony of the people involved, their families, friends and neighbors carry more weight with family and probate courts than a piece of paper? Shouldn’t people who can establish by basic means (mailing address, joint bank account, home ownership, etc.) their working partnership be eligible for rights of survivorship and dependency? Does it matter what sex they are, or even whether they have sex? Why?

Marriage as a rite and a party and a way of life isn’t going to go away any time soon. But no one else – and no institution of government or religion – can make a marriage. That’s up to the people who make the commitment to each other and any children they have (together or between them). Your religion may not approve of two men falling in love, or two women falling in love. So what? Why should that dictate what rights those lovers are entitled to as citizens of their town, state and nation, any more than it should matter that one of them is black and one is white?

I personally think it’s well past time for the religious to pay more attention to their own marriages. They might not be so prone to divorce if they did that. They wouldn’t have time to worry about their neighbors’ love lives if they paid more attention to their own. If and when religious people become perfect exemplars of marital bliss, they might have something pertinent to say about what makes people happy together for a lifetime. Until that happens, they should just butt out of everybody else’s business!

[/rant]

Links:

Taking Marriage Private

Wedding Traditions and Customs around the World

International Wedding Customs… Different Strokes for Different Folks

Discovering Wedding Customs and Traditions of the Past