As a Baker . . . Nonfiction and Personal

Bad Kocka!

I know I always say I won't have cooking or crafting on my blog. This blog is about writing. But writing is story-telling. This is my story and I'm sticking to it.

With the probability of next year inaugurating reduced circumstances in our house, we decided to make Christmas gifts for the family. My husband has prepared various and sundry smoked and spiced pecans. Give that man a grill and he can do anything. (Including a beef loin roast that he's preparing for our close-family Christmas dinner.)

Because we're having our Christmas dinner Monday evening; my husband is leaving for Christmas in Oklahoma early Tuesday morning; and I'm a world-class procrastinator, I did the baking Sunday. He's had the pecans done for days.

First I put away all the items cluttering the kitchen counters. This goes down to the basement. That goes out into our so-called pantry in the garage. To the linen closet at the end of the hall. Into the office. And voila, I've got a place to work.

The butter and sugar are in the mixer, creaming nicely.

CRASH! Something bad in the entryway. KOCKA! Bad cat! He'd knocked a plant off its perch. There the cat-demon sat obviously amazed and pleased at the freshly watered soil spread across the floor.

I'm ranting and raving. My husband is ranting and raving. "That's why I don't want a cat," he says waving his arms at the cat trying to shoo him out of the dirt. "Cats belong in the barn." (We don't have a barn.)

I was planning to repot the plant anyway. Just not on baking day.

I brought the broom and dust pan in from the garage and went to get a proper pot from the back porch -- preferably one that wouldn't tip easily.

Kocka closely watched the whole plant-repotting and soil-sweeping process, staying just beyond my reach. When I finished, he fled down the hall and hid in the bathroom. Perhaps I look dangerous when I'm not actively cleaning up after him.

Back to baking. Add eggs and vanilla to the sugar and butter. I couldn't open the vanilla without using my handy-dandy bottle opener. I'd been fighting that bottle's lid for months and I was tired of it. I used to use the vanilla lid to measure out a teaspoonful. Approximately. And I knew the vanilla dried and effectively glued the lid in place so I'd started using a measuring spoon and wiping the mouth of the vanilla bottle. It still stuck.

So I decided to transfer the vanilla into a bottle with a lid I might more easily twist off. Found a bottle . . . a mead bottle. A not quite empty mead bottle. But it was after 8 in the morning here and 5 in the afternoon somewhere, so I poured it into a glass and drank it.

              

Perhaps, you noticed my fancy funnel. Couldn't find my regular one so my husband re-purposed a plastic wine glass by cutting off its stem. It worked very well, so it is freshly washed and living in the drawer where the AWOL funnel should be.

Four Cookies shy of a full sheet.

And where, you might ask are those four cookies? That was the second sheet of cookies to come out of the oven. I only recently learned the benefits of parchment paper when baking. From my beautiful daughter-in-law. (Who is also a good blogger. Click here.)

However, parchment paper has side effects. One of which is that it slides easily. And the cookies slide easily. Those four cookies slid off the cookie sheet. Onto the floor. Into the bottom of the oven. Through that crack at the bottom of the open oven door into the drawer at the bottom of the stove.

Kocka thought the cookie-mishap clean-up was pretty interesting, too. But he doesn't eat cookie crumbs. Where's a Dachshund when you need one?

By 10:30 a.m. I had achieved a repotted plant, a clean entryway floor, a clean kitchen floor, clean stove drawer, and some oatmeal cookies. Rice Krispie Treats, Spritz cookies, peppermint cookies, two apple pies, and some kolaches were yet to be baked. I know. You don't bake Rice Krispie Treats. Thank goodness for tiny mercies.

And I'd learned so much. Cats belong in barns and they don't eat cookie crumbs. Be extra careful with parchment paper. And as a baker, I'm a pretty good writer.

Using Real World Senses

Green Mountain December 18, 2015

A writer needs to involve all the senses to set a scene or build a character. A good way to prepare to do this is to just pay attention to your own senses in the real world.

I walk in my neighborhood and gather ample sensory fodder to use.

First the sense of sight. In the distance, Green Mountain is obviously white, but the blue sky over Green Mountain tells me this snow is past. And the view is clear -- no blowing snow to dim the view, no shadows identifying the nooks and crannies of the mountain so the sun must still be in the east or overhead.

And touch. If you could've seen me, you'd know that I was wearing a t-shirt. No coat. No gloves. No hat. When I touched the snow, it was cold enough to make my hands ache. And wet enough to hold the snow ball shape. Yet all the while, the Colorado sun is warm against my skin, regardless of the ambient temperature. Warm enough to be perfectly comfortable. And there is no wind, not even a light breeze, and the lack of moving air touching my face is as palpable as a 20 mph gust, if I'm paying attention.

I'm surrounded by sound. Children squeal with delight and call back and forth to each other as they sled down a nearby hill. A tree full of magpies sound off. Their raucous cries punctuated with the piping of chickadees and counted by the coo of a dove. Somewhere a dog barks. And I can barely hear the traffic noises from the distant interstate highway. Barely, but it's there. The melting snow sounds of running water, while it crunches under foot in areas where it refroze in the night.

But scent, that's the one that I think is most important and least described in most written material. It may not be obvious enough to grab our attention, but it's there. Sometimes soft, calming, like a newly bathed and powdered baby. Sometimes energizing like the air in my neighborhood. Clear and cold and smelling of winter.

Then as I walk, I smell someone's dryer exhaust redolent with the scent of their fabric softener sheet.
And it occurs to me that the smell of clean is different from one person to the next. That can tell a lot about a character. To one character, that dryer sheet smells clean. To another the smell of sun-dried laundry means clean.

And scent from a house where they've had bacon for breakfast stimulates my sense of taste and makes me hungry and ready to go home.

My husband adds a sixth sense, proprioception. That's the sense of the relative position of parts of the body and the effort being employed in movement. This sense is probably more developed in my dancer and athlete brothers and sisters than it is in me. But I'm learning.

Take away one of these senses from our character or our scene and I've got a disabled character or a diminished scene. Or a really good plot device.

Best of Enemies -- a review

image from blu-ray.com

Best of Enemies, a 2015 documentary available streaming from Netflix, chronicles the 1968 televised debates between conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal Gore Vidal.

In 1968, three television networks vied for American audiences. CBS was first among equals, closely followed by NBC. ABC was a distant third. Those were your choices. No FOX. No CNN. No cable at all. Not even PBS.

CBS and NBC planned to cover the 1968 political conventions gavel to gavel. ABC couldn't afford to. They had to come up with something to draw ratings away from their two rivals. And as someone in Best of Enemies says "nothing draws an audience like the sugar of a fight."

Do I hear the names Jerry Springer and Donald Trump?

In 1968, ABC gave birth to modern political punditry and point/counter point political commentary with these end of the convention day debates between America's most television savvy intellectuals, both from Eastener aristocracy stock. Pompous, but well-spoken and mostly restrained, each was absolutely confident he was right and the rest of the world could acknowledge that or be damned.

1968's national political conventions found the United States mired in the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights Movement continued unabated. Women's Liberation and the youth movement further fractured the nation.

Everything happened on TV.

January 30, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive.

March 31, sitting president Lyndon Johnson announced "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term" as President of the United States.

April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

May 4, four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.

June 6, Robert F. Kennedy, a leading contender for the Democrat nomination for President, was murdered in Los Angeles, California.

And every evening on the national news no matter which network we watched the TV news anchors gave the numbers. How many Americans were killed in Vietnam. And how many North Vietnamese.

August 5, the Republican Party opened their four-day convention in Miami, Florida, to nominate their candidate for President of the United States. The leading contenders were former Vice President Richard Nixon and then Governor of California Ronald Reagan.

August 26, a demoralized Democrat Party opened their four-day convention in Chicago, Illinois, a city run by iron-fisted Mayor Richard J. Daly.

Best of Enemies mixes extensive footage of the actual debates between Buckley and Vidal with comments and clips from the conventions and the real world then swirling around the conventions. There are illuminating comments from people close to the political actors of the time and to Buckley and Vidal.

In Best of Enemies, we get to hear again the dulcet tones of Senator Everett Dirksen speaking at the Republican Convention. We see snippets of the luminaries of the times -- Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Dick Cavett, the Kennedys, Norman Mailer. There's a clip from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, the iconoclastic TV show that gave a comedic raspberry to the foibles of American society and introduced the American public to fringe, go-go boots, and psychedelic humor.

Best of Enemies reminds us that passionate political views can be expressed at reduced decibels, intelligently.

Janis: Little Girl Blue

Janis: Little Girl Blue, Official Trailer

Instead of a still pic of Janis, I'm putting up the Official Trailer. Give it a watch. I think you'll enjoy it.  For Janis, you need sound and color and motion. The Amy Berg documentary has it all and more.

I heard about Janis: Little Girl Blue on NPR December 1. I wanted to see it, but where was it showing? It supposedly aired on PBS's American Masters on November 25 which should mean that I could stream it on my TV at home. Easy-peasy, no driving. Wear what I'm wearing. Have a nice whatever I want to eat and drink. Sounded lovely. But it was not meant to be. Janis: Little Girl Blue doesn't show up on PBS's American Experience website.

Surely it'd be showing somewhere in Denver. Yup. December 4, 7:30, The Sie FilmCenter. Of which I'd never heard. Located on East Colfax which was somewhere downtown.

The Sie FilmCenter is separated from The Tattered Cover by a sort of alleyway re-purposed for outdoor dining. I've been to the bookstore several times, but had never noticed the theater. You get me near a bookstore or library and I can't see anything else.

Colfax is Denver's primary east/west surface street. I knew how to get there. Except, it was December 4, the first of two holiday Parade of Lights. The parade would cross Colfax west of the theater -- that was between me and my destination. An alternative route would be necessary.

No problem. I'd just go the way I go to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, my favorite place in Colorado. Cut north to Colfax and voila, I'm there.

Thank goodness, my daughter was with me, navigating. Who'd a thought the traffic would be so bad?! Guess it was Friday night in the big town with a parade that traditionally brought people into downtown by the hundreds, maybe thousands, from what I was seeing. And, like me, those folks weren't used to driving downtown in the dark with roads closed for a parade.

We got to the theater in plenty of time, took the elevated down from the parking garage to a subterranean theater lobby complete with bar and snack bar. And me, I thought I was so grown up at my regular movie theater where I can get a nice cappuccino and popcorn. Here I could get a nice margarita and popcorn.

We got to the window and Janis was sold out. BUT, we could take a number and see if anyone who'd bought a ticket online then cancelled or whatever, didn't show up, in which case we could buy those tickets, but we'd probably have to sit in the front row and may not be able to sit together. They'd let us know in about ten minutes.

I'd just driven through that traffic. The parade hadn't started yet and getting home would still be through that mess. The next showings of Janis: Little Girl Blue were sold out. My bad attitude was ignited and I wasn't about to come back downtown again anytime soon.

It worked out that we got two seats together and the front row seats have high backs so it was surprisingly comfortable to lean back and watch the show. And with the audience all behind me, it was as if they didn't exist. It was just Grace and I, our entire field of vision filled with the sights and sounds of my youth.

The documentary is very well-done. Lots of footage of Janis performing. It's matter-of-fact about the difficulties of being Janis Joplin, but not dreary. She did everything, be happy or be sad, full-tilt, just like she performed. And the film shows that.

Janis also has snippets from her letters to her family and interviews with her brother and sister that were enlightening and comforting. You get the idea that her family loved her and cared about her, kinda like the rest of us.

Janis: Little Girl Blue with its sights and sounds from an intense and turbulent time in our nation and lives brings back Janis's own passionate exhibition of that longing and laughter.

It was more than worth driving home in Downtown Denver traffic. All the lights and noise and people on the street just extended the experience.

P.S. I misread when Janis: Little Girl Blue will air on PBS's American Masters. It's next year some time. So we can all watch it again without the traffic.

P.P.S. Still glad I got to see it on the big screen.

( Explanation )

image from blog.acronis.com

I had a dream. In my dream someone was talking about IED's (Improvised Explosive Devices) but when they handed me one, it was an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) which exploded some kind of repulsive goulash all over everything. Without sound or smell. (Sometimes my dreams are like that. Visuals only.) But the feelings were there -- fear, revulsion, nausea, anger.

I live in Colorado and I love it here. Colorado is famous for world class skiing, majestic mountain scenery, and three-hundred-thirty days of sunshine annually.

And for mass shootings. (None involving Muslims.)

In the most recent here in Colorado, a man entered a Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs and opened fire. During a snow storm. While the shooting was ongoing, the images on our television screens showed flashing lights, ambulances lined up waiting, military style vehicles. And people with ATF, CBI, CSPD, CSFD, etc. on their jackets moving through the snowfall. It was like a snow globe gone mad.

Somehow the letters made it all worse. It's like the world needs parenthetical explanation. And there is none.

Today the sun is shining. The air is clear and cold. I am going for a walk with friends who do not espouse hate, celebrate war, or speak in acronyms that need explanations.

Someone from Home -- Flash Fiction

image from saintpaulalmanac.com

"Know what you want?" she asked him.

He hadn't slept well since he got there. Hotel beds never felt right. Hotel cuisine was uninspiring and too expensive. "Home cookin'," he said.

"Depends on where home is," she said. "Ray there, bless his heart, is from Chicago so I guess it's Chicago cookin'."

He rubbed the stubble on his chin and turned the menu over to look at the breakfast offerings.

"Breakfast 'til ten," she said. "You've got three hours. Take your time."

"Not breakfast without grits and biscuits and gravy." He laid the menu down.

"Honey, you are so right." She laughed. "Where're y'all from?"

He laid the menu down and looked at her for the first time. "Tyler, Texas, ma'am. Rose capital of the world. Where're you from? Not Saint Paul with an accent like that."

"Accent? Why ever would you say that?" She looked down the counter to check her other customers. "Back in a jiffy." She grabbed a coffee pot and was gone.

He felt more alone that he'd felt the whole time he was up here. Just Thursday. Meetings all week and it wasn't Friday yet.This world was cold and windy and cloudy. And the snow looked like it would be here until April. He missed his family.

She returned to him taking up their conversation where she'd left off. "Greenville, Mississippi, by way of New Orleans. Ray can fix you potatoes any way you want 'em as long as you want hash browns."

"Okay. Hash browns. Coffee, black. Two eggs, over easy. Bacon. Whole wheat toast. You got Tabasco?"

"Does the Mississippi run east past St. Paul and New Orleans? Of course we got Tabasco." She relayed his order to Ray and poured him coffee.

"Does it run east past St. Paul and New Orleans?"

"It does," she said over her shoulder as she went to the cash register to take care of a customer.

She was taller and thinner than his wife. Probably about the same age, but Brenda was prettier. Both their girls looked just like her. He should be home in time to see Meagan's school Christmas play.

The waitress plunked his breakfast down in front of him and retrieved a bottle of Tabasco from her apron pocket. "Eat hearty, Tex."

"Ted, actually," he corrected her.

"Well, Ted Actually." She winked at him. "Enjoy your breakfast." And she was off again.

He hadn't thought about how he looked when he left the hotel. Sweats, a fleece lined hoodie, gloves, a knit cap. He'd gone for a run before breakfast. That's how he found Ray's Diner. He'd not showered or shaved. He felt good working up a sweat in this cold country.

When she smiled, she was pretty. Watching her take somebody else's order, he felt grimy.

She was back refilling his coffee cup.

"desJardin," he said. "Ted desJardin. How'd you end up in Minnesota?" he asked before she could go away again.

Still holding the pot, she put her other fist on her hip. "I'm a refugee," she said.

What could he say to that? She must have seen his confusion.

"Katrina, honey. The storm?"

"Can I have some ketchup?" he asked.

"Me and Gene just kept driving north. Neither of us wanted to get away from the river. We both grew up on it. We had a baby then and we've had two more since then. Kinda made a home for ourselves here. I'm even getting where I like snow."

The food was good. He ate slowly and watched the waitress work. He asked her questions as she passed back and forth. What kind of work did her husband do? Did she cook at home? What was there to do for fun in Minneapolis? But he didn't ask her what time she got off work.

She put his check in front of him and leaned her elbows on the counter.

"Listen hon. I get off at two. How'd you like to go for a late lunch?"

He didn't know how to answer that. He had afternoon meetings scheduled. He was leaving in the morning.

"I'm married," he said quietly.

She smiled and laid her hand over his.

Had he said it so quietly that she hadn't heard? Did he hope she hadn't heard?

"Why, honey, I am, too. But Mama Susie's Creole Cafe is just about five blocks from here and it's the only place I know of that you can get decent red beans and rice north of  Monroe." She patted his hand.

Maybe he could miss the last meeting of the day.

"Meet you there at three-thirty. Gene'll pick me up about five. That'll give us an hour and a half to have a good meal and talk about home."

Yes. It was all he could do to keep from pumping his fist in the air.

"Are you any kin to the desJardins over at Lake Chicot?" she asked.

He laughed out loud. He didn't think so. He didn't know where Lake Chicot was. And it didn't matter. He was going to have a late lunch with someone from home, no strings attached.