This morning I enjoyed movement from thought to thought and subsequently through corresponding links on the Internet. Interestingly, stream of consciousness has become multi dimensional. From a “Busy Cooks” newsletter I receive I noticed a side note about a recipe being from an obscure 1950’s era cookbook written by a Minnesota radio personality, Joyce Lamont. Google informed me she was sort of the radio equivalent of Heloise/Abby/Martha. I’m fond of reading about daily life and values of that era. I’ve read David Halberstam’s book The 1950’s and yes, I understand that underlying the seeming simplicity there was at times dark complexity but I was raised by folks with down to earth sensibilities and who enjoyed the simple pleasures that were commonly found in small town America in the 1950’s. Have you ever attended a Moose Lodge Family Christmas Party? Santa arrived bearing gifts to the joy of every child there. Marshmallow-filled fruit salads, ham and potato casseroles, platters of turkey, bowls of shimmering cranberry sauce, spice cakes, chocolate cakes, pies piled high with merangue and pretty bowls of punch weighed down cloth covered tables. Coffee makers sat on the bar between the kitchen and the hall with those heavy, off white ceramic cups. And there is a vague memory of ashtrays and cigarettes fingered smoothly by cool fathers wearing pastel knit shirts with triangular designs and sometimes leather panels.
As I read about Joyce Lamont, a line about the subjects she covered read “how to open the stubborn jar”. For some reason my mind for a moment thought of a “psychological mechanism” an interesting way of approaching one’s emotional limitations. We all are stubborn about something. Some of what we are ungiving about may not be in our best interest, in fact may actually hold us back. What if we kept a “stubborn jar” in our imagination or in reality? Periodically we could unscrew the lid and give some thought to beliefs about which we may be unhealthfully ungiving and unwilling to examine. Stubborn, to me, indicates tightly holding unexamined beliefs or habits. Well, as I read further Joyce, it seems wasn’t quite so esoteric in her advice but the flight of my mind certainly shows where a multidimensional stream of consciousness may lead.
