A Virtual Chat With Friends

Facing a blank page awaiting your thoughts - it's amazing how stressful that can be for some folks. I've pondered what makes me return again and again to that blank page with determination to create meaningful prose. For me, it’s the pleasure of sharing. There are many things I care about and want to celebrate. My mother had many friends with whom she often got together and she loved to talk on the telephone. She shared. I’m in a different setting and a different time. My way of sharing is maybe less immediate and less intimate, but I’m doing it in a way that will last over time and, hopefully, touch lives beyond my immediate circle.

For ten years I've taught writing. It started out at my Dad's senior center as a Write Your Life Class to encourage folks to get something down for posterity about their unique experiences wending their ways through time. (That there's no such thing as time is a subject for a more esoteric blog.) Those who joined the class were not published writers but because my philosophy is: Writers should be read! They began to pick up on my enthusiasm and encouragement about their pieces finding a home in a publication somewhere. Since that time, I've had one win a national memoir contest sponsored by the Greyhound Bus Company, two in the class were picked to appear in the New York Times best-selling book by Willard Scott titled, The Older The Fiddle, The Better The Tune, one sold a column to a regional magazine, one had her humor piece, the first piece she'd ever sent out, purchased and published by the Christian Science Monitor, all in the class currently (now about fifteen) have now been published somewhere, some many times. I'm bragging for them, I'm excited for them. What a high to see your name in print.

I salute anyone who has the courage to face that blank page. It’s been said that the largest reason writers are not published is that they do not send out what they have written – I believe that. I had a writing instructor once admonish, "You know how to write. Don't spend time in grammar classes or obsess so much you never send something out. You can have people and even your computer help you clean up your piece for spelling or grammar."

If you have faced that blank page but don't know how to put a piece in the right format to send to a magazine, pick up a copy of The Writer's Market (it comes out yearly so there are a lot a second hand stores.) It shows the desired format, lists magazines and what they want and has simple articles on how to send pieces out. There are markets for everyone. If you haven’t published before look around at regional publications, even newspapers, as a way to start.

You’ll write if you are destined to, if that becomes your way of sharing. My mother, though, didn’t fret over not putting her words more formally on a page. She imparted much insight and knowledge and touched many lives in her way. I hope the insights I offer here make you think or give you a laugh or just comfort you in some way as evidence others have lived your experiences. I’m approaching this blog as a virtual chat with friends.

Raised Green

There is an area in India where, because of religious beliefs, many folks do not eat onions or garlic. Now, you’ll find me a most tolerant person of even the most odd-seeming religious convictions but – onions and garlic!? Since my husband and I are of the ‘live to eat’ rather than the ‘eat to live' crowd, I tried to imagine cuisine without onions and garlic.

Unbelievably, I survived the first twenty years of my life without garlic (I do believe I’ve made up for it since). With all the amazing fresh produce that emerged from my Dad’s huge and thriving yearly gardens and with the universal love of anything green and fresh, I don’t now how garlic slipped by them. I think they pretty much stuck to the vegetable array that had filled their plates in childhood. Thinking about that endless stream of green things to our table, though, they really did stick to the basics, onions, green and yellow, literally tons of potatoes, ears of corn, cauliflower, radishes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage (for vats of homemade sauerkraut) tomatoes, big, yellow Hubbard squashes (to be baked with butter and sugar), cucumbers and a few pumpkins for Halloween carving. There was that odd and wonderful asparagus patch my Dad tended lovingly and bunches of rhubarb on the side of the garage. Oh, and his huge and enviable raspberry patch with plants in it that were, he’d proudly explain, ‘75 years old’. How spoiled was I by all those readily munchable raspberries. And by the beautiful quart jars filled of peaches, apricots, and pears that lined our basement shelves each year. One day each year the whole family, grandparents, aunts and kids would trek to Wawawi, a sunnier place some twenty miles or so near a river to spend the day picking fruit for canning.

And, they’d bring home extra cucumbers from those picking trips because every year they would “put up” 60 quarts of dill pickles. Only after my cousin married a German fellow who introduced the “amazing” idea of hot peppers amidst the pickles was there a change from the established pattern. After that a certain number of quarts would get the peppers, for my Dad who quickly developed a taste for the peppery hotness. Hot peppers had certainly not been a part of those gardens or of the food they ate (wrong soil I now know - hot peppers had grown well in the soil of my husbands folks in Nevada and, thus had been a part of what he had learned to love.)

I guess there wasn’t a lot of vegetable experimentation. No garlic appeared in our dishes. I never met a bell pepper until I was grown. An avocado was a foreign animal to them (an adventuresome Uncle would return once in a while and enjoy avocado with salt, I heard said. I vividly remember my mom commenting, “They taste like soap.” Though a vegetable lover and willing experimenter, it took me way into my twenties to develop a taste for avocado (in guacamole) and into my thirties to enjoy it straight on sandwiches. Yeah, I know it’s really a fruit but it seems awfully vegetably to me.

The tomatoes were eaten fresh, not “put up”. Dad ate the thick sweet slices with salt and pepper. Mom and I loved sugar on ours. In the summer, salads (something unfamiliar in their youths because of no refrigeration for mayonnaise) would appear. Iceberg lettuce (my favorite to this day) and chunks of fresh tomato mixed with mayonnaise. On special occasions, a can of shrimp would be added. The concept of a salad appearing as part of what they ate stuck in my Dad’s memory. He told the tale of remembering his mother chatting with friends on the party line all agog over the new idea of a “vegetable salad”. He called them vegetable salads all his life.

Ah the vegetables of my youth, all freshly picked and full of taste. And back to onions, my Dad loved those little green onions, we now call scallions, on a little plate at dinner along side those slices of white bread. He'd eat each one with a little salt. Funny, as so many other dishes were filled with onions, no one ate them straight except dad. I guess there were some chopped into those green salads sometimes.

Since learning to make Indian food, I’m amazed at how they’ve come to combine vegetables. I make a Dahl (a dish with lentils or dried peas). It’s a heavenly mixture of zucchini, onions, tomatoes and green peppers all swirled together with aromatic spices and at the end combined with yellow peas. My folks would not ever have imagined combining vegetables this way. The only combining they did was to dump carrots, potatoes and onions together into a beef stew. The only vegetable combining I truly remember was when the “new potatoes” were on, new potatoes and fresh peas swimming in a cream sauce with a pinch or two of sugar. It was yummy but certainly not the serious vegetable combining of the Indian dahls. And, even though where I was raised is now known as the “Pea and Lentil Capital of the World” no dried pea I ever knew existed outside split pea soup and I never munched on one lentil during my entire childhood.

Ah, see where onions and garlic can lead one? I certainly thank my folks for my love of vegetables. I wish I could share with them some things I’ve learned and amaze them with my vegetable repertoire. I think they’d have loved, or at least tried, anything done with vegetables as long as avocados weren’t in the mix. And, if dad had his garden today, I’ll bet I could convince him to plant some garlic.

My Black And White World

The large bicycle with newly painted white fenders required real pedal pushing. It was too big for my short legs but in working class 1959 hand-me-down bikes were it. I flew past the two chestnut trees and screeched to a halt up a dirt road a block or so past my house. Laying the bike on it’s side in the grass at the roadside, I ran across patches of little white wild flowers like tiny daisies with yellow centers, and over a little stream. I clambered up onto some railroad tracks at the entrance to an old, narrow, black metal railroad bridge.

The smell of gummy black creosote and caked oil on the metal in the warm sun was comfortingly familiar. I ran the length of the bridge along the wood planks beside the tracks. At the far end I jumped down onto a metal platform and ducked under the bridge. The supports formed an odd maze of chambers. The first was clearly a kitchen with a metal beam “shelf” for imaginary spices. The hall was a narrow passage under the bridge with two identical square chambers on the left--the bedrooms of course. When you scrunched under the metal plate into a bedroom and sat on the cross bar “seat”, you looked directly into a perfect round hole the size of a dinner plate. Those “mirrors” saw me primp for many an imaginary boyfriend. Down the hall past the bedrooms was the patio, a black metal plate about a yard square that overlooked the creek.

I remember lounging on my patio, sometimes for hours. My only childhood memories of considering the larger questions and possibilities of my life were of sitting on my secret patio, watching the creek trickle through the field of white flowers.

Many years later I took my Dad to that bridge. We squeezed our way through my black; oil caked hideaway and sat for a while on that patio. The creek and flowers were still there but somehow the creosote just smelled dirty. My black and white world was gone.