Julie Farrar

Dahling, You Don't Look a Blog Post Over 50

2012-02-15T07:34:00.000-06:00

Cats in the window and copper pots. This must be France

Wow, can you believe it? I just turned 100 this week. One hundred blog posts, that is. I didn’t notice it until after I posted my Valentine’s Day piece. Note to self – start looking at all the statistics generated by the statistics-gathering plug-ins I plugged into this webpage. Considering that I started this project in 2009, I might reach my second hundred before retirement age.

When I set up home on the internet as a way to share with my family the stories and pictures of a summer in France, I had no idea that I would still be doing it and that people I’ve never met would be reading it and joining in conversation with me.

In developing my own blog, I’ve found many others writing with voices stronger than my own and with so much to teach me – about writing and about life. They may not be headlines on today’s celebrity news, but they tell stories of remarkable encounters, of the poignancy of everyday life, and of the uproariously funny oddities of the world that confound us all. In the span of 100 posts I’ve gotten inspired to up my writing game. I’ve gotten more disciplined with putting words down on paper (digitally speaking). I’ve seen that it is possible to be that strange creature called “writer.”

I’d like to thank everyone who has read during these growing years. And if you have taken time to share your thoughts, I doubly thank you. I’m trying to get to the websites of each commenter, but it’s a slow business. Knowing you’re out there makes me eager to sit down and start each new online conversation. Especially when I return yet again this summer to the place that started it all.

To mark this day, I’m turning on the Wayback Machine and sharing a few of my posts from the summer in France that started this whole writing experiment. Enjoy.

J’ecris (I Write) -- “It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.” --Alain de Botton The Art of Travel
This quotation started off my blog. It expresses why I travel. The post says why I write.

Look Up -- Up is where the French obsession with geraniums takes root. Up is where the lights glow. Up is where the architectural intricacies hide. Up is where unrecognized music drifts out of unknown windows.
You could get vertigo trying to keep alert to all the life that happens above street level in cities like Dijon, FR.

Suits Me To A Thé -- French cafés invite engagement with the world. There is nothing on the internet more entertaining than a French street on market day. My senses overflow.
American coffee shops may offer free wi-fi, but their atmosphere pales in comparison to a ringside table at a French salon de thé on market day.

While I hope that you’ll click on the post links, above, and make comments on them, I also hope you’ll come back here for some more conversation. How does travel inspire you? What projects or activities did you start on a whim then find you couldn’t stop doing? Where are you traveling this summer? What do you want me to write about next? Share your responses to these questions or add any other thoughts you have in the comments box.

I think it is not possible to have too many geraniums on too many bridges over too many rivers

No Reservations? 12 Cheap and Easy Ways To Celebrate Valentine's Day

2012-02-12T15:26:00.000-06:00

This is what young love looks like along the Seine in Paris

“Aaaack! It’s Valentine’s Day. Why didn’t somebody tell me? You know I live under a cone of silence and didn’t hear a thing about this. Is it too late to order those giant chocolate-covered strawberries from that expensive chocolate store? Where can I get a dinner reservation now? I can’t spend my lunch hour standing in line for a dozen long-stemmed roses because I have an appointment to get my car detailed. Valentine’s Day again? Give me a break.”

Is any of this you?

Have no fear. You might think that there’s no time to plan something for that special someone. Or your lottery ticket hasn’t paid out yet. Or you might be like me – married for over 25 years and worn out over the V-Day hype and hoopla. If you like the idea of dedicating a single day to your sweetheart but not all the work or money it can involve, here’s a sweet bouquet of a dozen ways to celebrate the one you love. They all cost less than those long-stemmed roses or fancy meal. And since we are trés environmentally conscious here, feel free to recycle them on birthdays and anniversaries.

12. Make a meal out of food that is red or heart-shaped. Try your hand at red velvet cake – or buy one. Make a pot of chili and serve it with a spinach salad topped with red pepper slices, red onions, strawberries, and raspberry vinaigrette. Add some feta cheese for contrast.

11. Make progress – together – on your household chore list. Nothing generates good feelings in a relationship like working together to achieve a goal. When finished, toast your achievement with a bit of champagne or red wine. An alternative might be to take a project on your partner’s to-do list (tax forms, cleaning file cabinets, etc.) and complete the task yourself. Consider it a new kind of foreplay.

10. Buy red balloons and before you blow them up, stick love notes inside or notes detailing a memory. A dozen sounds about right.

9. Visit the Dollar Store and buy a decorative basket that you fill with anything your sweetie might like – craft supplies, beauty supplies, snack food, automotive doodads, batteries for every electronic device he or she owns.

8. Give a small amount of artisan chocolate. In this case, quality can trump quantity. On the flip side, head to a candy store where you can fill a decorative cellophane bag with every possible gummy variety that is suitable for movie viewing. Then go to a movie together.

7. Make a field trip together to that distant shop that sells great cheese or beef jerky or whatever indulgence suits your fancy. Top it off with a great hamburger at a local grill.

6. Play a board game like Go or Scrabble or put together a puzzle, perhaps in front of a fire with a bottle of wine and ingredients for s’mores.

5. Eat at a great Mexican or pizza place. No reservations required. Let’s face it, white tablecloth restaurants can be highly overrated. Valentine’s Day is not about the meal. It’s about the company and the conversation.

4. Cook together. Make a menu, divide the chores, set the table nicely, clean up together. The easier the meal the better. Or you could even experiment and try your hands at a chocolate soufflé (they’re really not that hard). For V-day it’s really about spending time together, not trying to recreate a Kay Jeweler commercial.

3. Put a picture of the two of you in a very nice frame and display it prominently.

2. Get up and move. Bike, hike, ice skate, play basketball. Or even go bowling. Finish the evening someplace with great hot chocolate or fabulous ice cream.

1. Turn off all electronics from the moment you get home until the next morning. Talk with each other, or sit and read in the same room. The list of things you could do is endless, but whatever you choose, disconnecting from all of your cyber-friends to give undivided attention to the flesh-and-blood loved one in front of you can be the best way of all to say “I love you.”

In other words, don’t sweat the day. It should be enough just to shut out the busy-ness of life long enough to reconnect and show you care.

Do you enjoy making a big deal out of V-day, or do you and your sweetie reduce it to a greeting card at most? What’s your best or worst Valentine’s Day story from your past? What other activities or gifts can you add to the list? Share it in the comments box so we can stash it away for next year.

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In Case You Missed It -- A Weekend Roundup

2012-02-11T07:19:00.000-06:00

On this snowy day I feel like visiting the green on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. How about you?

For your weekend reading and viewing pleasure, here are several bits of wit, wisdom, and whimsy that you might have missed during the week. So put another log on the fire this snowy day and enjoy.

If you are currently single and have had it up to your earlobes with the Hallmark holiday, aka Valentine’s Day, then this poem by Kristen Lamb is meant for you. Read it before the next treacle-y Kay’s Jeweler commercial makes you go postal. Then buy your own heart-shaped box of chocolates and celebrate your strong, good self.

Bob Mayer always has great advice for writers. I never knew about the rule of 7. Read this to find out what else you need to do to keep from being invisible on the internet.

“Love Yourself” is a good theme to consider as we head toward a day that has convinced us that we’re nobody until somebody loves us and gives us a heart-shaped diamond necklace. Brenda Moguez and Kristen Lamb inspire us to accept who we are by teaching us where to look for our strengths and that we are not our thighs, no matter how many shots of Victoria Secret models make us believe that.

And for a bit of attitude read Becky Green Aaronson’s take on what holds us back, how she learned that it’s not excuses that help us climb that mountain. Read Tami Clayton, too. She reminds us that by living in the moment we can work ourselves into a state of gratitude, even when everything seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Finally, you have to watch this video that Julie Kenner found for us. Even if you’re not a writer or artist, you’ve encountered some a$$hat in your life who has blocked your vision or creative energy with his extreme a$$hatness. At least by watching this frightenly hilarious video you can reap some vicarious revenge.

Thanks to all who read my scribbles this week. Pop into the comments box to share with us the best thing that happened to you in the last seven days, or the worst. Or comment on anything these other fine bloggers offered up for thought.

Okay, I admit that I need a haircut. But don't worry. I have an appointment scheduled this week.

The Face of Beauty

2012-02-10T05:30:00.000-06:00

Bertha Myrtle Rule as a young woman

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

I stole that quotation from August McLaughlin and her Beauty of a Woman Blogfest. She celebrates the beauty in all of us with each post, but for the blogfest she asked others to join. While I was too late to enter the blogfest, it did send me back a couple of years to resurrect a piece on aging I wrote and promptly filed away. So today I join others in honoring beauty in all its forms.

I’ll also try to hold Emerson’s words tight as I head back to the gym to lose the weight I’ve gained during this five-year roadblock of pain. When I see myself in the mirrors by the free weights, I will look not at my chicken wings flapping in the breeze, but I’ll use my X-ray vision to see the beautiful triceps and biceps still hiding under there – waiting to come to the surface again.

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“You have a fit face. I wouldn’t do anything to it yet,” a plastic surgeon told my older sister. She and the other nurses at her hospital are always asking the plastic surgeons about different procedures. At an online news site I read this week about a 50-something woman who had an expansive list of surgeries in order to look more like her daughter.

Yesterday I looked in the mirror and for the first time noticed some newly formed canyons settling into my forehead. My options for erasing these are limited because just about everything I could plaster over them to “cure” aging would make my face break out in hives that will radiate all the way down to my stomach. But I look again in the mirror and wonder why would I want to change anything. For every plastic surgery procedure I could have, I would look less and less like all of those people I love and who made me what I am. I will never be tall, thin, and with sharply defined features.

I am my Grandma. We have a photo of her sitting on the porch railing of the house of a family she worked for most of her young life. Her father sent her there in her early teens because they had no money and her mother was mentally ill. This family took her in, sent her through high school, dressed her in the beautiful white summer dress she wore in the photo, treated her like family. And when I look at my 18-year old Grandma sitting on that porch on a summer afternoon, I see myself. And I see my sisters, all of us when we were 18. And I still see Grandma when I sit at the table for a family celebration.

Our faces are too round, and our noses are too snub. We got her thighs instead of my mom’s long, thin legs. But we also got her fair, smooth skin. I know that when I’m 96 my mind will be sharp and my eyes clear. I will be a little too hard on those I care about the most, but I will also have the spirit to thrive up to the end. I’ll probably be even shorter than I am now, shrinking a smidgen each year like she did.

No, I don’t think I’ll fight aging. Other than trying to take care of my health, adding a little hair color, and using an SPF 30 daytime moisturizer and a gentle night cream, I think I’ll just let nature take its course. I like looking in the mirror and seeing all the people I’ve loved.

What is beauty? What does it mean to you? When do you feel beautiful? Share your own stories on the beauty of a woman then head over to August’s website to read the fabulous entries.

And while we're on the subject of beauty, visit this post from April 2010 about an unexpected moment of beauty that interrupted a normally chaotic day.

GPS -- Is It A Map To Nowheresville?

2012-02-06T10:32:00.000-06:00

Few maps could actually lead you safely through the hills and valleys on the Isle of Skye.

You have to be able to read the signs of the terrain

When’s the last time you looked at a map? And, no, I don’t mean the last time you googled the location of that new restaurant everyone was talking about. When was the last time you unfolded a map or opened a road atlas to get from here to there?

I love maps. I love studying road atlases, finding landmarks, estimating distances, and looking for alternative routes. I want to know what rivers are in the area and what’s the history behind the odd names that mark the route. What could a GPS do for me that a good road atlas couldn’t?

Yet I’m considering whether or not I should buy a GPS before I head to France this summer.

This decision leaves me of two minds. First, I remember last year’s rented car that came without a navigation system. My husband and I spent a tremendous amount of time circling small towns looking for exits, any road signs that would take us to the route we wanted. After awhile we realized that France doesn’t regularly make signs that point you to roads (as did our carefully googled directions). French road and highway signs inform you of one or two towns you’d find if you turned off here. Eventually we came to consult our pocket atlas for town names instead of route numbers to understand the entire region as we advanced toward our destination. Maybe we could have used a GPS.

On the other hand, the previous year I had a car with GPS for my trip to the Loire Valley. It became a mighty contest of wills (I wrote about it here) between my French electronic dictator who wanted me only to take major highways and moi who wanted to take the scenic route. We finally made a truce when my directional instincts failed occasionally upon hitting town centers where a half dozen roads radiated out like spokes on a wheel. It would set me on the right path then I’d turn it off and check back with my atlas, familiarizing myself with all the village names along the route to keep myself on track before the next big town.

A recent article by Julie Frankenstein in the New York Times discusses the effect on our brains as we shift now from physical maps and landmarks to a reliance on technology to get where we’re going. As GPS units become standard in cars and on our phones for walking trips, we risk losing the “muscles” of our cognitive mapping abilities because we lack a spatial context for where we are. The human brain is quite good at developing “mental maps” of an area, the research explains. We see landmarks and remember them in spatial relation to other landmarks along the route we travel.

However, if all we see on the GPS screen is the road in front of us from point A to point B, when the technology breaks down, we find ourselves completely lost. Since the GPS, by default, maps the fastest and most efficient route, we don’t know the alternatives.

Only the cognitive map of our guide kept us on the trail

and off the rocky slopes to oblivion

Several years ago on a trip to the Isle of Skye in Scotland, my husband and I hired a guide to take us to a waterfall we had seen on a map. When I asked him why our trail had no arrows and only a few cairns (piles of stones) to tell us we were on the right path, he said, “We don’t want to make it too easy for people who really have no business being out here in this rough country.” So on we hiked, with our guide leading us through Scottish fog so thick I could have walked off the side of a cliff before I knew it. Every step of that trail was tattoo’ed on his brain. A handheld device might have gotten us to the navigational coordinate of that waterfall, but it would not have led us safely through the almost invisible bogs and the steep drop-offs on the rocky way.

What about our personal mental maps, though? I kept my eye on that “professional” GPS arrow down the highway to undergraduate school, graduate school, university teaching, research. Then a “road closed” sign stopped me. Life had thrown up a barrier that my personal GPS had not anticipated. I turned this way and that, looking for a new route. Life kept yelling “recalculating, recalculating.” Then the system crashed and I had no mental map, no idea what my options were, whether to turn left or right. I was stuck. Since then I’ve found a new route to travel and am having fun building a new cognitive map from scratch.

Sometimes it’s helpful to have those turn-by-turn instructions, e.g., if you’re trying to drive in downtown Chicago or you’re trying to survive law school. But still, the GPS can make a mistake and send you left when you should have gone right. If you don’t have a sense of the lay of the land, if you don’t have the big picture of your life and all the options, then you can lose a lot of time before you realize you’re on a limited access highway and the next exit is twenty miles down the road and thirty miles back to where your navigational instincts had told you to turn in the first place.

If you encounter an unexpected “road closed” sign in your life and a crashed GPS, do you have a mental atlas you can open to find yourself a new route – or maybe even a new and exciting destination that you never would have seen if you kept your eye only on the lurching little arrow on a 4-inch screen instead of all the looming landmarks and warning signs around you? Or is your personal GPS sending you, quite quickly and efficiently, straight to Nowheresville?

So, tell me. Should I or shouldn’t I buy a GPS? Tell us about times the GPS saved you or times you wouldn’t have even thought of using it? For your own life destinations are you more a GPS kind of person or a road atlas type? Share with us in the comments box how you navigate through the world and your life.

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Check out these other posts also. Leah Singer has a interesting new exercise to describe who you are. It’s a different kind of personal mapping system that gives you a wider lay of the land, if you will. And with Valentine’s Day bearing down on us, American ex-pat Lynn McBride gives us lessons on French, the language of love. It’s not what you’d expect.

Sometimes when you ignore what the GPS is telling you, you find beautiful surprises

When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear . . .

2012-02-03T08:13:00.000-06:00

. . . gladiator sandals in France, no matter the age of the woman

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple …” warned poet Jenny Joseph. She wrote it during an era that women got married, had children, managed households, cut their hair short, and wore incredibly sensible outfits. Now, we have mothers competing with daughters over who can wear their jeans tighter or their heels higher. At the opposite spectrum, I can walk into a grocery store and see so many women my age who have surrendered their style to gray fleece comfort. “Please,” I pray, “don’t let me look like I’ve given up on life.”

My trips to France inspire me because I can travel the entire country and not see one woman in sweat pants or athletic shoes. They may not be dressed in purple, but they all have style, that unique sense of who they are and what they want to say with their clothes. There are not teenager clothes here and old lady clothes there in the stores. There are just beautiful clothes that make you feel like you could float down the street. Even just draping one of their colorful scarves around my neck quickens my step at home today.

The idea that you don’t have to capitulate to your age is the topic of a fun blog, Advanced Style, by Ari Seth Cohen. He’s working on a documentary (see the video below) about the uniquely fashionable women of a certain age who stroll the sidewalks of New York City. One of his spirited characters declares “I dress for the theater of my life every day.”

“Theater of my life.” What a wonderful sentiment. My favorite costume ever for my own theater was a jacket I bought when I first became an assistant professor.

I bought the jacket when I first started earning real money and didn’t have to shop discount. The wool-blend piece, sans lapels, was adorned with quarter-sized flat pearl buttons down the front and smaller versions on the cuffs. With bold, oversized black-and-white houndstooth checks, it trumpeted my arrival with threads of fuchsia, pumpkin orange, teal, and Easter-grass green woven through the black rows.

Close-up details

It marked that I had arrived where I wanted to be in my academic profession. It set me apart from the typical university wardrobe of olive tweeds and sensible shoes. I wore it over knit dresses and I wore it with skirts and slacks. I wore it to mark the blossoming of spring and I wore it to brighten a dreary winter day. And I wore it because I planned on standing out in my world. And it did the trick.

On one of the last days I wore it one of my female academic gods walked up to me at an evening party at a professional conference and told me that she like this jacket much better than the blue one I had worn that afternoon at my presentation. I was floored. Of course, I would have preferred she told me what she had thought about theories actually raised in my talk, but for now this was enough. She had been there and she knew who I was and she had noticed. Next year would be soon enough to dazzle her with my brilliant analysis of the work she had published.

But next year didn’t come. I found out I couldn’t have it all. The children my husband and I had adopted needed me more. I knew where I had to be. So I let go of that life I had thought was my destiny for the life that was my reality. But I couldn’t let go of that jacket.

Fifteen years later it barely fits, but it still hangs there in a back corner of my closet. Some days it mocks me with what I once was; some days it reminds me of whom I could still be. But mostly it reminds me not to wait until old to live a life colored in shades of purple, or fuchsia, or teal. My daughter recently told me I was wearing “mom” glasses. I think I’ll go out next week and find new frames in blue or green or leopard print. And maybe I’ll buy some red shoes.

My jacket and my rainbow of scarves from France

What’s in the back of your closet to remind you of another you? What do you wear that wakes you up and makes you feel young, that makes you ready to face the theater of your life? Or do you dress strictly for comfort and efficiency? Which is your favorite stylish lady in Cohen’s video? Do you wear hats? What about men of a certain age and their fashion choices? Give us your fashion philosophy in the comments box.

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The Poetry of Friendship

2012-02-01T06:42:00.000-06:00

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Recently I took some food to my oldest friend who had been laid up by her first horse accident in almost 40 years of owning horses. Our conversation was the same one we had when we were ten years old, and sixteen, and forty. Over the course of an afternoon we shared our latest book finds, we continued in our ongoing quest to straighten out in our minds the geneology chart of British monarchs (the Tudors always trip us up), and we talked about our dogs past and present. We occasionally digressed to the aches and pains of midlife, our children, and household maintenance, but our conversation traveled easily back and forth across the decades of our friendship.

Friendship comes in all shapes

The Poetry of Friendship

Friendship is a poem
Wrapped up in metaphors.
I, like you
You, like me
We are alike but different

Ancient bonds are marked like
the brevity of poetry.
Few words say much.
We dig below the layers
And see yesterday’s four-year old as well as
the fifty-year old today
We unpack each other’s symbols
And understand the essence, the deep down
meaning.

The rhythm of the relationship sashays,
It swoops and twirls, turns toward then turns away

and back again.
The free verse of youth concedes to iambic pentameter
of settled lives.
It leaves us breathless
but remains until we are breath no more

Poet has reader
You have me
I, Thou.

Again, another good topic prompted by Write on Edge. How old is your oldest friendship? What object would you use to describe friendship? Tell me a story about signs of a true friend or that told you one was false. Let’s make friends in the comments box today.

How many of you still have friends you made when you were 4-years old? Here's me (on the left) with my oldest.

In our minds, we're still only in kindergarten.

Georgia On My Mind -- A Photographic Essay

2012-01-30T13:25:00.000-06:00

Burnt Mountain is for sitting

While the excitement of places like New York city (here and here) shake up your expectations and overwhelm you, those smaller, out-of-the-way corners of this world attract me again and again. One of my favorite places to wander either in a car or on foot is Pickens Country, GA. My husband’s family has property on Burnt Mountain, just south of the Chattahoochee National Forest and the southern tip of the Appalachian Trail. White pine trees, sharp-topped mountains, Georgia marble, and good barbeque define the region. Some corners of the county have more chickens and cows than people. There are bears, but we usually see the effects of their visits and rarely see them.

When visiting there, I feel enfolded in the arms of the mountains, especially when the fog snags on the sharp tips of those ancient hills and won’t clear until after lunch. The family gathers every New Year’s holiday to spend a few days unplugged from the world and to down copious amounts of black-eyed peas and collard greens for the year’s good fortune. We hike and read and eat cornbread. Today I’m sharing with you the winter world of Burnt Mt., GA.

When the fog rolls in the world becomes an abstract study in black and white

My brother-in-law said he couldn’t remember the last time he saw a kingfisher in the area. It sat so still I thought it was just a decoration someone had added to the dock on one of the small lakes in the area.

This road to nowhere is really a levee that divides a lake (left) from the spring that feeds it at the bottom of the steep ravine on the right. Only a couple hundred feet long, it’s still white-knuckle driving when you cross this stretch on a foggy night.

Somewhere just beyond the trees is a lake.

Pickens County is dotted with small churches, frequently Pentecostal. I guess this makes the mountain a particularly blessed place.

What is your favorite small or out-of-the-way place to visit? What do you find there; why do you go? Please share in the comments box places that I need to add to my itinerary. I promise not to tell anyone else about this secret destination (shhhh).

It's Not Exactly Up There With Climbing Mt. Everest -- My FiftyFifty Challenge

2012-01-27T08:45:00.000-06:00

"If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes." -Andrew Carnegie

I’m going to come right out and say it: laziness is my standard operating mode. That doesn’t mean you’ll find me sitting around all day watching Court TV. Dog walking, traveling, and gardening are default activities Over my 50+ years, though, the path of “good enough” seemed my favorite to travel. I did just enough to be good at things but not enough to excel. In music, I could play what was put in front of me, but I didn’t push myself to be at a professional level. I could write and play softball, but since others were better at it I did it only for fun. I exercise now just enough to be able to continue hiking and pick up my large dog, but not enough to actually get into great shape. I did manage to finish my Ph.d dissertation.

However, the crave for a real challenge gurgles in my stomach. Before I bow out of this life I want to grab hold of difficult goals and wrestle them to the ground. I want to be Rocky running up the steps with his theme music swelling in the background. Horrid visions of myself sitting in front of the television with a microwave dinner on a TV tray and watching Lawrence Welk reruns while my neighbors jog past on their way to salsa dancing lessons fill my waking hours (say, when sitting in front of the television watching Republican debate #632).

Some my age who wake up one morning with a sudden urge for challenges might run a marathon or eat bugs in Malaysia or something like that. Extremes are not my thing, though. Hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up, or get that darn book written, or find myself published in something every month of the year would be great goals. But, gee, they all require such long-term commitments. They all demand so much of me. Even that learning French aspiration has faded a bit (although it’s time to ratchet it up before traveling again this summer).

"There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams. Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they're still there." - Erma Bombeck

So I was glad to find a challenge right up my alley -- the FiftyFifty Challenge – 50 books and 50 movies in one year. My house is overflowing with books and movies, so you would think that this would be a cinch. However, I have a tendency to read three books at once and not finish any. And I frequently fall asleep while watching movies at home and never see the end. Plus I’m so undisciplined about it all, tackling things broadly but never deeply. I might read one Jane Austen, but I’ve never read all. When teaching and researching at the university level, all of my reading was so targeted, such clear objectives. I never had to ask myself what next. Now I just dabble.

Easy-peasy, right? Each week just skip a couple of Law and Order reruns to watch a movie. And there are plenty of short Hemingway novels out there to breeze through. It doesn’t all have to be Dostoevsky. But where’s the challenge in that? In fact, one definition of challenge is “to stimulate by making demands on the intellect.” Ah, so there’s the catch. I have to make demands on myself.

And so I will. I’m going to read and watch according to themes and report back to you on a separate page on this blog.

My movie goals:
- 10 foreign movies (I’m behind in my watching)
- 10 contemporary movies (whatever is in the theaters or came out in 2011)
- 10 documentaries (what can I learn?)
- 10 pre-1950 movies (I love old movies so an excuse to find some I haven’t seen)
- 10 Sundance award winners (find something I wouldn’t normally watch)

My book goals:
- 10 craft books on writing (I usually end up skimming them)
- 10 literary fiction or poetry (William Faulkner, here I come)
- 10 travel books (I’ll start with the large stack under my bedside table)
- 10 memoirs (if I want to write like that I need to read a variety)
- 10 by or about Edith Wharton (getting deeply into a writer I love)

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."  -Calvin Coolidge

Join me in this undertaking (although let’s hope it doesn’t put me completely under). You can sign on and see how others are approaching the challenge at the FiftyFifty website. If 50/50 is too much, try your own half-marathon challenge and do 25/25. Or if books and movies aren’t your thing find two other interests to do 50/50, e.g., 50 jigsaw puzzles and 50 bikes rides of at least five miles.

Something tells me that if I can discipline myself to do this one thing, at the end of the year several other goals that had been languishing in my dream box will be crossed off my to-do list. Mais oui! For now, though, it’s all about pressing on.

Do you have any long-term challenges for yourself this year? What are they and why did you choose them If you tried the 50/50 what movie or book themes would you tackle? For example, would you “major” in sci-fi films and minor in Martin Scorcese? ? If you developed your own 50/50 challenge, what would you pair to accomplish it? Share your thoughts in the comments box.

Maybe Skyler and I can make a dent in one of several bookcases in my house

Signed, Underwood 565 CR

2012-01-25T00:07:00.000-06:00

In my neighborhood there are still places that remember a less complicated technology

I miss her. We were friends for so many years. We sat up all night in college, pushing hard to be brilliant – or at least adequate. I vowed to be there for her 100% and never fail her in her time of need. For so long she remained faithful to me, too, even though her friends said it was time to look for something fresh.

I never asked for much. Just a new ribbon once or twice a year. A little correction tape. The distinct and smooth tap-tap her fingers produced signaled all was well. I never got sick on her, never caught a virus that would ruin her plans, and did my best to be a low-maintenance friend.

Together we made poetry. And we made parodies of Manichean cults in iambic pentameter. We explored the history of Irish mythic heroes and produced outlines of all the books of the New Testament. We expounded on Aristotle and Martin Luther and Hemingway. We wrote letters and exegeses. I knew her touch and I knew the pauses when she was thinking.

Forgotten but not gone

When her mom and dad brought us together I had never seen anyone so happy. “Just what I’ve always wanted!” she exclaimed. I thought we would be together forever. But one day a plastic box appeared on the desk next to me. White instead of my sleek, black keys, it seemed rather nondescript except for the small rainbow-colored apple in the lower left corner.

While my three-pronged cord and a single on/off switch made me a breeze to handle, this new machine seemed overly complicated. Wires out the back. Wires to keyboards. Wires to a device on the side she constantly slid across an 8x8 pad. She always was sticking something in the front slot like bread in a toaster.

Oh, I stayed faithful, sitting on that desk waiting for some attention, eager to create beautiful thoughts together. Occasionally I addressed an envelope for her. But I felt her touch less and less.

One day she unplugged me and placed me back in my molded plastic home. She closed it with a determined “click.” I haven’t seen daylight since. But I have hope. She has carried me from apartment to apartment. From house to house. Now I wait, seemingly forgotten in a dusty basement. I must still mean something to her, though, because I’m still here. Waiting.

My old friend

If you had one object that could tell a story what would it be and what would the story be about? Tell its story in the comments box.

Authors Note: This was written in response to the Write On Edge RemembeRED prompt:

Do objects have a memory? Does a rocking chair hold the essence of the snuggles it has witnessed? Does a pottery mug remember the comforting warmth it offered a struggling soul?

The dictionary defines personification as “the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.”

Now it’s your turn to tell a piece of your story from the point of view of an object who bore witness in 400 words or less.

Treasures You Should Read and Watch Today

2012-01-23T08:13:00.000-06:00

A glance at sweet Princess, the cat who couldn't sit still, grabbing at my camera strap

I wish I could say I didn’t have a fabulous and award-winning blog post today because I was traveling in exotic lands. Or dancing in a salsa competition. Or putting finishing touches on the next great book to hit all the best-seller lists. But life is more mundane.

This weekend I gave most of my attention to friends and family in various degrees of need. It started when my son called to say his landlord caught him with his girlfriend’s cat in his “no pets” apartment and he had to get rid of it (why Princess is not with the girlfriend/owner right now is another story). So me, a dog person, had to deal with a hyperactive kitten all weekend until new arrangements could be made. I also had a friend almost completely incapacitated in a leg cast because of her first major accident after almost 40 years of being a horse owner. I took down her Christmas decorations. Two of my sisters were sick (sinus infection and shingles – yikes!) so I provided homemade soup and what entertainment I could.

Instead of writing a blog, therefore, I caught up on reading some. Here are a few that would be worth a few minutes of your time this week.

*****

This is the week that I start back to the gym with my trainer since I’ve been officially declared “recovered” from my surgery. So I’m looking at health-related posts a lot.

Debra tells us about the value of Silence and Centering. One of the greatest challenges for me is turning off the noise in my head to concentrate on writing ideas. She reminds us that even 5 minutes each day of dedicated silence can improve our lives.

Indy Quillen in Making a Date With Yourself – Fueling Your Energy and Creativity also reminds us of the importance of taking time for ourselves. We all need to have multiple ways to recharge our batteries, whether it’s spending the day at the beach or the afternoon in a bookstore. Perhaps if I made regular weekly dates with myself I wouldn’t waste time all the other days getting distracted with useless stuff (hello, online celebrity gossip) because my well is dry.

I also gave some time to the literary/writing blogs I follow. These offer something interesting for everyone.

Debra Eve reminds all of us that it’s never too late to be great on her blog about Late Bloomers. In Edith Wharton: Beyond Downton Abbey she honors a great American writer on her 150th birthday. In her novels and short stories Wharton chronicled the complicated life of East Coast social climbers at the turn of the century. You probably read Ethan Frome in high school or college. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, start with the lavish film adaptation of her book The Age of Innocence starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis.

Chuck Wendig writes about a lot of things, but has dead-on posts about writing. In 25 Things Writers Should Start Doing (ASAFP) he tries to verbally kick butts to move some of us from the “want to be a writer” to the “be a writer, damn it!” category. But you know what, his advice works for a lot of dreams, like #12 “Start Escaping the Gravity of that Insidious Black Hole Known as ‘The Internet’” or #1 “Start Taking Yourself Seriously.”

This last one is totally random. While I’m no longer part of academia and mining the depths of the ancient art known as “rhetoric” (Aristotle and all that jazz), I still check in with my old community on occasion. Anyone who has spent any time deep in an academic environment can appreciate this. Those who haven’t can just feel superior for having their feelings about life in the ivory tower confirmed.

Julie Platt is currently a Ph.d student in Rhetoric and Writing at Michigan State University. Her little video, Shit Rhetoricians Say, does such a fantastic job of capturing the conversation flow of my beloved field of study. I see nothing’s changed in the years since I was a graduate student. Just enjoy her performance. And remember: Rhetoric – Don’t Leave Home Without It.

Be sure to visit these writers and leave them comments. Meanwhile, what great posts did you read or write this week? What was your favorite online video? What do you do to regain energy each week or what is your favorite literary/writing tip? Share it all in the comments box.

Stand up to Culinary Authoritarianism and Get Closer to Your Food! It's All the Trend

2012-01-20T10:54:00.000-06:00

They may go overboard on utensil obsession, but at least the French know dogs make the best dinner companions sometimes.

Wow. I just realized we have wasted a lot of parenting time. Apparently the countless dinners we spent teaching our kids to use knives and forks could have better been spent turning them into musical geniuses. The latest food trend at fine restaurants, it seems, is eating with your hands. Evidently, using your fingers instead of the fork passé allows you to “eat with conviction and passion.” I thought it just made your hands dirty and dribbled food on the tablecloth.

Lest there is any doubt, this fine dining trend got its start in New York City and California eating establishments.

Egg rolls, fried chicken, a barbecued pork sandwich? Sure I use my hands. But what about a communal bowl of orange chicken with chow mein noodles? Do I really want that mess all over me? What technique do I use to dig in to my crème brulée? Is that a one-finger or a two-finger scoop?

I’m not ignorant of the fact that other cultures eat with their fingers. And if I were the guest in a Bedouin tent in the Sahara being served goat meat and couscous on pita bread, I’d follow custom, even if somewhat awkwardly, just like I follow the insane French custom of eating pizza with a knife and fork when in that country. But if using silverware is, as one chef has said, like “fingernails on a chalkboard,” then exactly how do I attack my chicken vegetable soup?

“I hope that people let their guard down and throw out some of the rules we have regarding etiquette and connect like animals,” says chef Roy Choi. I know exactly what he means. Every day I encounter people who are just too controlled by etiquette, starting with the guy at the gym yesterday talking in triple-digit decibels about every career opportunity he was considering, right down to the salary and benefits package, and the woman who draped her sweat jacket on one machine, her towel on another, and a pair of free weights on the bench so she could flow unencumbered from one exercise to another in her sets without pause, leaving me to devise an exercise routine on her gym leftovers.

Yes, indeed, modern America needs someone to give them permission to throw the restrictions of etiquette out the window.

Something tells me that ancient cultures that ate all communal finger food (e.g., Ethiopian, Indian, Asian) did not do it because, as cookbook author Zakary Pelaccio claims for himself, utensils slowed them down. It was not a metaphor for life for them. They probably built the tradition around the high cost or lack of access to a full set of eating implements. To be honest, last week in New York, my husband expressed regret/hesitation at our expensive steakhouse that it would be out of place to pick up the bone of his $48 mutton chop and suck out every last drop of flavor from the marrow. On the other hand, I feel safe in assuming that tacos were not invented because someone wanted to reject culinary authoritarianism and get emotionally closer to his beans or meat. However, some culinary traditions, like French food, do treasure overkill and demand a full battalion of eating utensils that need a guidebook to go with them at each meal.

The French have their finger food moments, and do it with panache

I’m not a cultural luddite who thinks all trends are bogus. That intense desire to experience the latest thing just doesn’t grab me. I’ve yet to see a 3D movie (how do those cheap movie theater glasses actually stay on over the real glasses I must wear to see?). I’m sure for some films it enhances the experience, although I can’t see why it’s necessary to film The Great Gatsby that way. I can only think of one trend I was ahead of back in college. I wore parachute pants – original olive green parachute pants bought at the Army Surplus store with work boots, not the disco ones.

No, I’m not against trends (although you can get whiplash from watching them speed by so quickly). I guess I’m against the trendsetters pooh-poohing we who remain uninitiated or unenthusiastic. But maybe I’m really ahead of the trend because I can see that for many of them (are you there, Jazzercise?), this too shall pass. At least I’ll never be caught following a trend after it’s gone.

Oh, and as for that one hard and fast rule of communal platter eating – reaching in with only the first two joints of the thumb, pointer, and middle finger of the right hand? One of the pieces of useless information I remember reading somewhere long ago was that certain cultures traditionally ate only with their right hand because they used the left hand to wipe their behinds. It stands to reason – if they didn’t have silverware they probably didn’t have any Charmin.

Be first to the table! Talk to me about trends in the comments box. What trends did you throw yourself into that faded quickly? What trends did you join only when they finally became mainstream (hello, e-reader). Are you an early adopter or always late to the party? What is your favorite finger food? Have you had the opportunity to eat at an ethnic restaurant that uses this tradition?

Kebab and frites. My favorite food to eat with my hands in France

My Children -- Living the Martin Luther King Dream

2012-01-17T14:36:00.000-06:00

Nicholas and Tonya, my salt-and-pepper set, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris

(forgive my scowl - you have no idea how hot it was that day)

On Sunday and all day Monday I felt that I should be posting something to commemorate Martin Luther King Day. I tried for something profound. I tried to be deep. I tried to be uplifting. I tried to create the second “I Have a Dream” speech. I tried to imagine a time when I had been discriminated against. But it all sounded so inauthentic and pompous. Who am I to make grand statements about discrimination and struggle after a week vacationing in New York City and then returning to my nice home in a lovely, tree-lined neighborhood where everyone walks their dogs to the local coffee shop?

And then I read a touching piece of writing by Bella on her blog One Sister’s Rant in response to a writing challenge on Beverly Diehl’s blog to talk racism. She learned at a young age what it meant to accept herself when she and her sister doused themselves in powder to lighten their skin. They got in trouble, but only to the extent that their mother was upset because they did not want to accept who they were. Their childlike reasoning concluded if they looked different they would be seen as better people.

Her story reminded me of my own children when we brought them home from Russia in 1995. I called them “my little salt and pepper set” because my son is as fair as the Scandinavians across the Bay of Finland near his home city of St. Petersburg and my daughter is as dark as those in the ethnic regions of the former Soviet Union around the Black Sea. At 8 and 7 ½ years old, they had spent their entire lives in the narrow confines of the orphanage system in a very closed country. I had such fear that they would not be easily accepted because of their language issues or because they knew nothing about American culture except Flintstones cartoons. I worried that we would face a minefield of prejudices.

When my children arrived in their new home, they reacted badly toward the diverse ethnic groups in our corner of the city. They had never seen a black person before, although they had internalized the Russian disdain for non-white ethnicities. (You can read more about that country’s racism here and here.) That first summer when my son saw them – on our street, at the grocery store, in the park – he would, with no subtlety, point at them and make comments in Russian about their presence or appearance. Needless to say, I was mortified and made every effort to quiet him because I could tell by his tone if not his words that he was saying nothing good about them. I said a small prayer of thanks that no one could understand what he said.

That fall he began school in a classroom full of students who were Jewish, Irish Catholic, Indian, African-American, Asian, mixed race, and everything in between. Half of the students were children of university professors and the other half were on the free lunch program. Once he was settled in amidst this American melting pot, I never heard those comments again. Many of his friends have been and are the same African-Americans that repelled him at first. They saw him for the joyful presence he was and he saw beyond color to their humanity.

Nicholas and his cross-country teammate, Larry, after a hard race

(women pay hundreds of dollars for that hair color)

My daughter, on the other hand, directed her negative feelings only toward herself. She has the most perfect dark brown, almost black hair. Perfectly straight and thick. Her eyes are deep coffee and her skin a light olive tone. Yet when she was young all she wanted was blonde, wavy hair and fair skin like my sisters. She wanted to look like all the girls with Irish Catholic and German backgrounds that filled her classroom, that fill our town. As the mother, I was glad that her dark looks made it easy for us to distinguish her among all the blonde ponytails flying across the soccer field or basketball court. It’s also what made my husband and me sit up like a rocket and zero in on her when we first saw the video of orphanage kids that our adoption agency had sent us.

Yet she wanted nothing more than not to stand out. She knew her looks attracted attention – that she looked different – because people would stop me on the street and hand me their card just in case I ever wanted to start her on a modeling career. But at the beauty salon she kept trying to get our stylist to put blonde streaks in her hair. The stylist kept refusing, telling her she was not made to be blonde and she’d regret it later if she touched her perfect hair. Blonde didn’t match her lovely olive skin, she added.

Eventually, her desire to look like something other than herself faded as her interest in sports grew. Soon she was just another female high school athlete in soccer shorts and ponytail, with a headband made out of day-glo orange athletic tape. Two years ago, though, she had a chance to experience what life would have been like if she and her olive skin had never been a part of our family. She returned to her home city of St. Petersburg, Russia for a college semester abroad.

All around her she could see the treatment of non-whites in that country. She told us how much they hated the African immigrants or the Kazakhs or Chechnyans. Russia for Russians. She told us about the skinheads roaming the streets. And she told us that the Russians didn’t know what to do about her at first. She had the olive skin of those they hated, plus she spoke almost perfect Russian, which she used to help all her fellow students navigate the intricacies of life in that difficult country. Yet she had the visible confidence of an American, not a put-upon remnant of Soviet domination. Was she an ethnic Russian or was she American?

Mostly, she’s a survivor. She is fully herself. She wants to travel the world and has made friends from more countries than I have.

Tonya (#11), one dark ponytail amid a sea of blonde

Like any mother with children just slightly outside the norm, I fretted every day that they would face discrimination for being “different” or “other” because I ripped them from an insecure world and plopped them down into this comfortable, economically privileged, and, yes, rather closed culture of my own hometown (most important question – “Where’d you go to high school?” Tell me that and I can tell your life story). I’m blessed that they never needed a Martin Luther King to fight for their acceptance.

When we look at their experiences we see that hatred toward ourselves and hatred toward others can start at such a tender age. Embracing differences not only in others but also in ourselves can just as easily be taught. Although I’m sad my children had to feel what it was like to be an outsider in two countries, I’m proud that they never let that poison their spirits. And I repeat, as a mother I’m grateful every day that they escaped so much of the potential hurt and prejudice that attacks so many innocent children. Mine were lucky enough, as Dr. King had hoped, to be judged by the content of their character. Let’s hope we will all always be given that chance.

Have you ever worried that your children would face discrimination? Were you ever discriminated against as a child? Share your experience in the comments box. Then visit Beverly's blog to see links to the stories that others shared.

The garden at Château Chenoceau in the Loire Valley of France show us that

more colors make the garden a better place

New York State of Mind -- Don't Forget to Pack . . .

2012-01-13T22:34:00.000-06:00

One of the two lions, Patience and Fortitude, that welcome you to the NY Public Library

If you get the chance to spend some time in this city it’s vital that you come prepared. Walking shoes, small umbrella, black wardrobe (yes, seriously – you have no idea what it’s like to stick out like a sore thumb in taupe). But it never occurred to me that I would have to stuff in my quart baggy of 3 oz. liquids several pack of French’s mustard.

“Mustard?” you ask in astonishment. That condiment is as American as, well, the ballpark hotdog. You would think, I say. But picture this scenario: I got a late start on my Thursday with my plans to work half the day in the New York Public Library. After spending much too much time oo-ing and ah-ing over the lions, the drinking fountains, and the ceilings, I read and write until I am starved. I trudge down 5th Ave. toward my hotel, looking for quick and easy nourishment. Spying a well-known fast food joint I think, while unimaginative, it would fill the bill.

I step up to the counter and place my usual order. Hamburger with mustard only. “Uh, we don’t have any mustard,” the pointy-headed teenage cashier mumbles. What, I ask, thinking I misheard. This is an American hamburger joint. How can they run out of mustard? He asks another cashier who shakes her head, saying they have no packets of mustard. Never mind, I say and walk out, starved, tired, and dejected.

Library drinking fountain

Next day, same scenario. Again a late start on the day. Add to that the idiocy of WALKING 20 NY BLOCKS PAST MY DESTINATION. And that’s twenty more blocks back, in case you were wondering (maybe someday I’ll tell you about adding 40 blocks to my little stroll). The Museum of Modern Art was wonderful, although I will never claim to understand the artistic meaning behind an old wooden bar stool with a bicycle wheel attached to the top of it. But all that walking made me hungry. So I try a different hamburger joint. National chain. Have it your way. Hamburger with mustard only, please. The cashier stares for a beat. “We don’t have mustard here,” he informs me. What? No mustard? “The hamburgers only come with catsup, pickles, onions. We don’t have any mustard in back.”

I now have a mission for my next trip to New York. I will stop at every fast food joint in Manhattan to see if any of them have the most American of condiments. This ain’t France, after all. While I found one lone restaurant in that country that served good ol’ French’s, I didn’t even expect that. You can read about that wonderful discovery here. But these are national chains. Each restaurant in a chain cooks its fries the exact same number of seconds. Each serves absolutely identical buns. How can one group of franchises get away with deciding whether or not I can have mustard?

I ate too much good food on this trip to let this little mustard mishap cast a shadow on my trip. It probably is a message from the heavens that I shouldn’t have been eating at a chain in NYC anyway. If anyone out there has any explanation for this mustard mystery, however, please let me in on what makes New York think it’s so special.

But you can bet that next time I head east, I’ll come prepared. And consider yourself warned. Now is the time to start collecting for yourself.

*****

This trip gave me some time to catch up on missed blogs. Here are a few posts that will give you some food for thought. No mustard needed.

Dream Catcher -- Blogger Kristen Lamb shared this post from Ingrid Schaffenburg. Most of us want to follow our dreams. But what, exactly, does that mean? Her connection between “dreaming” and “learning” is a fresh perspective on an age-old problem.

Beat the post holiday (and beyond) blues – With cold weather finally settling in, we will really need these suggestions by Scrollwork. I especially like #1 because I think it gives me permission to eat ice cream.

Friday Inspiration – Get Uncomfortable – Amber West never fails to amuse. Mexican roosters and weak thighs make for a great travel adventure. A must-read.

Dr. Seuss’s Creative Process – Annette Gendler frequently finds off-beat exhibits and places and shares generously. Since Dr. Seuss is one of my favorite authors, I was eager to learn what she had soaked in about how his mind worked. His first rule of creation was “see.” We all could apply this in whatever we do.

Have you ever encountered such idiosyncrasies in fast food chains yourself? Please share them or any travel food stories in the comments box. And leave some comment love for some of these other bloggers on their sites.

Perhaps if we all had a room like the NYPL reading room, books would take more attention than video screens

New York State of Mind -- Scenes from the High Line

2012-01-11T06:30:00.000-06:00

New York at its cheekiest

Thirty years ago I traveled to New York City for an academic conference as a graduate student. I think I paid $50 for the airfare (it was the beginning of discount prices when they were discounts). We had to drive eight hours to get to the airport that had this cheap rate. Our small troupe of graduate students flew into Newark, hopped a train across the state line, trudged through the darkened streets of Sheepshead Bay to the tiny rent-controlled apartment of a friend where we all crashed for the night.

The next day we boarded a subway car with instructions not to make eye-contact with anyone (we were all friendly, innocent Midwesterners), then when we alighted somewhere near Central Park we obeyed further instructions to walk with purpose until we reached our hotel and don’t stop in the middle of the sidewalk to check a map.

For that trip I had no money. I lived off of the free food at conference breakfast buffets and book publishers’ evening receptions, with a slice or two of New York pizza purchased for lunch. Four of us grad students piled into a small, overpriced hotel room and endured the tone of disdain from a front desk who knew we didn’t belong in the Big Apple. I saw nothing of the city but a corner of Central Park. I wasn’t overly impressed with the place and left with no strong desire to return.

But now I’m back as a tagalong on one of my husband’s research trips. I’ve traveled a lot more. I have the money to eat pizza and then some. I have time to explore. But the hotel room is still tiny. With this unseasonably mild winter weather most of the country is having, we had the opportunity to spend our first afternoon in the city strolling along The High Line, a remarkable park created on an abandoned stretch of an elevated train track. It opened in 2009. I can’t wait to return when the whole thing is in bloom, but it still offers a wealth of sights even on the grayest winter day.

Here is a bit of what I saw as I strolled the meandering path above the streets of New York. Click here to see tons of photos more creative than mine posted by other users of the park in other seasons.

Brad and his colleague, Azita, miss the High Line scene as they are lost in mathematical discussion

Whimsical graffiti everywhere you turn

No, not a friendly native. A cutout that many apartment dwellers next to the Line post in their windows

Nature loves the High Line

Somewhere in Chelsea

Lady Liberty

What is your favorite unexpected place to visit you've found at home or when traveling, and what did you like about it? Tell us about it and provide a link (if possible) in the comments box.

Here's another story to read about one of my favorite street scenes in Dijon, France, where children are a local treasure.

So You Say You Want a Resolution?

2012-01-05T22:38:00.000-06:00

My thoughts exactly

Aaack! It’s that time of the year again. The time I always hate. No, not the time to de-decorate the house after Christmas (which mysteriously always takes twice as long as getting all of the knick-knacks and doodads out in December). No, it’s that time of year when everyone is talking about making resolutions. Time to set goals and visions and commitments to make life better, richer, skinnier, more creative, and generally more awesome.

And I hate it. I believe I fall into that group of people who never have succeeded in keeping a single one – unless it’s one like “I really resolve to return to that restaurant in Dijon that advertises French fries made in duck fat and eat a plate of those suckers” or “I resolve to branch out from my beloved French menthe chocolat ice cream and eat a different flavor every day in Dijon this summer.” In that case I’m all over that resolution-making routine.

At the beginning of last year I vowed to embrace failure. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. It was a bit of channeling Thomas Edison and his dedication to finding 10,000 ways that didn’t work. I also made a resolution to stop wasting computer (and writing) time clicking on celebrity gossip. That did last a full three weeks. And I felt quite productive and virtuous. I wrote a “Dear John” letter to fast food and vowed to exert more energy than my old, arthritic dog. But I let my neck and arm pain and all the attendant side effects pull me down the paths of sloth and gluttony.

New Year’s weekend – the usual time for making those impossible public declarations – was spent peacefully at my in-laws’ Georgia mountain house reading Stephen King, walking the lake, taking pictures, and eating black-eyed peas and collard greens for luck. With that annual luck feast fully digested, I’m now fully recharged. Now I just need the resolve to follow through on my resolutions.

Christmas lingered on Burnt Mountain

Fiery sunsets over the white pines, night skies crowded with stars and planets, and worry over whether or not the neighborhood bears had gone into hibernation yet (what with the radically warm December we experienced) distracted me from the job of reflecting on 2011 and setting a brand new path for 2012. So this year, instead of making new resolutions, I decided to just pull the old ones out of the plastic bin in the basement where I stored them. They’ve hardly been worn. I’m pretty sure they’d still fit me. And they’re not the kind to go out of style that quickly.

That pretty much gives me a full pannier for the coming year. However, I decided to add one more challenge to my basket and am also taking up writer/blogger guru Kristen Lamb’s cry to battle: “Don’t let the pixies win!” This year I want to blog and write like a madwoman, so I’m taking her workshop to learn how to beat back the Procrastination Pixies that convince me on a regular basis that I have to check all the toilet paper rolls in the house when my rear should be glued to chair and fingers on keyboard.

Onward to the future! I’m very much on the upswing in my surgical recovery and I’m eager to tackle everything that I should have mastered last year. Let’s just look at it as being environmentally conscious. I’m all about recycling. Better late than never and all that. And I’ll begin right after I put away all my Christmas doodads.

So how about you? Are you pro or anti- resolution? What energizes you to start a new year? Give us your ideas, handy hints, or motivations to screw your resolution to the sticking place. Share in the comments box. And have a fruitful new year!

Photographing more sunsets on Burnt Mt. in Georgia might be a soul-satisfying resolution

Time For the Christmas Feast

2011-12-23T10:30:00.000-06:00

This was Christmas Eve in 2010. It's not so cold or so beautiful this year.

My lead-up to the holiday this year has been slow. All the annoying bumps in the road for surgery recovery have seemed finally to even out, so this week I’ve been going full tilt at completing decorations and cooking. My mom’s strawberry bread and fudge have already been made once and distributed for gifts. Now it’s time for round 2 for the family. Last night my son’s girlfriend, Laurie, and I made two large casserole pans of my mom’s chicken casserole for the family Christmas Eve meal. There are more cookies to bake today for the family gathering so that night before Christmas can be left to wrapping presents.

If you asked me what my favorite gifts were over the years, I would be hard pressed to rattle them off like men reciting baseball statistics. For me, Christmas has always been about the food. My family is not the sort to serve a traditional Christmas meal of roasted turkey or ham with all the trimmings served on white lace tablecloths with festive candles filling the room. From my very first memory of Christmas, it has always been my Granny’s spaghetti, first created because there were so many mouths to feed at the family gathering each year. It took years for anyone to write the recipe down. When my Aunt Nancy followed her around the kitchen for that purpose she had trouble getting it right because Granny would wander into the kitchen later and add something else when no one was watching. Through group collaboration we finally got it down on paper (the secret ingredient is bacon).

The reason for the season

Christmas is also not Christmas without my Grandma’s strawberry cookies. You may ask what’s so Christmas-like about strawberry cookies. Nothing, except that is when Grandma made them. She was not a big cookie maker – more a pie kind of baker – but each December she went through the painstaking process of cooking the mixture of dates and sugar and pecans and butter that formed the basis of this treat. When it had cooled she sat in front of the TV and spent the afternoon molding spoonfuls of the sweet concoction into the shape of a strawberry, then rolling it in red sugar and carefully creating a green leaf at the large end with a can of Betty Crocker’s icing in a can. They were as bright and beautiful as Christmas neon. One year after serving as her strawberry assistant I submitted her recipe to a Christmas cookie contest for the newspaper. It won an honorable mention and a photo, but the food editors felt that they knew better and rolled the cookie concoction in multi-colored sprinkles instead of red sugar. I suppose it worked for some, but the brilliant red and green gifts from Grandma’s hands were what made the Christmas table.

So as you sit down to share a meal with family and friends at the end of this year, whether Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s or other special occasion remember all you’ve been given this year. Remember all who are not with you. And give a special thought to all who suffer and are alone at this time of the year. I wish you all the best and I’ll be back to regular posting after the New Year. I’ve got some eating to do now.

I know I should have had photos of culinary creations today, but I just couldn’t get it done. But stories about them are just as tasty. What is your favorite food from family holidays? You can think outside the Christmas season if you want and tell us about barbecue at Labor Day or latkes at Hanukkah or any family food that comes around only rarely and brings memories with it. Please share in the comments box.

Skyler with her present from last year. I think I'll just wrap it and
give it to her again this year.

You Must Read: This fall two blogging friends have published books that you must rush out and buy now to read during the cold nights of January. Kristin Espinasse, of the French Word A Day blog, has recently published Blossoming in Provence. It’s another in her series of books with photographs and stories about her life as an American raising two French children and adjusting to life at a Provence vineyard with her French husband. She has a wonderful eye for the scenes of France that she translates both with her camera lens and her words.

The other book you want to read is The Foreign Language of Friends, by Nadine Feldman. It tells the story of four very different women brought together in a Spanish class but who find they learn more than the language with this chance encounter. It’s for anybody who has faced a transition in their lives and have to choose a path. Nadine’s blog, A Woman’s Nest, shares thoughts and suggestions on travel in the world and into a life of creativity and joy.

Read another story about our Christmas vacation that wasn’t. Sometimes the best times are when nothing happens.

10 Things I'd Edit Out of My Life, or Making Room For the Good Stuff

2011-12-15T09:35:00.000-06:00

Some things are well worth the space they occupy, like my Russian Grandfather Frost collection at Christmas

(you should see how many are on the tree)

Before the great decorating frenzy that is Christmas at our house I looked around the living room to figure out if there were a new place to put the tree other than the same corner where it had sat for the last gazillion Christmases. I wanted it still visible through the French windows across the front of our house, so how could I rearrange the furniture to make this happen? The only logical conclusion was to sell my husband’s piano so I could move the couch to the wall the piano had owned since we moved into this house. Would you like to know how that conversation went?

I went out last week and purchased more Christmas paraphernalia, despite the fact that we have a small storage room in the basement dedicated to storing what I already had. And now I’ll have to buy some kind of container to store the new decorations in. And so it goes. It only seems appropriate, then, that this week I ran across a TED talk that was titled “Julie, You Better Watch This Because I’m Talking To You. Yes, You” – or something like that. TED is the nonprofit organization whose mission is to spread worthy ideas. Every year at its annual conference the best minds in Technology, Entertainment, and Design have eighteen minutes or less each to give the most inspiring talk they can, and then these are put up on the internet to share with the world.

That’s where I found Graham Hill, guru of sustainable living, telling me that less stuff means more happiness. He talked about the benefits of an “edited life.” As a writer, I know something of editing, i.e., paring a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter down to only the most essential words to convey the idea. That doesn’t mean cutting out beauty, poetry, or important details. Just choose what’s needed and leave the rest behind. Life editing, Hill said, gives us all a little more freedom, a little more time, and turns less into more. I decided to try this life editing on my own terms (you can see his talk in full, below, or here).

10 Things I’d Edit Out of My Life

1) Time Sucks – I’m an information junkie so I waste much too much time filling my head with every detail about every event in the universe – newspaper, television, internet, cereal box. Tom Cruise to the God Particle. I have to be more selective so I can focus on what makes me grow as a person, e.g., with my writing.

2) Blame – Blaming random people and/or things for why I don’t get my house renovated, or my writing revised and submitted, or my weight lost takes up too much space. My recovery from surgery kept me from being productive for the last two months. Yeah, but what’s my excuse for the first ten months of this year?

3) Martyrdom – Corollary to Blame. I need to strike this sucker completely out of my life, kill it with a red pen. No matter how much I stomp around the house or pout, I ain’t no martyr. Give it up, Julie.

4) Unhealthy Choices – How many times in a day do I get to make healthy choices for my life? How many of those times do I pick the unhealthy route? Graham Hill is right. Less is more (except when it comes to exercise for a woman of my age – more, more, more).

5) Late Nights – Occasionally staying up late to read or to work a fabulous idea like this into a blog is a good thing. Staying up late to watch Rachel Maddow reruns, or check Facebook “one last time,” or eat, or sort mail is just one more unhealthy choice I need to reduce, like a sequoia milled down to a toothpick.

6) Things – I don’t engage in mindless consumerism, but I don’t need to possess everything I love. Someday I’ll write about my collections. It’s time to start paring down now so my kids don’t have to do it later. But this does NOT include my books.

This space could use a bit of editing, ya think?

7) Negative conversations – Mine and those of others. A time suck, an energy drain, a distraction from really inspiring ideas. They can’t be avoided, but they can be limited.

8) Paper – We’re drowning in it. I hired an organizer to bring some order. I have more work to do with her. I know I’ll never digitize everything. But shuffling papers, searching for papers, filing papers is a grizzly bear-sized time suck, and is a direct cause for blame and martyrdom, as well as late nights. I need to learn to never touch a paper more than once or twice. Act on it or toss it.

9) Perfection – Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, Julie. Don’t let it be the enemy of actually getting something finished. Perfection is also a great, galumphing time suck.

10) (nothing more to say – 9 is enough, I don’t need a perfect 10; it’s late and I really should get to bed; spending all of this time blaming all the things I’m not doing instead of doing the things I should be doing does not get the job done, and so on)

So if I get out my great big red pen and start editing my life, as Hill urges us all to do, it won’t be long before I have more time and space for the good stuff. Who knows, maybe I’d accomplish something that made me qualify for my own TED talk.

What did you think of Graham Hill’s talk? Where would you start editing your own life? Start the conversation in the comments box.

Here's what I was thinking about at the beginning of the year. My blog has been my own little motivational cheerleader this year. Don't ask if I've accomplished all I talked about. But at least I have my driving directions down on paper for the next year.

Cheap? A Priceless Christmas Gift Is The Way To Go

2011-12-09T01:29:00.001-06:00

Nicholas had no idea why we had a tree in the house before his first Christmas as part of our family

Yikes! It’s 18 days until Christmas and all I’ve purchased is one small stocking stuffer. It’s not like I haven’t hit the stores. It’s just that I seem to come out of them with bags of things only for me – new holiday makeup, new holiday necklace, new red sweater. All vital necessities, but still not gettin’ the job done.

Aside from the savvy shoppers who snapped up the $75,000 yurts and the $395,000 sports cars in retailer Neiman Marcus’ 2011 Christmas Book, the average person says he’ll be spending just under $700 for presents this year. At least half of that, I’m sure, will go towards batteries. My kids are grown, so no more piles of presents taller than the tree for each of them. My sisters and I decided a few years ago that since all the kids in the family were grown we didn’t need to go wild at Christmas buying for the extended family. At Thanksgiving dinner we pull names for the gift giving, so with one name and a $30 limit Christmas shopping finally becomes sane.

If I had to guess, I would estimate that half of my family Christmas budget goes toward the stockings hung by the chimney with care. It’s the gift that gives back as I sneak Gummies and chocolate Santas when my kids aren’t looking. My mom used to wrap individual pieces of her homemade fudge and put it in our stockings. It was a favorite because it meant that none of us would miss out on that special treat if someone beat us to the Christmas cookie tin. Creativity came in when money was an object.

My blogging friend Nancy Mueller, who writes about all the wonderful places she travels, recently told her readers about a gift we all could give that would cost so little of our time and money but make a huge difference in a child’s life. For only $10 we could give the gift of libraries to children living in places where such things are usually just a fantasy. So check out Nancy’s post here about donating to the cause through Passports with a Purpose. Consider making an extra donation in the name of a family member or friend.

Although I’m talking about the price of Christmas, it’s not expensive presents that stick with me year after year. No, the things I remember about the season are priceless. Aunts, uncles, cousins, all of us squeezing into Granny’s apartment on Christmas Eve. Waking up one year to find that my mom had sewn a complete wardrobe for my favorite Pepper doll. Eagerly waiting in the hallway with my sisters each Christmas morning until Dad had his coffee and was ready to face the chaos of the Grand Unwrapping. How warm and inviting Mom always made the house look each December. When I dream of Christmases past I realize that many of the best gifts I’ve received throughout my life really were free or cost practically nothing.

Here are just a few:

-- A daughter who shares my birthday – that’s a gift that keeps on giving

-- A love of reading from my Dad – I’ll have that gift until the day I die

-- No argument from my parents when I wanted to go away to college – my sisters all stayed in town, so I knew what it meant when Mom and Dad gave their baby girl their blessing to leave home and never tried to persuade me otherwise

-- Two teenagers willing to spend a Mother’s Day one year walking around the Missouri Botanical Garden, pretending to like the flowers

-- My Granny’s powder in Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev – Granny always gave lacy underwear or pajamas or beautiful blouses for Christmas. She’d sprinkle her body powder in the box and I’d hate the day when I had to wash the clothes because I knew I’d lose that smell. One Christmas when I was a teenager, I insisted on that book and jumped for joy when, unwrapping the present, I smelled her powder between the pages. The best part about this gift is that even forty years later I can still smell her when I pick up the book.

-- A husband who puts up with me after almost 30 years – this is a gift from the Universe

I know they’re not as glamorous as an HD flat screen television snatched from the hands of another shopper at a Black Friday sale. And I have to admit I enjoy the fully loaded e-reader I found under the tree. One year, though, perhaps I’ll challenge myself to do an entire Christmas without stepping into a single retail store (that includes online shopping). Dust bunny collages anyone? But mostly I think I’ll just keep looking for ways to give of my gifts throughout the year. That’s truly priceless. What do you think?

What has been your favorite gift for any occasion that cost nothing or next to nothing but meant the world? Please share it with us in the comments box. And don’t forget to check out the link (above) for Passports With a Purpose donations.

Yes, I actually wore this homemade Christmas pin in days past. It's now a bit fragile.

I was planning on sending all of my readers something unique and wildly extravagant to put under their Christmas trees. Unfortunately, I’m running low on wrapping paper, and the line at the post office is horrifically long, so I think I’ll simplify things a little. My gift to you this holiday season is a wonderful recipe passed on to me from my friend, Martine, in Paris. ‘Tis the season for soup, and this one is easy as well as incredibly healthy. It would be great to serve with a Christmas feast or to make after an exhausting day of shopping. Add a splash of pimento or a dash of paprika and you’ll have a festive Christmas in a bowl.

Soupe de Courgettes (Zucchini Soup) -- serves 4-6
- 2-3 zucchinis (about 35 oz or 1 kg total)
- Chicken stock for cooking the zucchinis (homemade, in a carton, or made with water and 2-3 bouillon cubes to just cover the vegetables in the pot)
- 1 onion, diced (white or yellow)
- 2-3 servings of Laughing Cow cheese (Vache Qui Rit; it comes in a round, flat box with the cheese wrapped in individual triangles)
- Salt and pepper

Sauté the onions for about 5 minutes in oil in a 3-quart pot until slightly brown. Chop the zucchini into small chunks. Add them to the pot and add water or stock to just cover them. Add bouillon now if using regular water. Heat to boiling and then simmer 30 minutes or until tender. When cooked, purée the mixture. Then add the cheese and mix or purée again until smooth. Salt and pepper to taste.

Handy Hint: If you click here, you’ll see that Mme. Monica uses an immersion blender. I’ve recently purchased one and it is a miracle worker when it comes to mixing and blending. If you get it with the whipping and chopping attachments you may never again need any of those bulky countertop kitchen machines. It’s not too late to add to your Christmas list.

Source

A Reflection On My Mirror Image

2011-12-05T12:28:00.001-06:00

Skyler says, "Things are looking up around here now that Mom can pick me up again and put me in the car

to go places. I was getting bored."

One of the most horrendous side effects of my recent surgery and recovery was to realize that I am old. Not “getting older.” Not “aging gracefully.” But old. I now find myself drawn into those infomercials for Lifestyle Lifts, or the French cantaloupe miracle face creams that will make me look like super-model Cindy Crawford, or those electronic devices that will remove hair from places that only my grandmother had to worry about. I am old. Mirror, mirror in my hand, who’s the oldest in the land?

After the cervical fusion I could turn my neck only slightly to the left or right, and not up or down at all. This lack of mobility made it difficult to handle such grooming routines as styling my hair, changing pierced earrings, or searching for errant dog hairs that took up residence in my eye. I couldn’t comfortably lean in over the vanity in order to move closer to the bathroom mirror for any of these tasks. I decided my best solution was a new hand mirror.

I bought one with 10x magnification on one of the sides. That’s when I discovered a mustache growing above my upper lip that had to be a cousin to – or even a twin of – that thick patch of hair growing above Geraldo Rivera’s mouth. How could I be so blind? Had it been hidden by some anti-aging rose-colored glasses? But now I see. It’s a veritable forest of luxuriously long facial hairs waving in the breeze, so numerous that they could never be tamed simply with a pair of tweezers. With the help of my new 10x personal jumbotron I even found one of those wicked creatures trying to plant its flag and stake a claim in my chin.

Self-portrait post surgery with swollen face, cervical collar, and bone growth stimulator

But that’s not all. Oh no, I’m even older than my mustache lets on. In fact, I must be as old as the moon because surely those things called “pores” are as deep as those craters we see on a summer night with our telescope. The blood vessels on my chin (I’m sure courtesy of my Grandma’s rosacea) flash like Las Vegas neon, spreading out across my fair skin like the Amazon River and all its tributaries. My eyes somehow have become framed by the miles-deep canyons of the American Southwest. And while I was willing to admit to the two or three small age spots on my cheek and brow, I now see that it is really a dozen small Saharas spreading quickly across the landscape of my face.

Where would I draw my own line now in resisting this newly discovered downward spiral?

I’m trying not to fixate on the magnified side of my mirror, to return to the regular side and my attitude that, although I don’t look twenty-five anymore, my face also doesn’t look like I spent my life puffing on cigarettes while frying in the sun. I look good enough when I walk out the door each day. I make the effort to do the best with what I’m given.

What’s a mirror image anyway? It’s the reflected duplication of an image, but in reverse. That piece of silvered glass shows me my age . . . decay . . . every fault. I know that’s me inside the red frame I hold in my hand; I recognize myself. However, it’s just an imitation. The real me – the reverse of that reflection – isn’t aging as quickly on the inside, the part the mirror can’t see. I finally returned to yoga class after almost two months of inactive recuperation and found that I could still stand strong in my tree pose, and I left more energized that when I had arrived. I have a new pile of books to read to keep my mind agile. I’m thinking about where I’ll travel next because curiosity about new places, in my opinion, is a better youth tonic than Retin-A.

I’m starting to make friends with what I found under the 10x magnification. There might be a few things I can do to spruce up that version of Julie that aren’t the equivalent of knocking out a load-bearing wall in a home renovation project. But for the most part I think I’ll continue to put my focus on the self I can’t see, the one looking out on the world through what I now know are clearly aging eyes. That one is easier to improve than the magnified mirrored image I saw.

What makes you feel older? Where do you focus your attention or energy when you want to feel younger? My oldest friend and I used to joke that we never felt our real age (until recently). What age do you usually feel? Please share your thoughts on aging or your favorite “anti-aging” technique in the comments box.

The best way to get younger, Skyler and I think, is to head out for a good walk with good scenery

(our first excursion post-surgery)

I’ve been MIA on a large scale since my cervical fusion surgery. I’ve been MIA on my blog, on e-mail, on Facebook, on Twitter, on websites of friends and organizations that continue to post compelling things I should be reading but have passed me by. Time – and the internet – wait for no man or woman. The surgery went fine. I felt improvement the moment the anesthesia wore off. What has kept me down for so long was a steady stream of physical ailments, one after another, that flat laid me out on the couch, no energy even to read. Focusing my eyes on a computer screen seemed like too much effort. But I’ve started physical therapy and feel back on track. I hope to catch up with all of you soon.

A Thankful Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T08:49:00.001-06:00

This creature we saw on a pre-Thanksgiving walk last year doesn't have to worry about being anyone's dinner.

This was in a protected park.

I hope all of my American readers are having (or had, if you were too busy eating turkey today) a wonderful Thanksgiving. For those readers who don’t celebrate this holiday, select a day of your choice to count your blessings. Here are some things for which I’m thankful this year:

Turkey – Roasted turkey, turkey gravy, turkey sandwiches, turkey soup, turkey casserole. It’s all good.

Health – Not everyone in my family (truth be told, most of us) is fit to compete in a triathalon – or even a 5K walking race – but we’re still here and still moving. I say a prayer for friends who are not so lucky.

Apple pie – I know. It’s corny. But when I make one I’m twelve years old again and in my mom or my grandma’s kitchen learning for the first time. I love the things that make it feel like they’re in the room with me again.

Never-ending supply of democracy – Although some days I watch the television or read the paper and wonder where it’s gone, I know it still exists here. We occasionally might have to make a lot of noise to remind people, but at least my country is not in flames like a friend’s home country, which is trying to claim the big D for the first time.

Kids – Mine, specifically. They’re both heading out into the world but seem happy to come home, too. I can’t ask for much more.

Food on the table every day – I don’t ever take it for granted. This week I delivered my church’s monthly contributions to a local food pantry, which has seen almost a 50% increase in the number of clients they serve. While there, grade school students were enthusiastically unloading a truck full of food they had collected. They are starting young to care about those in need. For that I’m thankful.

Uh, sorry – I’m drawing a blank here. Suggestions?
(editorial addendum -- after I published my husband came back with "How about 'Undying devotion of your husband?'" Of course. There's nothing better to add.)

Love from family and friends – It surrounds me and lifts me every day. I try to give back and pass it on.

After you’ve recovered from mounds of mashed potatoes and heaps of whipped cream on pumpkin pie, then gear up for Small Business Saturday. Yes, it’s another specially designated shopping day to encourage you to spend spend spend. But this one is new and very much worth supporting (read here for reasons why it’s a good idea). It’s scheduled for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. On that day get out and support the small, local businessperson. He pays local taxes, doesn’t ask for kickbacks or tax relief from the city council before he opens his door, and spends his profits locally instead of shipping them off to national headquarters someplace else.

On Saturday visit a shop that sells what is unique and personal. Eat at a one-of-a-kind local restaurant instead of a chain. Pay full price for a book at a homegrown bookstore. Support the businesses that give our communities their personalities. Let them know that you are glad that they chose your neighborhood to set up shop. I know that on Saturday I’ll stop by my massage/yoga studio to check out the new bamboo socks and handmade soap. Maybe I’ll get a massive breakfast at a local diner. Maybe I’ll end the day watching a movie at a theater not owned by national chains, where the popcorn really is popped as you wait and they stand outside the door with a tray of candy to offer you one final treat before you hit the cold night air.

Happy Thanksgiving. I’m off to bake that pie.

My flash is bigger than yours, my nephew bragged last Thanksgiving.

To see what he creates with it, visit one of his many websites (click here)

I hope your holiday is filled with family and good cheer. Pick a letter and share with us in the comments box what you’re thankful for and/or how you’ll support Small Business Saturday. And, if you have any ideas, please tell me what you’d put for “U.”

When you finish here, you can click here to read about my Thanksgiving in France. Finding a turkey in November there wasn’t the only problem.

Eating While Shopping -- Is It OK or a Sign of Cultural Apocalypse?

2011-11-21T08:59:00.001-06:00

Don't pinch or poke the merchandise. Someone will serve you soon.

There’s one store in Dijon, France that has as much as banned me. Ok, I don’t think I’ve been officially banned (although with my weak language skills I never can be too certain). However, I do know that my face is permanently imprinted on the French Black Avenger’s memory (or Le Avenger Noire?). Yes, the man fashionably clad all in black caught this very déclassé American doing the unthinkable. I messed with the merchandise.

The dark-cloaked store manager caught me unscrewing the cap on a bottle of body lotion to see if it really did smell of the wonderful summer aroma of apricots promised on the front. He wagged his finger in the air, pinning me against the wall with a dark look, and his angry brows drew together in a deep frown. You would have thought that I had begun to slather my body with the stuff in the middle of the store. I am forever ashamed to show my face in that store again.

In France you don’t help yourself. You don’t finger the grapes or open the box to check the color. There are no self-serve soda dispensers or many U-scan machines. Clerks will retrieve items off of high shelves, they will follow you through boutiques carrying your choices to the changing room and returning unwanted items to the proper rack with the hangers facing just so. They will choose the best tomatoes for you at the market. They will find the perfect fragrance for you at the makeup counter. But they will not let you run through the place willy-nilly behaving as you please.

I’m thinking about my most shameful experience in that country because I recently read about a woman in Hawaii who was arrested for eating food at the grocery store she hadn’t paid for. She swore that she intended to pay for the sandwich but then forgot and walked out of the store with her other purchases and the empty sandwich wrapper. The situation brought attention to a growing trend of people munching their way through the store as they shop.

I can see the sense in eating a single grape to test a bunch before putting it in my cart. In France the fruit vendors will often offer a sample to entice you to buy. But now I see mothers filling a bag with fresh cookies from the bakery section and then feeding them to toddlers as they push their carts through the store. They reach the checkout lane, hand the empty bag to the checker, and say, “I had six of these.” Yeah, right.

Waiting patiently for Sunday's loaf of bread

I’ve seen people tearing into packaged lunchmeat, drinking from cartons of milk, eating sushi rolls, ripping open bags of chips or boxes of crackers and start feeding their kids on the spot, claiming they still intend to pay for the opened merchandise. Every time I witness this I ask myself “When did this start?” and “What made people think it’s acceptable?” I would have asked myself “What would their mothers say?” if mothers weren’t in on this. Yes, I myself have torn at boxes of mallomars before I reached the car, but it never occurred to me to touch any of my food before I hit the checkout line.

Why wouldn’t I? It seems relatively unsanitary. And if you nibble on a banana, apple, or anything else charged by the pound it’s impossible to get the correct weight, hence you underpay. It also just seems like a tacky thing to do. And while I don’t have statistics to back it up, I’d bet a lot of that “saved” power bar packaging never sees the light of day at the checkout lane. And then that “forgotten” item adds to my grocery bill as stores increase prices to balance out what they call “shrinkage” (broken items, shoplifted items, etc.) How many intentional shoplifters actually make the claim “Oh, I just forgot to pay for it”? Even as recently as ten years ago I don’t remember seeing so much noshing going on in the aisles of the supermarket. Has our culture become so self-centered that we walk through life believing “I want to do X so it can’t be bad”?

I could understand if someone were having a diabetic attack and needed something NOW. That is a true emergency. However, I don’t remember my mom ever giving us anything in the store, and I’m sure we had our crabby moments. She either just endured it or shopped faster or left the cart where it was and took us home. As for the adults, hunger is no excuse. You won’t die from hunger or thirst in the time it takes to run through the checkout line.

Very little seems taboo anymore. The whole concept of taboo behavior seems quaint. Shame seems to hold little weight. Yet when I’m in France I’m never under the impression that manhandling the merchandise is acceptable. You wait to be served at the vegetable stand or at the luggage store (where I buy beautiful backpacks each year).

I know that eating while shopping is not the largest problem this country faces. As our first (and probably last) Super Committee gets ready to produce a Super Fail this week I can’t help, though, but think about our growing habit of consuming before paying. And if we walk out of the store with something we forgot to pay for, well, instead of returning to rectify the situation we shrug our shoulders and say “No biggy – I’m basically an honest person. I meant well. I’ll do better tomorrow.” I’m OK. Just take my word on it.

Engaging in the national pasttime -- waiting in line

Please enlighten me here. What do you think about eating while you shop in a supermarket and why? Do you think it’s becoming more prevalent? All opinions in the comments box will be read with the greatest interest. But maybe what we really need is our own local Black Avenger to set us right.

What I Read -- Lots of Award-Winning Stuff That You Should Read, Too

2011-11-16T00:51:00.001-06:00

The truth, and nothing but the truth -- that's how I roll

Sometimes good things happen when you’re not paying attention. People give you little presents “just because.” It’s kind of like finding a $10 bill in the pocket of your jeans that didn’t get destroyed when you threw that pair in the washing machine without checking first. Or a car departs a street parking space right as you arrive so you can pull straight in and not have to try to parallel park your big-ass SUV. And there’s still time left on the meter.

Such is the kind of surprise I found as I recovered from surgery and finally got back to my computer. I had a message that my new, wonderfully witty blogosphere friend, Laura, had left me an award on her blog Catharsis: Not Your Average Mommy Blog (believe it!). She graced me with the 7 X 7 Link Award. The award gives you a chance to follow me down memory lane, reading or rereading seven of my posts that I think deserve tiny little awards of their own. Then the excitement ramps up several notches as I fulfill the award requirement of pointing you toward seven blogs that will just make your day – maybe even your week!

If this award show were on television, now is when the overproduced musical interlude would fill seven painful minutes of your life that you would never get back. But I believe in keeping it simple, so without further ado the winners are:

1) Most Beautiful Post – The writing may not be perfectly poetic but the subject is beautiful (with the pictures to prove it). It was written at the beginning of my illustrious blogging career when only my sisters and somebody who got lost when googling recipes for strawberry pie read it. Enjoy my Strawberry Ode.

2) Most Popular Post – I know that it had the most comments not because it was the best writing but because I was taking part in a blogging challenge and others in the event came over to read it. However, I’m proud of how the challenge pushed me to try my hand at poetry with Imago Populi, Imago Dei.

3) Most Controversial Post – I can’t say that anything I’ve written has warranted an extreme range of opinions in the comments box. Maybe I’ll try for that more in the future. However, in the spirit of the category, find out why One Must Agitate.

4) Most Helpful Post – I wish I didn’t have so much experience in this regard, but I offer lots of good tips on how to avoid becoming Down and Out in Paris.

5) Most Surprisingly Successful Post – Although I’ve been doing the blog for a couple of years, I’ve only very recently learned how to gather and interpret all kinds of statistics regarding traffic for each post. Imagine my shock when I found that The Joys of Flying Solo had received over 1000 views! The comments, however, nowhere near that. I guess it just goes to show that those little key words you see listed at the end of a post really do matter in search engines.

6) Most Underrated Post – I think it’s worth another look. If you’re in the mood for some Serendipity, give it a go.

7) Most Prizeworthy Post -- Have you ever done battle with the disembodied voice of your GPS – in French? Come with me on a ride through the French countryside in Tournez à Droite.

Here is a list of blogs I think deserve their own award. They give me pause, give me a laugh, give me pleasure every week. So give them all some love by clicking on them, reading, commenting.

Annie Off Leash – Observations about mid-life transition that sounds too familiar.

One Sister’s Rant – Adventures of Bella and her adorable dog, Roxy, with lots of laughs thrown in for good measure. If you click on the link you’ll be taken to a bit of reality that can leave you rolling on the floor (literally).

An Improbable Life – Becky Green Aaronson tells fascinating background stories for her photojournalist husband’s luscious photos from around the world.

Turning the Page – Stacy Green has a bit of humor about the world, a few thoughts about writing, and my favorite, Thriller Thursday, where she uses her writing specialty of the supernatural to explore real people and events in the category of the macabre, violent crimes, and tales of the supernatural.

For the purposes of this award I’m really supposed to give you seven of my favorite blogs. But I’m too radical for that. I flaunt rules at every turn. So instead of finishing out the list I’m going to turn my job over to you (no, it’s not late and I’m not too tired). In the comments box post a link to a blog that you want us to fall in love with. Open our eyes to an undiscovered gem. And I would love it if you clicked on my own posts, above, and left your thoughts there as well.

I humbly accept this bouquet in recognition of my exciting award

In the Spirit of the Holiday, Just Say No to Black Friday Creep

2011-11-14T09:43:00.001-06:00

A sign of the season in Dijon, France

I don’t know about you, but I started seeing signs of Christmas in the stores long before Halloween. This weekend when driving through a small commercial stretch of a road in the suburbs I saw a store already outlined with Christmas garland. I know that it might be an attempt to stay ahead of the cold weather (images of my father wrestling with Christmas lights during a dusting of early December snow), but still the holiday is coming earlier and earlier.

Make note in your history books that Black Friday creep officially begins this year.

Christmas competition (ahhh, what a wonderful holiday tradition) has taken full hold on this nation, so instead of Big Box retailers encouraging their customers to line up well before dawn for a 6 a.m. stampede and Early-Bird Sales, many chain stores have pushed the time even earlier. They are opening at 4 a.m., midnight, even 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day! I shop, therefore I am.

Of course, the executives who made this brilliant decision will not be the ones leaving their families, their warm hearths, their football games, and their pumpkin pie to prepare for this. They say their employees get holiday pay, but how does that compare with the family time that they will be missing because they have to ready a store for the rushing hoards? And in this challenging economic atmosphere, would any worker dare say to his or her employer, “I’m sorry. I can’t be there Thanksgiving night because my family time is sacred.” I’m beginning to wonder if there is anything that this country can’t turn into a chance to make or spend money.

Several years ago Brad and I were in Dijon during the fall and up to the beginning of December. At the beginning of November on that trip I began to notice oversized blue and silver draping, red banners dotted with stars, and white crescent moons being strung high across the narrow streets in the historic part of town. Sometimes, if I walked down a certain street just at dusk I’d be greeted – only for a moment – with all the decorations above me glowing brightly. Then as quickly they’d go dark. It was merely a testing of the lights.

My anticipation for the coming holiday grew each day as I’d pass by another square and see signs that the city had been at work there. The shop windows may have displayed winteresque themes with snowflakes and silver stars, but Christmas had not yet arrived. In Place de la Libération a small village of wooden huts was constructed. In late November these little huts became the center of a temporarily-planted pine forest. Trees bedecked with gold and red balls stood where just a couple of weeks before children had ridden bikes and families strolled on a Sunday afternoon.

It was a true Advent. A true anticipation for the coming season. I was not being blasted with safely secular or over-produced Christmas music in store after store. The newspapers I bought were not weighted down with advertisements for all the Christmas goodies that show someone how much you loved them, like Elmo dolls or electric drills – 50% off! Television did not have a marathon of holiday-themed commercials. But when the glass walls of the market building were draped with a curtain of lights I felt like a kid on Christmas Eve.

We asked Brad’s Dijon colleague when all of this Christmas cheer would come to life and he said he wasn’t sure. It would be sometime the weekend we were leaving because that would be the beginning of Advent, the liturgical start to the Christmas season. With my weak French I thought I read in the local paper that something would be happening on Friday, the night before we left.

Not knowing what or where anything would happen, I dragged Brad out into the cold French night to the plaza with the carousel. It seemed as likely a place as any for a Christmas event. We hunkered down like all the locals at an outside table with hot wine and hot chocolate just before dusk, waiting for we didn’t know what. It was a perfect holiday feeling. Rosy-cheeked children bundled so only their eyes and nose showed rode the prancing horses and beautiful swans of the carousel. Multi-generational families pushed strollers and chatted as they moved down rue de la Liberté. Dijon residents laughed and drank at the sidewalk cafes before going off to dinner.

Then at seven o’clock on the mark, voilà, the entire town center lit up in a blaze of red and blue and silver lights. Christmas came to Dijon in an instant. Everyone stopped where they were and applauded their joy at the beauty that surrounded them. A clarinet sounded in the distance as we followed the music to the temporary village in the temporary pine forest. We bought hot cider at the wooden huts and swayed to the tunes of the strolling musicians. I felt like it was a Christmas miracle that we had been there to experience the celebration.

I’ll think of that perfect Christmas feeling when Black Friday creep officially begins Thanksgiving night. I hope that enough people might boycott this rampant commercialism with a “No thanks, I think I’ll just stay at home with my family where I belong” so that this becomes also the death knell for Black Friday creep.

Are you one of those who have always hit the sales in the dark morning hours the day after Thanksgiving? What do you think of pushing it back to Thanksgiving night? Or do you try your hardest to avoid all the commercial hype? Share your thoughts in the comments box today.

Anatomy of a Migraine, or Thank Heavens for NCIS Marathons

2011-11-11T13:20:00.001-06:00

Autumn windflowers give one last moment of relaxing beauty before cold comes

Two days in a fetal position on the couch with an elephant standing on my skull. A migraine to end all migraines. This one sneaks up on me, gets a head start while I’m sleeping so it was in full flower, past the opportune time to take my medicine. Ice? Heat? A different pillow? Close my eyes to the flashing lights that are really inside my head. Turn down the television to a quiet murmur. What will release the vise grip on my neck? Can I outlast it or will this be the one that finally kills me?

But then the hallucinations start. And the nausea. I know I must be hallucinating because over and over again I hear the voice of Herman Cain talking about “false accusations” and “anonymous accusers.” It’s just that one voice I hear over and over for hours as the vise tightens another notch. “A troubled woman to make false accusations. . . .” Surely it must be the pain talking. In the 21st century women who make sexual harassment accusations surely are not still victims of the “slut or nut” portrayal by accused harassers and their supporters.

Perhaps the reason I seem to hear only Cain’s narrative in this hallucinatory migraine stage is because I keep fading in an out of consciousness. That must explain why I don’t hear the women’s voices. Surely it wouldn’t be because they were made to sign legal documents that forbid them ever to speak publicly about their unnerving encounter while the man with the money and power to circumscribe their female voices could face all the cameras and microphones he desired to declare every 30 minutes in the 24-hour news cycle that he did nothing wrong and doesn’t know what these crazy women are talking about.

Clearly this is the worst migraine delirium I’ve experienced in years. It just won’t end. What’s that? A new voice enters my head, questioning the one-sided tale, bringing up the women, the accusers, that the presidential candidate has declared don’t exist and which he swears never to discuss. The voice attempts to summon them, their stories, their voices in the midst of a debate. But the mere mention of these “anonymous accusers” brings out ghosts of an alternative America offering a loud BOOOOO to the one who questions. I hear the voices in a continuous loop in my head as I sweat and toss and seek relief from the pain throughout the night.

I finally fall into a fitful sleep wrapped in a blanket on the refuge of the couch. Faithful dog by my side to alert me to any real evil in my world, not just the voices in my head. Then I turn again and, click, I hear a new voice about football and tradition and greatness and honor.

The last of the morning glories, beautiful and delicate

At one point I try to stand and move to see if I can clear my head of the voices. However, a strong wave of nausea floods me at the light of the second day. Nausea and voices whispering about sins of the fathers of deified college football programs. Programs that had been worshipped as the shining moral compass within a corrupt sports universe. My migraine triggers overwhelming nausea, leaving me spending day two hanging over my porcelain lifesaver even as the disembodied voices continue.

Through the fog of my pain and the frequent need to retch I hear a second narrative told with only one voice. A voice witnessing acts of pedophilia yet remaining silent until the damage was done a dozen times over. New names float in my dream state. Paterno. Sandusky. McQueary. A collective voice of rioters overturning cars and destroying property, not to speak with outrage for the silent and powerless victims but to raise on their shoulders the powerful who knew and said nothing, who did nothing. Nausea engulfs my body as I hold my head and rock in an excruciating fever while the voices declare innocence behind a curtain of lawyers.

Far into day two of this migraine fog. I roll over on the couch to see if the right side of my brain (which by now is clearly bleeding out of my ear) feels less pain when touching a pillow than the left, which is covered by a skullcap of a thousand tiny needles. I open one eye to see some sun sliding in under the blinds and faithful Skyler still dead asleep at the base of the television cabinet. I shift and feel something cold and metallic at my elbow. Click. The voices in my head shift. Paterno. Click. Cain. Click. Sandusky. Click. Jethro Gibbs.

Gibbs? Ahhh, the low-key, comforting voice of Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, investigator in the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. A voice I recognize. This one I know for a fact isn’t real. So I’m not hallucinating. I’m listening to the beginning of an NCIS television marathon. Something on which to rest my migraine-addled brain. A world of right and wrong. A world where the line between good and evil gets a fair workout. Life is made up of 50 simple rules, like #3, “Don’t believe what you’re told. Double check everything.” In that fictional world a quick slap to the back of the head serves as a wake up call to do the right thing . . . now.

Ahhh, I feel my migraine floating away. All the insane noise, the pain, the endless voices, the nausea it brought me. I sink into my pillow. Skyler snorts a little as she stretches and curls herself back onto her pillow, too. We settle in to await the easing this overlong physical and mental disequilibrium. For the next six hours I doze on the cushion of a blissful and secure NCIS marathon. When I finally stand, pain and nausea free, I’m ready to believe again in a world where the good guys will win – eventually.

If you want to talk about your own migraine experiences, please feel free to share in the comments box. Or, on a lighter side, tell us what are your final signs of autumn, whether in nature or something else.

For your own fun, a montage of Jethro Gibbs' rules for living