La Lectura es el viaje de los que no pueden tomar el tren. – F. Croisset
(Reading is the journey of those who cannot take the train.)
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested . . . . – Sir Francis Bacon“Of Studies”
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. – Groucho Marx
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.– Oscar Wilde
LAUGHTER
When we laugh, a sort of temporary anesthesia is released within us that blocks the pain as our attention is diverted.–Chuck Swindoll in Five Meaningful Minutes a Day
I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person. – Audrey Hepburn
CHINA
Friendship is delicate as [china], once broken it can be fixed but there will always be cracks.– Waqar Ahmed
It’s a wise husband who will buy his wife such fine china that she won’t trust him to wash the dishes.– Honoré de Balzac
I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and salmon sing in the street. – W. H. Auden
We have a week and a half left of work and we are like delicate china speeding toward a brick wall. Sounds fun, huh? – Jennifer Anniston
Start living now. Stop saving the good china for that special occasion. Stop withholding your love until that special person materializes. Every day you are alive is a special occasion. Every minute, every breath, is a gift from God.
– Mary Manin Morrissey
A comment? Another quotation? Both are welcome here!
On the playground of Rheems Elementary School, Red Rover, Hide and Seek and Tag were standard fare. I wrote about fun at recess in a blog post last September entitled Games We Played.
Google Images
In the blog world, I have been tagged in the 2014 Work in Progress (WIP) Blog Tour, offering authors the chance to share snippets of their Works in Progress. When Janet Givens tagged me, my first reaction was this: “I’m so busy in my personal life and my writing life, I don’t know how I could possibly squeeze in another thing!” At the time, she did not remind me that she herself was busy promoting her just-published memoir of her years in the Peace Corps At Home on the Kazakh Steppe while keeping current on her blog.
Before I said, “Okay, I’ll do it!” she explained, “It’s really simple. There are just three rules.”
1. Link back to the post of the person who nominated you. (See above.)
2. Write a blurb about and give the first sentences of your next three blog posts (or book chapters)
3. Nominate four other writers to do the same.
While thoughts of my memoir are incubating, I have spent time here on my blog mining material that may be woven into my book some day. Here, in chronological order, are the opening lines of my next two blog posts and a blurb from the preface to my work-in-progress memoir. That makes three!
November 8: “How to Tell Your Children What’s What”
Unlike Hansel and Gretel whose mother tried to starve them and then lock them out of the house, Mother Longenecker provided well for her children and left behind, not white pebbles or bread crumbs, but hand-written notes tucked away to tag her heirlooms.
November 12: “Purple Passages and Fine China”
La Lectura es el viaje de los que no pueden tomar el tren. – F. Croisset
(Reading is the journey of those who cannot take the train.)
Excerpt from preface of my untitled memoir, WIP:
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
The Longenecker family doesn’t have a cat in residence but we all live together in a little crooked house. Crooked as in lintels above the bedroom doors that slope crazily so much so that they can never be closed tight. Crooked as in floors that sag slightly so that water flows oddly when I’m on my hands and knees washing up the kitchen linoleum. Sagging steps from the 1903 part of the house leading down to the cellar. Every night I sleep downhill on my hard feather pillow.
But there is nothing crooked or saggy about my upbringing . . . .
Now it’s my turn to tag 4 writers for the 2014 WIP Tour:
1. Laurie Buchanan, holistic health practitioner and life coach with inspirational posts weekly on Tuesdays with Laurie. They are short, sweet, and wise.
2. Marie Keates, blogger tells true stories with a British accent. When her fat-girl-slim-blog was hacked (decimated) recently, like a Phoenix she rose from the ashes and now posts at I Walk Alone.
3. Melodie Miller-Davis, author with over a dozen books/cookbooks to her credit, most from Herald Press, she writes weekly on her blog, Finding Harmony.
4. Marylin Warner, writing coach, short story and memoir author, writes of the remarkable connection to her literary mother suffering from Alzheimer’s in her blog Things I Want to Tell My Mother.
I hope you’ll click on the links and visit their sites often.
None of the four are under any obligation to play tag. But I hope they do. I’m looking forward to reading bits about their Works in Progress. So, Laurie, Marie, Melodie, and Marylin. You’re it!
* * *
Coming next: How to Tell Your Children What’s What
“Just two generations ago, preparing meals was as much a part of life as eating,” so says Mark Bittman in an article entitled How to Eat Now published in the October 20, 2014 issue of TIME magazine. Although a recent Harris poll reveals that 79% of Americans say they enjoy cooking, probably most get at least a third of their daily calories outside the home. Bittman goes on to show how easy it is to get a nutritious home-cooked meal on the table and includes 3 simple recipes: Vegetable soup which borrows from the freezer aisle, a whole roast chicken with garlic and lemons, and skillet pear crisp recipe which makes for easy cleanup.
Mother of course cooked two main meals every day. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times we ate in a restaurant. Her recipes were hearty, reflective of the PA Dutch cooking she grew up with, never skimping on the butter.
When I came back from Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, I brought on the plane frozen ham loaf and chipped beef. After the ham loaf is thawed, it’s a cinch to pop it into the oven and serve in a few hours with virtually no prep time.
Preparing chipped beef gravy though, while not enormously time consuming, does require assembling ingredients: dried/chipped beef, butter, flour, milk or cream, and a touch of pepper and then stirring in a skillet on the stove.
Last Wednesday, I pulled out my trusty Mennonite Community Cookbook by Mary Emma Showalter, a book of 1100 favorite recipes gleaned from Mennonite families all over the United States and Canada. Usually, I use Mother’s recipe in my head and knowing the ingredients to what she called dried beef gravy I add a hunk of this and two cups of that, “just what you think” as she used to say. This time though I will follow the cookbook’s recipe for creamed dried beef, which I see browns the beef with the butter.
Next I assemble all of the ingredients and fire up the stove, beginning with melting butter in a hot skillet.
Adding the dried beef to the melted butter sends a hearty aroma throughout the kitchen. Then, sprinkling flour over the butter and beef, I create a roux to which I slowly add milk. Depending on your sensitivity to calories, you could use water, milk, or cream. I always use milk. Keep on stirring until the mixture becomes smooth and thick.
Finally, your creamed dried beef, which Mother always referred to as dried beef gravy, is ready to serve over toast, over mashed potatoes, as you wish.
Typical Menu
Dried Beef Gravy over Mashed Potatoes
Garden peas
Applesauce
Mark Bittman would probably raise his eyebrows over the amount of butter and flour in the creamed dried beef recipe. And of course this menu is heartier than his lower calorie menu of vegetable soup, roast chicken with pear crisp but, oh, is it delicious!
* * *
For years I thought of creamed dried beef as a Pennsylvania Dutch dish. After all, it appeared on page 58 of the Mennonite Cookbook, 1972 edition. Recently, my sister-in-law Terry told me her mother made the same recipe when she was growing up in California.
How about you? Did you enjoy creamed dried beef (or a variation) growing up? Is this recipe part of your cooking repertoire now?
Ten years ago grandsons Patrick and Curtis were one-year-olds at Hallowe’en. In October 2004 they lived far away from us in Chicago. Fortunately, their parents captured snapshots of them in costume, Curtis a pumpkin and Patrick, Tigger, both in store-bought outfits, unlike my own get-ups, which were always homemade as shown in my Hallowe’en post last year.
Last weekend, among the children dressed as Muggles, Dumbledores, or Valdemort, Patrick and Curtis chose to attend the “Harry Potter” Sunday Symphony sans costume. Only Curtis wielded a wand, which caused a wee bit of trouble amidst the spider webs.
* * *
Students at Rheems Elementary School grades 1 – 8, though familiar with Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Ichabod Crane” and perhaps Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” could not have anticipated J. R. R. Rowlings’ Harry Potter series.
Though Rheems was no School for Hogwarts, our village school had its own version of The Sorcerer’s Stone and the Goblet of Fire in the Deathly Hallows of the school’s basement, made ghoulish by the upper grades who created scary events with “eye” grapes in bowls, ghostly recorded voices among the hay-bales, and an illuminated skeleton.
Students raided closets and attics to conjure up costumes for the Hallowe’en parade, the culmination of visits to the House of Horrors in the basement of the school. My Mennonite aunt, also my teacher Miss Longenecker, initiated much of the fanfare that marked all the holidays, both the sacred and the secular. Here she has recorded our annual Hallowe’en parade, including the stumbles and falls!
Quote of the week by Erma Bombeck:
A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween.
Your Hallowe’en memories — a scary tale? a memorable outfit? The conversation starts here.
Coming next: What’s for Dinner: Dried Beef Gravy and . . .
My Mother Ruth Landis Metzler was a simple girl who grew up on a farm near Lititz, Pennsylvania and attended Erb’s Mennonite Church. As a young woman, she wore plain clothing and never cut her hair. Her adornment was of the biblical kind as the Apostle Paul admonishes:
I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes . . .
I Timothy 2:9 NIV
As we sorted through her personal effects recently, we found two prayer coverings and three bonnets, all miniature versions of those large sizes (jumbo, actually) she wore during her girlhood and all through the years we children lived at home.
On the clipboard in her kitchen, we found the business card to the Sue’s Covering Shop in Lititz where she bought her most recent headgear, the black bonnet now rivaling the size of a Jewish yarmulke and fastened with a shiny black-tipped hat pin.
Size mattered among the various congregations in the Lancaster Mennonite Conference in all the years my mother wore prayer coverings. Handwritten on Sue’s Covering Shop business card was Mother’s latest size: D – 19 1/2. When I called Sue’s, the clerk said that D indicates the pattern number, the higher the number (okay, it’s a letter) the larger the size. And 19 1/2 describes the inches around the circumference of her covering.
Hankies, now replaced by Kleenex, were once a part of every woman’s wardrobe. As a young child, my offering (a penny as a toddler, and later a nickel as I grew older) was tied into one corner of my white handkerchief, so I could untie the knot and put the coin into the tin box my teacher passed around during the Sunday School class. Surprisingly, Mother’s hankies were fancy, some even gaudily so, and one even boasts green tatting.
Mom’s purses have usually been black and serviceable though we found set aside a hand-tooled leather purse and remember a lacquered basket-weave popular in the 1950s and 60s. In the October 2014 issue of Guideposts, Malinda Bertels takes stock of her Grandma’s purse and finds in it tissues for applying rouge, a vial of holy water and a faded inscription on a small wooden cross which provides insight and courage to move forward. Mom’s purse contained none of those things, only the bare essentials.
The very last purse she ever carried had a zippered compartment on the outside and all the pockets she liked on the inside for her cards and such. Most important was the pouch on one side, probably designed for a cellphone, but which held her house and car keys. The house key remains, but the car keys have been passed on to a friend from church.
Mother never wore any jewelry except a wrist-watch, but friends bought cute little pins for her anyway. They were never all in one spot, but when we gathered them together, they numbered nine. The only one I ever remember her wearing was the round silver-faceted one, probably to her grandson Austin’s wedding.
Plain and fancy, her wardrobe included the gamut. A plain woman with fancy edges, that was Mom!
* * *
A souvenir of their honeymoon, this pillow was found among Mother’s treasures, obviously a gift from Dad, revealing his softer side.
Was/Is your mom plain or fancy? Are you similar or different in fashion sense?
Emily Dickinson was referring to the morning after the death of a loved one, but such hustle could also refer to what happens weeks or months after a loved one dies, and the bereaved are required to sift through that loved one’s possessions.
There is no shortage of articles on how to tackle this bittersweet task. Sara Davidson in a piece in The New York Times asks, “What to do with Mother’s stuff?” which in her case too involved dispatching with a car, furnishings, and memorabilia. Following Joan Didion’s rule, she tried to follow the principle of touching an object only once, making a decision and moving on.
The most emotional aspect of cleaning out a house is sorting the belongings, says Elizabeth Weintraub in an article “Cleaning Out the House After a Death.” She suggests sorting items into three piles or tagging them with color-coded stickers: Items to keep, items to donate or sell, items to throw away. Wendy Schuman outlines “9 Tips for Cleaning Out Your Late Parent’s Home.” She remarks, “Consider the cleaning-out job a labor of love. As hard as it was, clearing out my mother’s home was the last important service I could render her . . . .”
Recently, my sisters and I said our goodbyes again and again as we sorted, reminisced, cried, but forged ahead, emptying drawers, closets, and eventually rooms.
Some discoveries are hidden. Out of sight. Others are hidden in plain view. Last week we uncovered my dad’s first grade report card from 1921-22 in a box on the upper shelf of the closet. It’s a document, really, a fancy booklet with flowing cursive penmanship. The opening page announces the teacher’s name and school, Frank R. Mauss at Washington School, like many schools of the era on the same grounds as the church, in this case Bossler’s Mennonite Church.
There are no vague S’s or U’s for satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Not even an A, B, or C. No, the grades are recorded precisely as percentages: 86% average for the first reporting period. And a 90% for behavior, not quite the teacher’s pet!
* * *
And, yes, other discoveries are hidden in plain view, like Mother’s Dodge Spirit. With 98,000 miles it’s been around the block more than once, but certainly not worthy of an antique license tag. What to do with it? After some deliberation, our sister Jean suggested we offer it to our friend Edda, a member of Bosslers’ Mennonite Church. A first-generation immigrant from Colombia, Edda is getting a foot-hold on a new life in the USA while enabling her son to get a college education. She is tickled pink with our recycled gift. A bonus for us: We get to see Mom’s car parked at church when we visit on Sundays.
Cards and cars – both have a second life, one an artifact to hold – the other, providing a pathway to the next step in adventure for a brave woman.
Valuing the past and the present, both solemn acts, both borne of love. As Wendy Schuman concludes, “As I sorted through her things, I felt surrounded by her presence. In a way, it helped me say my final goodbye.”
Have you had to say goodbye to someone or something you have cherished?
How have you learned to say “Goodbye”?
Coming next: Mom’s Accessories: Bonnets, Hankies, Pins, and More
Aunt Ruthie Longenecker takes us to Philadelphia, my first recollection of a train trip. I feel the rocking motion of the Pennsylvania Rail Road train car we occupy, the clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails, and the prize of the big city zoo at the end of the trip: lions and tigers and elephants, oh my!
When I pick raspberries with Grandma Longenecker, I hear the train’s clatter-clack over segments of track speeding from Lancaster to Harrisburg. With our round aluminum kettles laden with berries and handles that cut into the palms of our hands, we stand just 50 yards from the track, feeling the vibration of the passing train through our shoes, gazing in awe.
Years later, the young Beaman family bridges the gap between Florida and Pennsylvania via Amtrak’s Silver Meteor. The miles disappear behind us effortlessly. Parents and children eat, read, stretch our legs as some passengers wonder “Who’s that little kid running in the aisle?”
Train Trips Engage the Senses:
Rocking motion as the train speeds along
Sound of the wheels on the rails
Smells of warm exhaust, food in the dining car,
Surprising views as train wends its way through towns, countryside
Spontaneous, easy conversation sometimes with strangers
Alexander McCall Smith, known for his light mysteries that kindly expose the foibles of his characters, describes the mystique of train travel in his recent novel Trains and Lovers (2012):
“I’m thinking that’s a fishing boat.”
It was. He saw it from the train, but not for more than a minute or two, as the line followed that bit of coastline only for a short time before it suddenly swerved off, as railway lines will do. The view of the North Sea was lost, and trees closed in; there was the blue of the sea one moment and then the blurred green of foliage rapidly passing the window; there was slanting morning sun, like an intermittent signal flashed through the tree.”
Train Poetry
Of course, nostalgic verse has been written about train travel, Sara Teasdale hearing and seeing from In the Train the “restless rumble,” the “drowsy people” and the “steel blue twilight in the world (1915).
Edna St. Vincent Millay reflects on viewing the distant steam locomotive in Travel (1921)
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.
You can hear the rocking rhythm of the train in W. H. Auden’s lines from Night Mail – This is the night mail crossing the Border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order.
The Destination
Arriving in Pennsylvania from Philadephia more than ten years ago, grand-niece Heidi runs to meet Aunt Ruthie at the tiny Amtrak terminal in Elizabethtown – exchanging cold, wet weather for a warm, welcoming hug.
Your experience with train travel . . . tell us about it.
A response to the anecdotes or poetry here? All replies welcome.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. – Albert Camus
Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons. – Jim Bishop
Original Photo: Autumn in Pennsylvania
Quotation, noun: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. – Ambrose Bierce
(In September’s Purple Passages, I published one of Bierce’s quotes on photography. The one above was contributed later by photographer son Joel.)
CAREBEAR
A bear grows more alive with age. No one with one ounce of sensitivity could ever consign a bear to the dustbin. – Johnnie Hague
Mom with sheepish look holding teddy bear 1992
“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh?” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s hand. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh.
The cell phone has become the adult’s transitional object, replacing the toddler’s teddy bear for comfort and a sense of belonging. – Margaret Heffernan
People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it’s scary. And the bear because it’s intense, but the monkey makes people laugh. – Lorne Michaels
HUMOR
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road. – Henry Ward Beecher (Contributed by blog reader Carolyn Stoner)
It is bad to suppress laughter. It goes back down and spreads to your hips. – Fred Allen
* * *
Your opinion please: the quote about the teddy bear and cellphone. A comment on something else? Obviously, I like to chat too.
This time I’m focusing on a birth, our grandson Ian’s miraculous birth seven years ago this week. According to the doctor’s calculations, he was scheduled to arrive on January 9, his Grandpa Beaman’s birthday. Instead he made his appearance on his mother Sarah’s birthday, October 5.
All births are miraculous, really, the tiny embryo maturing into a marvelous baby with millions of synapses making connections within the brain, a sense of rhythm and an ability to breathe and suckle at the same time. One study mentioned that babies can pick out the gender of other babies even when they are cross-dressed, something adults cannot do.
But Ian’s birth at 26 weeks gestation weighing a mere 2 pounds, 5 ounces meant many un-connected synapses and a severely undeveloped breathing apparatus. For weeks it was touch-and-go, and we weren’t certain that we would be bringing him home from the NIC Unit at Wolfson Children’s Hospital. Aside from the frightening awareness that Ian had a hole in his heart, we were introduced to a whole new vocabulary of problems: bradycardia, retinopathy, hip dysplasia. Translation: Slow, interrupted heartbeat requiring a nose cannula, undeveloped blood vessels in retina, and an immature hip ball and sock requiring a harness to hold legs in a frog-like fashion. Here is his photo-story:
Hello, world!
My journal records that on November 29, 2007 Ian weighs 4 pounds, 3 ounces and is taking three bottles a day. He is also employing the services of a speech therapist and an occupational therapist along with physical therapy.
How would a speech therapist help a premature baby who can’t speak or an occupational therapist assist a child whose main job was trying to survive? Speech therapy facilitated the transition from tube feeding to bottle feeding and the occupational therapy improved the range of motion inhibited by hip dysplasia.
“Did you finally bring me home?” asks Ian.
After a 14-week stay in the hospital, Ian is brought home. Glory, hallelujah! Though still on a breathing apparatus, he resumes a more normal life with his family, under the watchful eye of his brother.
“Ian, here’s my advice,” says Dr. Curtis.
Praise God – At age seven, Ian is now at the 98 percentile in height and weight for his age and is taking an advanced course of study in first grade at his school. There are delays in behavioral development though, possibly attributable to his prematurity. But who can be sure whether it’s prematurity or personality.
* * *
I wrote a letter to each of my grand-children before their first birthday and sent it to their home address so it would have a post-mark. In Ian’s case, I waited until the one-year mark to write and send his letter. Call it a welcome-to-the-world, a blessing from Grandma/NaNa in writing. Here is a copy of the letter he received:
Ian has not opened this letter yet though he is able to read. In fact, none of the grand-children have opened and read their letters and I’m wondering at what age they should be read. It seems the opening and reading calls for some special occasion. What do you think? I welcome your suggestions!
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful . . . .
Psalm 139: 13, 14 NIRV
Your advice on letter reading welcome. Other comments or suggestions from your own experience. You will always get a reply from me and maybe from other readers. Thank you!
“Every child is a story yet to be told.” Sesame Street
Thursday, Friday, Saturday till Sunday comes again.
Sung to a melody with a 4-note range similar to “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”
10 Things My Family Did or Did Not Do on Sundays
What we did . . .
Went to church, always unless deathly ill
Invited folks to a nice Sunday dinner after church – or were invited to home of relatives or friends. “Don’t look on turns” was a saying spoken readily from one hostess to the other but not strictly adhered to. Dinner served with fine china, crystal, best silver unless it was a picnic
Drove in the Studebaker to Uncle Landis, Uncle Abe or Aunt Verna’s house – Didn’t call ahead, just appeared at the door – and they would do the same!
Took a walk in the woods or across fields
Nap, my mom in the bed, my dad in his chair
Daddy drying dishes – Only on Sundays after church!
What we never did . . .
Ate in a restaurant
Went shopping
Did the laundry
Cleaned the house
Mowed the lawn
Our neighbors, Paul and Edna Mumma, owned and operated the Clearview Diner along Route 230 between Elizabethtown and Mt. Joy, Pennsylvania. As members of the Church of the Brethren (an Anabaptist group similar to the Mennonites) the Mummas adhered to the closed-on-Sunday rule as well.
Nowadays most retail stores are open seven days a week. Banks and almost all businesses are accessible online even on Sundays. Yet there remain a few stores like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A whose doors are locked on the Lord’s Day, the latter with soaring profits.
Your thoughts please – a reminiscence or an opinion!
Coming next – Ian’s Miracle Birth: The Million Dollar Baby
Plain and Fancy 