Ghost stories
Now, I’m not a believer, as you know, but…
Who’s to say there are no ghosts?
When I was pregnant with M’hijito, his father and I lived in beautiful high-ceilinged old house in an elegant midtown historic neighborhood. Being centrally located and full of pretty 1920s and 30s homes, the area was very hot with the young professional set…and it was a playground for the homeless mentally ill, had the highest per-capita rate of drug use in the city, and was served by an unsafe and unusable public school. With a baby on the way, we considered moving.
But we loved the house—loved it to the point of distraction—and really didn’t want to leave. So instead we decided to add on to create a little more room for the new family member and then hunker down and learn to live with the facts of life in the big city. We hired my best friend’s father-in-law, an underemployed architect, to design the addition.
Bob came out of retirement (it’s hard to be “retired” when you’ve never worked, to speak of) and created exactly what we wanted: two large rooms added to the back of the house, one a spacious nursery and bedroom for the pending baby, and one a custom-designed office for me, appointed with a vast built-in desk, matching cabinetry, ceiling-to-floor bookcases covering an entire wall. What we didn’t know—no one knew—was that during this project Bob was suffering from terminal cancer. He seemed perfectly well as he supervised our contractor and ran interference with the city inspectors. But within a few weeks after the addition was completed, Bob died.
By the time we moved into the rooms, my son was born and six months old. Because I was finishing my dissertation, M’hijito was farmed out to a wonderful, grandmotherly neighbor for several hours a day, so I could write uninterrupted. I had a big old German shepherd, Greta, the only dog I’ve ever known that truly rose to the level of greatness. Greta saved my son’s life once…but that’s another story.
So on this quiet autumn day, I was working in my office, writing, frantically writing, with Greta dozing in her usual spot near my chair.
Suddenly, Greta sat up, her ears at attention and her gaze fixed at a point in space near the door to the room. She seemed to be watching something. But nothing was there. Not that I could see, anyway.
Her eyes tracked across the room, as though she were watching someone or something enter and walk across the floor.
She rose to her feet. And I rose to my feet. She didn’t appear to be alarmed. She made no sound. She didn’t lift her hackles. Strangely, I didn’t feel alarmed, either, even though this was very odd behavior. She started to walk around, in the same way she always followed me around. She moved back and forth in the room and then walked out through the door and into the baby’s room, where she paused, walked around a bit, paused.
I knew it was Bob. He’d come back to look at the rooms. He hadn’t seen them after we moved in—he’d died soon after the project’s completion. He came back to see what the place looked like with people living in it.
So convinced was I of this conceit that I actually spoke his name aloud. Greta again moved across the room as though she were following at someone’s side. At that point I said something like “Thanks, Bob. You did a beautiful job. We love the new rooms.” A few seconds later, just as abruptly as she’d gone on the alert Greta lost interest, came back to me, and sat at my side. Whatever it was that had happened was over.
We walked back into the office. I sat down and went back to work. Greta went back to sleep.
Who knows? Maybe she was having some sort of waking doggy dream, a canine hallucination. But the sense that someone was there—and the sense that it was Bob—was inescapable.
Still: if humans can have dreams and visions of the dead, why can’t a dog? It’s easy to understand how people living in less skeptical times believed the dead could return to visit in dreams. Dreams like that can be extremely vivid.
The other night, I experienced such a dream. For me to dream at all is unusual: as you get older, you dream less and less, and in my dotage I hardly ever dream, and almost never in color. But here was this dream: not only in color but with imagery so tangible it felt three-dimensional—not at all like the usual movie reel.
In the dream, I had gone to Texas to attend a professional conference, which took place in the hotel where I was staying. I hate going to conferences. Few things bore me more intensely than sitting through endless presentations at conferences. So I was less than thrilled to be in this old-fashioned, historic-looking hotel, though it was a handsome old place, its walls painted a creamy color with deeply polished walnut trim complemented by thick, rich carpeting.
Morning having dawned on what I expected would be a tedious day, I got up, showered, dressed, and walked down the stairs that led from the upstairs rooms to go to breakfast. Already pre-bored, as it were, I dawdled on the steps, playing like a little kid with the wooden banister. When I reached the bottom, where the staircase curved out into the lobby, I looked up and there was my father.
My father, a Texan fond of saying the best thing about being from Texas is being as far from it as you can get, has been gone for so long that I can barely remember what he looked like. In a waking moment, I couldn’t conjure his face to save my life. But there he stood, clear as day, in full color and three dimensions, absolutely recognizable.
He looked just as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I didn’t give voice to the words in my mind: What are you doing here? You’re dead!
He said he was in town to see his mother, who was ill and needed someone to visit her.
My grandmother died long before I was born.
Shortly, I awoke. The image of my father’s face and the sound of his voice were as clear and sharp as if I had just seen him alive. And who knows? Maybe I did.
Have you ever had an experience where you thought, seriously, that you were visited by the dead?
Zombie consumerism may take book publishing down
A series from ATC
If you enjoy reading and you like your reading matter on paper, not in little lights on a screen, you need to know what is happening to the people who bring novels and nonfiction to you. The following post, originally published in the October 2009 issue of Southwest Signature, is by Bill Fessler, president of the Arizona Book Publishing Association. Bill is general manager of American Traveler Press. ATP has published more than 250 books, primarily focused on the tourism industry, among them souvenir cookbooks, outdoor and nature guides, and general information about local subjects. Bill enjoys traveling, and his business fits in perfectly with this love.
The latest (big) news in the book industry is that Wal-Mart has begun selling bestselling, hardcover books for $10 on their website. Amazon.com decided to match this price, and now Target seems to be joining the fray. Things are getting heated, and the prices have dropped to $9. As a consumer, this sounds awesome; but as a publisher, this is awful. And yes, this includes those of us whose books are not on the bestseller list.
If a book by Sarah Palin, Barbara Kingsolver, or another big name can be purchased for $10, how are the rest of us going to convince the customer that our $19.95 book is worth the extra money? The answer: we can’t compete at this price. If your book is $19.95, the consumer will simply pass over your book and look for a $9.95 competitor. If your book is $9.95, that means you are selling it to the bookstore for $6 or less (probably in the $3 range). Very few of us can make a profit selling books at this price point.
“If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over,” David Gernert, Grisham’s agent, told the New York Times. “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s Ford County for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25? I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted bestsellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”
“But Bill,” you ask, “what can I do to combat this?”
First of all, don’t buy these $10 books; if you really want to read them or buy them as presents, pay a reasonable price (I suggest no less than 20% off of the retail price). Second, buy them at a physical store, not online; pricing like this is designed to direct consumers to online purchasing, which ultimately leads to closed stores. Third, strongly consider buying them at an independent bookstore; Barnes & Noble and Borders have a better chance of surviving a lengthy online war between Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, and Target, but the little guys need customers in their store every day, buying books, in order to survive.
Last, start discussing this bad decision with your friends, coworkers, and neighbors; we need to break the cycle of Zombie-consumerism (basing our purchase decisions on price more than any other factor). Just as McDonalds does not make the best hamburger, Simon & Schuster does not publish the best book. But if you look at their revenue stream, one could argue they do.
There are better books out there—we know that there are better books among our publishers right here in ABPA. But until we begin to spread the word and change the buying habits of those around us, the loser will be the consumer. Don’t be a Zombie!
w00t! Budget success!!!
The American Express bill arrived today. Hot dang! Just a little over $1,000!!
That’s within easy shooting distance of the $1,000/month post-Canning Day figure I’ve set for total discretionary spending (i.e., all costs that are not recurring monthly bills), and it’s well below my current $1,200/month budget.
And that’s without even trying very hard!
Last month’s success included a $97 bill for pool repair, a $50 trip to Home Depot, and a $25 junket to Lowe’s. Plus the $30 flu shot that GDU’s cockamamie insurance wouldn’t cover. Criminey, I even went to Whole Foods in this billing cycle!
So pretty clearly, even at the $1,000 target, there’s room for some play.
This month I’ve been consciously aiming for the $1,000 budget—last month, I had in mind $1,200 as the spending limit. So far, I’m in the black overall…but we’re only a week into the budget cycle, and I’ve spent about $60 more than planned for that first week. But catching up should be fairly easy: I’ve got all the food in the house I need, probably won’t have to buy gas for another week…uh oh.
Nooo… I take that back: the plumber’s coming over this morning. Day-umn! Bathtub drain is clogged. That’ll be a hundred bucks.
Okay…so I’m about to be about $160 over budget for the first week of this month’s budget cycle. That just means I’ll have to stay out of grocery stores next week. Not a very tall order, since the freezer is so full I can barely close the lid.
So, what’s the explanation for this little flicker of budgetary joy? A couple of things:
1. Mindset. I just made up my mind that I was going to spend less. Somehow, like making up your mind that you’re going to eat less and eat better to lose weight, that seems to set you on the right track.
2. Keeping track of every expense, to the penny. I keep an Excel spreadsheet in which I subtract expenditures from the amount budgeted for each billing cycle.
3. Strategizing shopping trips. I made three Costco runs and three trips to Safeway, each time with lists in hand. All were scheduled shopping trips, not serendipitous drop-ins on the way home from work. During the month, then, I had three shopping days, and on those days I went to Costco, Safeway, AJ’s, Trader Joe’s (once), and Whole Paycheck (once). Because I bought only what I’d planned to buy, costs at each of these emporia were kept under control.
4. Staying out of stores! Other than the grocers’ (if Costco can exactly be called a “grocery”), the only other stores I went into last month were Lowe’s and Home Depot, and the only reason I went to the Depot was that Lowe’s didn’t have everything I needed.
5. Not getting discouraged. Several times in the past few months, I’ve thought there’s no way in He** I can possibly get monthly expenditures down to $1,200. Then when I realized even that was too high, I thought I was doomed! But lo! Here we are closing in on Canning Day, and spending is getting right down to where it needs to be.
Don’t give up! You can meet your goal if you keep at it.
With my share of the Downtown House mortgage coming out of a tax-free draw from a whole life policy, if “non-regular” spending stays at $1,000, my bare-minimum costs next year will come to $27,672. They’re that high because the cost of Medicare will be many times what I’m paying now for health insurance. Though I think my projection is accurate, I may be overestimating the total Medicare cost by as much as $100 a month. If that’s true, then I might get by on $26,472. My projected net from teaching and Social Security alone will be $26,453. Not quite enough to cover costs, but it doesn’t count the $2,000 I can pull down as a dividend from the S-corporation or the $3,960 in projected net vacation pay. In 2010, total net income should outpace total costs by at least $2,600.
The year 2011 will have to take care of itself. And it probably will.
Get OFF the flickin’ PHONE!
This morning as I was strolling home from the daily walk with La Maya, a woman passed me in her car on a neighborhood road.
She caught my attention because she was driving too fast for a residential street. She had both hands off the wheel and her eyes off the road while she pawed frantically through her purse, which she had balanced on her lap. Presumably she was searching for a ringing cell phone. She didn’t see me. She didn’t see my dog. All she could have seen was her purse and the junk inside it.
I wish I had a loud blatting air horn to blast at chuckleheads who drive while yakking on the phone. Folks. If you’re driving, get off the phone!
In a study recently reported in the New York Times’s science section, researchers sent a gaudily got-up clown on a unicycle pedaling around a town square. Afterwards, they collared pedestrians and asked them if they’d seen anything unusual.
A third of walkers who were listening to music or (weird!) walking alone in silence said they’d noticed a clown on a unicycle. Even more—almost 60 percent—of those who were walking with a friend remarked on the clown. But only 8 percent of pedestrians yakking on cellphones said they’d seen the clown.
Think of that. Two in 25 cellphone yakkers were alert enough to their surroundings to notice a guy with a red nose perched on a wheel and wearing a purple and yellow outfit with polka-dotted sleeves.
What it means is that when you’re driving down the road or walking on a sidewalk next to a road, only two in every 25 drivers on cellphones see you! Maybe fewer, unless you’re wearing a red nose and a garish costume.
Damn it. Get off the phone! No one needs to be “connected” (grr!) to the entire world every living, breathing minute! It can’t be healthy for you never to have a moment of privacy, not even when you’re alone inside your car where you should be paying attention to your driving.
Very, very few items of personal or corporate business can’t wait until you get home or to the office, where you can sit down and focus solely on the person on the other end of the line. And fewer still can’t wait until you can at least find a place to pull off the road.
Even if you don’t care about the rest of us who are on the road with you, for your own personal sanity and health turn the phone off while you’re in the car. Don’t allow the cutesy ring tones or annoying jangles to intrude on your privacy, especially when you’re behind a steering wheel.
I never replaced my cell after canceling it during the Qwest Wars. Though I occasionally think it would be good to have something in the car to call for help in an emergency, I’ve never missed the thing. I have, however, watched my friends be interrupted in mid-word by jangling phones, which they feel compelled to answer while they’re crusing down the freeway or in the middle of a conversation. Some act apologetic but pick up the call anyway; others seem oblivious to the basic rudeness of leaving a face-to-face friend hanging while they turn on a phone to respond to something that, about 99 percent of the time, is trivial and could wait until after the conversation ends.
It’s just plain bad manners to drop a real-life conversation to yap on a telephone. Unless some real emergency comes up, there’s no excuse for it. You understand, the message to Friend Interrupted is “what you have to say is even more trivial than the trivial message that’s coming in on this phone. You are less important than anything else in my life, no matter how petty and transient it may be.”
And when it comes to yakking on the phone behind the steering wheel, it’s not bad manners: it’s homicidal.
What does this have to do with money?
Your insurance premiums…
My insurance premiums…
Our insurance premiums…
Your car wreck…
My car wreck…
Our car wreck…
Your medical bills…
My medical bills…
Our medical bills…
Please. Get off the phone!
Mansef: A Middle-Eastern feast dish
Arabs cook meat—most often lamb, goat, or chicken—with a variety of aromatic spices and then add yogurt to make an ineffably delicious sauce. The feast based on this dish is called mansef. Recently in my collection of magazine and newspaper clips I came across a late 1960s Americanized version of mansef. Authentic mansef is boiled lamb with sweet spices and yogurt. The Yankified version substituted cream cheese for yogurt, probably because few Americans would eat yogurt during the 1960s, and those who would were unlikely to find it in a grocery store. The flavor is quite lovely…but not having any cream cheese on hand, I decided to try yogurt and also substitute freshly made beef/chicken broth for the original recipe’s water.
Re-adapting it backward for authenticity and forward for the crockpot, here’s what I came up with:
• about two pounds raw lamb, cut into 1- or 2-inch chunks
• beef or chicken broth
• about 3/4 tsp ground cardamom
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 10 or 12 cloves
• salt and pepper
• a little olive oil
• juice of a lemon
• 2 containers or more of plain yogurt (about 4 cups; Greek-style is recommended)
• rice
• pine nuts
• a little chopped parsley
• tortillas or pita bread
Season the meat with salt and pepper. Skim the bottom of a large frying pan and brown the the lamb pieces nicely on all sides. Then place the browned meat in a large crock pot.
Sprinkle cardamom and cloves over the top of the meat, and tuck the cinnamon sticks in around the meat. Cover with beef or chicken broth. If there’s not enough liquid, add some water to cover. Squeeze the juice of a lemon into the pot with the liquids.
Place the lid on the crock pot, turn the pot to “low,” and let the meat cook until tender, about four to six hours.
At dinner time:
Prepare some rice—for a large group, you might want to cook up two or three cups of dry rice, which will make quite a lot of cooked rice. Judge the amount of rice you’d like by the amount of meat you’re cooking. While the rice is steaming, gently brown a handful of pine nuts in some olive oil or butter. Watch: don’t let them scorch.
Remove the meat from the crock pot and set aside. Place a cup or so of the juices in a blender, and add about a cup of yogurt. Cover the top and place a towel over the top to protect your hands, in case the hot liquid tries to escape. Blend the ingredients well. Repeat to incorporate all the yogurt into the juices.
If any juices remain in the pan, pour the yogurt mix back into them and stir well to mix. Taste. Add salt and pepper to taste. If desired, add more yogurt, using the same mixing technique. But don’t turn the heat on under the pan with this yogurt-meat sauce, lest it curdle.
Pile the rice in a big bowl. Toss the meat and toasted pine nuts into it. Then pour the sauce over the rice and meat mixture. Garnish with chopped parsley sprinkled over the top.
Serve this with some warm tortillas or pita. Diners place a bit of mansef into the center of a piece of flat bread, wrap the bread around the meat mixture, and eat.
About the tortillas. They’re not cooked (exactly) when they come from the store. One way to finish them is to dab a little butter on each tortilla, stack them up, wrap them in tinfoil, and warm in a 250- to 300-degree oven while you’re preparing the sauce. Another way is simply to heat a griddle over a moderately hot burner and flip the tortilla on it until the tortilla is hot. Stack them on a clean table napkin or piece of waxed paper and keep wrapped until you take them to the table.
Image: Nickfraser, Mansaf as Served in an Ammani Household. GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia Commons.
Another little roommate
{sigh} A new little rat has moved in behind the washer and dryer, out in the garage. She (I’ve decided it’s a girl, for no good reason) was wooed by the garbage, which I keep in the garage, just on the other side of the kitchen door. She’d carried various delicacies to her dining table behind the dryer, where she evidently enjoyed them with gusto.
The last roof rat who lived out there came in to eat the dog food. That was when the German shepherd and the greyhound were consuming about 20 pounds of kibble a week. I murdered him—the rat, I mean, not one of the dogs. Pizzened the little guy. He croaked over under the dryer. I had to drag the machine out from the wall in order to retrieve his ripening remains and inter him in the garbage can.
Anyway, the neighborhood is enjoying quite the roof rat infestation just now. On the phone yesterday, La Bethulia said she’d found not one but two of the little charmers…inside the house!!! One of them was after the dog food—her house has an indoor utility room, not a washer-dryer hook-up the garage. And the other was, hevvin help us, nestling in the linen closet.
Augh!
Another neighbor e-mailed to say he’d found rat signs around his house.
Well, what to do with Our Rattie? She was out at the time I discovered her dwelling behind the washer and dryer. I’d had to move my car out of the garage, because the tree guys’ equipment and debris blocked the driveway. This provided an opportunity to break out the shop vac and thoroughly clean the garage. That was when I discovered her pellets and the remains of her lunch.
She must have been utterly terrorized, between the unholy racket the men made cutting down the huge tree outside the garage, the banging and thumping of the washer and dryer running (it was a multitasking day), and the roar of the shop vac. She ran off. One of the men pulled the washer and dryer out so I could clean up the mess behind them, and there was no sign of her underneath the machines.
So I hauled the garbage to the alley and determined to keep each day’s kitchen trash in the kitchen and trot it out to the alley each evening. I really don’t like to go out there after dark—don’t know which I’d less rather encounter: a four-legged rat or a two-legged one. But obviously nothing even vaguely edible can be left in the garage.
Poisoning rats is not the ideal strategy. If one of the little guys passes not through the Veil but through a hole in your wall, you’ve got a major stench that you can’t easily get rid of. Rat traps are supposed to be effective, but I can’t set a mouse trap without slamming my fingers…just imagine what a rat trap would do to a finger! I picked up a pair of glue traps at Home Depot, but they seem inhumane, to say the least.
But I had an idea.
This is gross. If you’re already grossed out by this conversation, by all means avert your eyes here!
It occurred to me that a dog is a predator. A rat, which is much like a rabbit with short ears, is prey. No prey animal with will sleep in a den decorated with fresh predator markings. Dogs mark their territory not just with urine but also with feces—the glands around the anus dispense pheromones that say “I was here.” Or, more precisely, “Get off my property!” Cassie’s little mounds, in contrast to those of a 90-pound shepherd or hound, are so small they’re fairly inoffensive. To the human nose, that is. But what if…
Next time I took Cassie for a walk and gathered one of her gifts off the neighbor’s yard, instead of tossing it in the nearest garbage can, I brought it home and deposited it in a disposable paper bowl. Slipped this into the nest area behind the washer and dryer, and then snuck away to wait.
I think Rattie may have been back once or twice—a few more of her pellets showed up around the washer. But they could have been old ones. She certainly isn’t hanging around, because there’s nothing to eat.
Gerardo blowered out the garage when he came by to clean up the yard, removing those last few pellets from sight, and I deposited a fresh dose of predator pheromone behind the washer. So now we shall see if this scheme works!
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