Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Spring is Sproinging in Phoenix

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So, you say, it’s colder than a bygod where you are? Heh heh heh heh… Well, it’s pushing 70 here. Reached 81  a couple of days ago but by and large has hovered in the 70s. If you wanna be warm, please come to Phoenix in the springtime. That would be January…

The plants are going nuts already. I came outside to put a little extra water on the citrus and the climbing roses, both of which have gone thirsty all winter. Ended up spending two or three hours puttering around the yard, yakking with the neighbor, throwing the Queen’s tennis ball around.

So, sooo much work to do — shovel off the desk, plow through the latest snowdrift of paper that’s collected there, do the bookkeeping, write the Eng. 235 syllabus, build a new Canvas site for them, ride heard on the 102s, edit copy, edit copy, edit more copy. And y’know what?

I don’t want to work.

If I’m going blind in one eye, maybe it’s my body trying to tell me to quit working and go do something else while there’s still time. Sometimes I think I should shut down the editorial business, quit taking on underpaid junior-college courses, and just loaf.

Maybe not, too. 😉 Heh! Good thing I pulled down Fidelity’s share of this year’s savings ten days ago — for the first time in recorded history, we managed to sell at the top of the market! And it’s prob’ly just as well I didn’t buy a new vehicle. The money for that (most of it) is in an old whole life policy and so neither earning nor losing money while the Dow merrily heads south, but still…my cookies would be frosted if the bottom line had dropped an extra 15 grand for the purpose of buying a car.

Ruby-Throated_Hummingbird_1The roses, whose population is much depleted because I’m sick of pruning them every year, are bursting out in new growth. The bougainvilleas survived the winter with little or no frost damage, because we haven’t had a single hard frost all year. A fierce little curved-billed thrasher has been excavating the yard in search of bugs, in the process turning over the soil and saving me a fair amount of work. Good bird! The hummingbirds, mostly Anna’s at this time of year, are in a frenzy…OMG! There’s a broad-tail! Who’d’ve thunk it?

We have three hummingbird feeders around the shack, which have had to be refilled with some frequency. Lately I’ve taken to preparing a half-gallon of sugar water and keeping it in the fridge, so I don’t have to fool around with making the stuff when the feeders run dry.

honeyBee-apisUhm… A honeybee just flew down into my mug, half-full of tea. Thought she was going to fall into the drink (heh! the literal drink!) but she came to rest on the interior, strolled up to the rim, walked all around it, and then took off for wherever honeybees go at this time of day.

So many things to do out here. I’d like to move a bunch of iris bulbs that have been living but not thriving in a large pot…want to put them in the flowerbeds around the climbing roses. KJG, who gave me the bulbs a couple of years ago, says they don’t do very well in pots. And it looks like she’s right. The bed by the pool is overrun with Mexican primrose and red salvia, both beloved flowers but plants that tend to get out of hand. They’re majorly out of hand just now! One of the citrus trees has sprouted a big yellowing section, indicative of root rot. I need to climb underneath there with a screwdriver in hand and adjust the irrigation, cut it back a bit. And I suspect the dirt Richard’s crew piled up there (when they should’ve hauled it off or spread it in the alley…) is too close to that tree’s root system, which could suffocate part of the tree. Either way, that looks suspiciously like a job. Probably I should hire Gerardo and his underling to come in here and shovel that stuff out of the yard.

Won’t he be thrilled…? 🙄

In the paying work department, I finally finished the intro to the proposed cookbook. Intro is three chapters explaining how to lose weight without really trying. Still have to organize the recipes in a sane order and list the jpegs in the order in which they should appear — that’s going to be a time-consuming job. Then decide exactly how to publish the thing.

One friend publishes cookbooks as PDFs, but I don’t think she can go through Amazon with the things. A business acquaintance has taken up converting Word files to Kindle format and is anxious to do both the cookbook and the novel that way. But he can’t handle many graphics, and the utility of having a recipe book on Kindle just escapes me! He thinks if people want to actually use the thing — like, say, in a functioning kitchen with water and pots and pans and dishes? — they’ll buy the print-on-demand version. I suppose. But I know I sure wouldn’t…if I’d paid for a Kindle version I wouldn’t pony up another ten or fifteen bucks for a print version, not on a bet.

So that question is under consideration.

The novel is about ready to go, at least to a designer. Same business friend wants a shot at converting that to Kindle. The agent who advertised that she was looking for new adult fiction writers never even bothered to send an f**k-you-very-much response to the full-length proposal I sent, which was quite a project to put together. So at this point I’m willing to self-publish the book through Amazon and try to market it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how.

Nor am I enthusiastic about doing a plain-vanilla Wyrd-to-Kindle conversion for the novel. In the first place, the thing has a DIY map that needs to be drawn by a professional graphic artist; in the second, there are several tables that I do not want converted to toilet-paper-style lists. And in the third, it really needs decent cover art, and I feel no craving to substitute a piece of cheap stock art for that.

The designers that my little business has been subcontracting to charge a mind-numbing fee for interior page design. Which IMHO is a little ridiculous, because once you’ve got a design (which isn’t hard) all you do is pour the copy into InDesign. To design cover art? Don’t even ask.

Uninclined to pour a ton of money into what’s really a hobby project — any piece of fiction that doesn’t get published through a legitimate publisher is just that: a hobby — I called an old friend of mine, the former art director at Arizona Highways. He’s semi-retired now, but he’s still doing design for an occasional client. He proposed to do the page design for less than a third of what my underling charges, and the charge for the map and the cover art was pretty reasonable, too. He’s very, very good: at the top of his form was one of the premier magazine designers in the country. So if he’s willing to do it, I’m going to hire him to do the novel, I think.

Speaking of work, none of it seems to be doing itself. So I suppose I’m going to have to get up and stagger back into the salt mine. Bye!

 

 

$$ Flying Out the Window (and back in…)

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Glasses ApostleQuiet around here just now. The only drama playing these days at the Funny Farm is the perennial Battle of the Checkbook. Lordie! I’ve spent so much money this month that I’ve lost count, and am about to spend some more, on glasses!

About eleven grand remained in the bank at the end of 2013. Of that, $7,700 will have to go to 2014’s property tax, house insurance, car insurance, and Medigap coverage. For 2014, instead of doling out savings in quarterly chunks as I did last year, I decided to draw down enough to cover the entire year’s needs in one swell foop. Figuring on teaching only two sections this year, English-major math suggests I’ll need about 15 grand from savings to supplement Social Security and the minimum-wage adjunct income. I hope.

So: bye-bye Vanguard fund!

Hello cash.

Meanwhile, since I made that calculation I picked up two other community college sections. So far, this spring’s magazine-writing course has only six students — Heavenly Gardens classes make at ten or twelve — but another eight weeks of registration remain for that section, so there’s a good chance it’ll pick up another few. The other extra course is a summer Eng. 102 section, which of course will be packed. So even if neither this spring’s nor next fall’s magazine-writing things makes, I’ll still end up with two sections. Every maga-writing course, then, is pure gravy.

At any rate, with all that booty in the account, for the nonce there’s enough money to cover the current costs.

BUT…the current costs are gonna have to be reined in! Every time I turn around, here’s another $125 or $150 bill. Though I got a smokin’ deal on the clothes I picked up on the latest run to My Sister’s Closet, for example (three very nice shirts, one of them still bearing its Chico’s price tag, a pair of Brooks Brothers slacks, a Dana Buchman skirt, a pair of Eileen Fisher slacks…not bad), it still was $138. I’ve gone out to eat a couple of times, had to stock up on groceries and dog meat, had to pay $50 for the vision assessment part of the late, great ophthalmalogical adventure, and on and on and endlessly on.

So, even though I haven’t calculated the damage to the penny, I know very well that I’ve way overspent this month’s budget. The extra teaching income should cover shortfalls like this, but…gosh, I sure do hate spending money I haven’t earned yet!

Yesterday I put my contact lenses in — haven’t worn them in forever, mostly because contacts are a nuisance. Especially when you’re swimming a lot, as I did this summer as part of the weight-loss campaign. As usual, I can see SO much better through contacts! Even when my glasses aren’t old and scratched, as they are now, contacts really open up the world.

So now that I have a prescription, I’m going down to the Contact Lady to buy a ton of the things (worn every day, one pair lasts three or four weeks). At the end of the year, I’ll buy another lifetime supply, by way of putting off having to pony up another 50 or 60 bucks for another pointless eye exam.

That notwithstanding, I need at least two new pairs of glasses: a new pair for distance and a new pair of progressives. I actually need a third pair: distance shades, since like the regular progressives, the distance progressive shades are pretty ridiculous, but if push comes to shove I can get by with the progressive shades. And right now I’m getting by OK with the up-close glasses. WhatEVER happened to my eye the other day finally seems to be settling down, and I can see through the close-up prescription almost as well as before.

The distance glasses: not so much. The progressives are even more annoying than before — apparently some sort of permanent damage occurred in the right eye, no matter what the doctor imagines. It’s so smoggy here right now that it’s hard to tell, but still: no question the haze is thicker when viewed through the right eye than through the left.

I should drive up to Yarnell, where the air is cleaner, and take a look into the crystalline distance. That way I’d be able to tell a little better just how much new impairment is really there.

At any rate:

• Indispensable: New clear progressive lenses
• Indispensable: New clear single-vision distance lenses (which may require new frames)

• Needed: New single-vision distance shades (which probably will require new frames)

The guys down at the eyeglasses shop can replace the existing prescription with new lenses in existing glasses frames. They definitely will be able to do that for the clear progressives. I lost my beloved pair of extra-strong distance shades some months ago, but I have several pairs of old — very old — metal frames around the house. (heh! NEVER throw out an old pair of glasses!) So I’m gonna ask if they’ll put new clear distance lenses and new distance sunglass lenses in those frames. If not, then it’s off to Costco for those two pairs.

Yeah, I know: order them online. Maybe. I’ll have to extract the pupillary distance from the quack’s office, adding another layer of hassle to my life, as if I didn’t have enough hassle. I think I’d rather pay a little extra at Costco for only slightly marked-up frames than dork around with trying to extract usable ultra-cheap glasses from the Internet.

Damn. Starting the year with a big expense — when you’ve cashed out a mutual fund to live on for the year — is not very pleasing.

Sure do hope all four sections make this year…

Image: Conrad von Soest. The Glasses Apostle. 1403. Public Domain.

Back from “Vacation”…with a New Book

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Hah! That was some vacation from blogging! Naturally, I got the nasty cold that’s been going around, probably once again picked up from sick students turning in germy hard-copy papers on final exam day. Have been sick as a dog the whole time I set aside for R&R. Of course, singing was out for the entire Christmas season, so there’s been pretty much nothing to do but sit in bed or a rocking chair and work.

But that itself has been moderately salubrious. Picked up a new client and have made decent progress through his and the other author’s magnum opuses (opi?).

One of these guys has written a vast saga of a novel. It’s pretty entertaining, but he needs some coaching on how to write fiction, he being by and large an academic sort of fella. As I was racking my brain trying to think of ways to explain how to blend setting, description, narrative, and characterization with the dialogue that he does best, it occurred to me that somewhere in the murky depths of an old hard drive, I had some examples that illustrate exactly those issues, and if I could find that stuff, I would know exactly where to go to find the right examples for the specific issues in question.

A plunge off the dock into the digital lake dredged up…yes! A novel I wrote way to hell and gone back in 2000! And yes, it did have examples of exactly what needed to be explained.

Huh. Think of that.

Out of boredom work-avoidance, I started re-reading the half-forgotten tale…and thought holy sh!t!

Did i write this?

REALLY???

The thing is incredibly good. It was good from the git-go, and right now — fourteen years later — it fits into a genre that’s selling briskly. It’s one of those things that leaves you wondering where these characters came from, where their story came from, and how on earth you ever came up with the skill to tell their story.

Why did I not try to publish when I finished it?

Well, because I got discouraged.

Stupidly — I knew better — I allowed myself to be talked into “workshopping” (yeah) the manuscript with a group of friends who wanted to be Writers with a Capital W. Two of them were taking graduate-level coursework in GDU’s creative writing program, at the time ranked among the top ten such programs in the country. Basically what creative writing programs do is teach people to run their copy past groups of readers who are interested in doing the same thing they’re doing (i.e., fellow authors of unpublishable fiction), subject themselves to criticism by these groups, rewrite, run the copy past…and so on to infinity. It’s an incestuous process that, in my opinion, produces just the kind of narcissistic snoozers that pass for literature these days. It discourages excitement and encourages conformity.

One of these women really did not like what I was writing, which, shall we say, ran to the swashbuckling and highlighted manly enterprise. And it must be said, in her defense, that the novel in question does contain some startling violence and alarming prognistications about the direction humanity will take in a post-post-apocalyptic era. This lady was into postmodern feminist Theory and New Age woo-woo (chakras! :roll:). My hero was the ultimate (male! :shock:) pragmatist in a Dark Age dominated by religious hoo-haw run amok. She hated that.

At one point, she announced that she refused to read any more of it. But she expected me to keep reading her endless naval lint-picking, which may have been wonderful as an exponent of the naval lint-picking genre but which, as it developed, she never had any intention of trying to publish. Because, she said, her feelings would be hurt if some editor rejected it.

Right.

As a result, I became so discouraged that I simply set the manuscript aside, even though it was essentially complete. My co-conspirator had me convinced that it was no good.

Wrong, lady!

When I picked it up again, fourteen years later, I could not believe I could have written anything that good. It is amazing stuff. Right now I’m preparing a proposal for an agent who says she’s looking for new authors (let’s hope this one isn’t into chakras). If she rejects, I may simply self-publish the thing — one of my business associates does Kindle formatting. One way or the other, this thing is going to see some kind of light of day.

So I’ve spent the alleged vacation dividing the days into thirds: half the daylight hours working on the client’s Micheneresque novel; half the day working on the other client’s memoir; and the evening working on the proposal. Let’s hope the index of 460 pages of medieval maritime history doesn’t drift in anytime soon!

As for the experience with the wannabe writer’s group: it pretty much confirmed what I’ve always thought about writer’s groups. It’s the blind leading the blind.

Want to write a book? Sit down and write it.

You don’t write it, jaw about it, and then rewrite, ad nauseam. You write it. You see if it works. You see if it works with professionals, not with a bunch of amateurs. It works or it doesn’t work. Then (and not until then) you move on.

 

A Phone Call to Daddy

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by Jennifer Kinnaman

Here’s a great kick-off for the New Year: a wonderful true story from one of last semester’s magazine-writing classmates. Some people think kids say the darnedest things!

Every once in awhile a confluence of incidents leads to a bizarre and somewhat hilarious event.  Such was the case on a sunny April morning.

The evening before, my husband had called our insurance company to tell them we did not want to renew our life insurance policies that were expiring in two days, due to the downturn in the economy and cost. The next morning, my five-year-old daughter wakes me up with phone in hand to ask if she could call Daddy at work. After grumpily telling her that she is not allowed to wake people up who are sleeping, especially her mother who is fighting a bleeding rash on her neck, I tell her that all she had to do is hit the redial button on the phone if she wanted to call Daddy at work. Since he was the last person I called on that phone, it should ring right into his office.

Ten minutes later, as I’m drifting back to sleep, my eight-year-old son runs into my room and tells me that someone is banging on the front door, looking in the windows and coming into our fenced back yard.  I leap from the bed to look through the window and discover that several Sheriff’s officers are trying to get into our house.  I bang on the window and say, “Can I help you?”  They tell me to come to the front door.

After quickly getting dressed, I open the front door to find police officers all over our front yard, three standing on our front porch.  I ask if everything is OK.  One says, “That’s what we’re here to find out, ma’am.”

They said they got a 911 call from our insurance agent this morning who said that they had a five-year-old girl on the line who was telling them that she can’t wake mommy or her brother up and that mommy has blood on her neck and that she needs to call daddy and wondered if they have his number at work.

Based on the things my daughter was saying, the insurance agent believed Daddy had possibly killed Mommy for the insurance money before the policy expired the next day and had called the police. Mortified, I apologized profusely.

And that’s why my daughter is not allowed to use the phone for the next five years!

A New Year’s Eve Tale: Penny and the Poltergeist

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Back in the Day, my mother had a long-haired Chihuahua. She’d coveted Chihuahuas for quite some time, and while I was still in high school in southern California, she’d managed to bring herself to buy this little dog from a breeder. The pooch was chocolate brown all over, and my mother called her Penny. We brought Penny with us to Arizona when my father retired to Sun City.

Well, Penny was quite a little number. Unlike many of today’s specimens, she wasn’t especially aggressive, although in her tininess she could be alarmed by large moving objects and humans. Though she didn’t bite or threaten to bite, she yapped incessantly. This dog would bark at the sound of the sun rising and going down. She barked for no other reason, as far as anyone could tell, than to hear her ears rattle.

One December, I had come home from the University of Arizona for winter break. My father had gone back to sea, claiming he needed to earn some more money to make their retirement secure but really, I suspected, because he’d found full-time shore life less than the paradise he’d hoped for. So it was just me and my mother.

It was New Year’s Eve. My parents’ old friends, Capt. Karl and Mrs. Mabel Brunberg, had recently moved to Sun City, trailing my father as did a number of his other friends and his brother. They invited my  mother over to their house to ring in the new year. Since a fair amount of drinking would be done and I was not of age — I was only about 17 then — I was left at home with the dog.

So, along about 11 p.m., when my favored TV shows went off the air, I climbed into the sack, with the dog ensconced on the foot of the bed.

Down the road was a grody little burg called Surprise. Today this town, having fallen into the clutches of the developers, is a middle-class suburb of stick-and-stucco look-alikes, but in those days it was largely an immigrant labor camp. It was small and quite a ways from Sun City, maybe eight or ten miles off. But real people did live there.

Well, along about quarter to twelve, the locals could no longer restrain themselves. The car horn-blasting, the firecrackers, and the pistol shots in the air began well before midnight.

The celebration was way, way in the distance, so far away it was barely audible to me.

But Penny could hear it. And she didn’t like it.

She started to yap at the first faint sound of a horn blaring into the black sky.

I figured she’d have a little frenzy at midnight, when everyone went outside to shoot and holler, and then she’d calm down and I could finally get to sleep.

Uh huh.

Right on one count. Wrong on the other.

Once she got herself wound up, she stayed wound. Along about twenty to one, I finally gave up and went into the living room to await my mother’s return. Figured I sure wasn’t going to get any sleep in the bed. And maybe a change in venue would quiet the beast.

So now we’re perched on the living-room sofa. It’s a tiny house, no bigger than any of the two-bedroom apartments where my mother and I had lived over the previous six years. The living room, which was too small to accommodate a dining area if the residents wanted to devote space to a television set, was demarcated from the galley kitchen by an L-shaped wall that created entries to the kitchen from two ends.

Parked on the sofa, Penny has calmed down a bit. I pull an afghan over me and hope to catch a few Z’s.

Wrong.

She just settles down, and YAP!!! She’s up and barking. Settles down again and YAP YAP YAP!!! and settles down and…

Damn. This is going on and on. I begin to wonder if maybe someone is actually outside in the darkness.

Not being the brightest of young things, I open the front door. Can’t see anything, so I step outside to investigate.

A light breeze wafts past and whistles through the fronds of the Mexican fan palm in the front yard. And YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP!!!!!

Holy cripes. She’s barking at the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves.

I go back inside and we take up our position on the sofa again.

Penny has just settled down when BING-BONG!

The doorbell rings.

Whaaa? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP  It’s now one in the morning. YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP Who the hell is at the door at one o’clock in the morning? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

I look out and see the neighbors from across the street. Open the door. They’ve come over to wish us a happy New Year. I return the compliment and say my mother is at the Brunbergs’ house. They, probably noticing that I’m a bit pale by now, ask if I’m OK. Stupidly, I say everything is just fine. They go away, leaving me with my nerves unraveled and the dog vibrating like a gong.

This, I think, is getting out of hand. Enough is enough. I decide to call the Brunbergs and ask my mother to come home.

But they haven’t lived there long enough for their number to have been published in the current phone book. (In those days, the Internet had not even been dreamed of.) I get out my mother’s address book and find it is just chuckablock full of scribbled names and addresses. It’s so full that she no longer can list her entries alphabetically. I can’t find the Brunbergs’ number.

So I decide to call information. In those days there was no 4-1-1 (nor was there a 9-1-1). You dialed “0,” got an operator, and she would use the phone company’s records to look up the number you needed.

So I dial “0.” The phone rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP rings and YAP YAP rings and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP and rings and rings and YAP YAP YAP YAP rings and…. It’s New Year’s Eve. Everybody and his little brother, sister, and yapping dog must be calling their relatives long-distance. The operators’ lines are maxed, and I can’t get through.

I consider calling the sheriff, but think better of it. What am I going to say? My mother’s dog is yapping, please come protect me from the wind blowing through the palm fronds?

I consider walking across the street to the neighbors’ house, but…what if someone is out there? Walking around in the near pitch-darkness does not present itself as a wise idea.

The dog and I go back on the sofa.

Penny continues to doze off, jerk awake, and yap frantically, doze off, jerk awake, yap frantically, doze off, jerk awake, and scream YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

She just settles down after a round of yapping, when all of a sudden a weird noise emanates from the kitchen, followed by a loud KEEEE-RASSSHHHHHHH!

Holy SH!T

I leap off the sofa, hair on end and heart pounding. The Chihuahua bounds to the floor, her hackles up, in full dwarfish ROAR.

She charges the kitchen in a cloud of purple YAPs.

I holler Get’em, Penny! Sic’em, sic’em!!!!!!!!!

YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP

Penny barks her way fiercely toward the kitchen door, but she’s afraid to go near it.

Finally the adrenalin load subsides enough to restore a modicum of common sense to my addled young brain. I realize that while we were on the sofa we had a clear view of both the hallway and the back door. No one could have gotten into the kitchen without my having seen him. And it’s not very likely that a burglar has been hiding in the kitchen all night.

I work up the nerve to creep over to the kitchen doorway. There I see…

A decorative holiday liquor bottle lid — one of those fake cut-glass lash-ups — has somehow fallen off the countertop and tumbled to the floor. My mother and her friends must have finished off the booze, and she evidently left the lid to the empty bottle sitting there.

But WTF? The counter tilework, as was the style at the time, had a border of lipped tiles that formed a little barrier to keep water from dribbling over the edge and small objects from rolling off.

I actually heard this thing slide across the counter before it fell to the floor. The sound was not CRASH but r-r-r-r-r-CRASH. How the hell did it move, on its own, and cross the lipped tiles to tumble off the counter?

That is a mystery I have never solved. Possibly it was the vibrations from the dog’s high-decibel yapping.

I figure she called up a poltergeist. After all, I was a teen-aged girl, and we know poltergeists are drawn to adolescents. And poltergeists are great tricksters. The spook must have thought it would be very funny to see what the little wind-yapper would do if a real, credible noise set her off.

BOO!

YAP!

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Well, it’s a gray day. I hope you’re not out there driving around or trying to fly around in the snow and ice that seem to have descended on half the country.

Hereabouts, Gerardo, clad in a thick down jacket, is out there shoveling up two months’ worth of mess…he must have noticed at the same time I did yesterday that he didn’t come around last month. He called last night to say he’d be here at 7 a.m.

So. If I were having TG here, the yard would look very nice. 😀

M’hijito and I are going to his buddy’s home for an afternoon of socializing and eating. This has become an annual tradition…getting a bit out of hand, maybe — he says they expect 25 adults and God only knows how many children. So that will be a ton of fun, tho’ how they’re going to fit that crowd into their modest starter house out in the suburbs beats me. But young people have resources and energy that we old folks can only remember vaguely and dream of.

LOL! Some of those dreams are the stuff of nightmares.

Back in the Day, we and the couple who were our best friends each had family to cope with over the holiday, and for both of us it wasn’t all that great an experience.

Barbarella, who was given to even greater crankiness than I — and I’m cranky as a cat under normal circumstances — had to make a vast effort to put up with her hopelessly bourgeois sister-in-law; a brother-in-law who, after, having been thrown out of the state AG’s office for some sort of malfeasance, subsided into quiet sleaziness; a mother-in-law whose life was consumed by supporting the man who married her after she gave birth, illegitimately, to her oldest son (our friend, Barbarella’s husband); and parents who as they aged were slowly sliding into alcoholism.

My then-husband and I had to put up with the woman my father married nine months after my mother died, whom I liked at first but came to loathe for her mind-bending meanness; her proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual, extreme right-wing family and their circle of Ohioan ex-pats; his father, who was simply bat-sh!t rabid; his father’s meek, submissive second wife; and his mother, who was a decent person but whose eccentricities and extreme left-wing opinionation drove me nuts.

Thanksgiving would pass, for each couple, in the company of these worthies. My step-sister, whose idea of cooking involved plenty of boxed items, would prepare what I used to call “flat white food”: a typical feast consisted of steamed turkey with the flavor of sawdust, mashed potatoes, cauliflower…the only color on the table came from the Jell-O salads, usually arsenic green or day-glo orange. Barbarella’s relatives served up similar fare.

Then, after the dust settled and the dishes were washed and the flavorless turkey leftovers were stashed in the freezer (or fed to the dog), we would have our own holiday party:

TGTGIO!

Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over!

Barbarella and I could cook, and I mean really cook. And we liked to work together — we were very good at it. So we would prepare some amazing feast, the centerpiece of which would always be anything but turkey. Leg of lamb, maybe — in those days it was possible to get these marvelous bone-in New Zealand legs of lamb. Haven’t seen them in years…they were so good. But sometimes we might have a real prime rib, or a pork crown roast, or…whatEVER was not turkey. The kids would be fed and relegated to the TV room, which in both houses was far enough from the dining room that the humans could linger forever over their wine and conversation. The dogs would take up residence under the table. And a good time — at last! — would be had by all.

My son’s friends, mercifully, like to cook. So we surely will be served up a meal that does not leave us feeling we need to stage our own to make up for a lost holiday. It’s not easy, though, to turn out enough chow for 25 adults and a passel of children in a tiny modern kitchen with a stupid glass cooktop. So these things are largely a pot-luck kind of thing, with the young people preparing the pièces de résistance and the guests bringing the side dishes and desserts.

We’re bringing fresh cranberry sauce and a carrot dish that I’ve found the young people like a lot.

Whipped Carrots with Apple

You need:

• As many carrots as you figure will feed your guests
• About one fresh apple per package of carrots
• Spices to your taste: a little cinnamon and nutmeg, for sure. If you feel daring, try some cardamom and maybe even some cumin. Take it easy with these — a little goes a long way
• A freaking ton of butter. For one package of raw carrots, about half a cube. Increase according to the size of your carrot output.
• A food processor or blender

Scrub the carrots clean, peeling off any scraped or bruised spots and trimming off the root and the stem ends. Steam or boil the carrots until they’re soft all the way through.

While the carrots cook, peel the apple(s) and cut out the seeds. Cut the carrots coarsely into chunks.

When the carrots are done, drain them and cut them into chunks, too. Place the hot carrots and apple into the food processor, add a chunk of butter, and toss in whatever spices you’ve selected. Process or blend until the mixture is smoothly, gloriously puréed.

You can make this ahead and reheat for dinner. For pot-lucking, we intend to cook up a large amount of this stuff, place it in a crock pot, and haul it to the friends’ place, where it can heat during the pre-dinner festivities and be kept hot and out of the hosts’ way until the feast is served.

There’s really no need to put sugar in this dish, because the apples contribute just the right amount of sweetness. If you’re concerned that it won’t be sweet enough and you’re boiling instead of steaming, add a tablespoon or so of sugar to the cooking water.

wild turkey

Image: Male wild turkey, re-introduced to California. Yathin S Krishnappa. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.