Morning glory

What a glorious morning, the weather is cool, the Sun is bright, and the humming bird is browsing the nasturtiums. I have been up since three A.M. and welcomed the sunrise. I am even wearing long pants and a shirt, something that I have not done in a while.
I have been reading about an old friend, Gilgamesh. The story about the Flood makes more sense now that I read the National Geographic article about the Marsh Arabs in Iraq. Build an ark, simple. Just turn the house upside down, tar the inside, pitch the outside, and the ark is done. I guess that that discounts the idea of the Atlantic Ocean breaking through at Gibraltar. Still, there is Ballard's discoveries of the villages beneath the sea near Turkey. Will we ever know where them silly unicorns lived?
I am rereading a number of things that I read in my youth. So many things make sense now that didn't then. Does this mean that some time in the future I will be able to understand Hawking?
I am overrun with tomatoes. Each day I make a fresh tomato sauce. It seems a shame to use Brandywines in a sauce but what am I going to do with a surfeit of tomatoes? My little pals the fruit flies are loving this.

A taste of Fall

It is cool here this morning. I am sure that the temperature will soon be in the eighties again but it is nice to once again have a cool morning. It is easy to deal with the cold. Put on another sweater and the long underwear but I have always had trouble dealing with the heat.
I have roofed in August, dealt with Kentucky in August, and labored outside in southern Texas in August. The heat doesn't seem to effect me as much as it does other people but it does effect me. Maybe it is just being a svenska boyo but I do prefer the cold. There are not many Swedes in Alabama but there sure are a lot of them in Maine and Minnesota. Maybe it is the mystery of the women. It is not tempting to see what is under a sweat soaked blouse but an Icelandic sweater, now that is another story.

Little Dickens

I was thinking of the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities. It is like that here but on a much smaller scale. It will be the easiest of times and the most trying of times. There is something approaching that may cause things to get difficult. It is not a calamity nor a doom but it is something that I could have avoided if I had been just a tad more diligent. I will get through it, somehow I will get through it, I just at this moment cannot see how.
It is like everything else about my life. Through a legacy of misguided action or the lethargy of inaction I have put myself in a situation and somehow the situation is going to have to work itself out, it always does. It may take moments or it may take years but somehow things work out.
There have been times when what seemed like a monumental catastrophy has turned out to be the best thing for me in the long term. I think back to an accident many years ago that probably saved my life and two wrenching partings that probably turned out best for everyone involved.
There are those in my life that I would desperately like to be closer to but, knowing me in my peculiar ways, it is probably better for them that we maintain a distance. Absence may make my heart grow fonder but distance makes their hearts grow tolerant. Is it better to be loved or just not despised? Toleration is the answer.
As the poster boy for Muddles, I will just muddle through. It is sometimes difficult to remember that without some rain there is no mud to muddle through and only a parched and impassible desert. It is better to muddle than to drown in an ocean of rain or dessicate in an arid wasteland.

A time of troubles

Last night I watched television. It is something I have been trying not to do but there was a special on WGBH about the younger days of Bob Dylan. It awakened old feelings and new thoughts.
It was amazing how young he looked. I had forgotten that then he almost always had an impish grin on his face. The duet with him and Joan Baez both paradying Bob Dylan was especially refreshing.
Then the show got serious. So many of my generation remember the Sixties as a golden time. We forget that it was a time of racial violence, assasinations, parents and children alienated from each other, war, and drugs wreaking their untold havoc on so promising a beginning.
Then came the ultimate Dylan, a man who was a true wordsmith, singing the saddest lyric ever written. "How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home, a complete unknown?".
Then it hit me, "No direction home". Thomas Wolfe was right. He was blunt and cruel but right. I miss coming in out of the cold to a warm home with a hot meal on the table and people who were genuinely glad to see you, who smiled gently at your supposed troubles and worries, and reassured you that everything was going to be allright. It was allright for them because you were home safe for one more day. They loved you but they also knew you very well. They knew that a hot meal and a warm place to sleep, surrounded by people that cared about you, were more important than anything else and they also knew that you didn't know that and were reaching out to the world for justification and validation. It isn't out there and never was. Working class heroes sleep much better than Rock stars. Rock stars bathe in the glory of a concert and then stay up till dawn in the long denoument of their day. Working class heroes endure their day and then go home and bathe in the paradise that is the busom of their family, if they are wise.
Dylan doesn't seem to smile much anymore. Perhaps he has Hibbing on his mind. Are there tamborines there? You can spend a lot of days coming in from the cold there.

Stinkybraten

Well, I tried the sauerbraten. I got the same result that I got when I tried it long ago. Imagine a roast beef sandwich from a convenience store. The kind where the use/by date is three months ago and the meat is a beautiful pink and green shade. It was not pleasing at all and a wasteful use of what could have been a wonderful Yankee Pot Roast. I think that the red wine vinegar is the culprit.
I have a new, for me, recipe book of Jewish cooking from the tenements of New York. I grew up on tzimmis and knishes and blintzes and pastrami and knackwurst and herring and roast brisket. The book has them all except for the brisket. No Gentile will ever be told the recipe for brisket. The recipe was destroyed by Titus and is only handed down orally by Jewish Mothers to their daughters. A Gentile attempting roast brisket is like a Mexican attempting Swedish Meatballs. It will be a disaster.
It is hot here. Not just warm but hot and it is five o'clock in the morning. It has been eighty degrees every day for the last few days. The tomatoes are loving it but the tomato eater is not. Fall will come soon but not soon enough.
Blintzes are in the future, maybe even Jewish Chicken Soup which has no equal anywhere in the world. It would be the nemesis of the flu that is being forecast. An old Jewish proverb stated that "If Chicken Soup and sleep can't help you, you are doomed.". As an added benefit, there will be schmaltz!

Ahrrgust

I recently posted that August was cool. I was tempting fate when I did that. So far, August has not been cool. During the day it seems to be always in the eighties. The nights have been warm and damp. The early mornings have been very pleasant, a cool breeze is almost always with me when I have coffee on the porch early in the morning. September is coming, September with its foretaste of Fall and frost and cider and cinnamon doughnuts. It can be warm but usually is dry so there is pleasure in the air that wafts through our lungs and keeps our feet from announcing their presence. September, when the Red Sox begin their traditional plunge from first place to 1.0001th place. Landsdowne Street will always be in first place. First place because of the sausage and peppers vendors and the beloved Cask and Flagon.
The tomatoes are beginning to ripen. In the last few days I have had Mortgage Lifters and Brandywines and Cherokee Purples. All sliced with just a touch of salt. The Brandywines are amazing, tomatoes with the flavor that I remember from the roadside stands in New Jersey. I corrected the problem I was having with blossom end rot with bone meal and lemon juice and it is working well.

Breathless

Yesterday a woman stepped back into my life who left me breathless. The last time that I saw her she was just a pretty young lady. She stepped off of her shell and into my kitchen.
There are women that are cute, there are women that are pretty, and once in a very great while there are women that seem to stop the rotation of the Earth with their loveliness and grace. Eighteen years ago this condition would have alarmed me and kept me up until the wee hours, waiting for the sound of a car in the driveway.
The last time I saw such a woman was in Eatontown New Jersey, in a smoke-filled, boozy, room. She too left me breathless and caused me to threaten an old friend, a friend who was bound to me with the olive-drab bonds that have no peer.
Many years ago, I was going down the escalator in Filene's Basement. Coming up on the other side was a young lady with similar attributes and not much clothing. That was the day that I realized how much my life had changed. Normally a man's thoughts would flow into an easily predictible pattern. Only one thought raced through my mind, "Boy am I glad that I'm not her Father!". (Insert driveway sounds here).
The woman sat in my kitchenand shared a meal with me. All the while I was marvelling at the change that has come over her. Her mind is as beautiful as it has always been. There is no rancour or lamenting to her conversation. There is still the tongue, a katana that shreds pomposity into the dustbin that it deserves. There is only one person that has aroused her ichor. She spoke of sacrificing that person to Pele but I doubt that that person posseses the primary prerequisite.
I should have seen this coming. The woman comes from a long line of beautiful women, beautiful of form, beautiful of mind, and beautiful of spirit. I have had something to do with a trinity of such women. The only thing that they got from me was the verbal katana that they keep hidden but can unleash at any moment.
Blessed is the Father of daughters but wretched is the Father of beautiful daughters as he sits making tea, waiting for the sound in the driveway. Blessed is the Father of daughters who have learned to think and reason but wretched is the Father of daughters who have learned to apply those gifts to his mentoring. Blessed is the Father of daughters who have learned to speak what they are thinking but wretched is the Father of daughters who have learned to loose their katana on his pomposity.
Is it blasphemy to pity God? For there God was, with the power to change the world forever, and picked the wrong gender. He might have created a world with no war, no stife, and no famine. A world with only a woman to rule it who had snakes for bracelets. I guess that he just took a look at her oufit and said "I'm glad that I won't be her Father.".
How do I feel about my daughters? In the words of my old poetry mentor "Cherished they are and legend they will be.".

August is cool

I am up very early in the day. The reason is simple, I woke up to put a blanket on the bed. I came awake realizing that a very cool breeze was blowing in the window and across the bed. This is not normal for August in New England. I live in an attic apartment and am usually blessed with a built-in sauna in August.
Each day this Summer there has been a nice breeze, not only at night but during the day also. It is pleasant to walk and pleasant just to sit and read. Who knew that being old and retired was going to be so easy?
The lyrics of a song I heard a while ago are wafting through the dusty corridors of my mind.

"It's allright
It's O.K.
It doesn't really matter if you're old and gray
It's allright
It's O.K.
You're coming to the end of the day."

It is surprising that such thoughts do not bring fear or gloom. Here I sit at two-thirty in the morning. It is not the end of the day, it is the beginning of a new day. It is time for change in the way I live my life, changes I have tried to make so many times in the past. Out with the extremes that have bothered me so much in the past. No 10's and therefore no 1's, just an ongoing procession of 5's. "Ease on down the road". There will be ruts in the road but hopefully no chasms.

Trying

I am going to try sauerbraten. I have always been intrigued by it and finally found an original recipe. I have gathered together all of the ingredients, except for juniper berries and don't think adding gin would be a good idea, and will assemble the marinade today. The meat has to marinate for two to three days.
The recipe book is all German cooking. From what I can see, there cannot possibly be a skinny German anywhere. There is even a recipe for German potato salad, something I had at my Mother-in-Law's long ago and have a very fond memory of. Any memory of Betty Eulo is a very fond memory.