hoppin' john

I mentioned to a nurse who gives me my bi-weekly shots that we had "Hoppin' John" for New Year's Day--as we have for years.

She had no idea what I meant, so I told her.

Bern and I aren't true Southerners, we're from Appalachia and neither of us ever had Hoppin' John in our childhood. But I found out about it at some point and we started a New Year's tradition.

Here's a little verse many of you will know:

"Beans, beans, a wonderful fruit,
the more you eat the more you poop.
The more you poop, the better you feel,
so eat your beans at every meal."

The main ingredient of Hoppin' John is black-eyed peas, which are, of course, beans not peas. And they work like the verse says, believe you me.

Then their is rice to mix with the black-eyed peas and some kind of pork (we had ham) and cooked kale.

That's Hoppin' John. And it is gooood!!!

There's a story to it--the kale stands for green money, the rice is for happiness, the black eyed peas are for health and the pork is for luck in the coming year.

Or something like that--I may have everything but the kale.

I really love it, but be prepared to always be near a toilet for a couple of days....

have a new year like mine

Today I was thinking about my cousin, Mejol.

What I was thinking is what I would say about her.

And this is how it would go: "I have no brothers and sisters, but I am not an 'only child'--I had Mejol."

Mejol is 6 years older than me and my parents had adopted her as a sort of child of theirs before I was born. Mejol wasn't an orphan--she had a mother (my mother's sister, Georgia) and a brother (Bradley) named for my father. But her father, the other "Jim" on my mother's side (several more "Jim's" on my father's side) had what would now be known as PT SD. from being in the navy in the Pacific in WWII. He wandered away a lot and spent his last years in a VA hospital in Virginia.

But Mom and Dad were childless and growing older (in those days, 38 and 41 were 'older') so they had Mejol be a surrogate

So, when I came along, Mejol was still around and was at our home a lot as we were at hers. She went on vacations with us to the Smokey Mountains for several years. (Why Appalachians went to the mountains for vacations is an unanswered question.)

She corrected my spelling all through school--I still can't spell and thank God for spell-check on the computer except that no matter how many times I tell it to 'ignor' Mejol's name, it won't.

She also, when I was 12 or so, locked me in her room with a copy of Catcher in the Rye and an album by Bob Dylan. That afternoon literally changed my life forever. It drug me out of just being a boy from the coal fields that I had been, to something else. Better or worse, I'll leave to you--but, believe you me, I was never the same after Salinger and Dylan.

I talked with her for almost an hour tonight on the phone. She still keeps me from being 'an only child'.

I love her so. She has molded and formed me in more ways than I can tell you.

For example, she is the only other person on either side of my family that is an Episcopalian!

My journey to the Episcopal Church was made possible because she made the journey first.

Imagine how profound that is to me.

I hope you think about something this New Year that formed and shaped you and made you who you are the way Mejol did for me.

That would be my New Year's gift to you.

Happy, Happy One!

Man ("-impulator") of the people

So, 800,000 federal employees are not getting paid (though many are working without pay) because the President is being pissie about his 'wall' that not only won't be built, CAN'T be built because it would require incredible purchases of private land and destruction of several environmentally endangered places and (besides all that) there are simply areas along the southern boarder where a wall simply couldn't be built.

(That's a long sentence, I know. And probably not correctly punctuated. But I don't think or write straight when I'm thinking about all this.)

And then, yesterday he signed an executive order freezing the salaries of ALL federal workers except the military!

Several trite sayings come to mind: "adding insult to injury"; "pouring salt on the wound" and "flogging a dead horse", among others.

Retired 4 star general McChrrystal said today that the President was "dishonest and immoral".

And I won't argue with that.

Enough is enough.

Come on Robert Mueller, get stuff going.

The new Democratic House is set and ready to help you....

"The time has come," the Walrus said.....There are many things to bring out of the shadows into the light of truth and decency and honor.

Let's get going.

{Oh, as an afterthought, our Commander-in-Chump (er, Chief) flat out lied to the troops he visited in the Middle East over the holidays. He told them he gave them a 10% raise when it was really around 2% and said they hadn't had a raise in years when they've gotten one every year and some higher than his in the Obama years. Isn't lying to Americans in service to their country just damn wrong?}

 

church bells and jeans

We live in hearing distance of two church bells--First Congregational Church and St. Peter's Episcopal Church. They toll the hours.

There is something comforting and centering about hearing the church bells each hour.

Sort of like the pair of jeans I wear almost every day for some time. I don't wear them when I wash them, every two weeks or so.

There's a split at the knee, in the inside stitching that will need to be sewn sooner or later. But they fit perfectly and are oh, so soft and I feel comfortable and centered wearing them.

Things that both comfort and center are things to be appreciated and thankful for. Things that comfort and center are blessings.

Bern does that for me, most of all. Our years together have not always been perfect--but in great measure they have been comforting and centering.

Our new dog, Bridget, does that better than any dog we've ever had. She is so easy and sweet and good you just feel good around her.

Bacon does it for me too--if not to crisp and not too rare.

Birdsong as well--not much this time of year in Connecticut.

Pinot Grigio does too.

I'll give you a blessing: take ten minutes and think of the things that give you comfort and make you feel centered.

And give thanks for each of them.

(You're welcome....)

I'm surprised how much it hurts....

In the next 24 hours, there is a huge possibility that Sears will be no more.

Lots of big box stores have been going out of business--but Sears? Or, as I remember it, Sears and Roebuck...that's a whole different thing.

Most of my clothes and Christmas presents came from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. It was a staple at my childhood home. And there was a Sears store in Bluefield, across two mountains from where I grew up. We'd go there often.

Sears was Amazon but in a catalog, not on line.

And the out of date catalogs were in my Grandmother Jones' outhouse to use like toilet paper--not pleasant as I remember it, and not very effective.

That outhouse was a two seat outhouse though I never used it with anyone else and couldn't imagine doing that. But it did mean you had twice as much poop and pee to put in the ground before you had to dig a new hole and move the outhouse. And there was, besides the Sears catalog, lye to throw in after you were done to dilute the smell.

But truly, though I visited many Sears stores over my lifetime, it was the Sears and Roebuck catalog that I thought of when I heard the company had one day left before total bankruptcy. The Sears in Meriden closed several years ago and I've never been in a store since. Yet the end of Sears surprises me how much it hurts.

Childhood memories are precious. And one of mine is dying.

 

Going to Brooklyn

John volunteered to drive, which made my heart leap up! I hate driving to Brooklyn. I'd rather drive to Columbus, Ohio than Brooklyn.

Eleanor was asleep when we got there, after an uneventful two hours.

But she woke up and we gave her our presents--about 40 cut-able pieces of food and all these pans to cook food in.

She spent over an hour tearing the Velcro that holds the pieces together with a toy knife and putting the pieces in pans. She wanted no help. thank you! And very few suggestions, thank you very much.

Then we went to lunch at a bar less than a block away--nothing you need is far away in Brooklyn.

Mimi started feeling bad and retreated to their 13th floor apartment. I had, on a whimsy, a fried oyster sandwich and fries. The sandwich was amazing as were the fries.

Then we drove back to New Haven, where John lives, to pick up our car. The trip back was a typical Brooklyn to CT drive--40 minutes longer than the GPS had initially promised.

Tim and Mimi were great (besides Mimi's feeling bad) and Eleanor was, as always, amazing! So cute, so smart, so fun.

There was a woman on the street where Tim and Mimi live, with her head on the pavement, though her feet were on the ground. She was there when we went to the bar and had moved maybe five feet when we came back. Bern and I had seen her before. She's a local. John hadn't. He's a psychologist for the VA and has worked in several mental hospitals and had never seen anything like her.

He and Bern talked about her in creeping traffic for nearly an hour.

I almost smacked them both.

This is a woman that needs to be in an institution that we, in this country, have chosen not to maintain because of the cost. Nothing short of 24 hour care would help her--but we let poor folks like her, with serious mental health problems, be on the streets of Brooklyn and most any city of any size.

Children can be held, against their will, in detention, away from their parents, from Central America but a clearly disturbed woman can't be housed for her own good.

Make American Great Again! Give me a break....

Make America Sane Again! should be our goal.

God help  us!

A quiet Christmas

For the first time in 43 Christmases, Bern and I were on our own.

Josh and Cathy and the Bradley girls called this morning--9 p.m. Christmas Day in Taiwan--to say Merry Christmas.

Mimi and Tim are in Brooklyn, where we'll go tomorrow along with John Anderson, who, by the way, was our only guest at Christmas dinner. We also went to a Christmas Eve party at John's apartment with 8 close friends. My Christmas Eve service was at 4 so Bern and I could arrive together.

Pretty odd to open presents alone after 4+ decades of having someone around.

I write something for Bern for Christmas and she makes me a piece of art. Her art this year was about our 13 year, empty nest dog, Bela and had three pictures of him along with decoration and words. One was him in the snow--which he loved until his last winter--one on his back on our back deck and one on a couch, looking right into the camera. We both loved him so, so much--as bad as he was, and he WAS bad! We mourned him for six months before getting Bridget from the rescue place called Half-way Home in North Haven.

For Bern I wrote "Bridget's Diary" from the day we got her until December 18 when she finally knew 'there was no "next place",' and she was HOME!

As odd as it was to be alone on Christmas, it was fine.

We are very at home just being here alone.

Bern and I have been 'a couple' since I was 17 and she was 14--54 years! So we know how to be alone together.

I hope your Christmas was as peaceful and quiet and lovely as ours was.

Be well and stay well in the New Year.