Light and Momentary

Late October Snapshot

Sometimes I look back at blog posts from 2015 and I think to myself, "You had no idea what was coming. NO IDEA!" I expect someday I will look at January 2020 posts in the same way. 

Today was Stella's first day back in in-person school. She'll attend two days per week until the governor shuts us down -- Midwest COVID numbers aren't looking great, so it seems inevitable. But I won't worry about that today: I'm glad she was able to start junior high in person after weeks of only seeing teachers and classmates on a screen. DERNIT, I just realized I didn't get a picture. So let me tell you what she looked like instead: carefully chosen black skirt and green shirt, just the right color for her golden-green eyes. Her feet are almost as big as mine now, if you can believe it, and she grabbed a pair of my socks in haste as we were heading out the door. It's been so long since anybody had to get to an actual school building that we are out of the sock habit.

The junior high isn't very far away but it's not a nice walk-- there's a crowded intersection with too many student drivers, and then you have to cross two big busy streets with no lights or crossing guards. Stella is worried about the bus, though, and I don't want to contribute to extra parent traffic on the aforementioned big busy street, so we walked it today. I was a little worried as we drew near, because there weren't any buses and there were hardly any cars out front. Had I misunderstood the date, or the schedule? Turns out that's just how it looks when you deliberately keep the numbers low -- today only half of the sixth-graders who will attend in person were present, which is something like an eighth of the usual student body.

As we approached the principal greeted us warmly. "Hello!" she said. "I have been waiting for TWO HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE DAYS to meet you! May I introduce you to the teachers who are waiting inside?"

And off she went.

I suppose adult life is always an exercise in making decisions with incomplete information, but I am really feeling it keenly this year. I pulled Stella out of band and chorus, mostly because of that Washington state choir practice. It seems like much of the transmission at that choir practice must have been the result of aerosolized virus, against which masks are less effective. I'm not convinced it's a great season in which to be playing the flute in a large group either. 

But I don't know. I just don't know. If I were really worried about aerosol transmission via singing I wouldn't be playing bass for Mass every weekend, but I'm not about to give that up. I can explain it to myself in terms of total number of minutes of singing and total number of people singing, but it boils down to this: I am guessing. I am guessing all the time. We're all guessing. It is wearying.

This afternoon I walked back over to the school to meet her, and I ordered a latte online from a little nearby coffeeshop to drink on the way. It was so delicious -- the first time since March that I had drunk coffee prepared outside my house by someone not related to me.

The first day of in-person school went well aside from a hideous lunch (hard-boiled egg, green pepper strips, cold cinnamon roll, dried cranberries -- no other options available). Pete goes back next week, also two days per week. At least two days per week, at least for a little while, I will be alone in an empty house.

I have not spent much time alone during the past seven months.

Perdita went in this evening to be spayed, and she is still pretty foggy. They gave us pain medication for her, which I wrapped in a little piece of ham, but she felt too crummy to do more than sniff at it. I've been dreading the recovery -- Ziggy had a pretty tough time. Dread, though, is rooted in the idea that we can know what's coming, and if 2020 has taught me one thing, it's that I have no idea what's coming.

This morning for the first time I allowed myself to think "in 15 days we could have elected a new president" -- and OH the wash of relief that poured over me at the prospect! See above, though: we never really know what's coming. When I remember this fall I want to remember the strange mix of hope and uncertainty, the small glimpses of normal amid the sea of strangeness.

Weekend Update

The college kids came home this weekend for the first time. It's so nice to have four kids at the dinner table again.

Our foster dog is not very used to living in a people house, it turns out: not house-trained, still figuring out what's okay to chew. Good thing she's cute.

I have settled on calling her Perdita. This is because (a) Perdita is one of the dogs in 101 Dalmatians, and this Perdita has spotted ears and a spotted belly, and (b) Perdita is a character in The Winter's Tale (though let us hope she does not exit, chased by a bear), and (c) Perdita means "the female who was lost," which is a good name for a rescue dog.

I do not think I can get a good picture of her lips, but she has these funny irregular spots along them. She looks like a 4-year-old who borrowed her mother's lipstick and smeared it all around.

When Champ was here he thought squeaky toys were The Best -- except he loved them so vigorously that they stopped squeaking in short order. He would continue to try to wring squeaks from them long after their squeakers had given up the ghost. So when Ziggy came, we got him a little squeaky pig. Well, Ziggy thought it was a Devil Pig. He would flee from the Devil Pig. If he'd had opposable thumbs he would have been flinging blessed salt and the St. Michael prayer in its direction. Opposable thumbs and better catechesis, I guess.

When we first showed Perdita the Devil Pig, she agreed with Zig about its origins. She barked vigorously at it. She backed cautiously away from it. Today, though, she has decided that even a Devil Pig deserves a second chance. She and the Devil Pig are now fast friends. She plays Devil Pig Theme and Variations: squeeeeeak-squ-squ-squeak.

I guess that's progress? one small step toward civilization, for her to learn to play with toys as they're intended to be played with?

But just between you and me and the internet, Devil Pig might be heading off to the Sty in the Sky pretty soon. There are a few too many repeats in Perdita's version of Devil Pig Theme and Variations.

More Foster Fun

Check it out-- we have a new foster dog.

We know nothing about her background, but she is sweet and trusting.

She came to us with a name that I dislike, but she doesn't seem to answer to it. They might have just slapped it on her in the shelter, don't you figure? I might call her Perscitia while she is with us, after one of my favorite Temeraire characters. It shares some phonemes with the other name, but I like it much better.

I think she looks like a dog who could appreciate a well-reasoned theorem, don't you?

Murder Mystery Salad

Tonight I ate an astonishing quantity of something my husband finds very odd, and I am going to tell you how to make it too.

Before we joined a CSA I had a vague idea that lettuce was a spring food; I didn't know that it's also a fall food. It all bolts and turns bitter in the summer, but you can get two cool-season lettuce crops in these parts. Unfortunately I do not love lettuce any more than I did when I wrote this post in 2004. Mostly Elwood eats the lettuce around here.

Tonight, though, I was doing a vegetable inventory, and I realized there were four -- count 'em, FOUR -- heads of lettuce in the fridge.

Elwood is not going to eat four heads of lettuce.

I went scrabbling around in the sticky file cabinets of my brain in search of dinners that might make a dent in such a lettuce backlog. I thought about doing a grain bowl kind of thing with shredded lettuce to go on top, or lettuce wraps with an Asian-flavored filling, but the idea that made me say YES YES COOK THAT was a killed lettuce salad.

Killed lettuce salad is one of those Southern foods, like spoonbread, that makes me nostalgic even though we never ate it in my house when I was growing up. My mother tells me that her sister might have served it to us when we visited, and I have dim memories of people ordering spinach-mushroom versions in restaurants. It's a little weird for me to get nostalgic about killed lettuce salad when I would never have put it in my mouth as a picky kid, but hey-- "a little weird" is practically this blog's tagline.

To make a killed lettuce salad, fry up 5 strips of bacon. When they are crisp, set them aside to drain and brown a finely sliced small onion in the hot fat. When the onion is nicely browned, set it aside. Add a pinch of sugar and 2 T. apple cider vinegar to the hot bacon fat along with a sprinkle of red pepper flakes. Stir it all up and keep it hot.

This is the weird part: put a pile of torn lettuce leaves on a big plate with crumbled bacon and browned onion, and coat them with a generous amount of hot dressing. The lettuce will wilt slightly, and the salty tangy slightly sweet richness of the dressing may cause you to levitate slightly. 

Do not make more of this than you can eat right away, because the bacon fat will congeal as it cools. And even for someone whose love of bacon fat is firmly established, that's kind of gross.

I do not actually know if "Murder Mystery Salad" is a more appealing name than "Killed Lettuce Salad" to people who didn't grow up with hot bacon fat on wilted lettuce, but maybe it is. And maybe I'm not the only person in the Midwest whose veggie drawers are overflowing with lettuce right now.

P.S. Is this weird to you, and where are you from, and do you know it as "killed lettuce" or "wilted lettuce"?

Cleanse

This is not a post about juice fasts or detoxifying vegetables or any of that nonsense. This is a post about cleansing my brain.

You guys, what was I thinking, going back to social media with a presidential election coming up? How did I think that was going to be anything other than an express route to tooth-gnashing and futility-flailing? I haven't even been engaging with other human beings there; it's strictly a read-it-and-weep undertaking.

If social media causes you to struggle with moderation (and/or DESPAIR for the HUMAN RACE), what do you do? I am thinking I need to go fairly extreme here, and stay the heck away from Facebook and Twitter until after the election. Maybe I'll give Pete permission to view my Facebook account, because fostering another dog is high on the list of anti-futility-flail strategies and those opportunities only show up on Facebook.

So step 1: pull the plug on the poison pump. More steps to follow.

P.S. The irony is not lost on me that Twitter will now create an automatic tweet summarizing this post about the evils of Twitter.

Also Recommended

Months ago I requested Code Name Verity from one of my library's e-reader apps, after a smart friend raved about it on Facebook. It finally became available last night, and I tore through it. As soon as I had finished I looked up all of the author's other books so I could request them from the library too. So if you need a diversion, it's a good one.

Holidays

The kids are asking about how we're going to handle the holidays. Halloween is pretty easy: bowl of candy on the porch. Thanksgiving is less straightforward and Christmas even less so.

Have you figured out what you'll be doing?

Recommended

I have been having troubling focusing on books lately. I flit from one to another but I can't seem to settle down and finish anything. But today I got further than the first two chapters in Naomi Novik's newest book, and it's a page-turner.

(This is your periodic reminder that my links to Amazon products are affiliate links, and if you buy yourself a copy of a Naomi Novik novel based on this recommendation, Amazon will send me a few cents with which I will buy more books.)

Endorphin Fireworks

When the wheels fell off in Gladlyville, I told Pete we couldn't go back to the climbing gym for a while. There were just too many college students in close quarters, in a building with sketchy ventilation. We hadn't climbed in six weeks. Last night, though, we went back.

Our new case counts have been down (although we do keep setting new records for hospitalizations), and last night the climbing gym's visitor counter showed that they only had a single-digit number of guests. I said we could go and check it out, but I cautioned Pete that it might be a quick trip.

You guys, it felt so good. I thought I was saying yes because it would make Pete happy, but wow, have I missed climbing. There were a bunch of new routes, one of which used some familiar holds in a new configuration. I paused for a minute to listen to my internal monologue: "I am going to put my HAND on that BLUE HOLD and I know just how SOLID it will feel! This is AWESOME!!!" -- accompanied by a little fireworks show of endorphins and dopamine in my brain.

It was a little bizarre, honestly, but in an extremely pleasant way.

You can't skip six weeks of climbing and jump back in where you left off. I have some work to do on the mental part of it as well as the strength part, because it's kind of a weird choice to entrust your life to a slender rope while you propel yourself upward-- 40, and then 50, and then 60 feet into the air. But Pete and I are watching the gym's guest counter, and the county's case counter, and looking forward to our next opportunities to climb.

2020, the most improbable bingo card

Can you imagine if a person from the future had shared today's headlines with you in 2014? PRESIDENT TRUMP TESTS POSITIVE FOR COVID!

I would have been like, President WHO?? has been diagnosed with what??

Even a year ago-- I had reluctantly adapted to the "President Trump" part, but...diagnosed with what?? A previously unknown pathogen that has killed how many people??

On the night of the police manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, I lay next to Stella and refreshed Twitter over and over. It cemented a lesson I began learning on the first night of the first Gulf War: it is not good for my peace of mind to get wrapped up in breaking news. CNN was new at the time of the first Gulf War, and my roommates and I clustered around the television and listened to the same limited information trotted out again and again. The correspondent was broadcasting from under a table in a hotel room, if I recall correctly, and he just kept saying, "Yes, I'm still under the table, and yes, bombs are still falling in Baghdad."

The older I get, the less directive I am in my prayers. I can't tell if it's wisdom or resignation, but that's where I am. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done: I'm leaning pretty hard on those. Today I am tempted to keep refreshing the news sites, but they are just going to keep trotting out the same limited information again and again, and writing paper #4 will be a better use of my time. I had already decided to take an October break from social media, and I am going to resist the temptation to peek. There will be too much ugliness, and too many hypotheticals -- too many breathless posts built on the shaky foundation of "could" and "might." I do not need any more hypotheticals here in this strange era, where reality is QUITE ENOUGH to be getting on with.

Pete asked if I would take a short break to walk through the garden and admire our new plants with him. So I am going to take a deep breath and tend my own garden: first literally, and then metaphorically.