Line 'Em Up, Knock 'Em Down

This is concert week: our Symphony closes out its season this Saturday evening. Concert weeks are packed no matter when the time; this one is extra full because of the programming, the guest artist (astronomer/visual artist), the activities planned around the guest artist, an after-concert reception, and on and on. My weekend will be extra special because my longtime close friend Katrina is flying in from Miami to spend time with me and close out the season. In fact, I just finished putting the guest bedroom (well, both of them, actually, because we have another friend/colleague staying overnight on Saturday) and feel that I can now let out a sigh and say "come on in."

And yes, I am still recovering from the viral infection that knocked me for a loop. I am almost back to work at my full schedule (24 hours a week) but I still have to measure out carefully my energy and my daily activities. I rest a lot. It has been a humbling experience, to say the least.

However, one benefit of all that downtime in my reading continues unabated. Here are the latest additions to the done list:
78. Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad by Krystal A. Sital (a memoir of three generations of women and not only the secrets they kept, but the secrets that were revealed when the patriarch, the author's grandfather, became debilitated and the stories started to flow)
79. Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, The Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich (the author of Nickel and Dimed, among other works, turns her keen eye and caustic pen on the inevitability of death, no matter what we do, in large part because of the cells that make up our bodies; Ehrenreich has a PhD in cellular biology, incidentally)
80. Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous With American History by Yunte Huang (a breezy and insightful history of Chang and Eng, truly the original Siamese twins, and their unlikely history in this country)
81. Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (this novel follows a Nigerian woman from birth to, well, I'm not sure, told by the multiple identities within her)
82. I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O'Farrell (these are the author's seventeen brushes with death, from being almost hit by a car as a young child to an encounter with a murderer; Plath fans will recognize the source of the title)
83. The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer (a novel about feminism in the 21st century, where does one's loyalties lie, when does one break from an icon who puts pragmatism before ideals, and how do we define love—Wolitzer pulls it off)
84. Political Tribes: Group Instincts and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua (my youngest brother, whose politics differ from mine, called me up after hearing Chua interviewed and asked me if I'd be interested in reading this and discussing it; for those of us on all sides of the political spectrum who shudder at the polarization of this nation, Chua offers both a warning of what could happen if we don't close the gap and some commonsense suggestions on how to begin that long, hard process)
85. The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats by Daniel Stone (I'd never heard of David Fairchild before reading this book, but his life work indeed fulfills the title of the book)
86. The House of Erzulie by Kirsten Imani Kasai (vodou, bloodlines, African-American Gothic: a novel set in our time but reaches back to Louisiana in the 1850s through letters and diaries)

I just started #87 tonight.

Small Moment

I was walking out of the drugstore when someone called out to me.

"Hey!"

I turned and there was a young man, striding towards me, a grin on his face. He looked familiar; I could not pull up the name.

When he told me, I exclaimed loudly, "Oh my gosh, look at you!"

He blushed and grinned broadly. We'd met at Juvenile Court several years ago when he was court involved. This is the first time I'd seen him since then.

He stood there catching me up. Working. Got his driver's license. Hasn't graduated from high school but is chipping away at it. He shrugged at that one: "I let some stuff get in the way."

I asked him how old he was. He's 19 now. (Another gasp from me. How did he get to be 19?) I told him how great it was to see him. I told him he looked happy and pulled-together.

He laughed. "Yeah, I learned to let things go." He ran his hand across his large Afro. "See, when bad thoughts that get me down come my way, I just let them go by. That's why I keep my hair like this—so they can just whoosh right over me."

After a few more words and a shared laugh, he turned to go into the store and I headed to my car, marveling.

I've been at Juvenile Court for a little over seven years now. I've come into contact with a wide range of kids. Most of them I interact with briefly at best. I hear about some of them through court grapevines: which ones made it, which ones are struggling, which ones we lose. So when a young person that I have worked with crosses my path and has clearly moved forward in positive ways, I am thrilled and encouraged and uplifted, all at once.

"Hey!"

I am still smiling.

So Many Books, So Little Time

We just got back from a brutal trip to Mayo. Brutal because we crammed it into a very short pocket of time and because I am still struggling with getting over something (three doctors and two nurse practitioners have now all weighed in on it). Because of schedules and illness, I wanted to get up and back in the shortest time possible. We did, we both survived, and there truly is no place like home.

While I total up the dollars this trip cost us (more than usual because we had an extra hotel stay in there rather than staying with family as I did not want to run the risk of getting anyone else sick), I thought I would bring my book reading for 2018 up to date. Here's the latest additions to the done pile:
70. Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern (a fun light read about three unsettled lives intersecting at a small New Hampshire library one summer)
71. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (a reread of Hemingway's memoirs of being a young expatriate/struggling author in 1920s Paris; this was the original text and not the revised edition brought out by his grandson in 2009)
72. Matchless: An Illumination of Hans Christian Andersen's Classic "The Little Match Girl" by Gregory Maguire (a reread of Maguire's heartrending tale of what happened after the Andersen story ends)
73. Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis (a reread of my very favorite Lewis novel and one that is rarely mentioned in this day and age; there is no more American American than Samuel Dodsworth and no more shallow and callous partner than his wife Fran)
74. Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (a quirky, unusual novel with intricate philosophical and literary references threaded through; I almost sanchezed it but stuck with it to the end)
75. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 by Edward L. Ayers (this is the prequel to a Civil War history I read earlier this year (#7); it was every bit as mesmerizing and I wish I had read the two books in chronological order)
76. The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea (family ties, family secrets, family loyalties, all wrapped around the dying and death of Big Angel, the family patriarch; what a gorgeous novel)
77. Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznok (a novelization in the first person voice of the life and death of Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokzhad, a feminist whose work was controversial under the Shah and was banned for many years after the Islamic Revolution)

And that is all for now.

Deconstructing A Meal

I was recently interviewed by some college students about cancer (mine) and nutrition (also mine). They explored my food history from childhood forward (interesting, to say the least), whether I made major nutritional changes when I was diagnosed (no), and how I now approach food, cooking, and nutrition in general.

There were times when I had to explain to these young adults (20 and 21, for the most part) how much the overall food landscape, at least in central Ohio, had changed in the decades since I was young. Produce wasn't trucked in from all around the world back then (bananas being a major exception) and many of the things we take for granted at a grocery just weren't there. Oranges appeared only in the winter, usually starting at Thanksgiving and disappearing in early February. They were equally baffled about my early college years: they didn't understand how a no-choice dining hall worked (one student, who came from a military background, finally got it: "oh, a mess hall!"); they asked why I didn't eat at McDonald's (I had to explain Hyde Park pre-gentrification).

But what really threw not only them but also the professor was when I said that this year I was tracking my food expenses and aiming to spend $175.00 or less a month on groceries, including household items. That provoked questions. How did I do that? What did we eat? Did we skip meals? 

I discussed some of the food (and food spending) choices we made, then sent a link to one of my posts to give them a general overview. Their curiosity stuck with me. 

Last night, as I prepared supper for the two of us, I wondered more about the actual dollar and cents that went into the meal. What was this meal costing us? I sauteed onions and peppers, sauteed some chicken breast, made rice pilaf (out of a box), shredded some cheese, warmed up some tortillas. We then filled the tortillas, rolled them up, and ate them.

Here are my approximations (well, some of them are dead on) of the meal:
     1. We bought a 5 pound bag of sweet onions for $1.88. There were 14 onions in the bag, which comes to 13.5¢ an onion. We used 2, so 27¢. 
     2. There were frozen peppers, split and grilled from last summer, that I thawed and used. I thought they were sweet peppers from my dad's garden, which would have been free, but upon tasting, we realized they were poblanos, which we would have bought. Knowing us and seeing how they were prepped before freezing, I'm betting we bought a bag of several marked down by a produce manager because they were past their prime. I am generously saying $1.00 for what I cut up; that is probably high. 
    3. I cut off one side of a breast of a roasted chicken we had bought earlier in the week. The chicken, with coupon, cost $5.74. This was the third meal we had gotten from it; there is still a half breast (another meal) to go. A quarter of the cost of the chicken is $1.43. (I am not discounting further for the stock I will make from the carcass this weekend.)
     4. Rice pilaf from Aldi: $1.29 (end of season closeout).
     5. Torn-up lettuce: the whole head of red leaf lettuce cost 98¢. This was 2 leaves: maybe (maybe) 5% of the total head. 4.5¢.
     6. Grated cheddar cheese: 3 ounces (it was the end of a block and I threw it on a kitchen scale to see what I had). The block costs $1.79 for 8 ounces (Aldi again), or about 22¢ an ounce. 67¢ total.
     7. A bag of 8 flour tortillas (Kroger): $1.49; we had one each. 37¢.
     8. About two-fifths of a 13 ounce bag of tortilla chips (Aldi): I'm guessing here. I think the bag of chips runs about $1.29, but I'm going to go higher with $1.69 (I know it is no more than that): 68¢.
     9. About one-fifth of a jar of salsa (also Aldi, but a more "upscale" salsa, which means it was probably $1.59 instead of 99¢): 32¢.

Grand total? $6.08 for two of us. But wait: there are leftovers: chicken, pilaf, cheese, and onions/peppers. So if we do it again tonight, as we likely will, we'd only be looking at the tortillas (37¢), chips and salsa ( $1.00 but even less because there is less salsa left). So tonight's meal would be $1.37 because I've already counted the costs of the leftovers into last night's meal.

I don't do this every single time we eat. Sometimes I do a light tally in my head so we can laugh about it.

But it is fun to see where the meal pennies go!

*******
After posting this, we went to Aldi for some shopping and I got to check a few prices. Bag of chips? 89¢, not $1.29 as I speculated. So the cost of the chips was 36¢, not 68¢. And although I attributed the entire cost of the rice pilaf to this meal, it probably would have been more realistic to cost out about 1/3 of it, or 43¢.

Still cheap no matter how you slice the pennies!

Food

I recently read (#68) The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan. McMillan is a journalist who worked in farm fields, the produce section of a Supercenter Walmart, and at Applebee's in a quest to figure out how food (produce) makes it from field to table, why so many of us lack access to affordable, fresh produce, and how, regardless of one's race, ethnicity, age, class, socio-economic status, or any other factor, most of us truly want to eat good food.

It is a powerful book and more than once I found myself nodding in recognition and agreement. For the politics and economics of food distribution, and what can be done as a society to make food more accessible and affordable, read the book.

What I was not expecting was how this book triggered food memories in me. McMillan wrote of her own upbringing in a working class Midwest family and what she learned and did not learn about cooking and eating and nutrition growing up. This sentence says it all: "We ate a lot of Helper Meals and Ortega Taco Dinners when I was growing up, and I liked them." She describes salads of chopped iceberg lettuce, some diced carrots, and Wish-Bone Ranch dressing. Oh, Tracie McMillan, I could match you meal for meal with some similar variations of my childhood: frozen fish sticks, cheap hotdogs and chips, and the occasional (and intensely disliked) rice with margarine, milk, and sugar (I was a teenager before I realized that most people I knew did not eat warm rice as a cereal, let alone for supper).

At supper Saturday after I finished the book, we had a somewhat more deliberate meal than we often manage during the workweek. A filet of salmon (from the Aldi bargain salmon last fall), a baked potato for Warren, a baked sweet potato for me, steamed broccoli. We ate slowly, savoring the flavors.

And I talked about food.

At one point in her yearlong quest to source and follow food, McMillan worked in the produce section of a Walmart. She eventually realized that one of her shortcomings in produce was that she was "incredibly ignorant when it comes to buying quality produce." McMillan observed that most of her "food literacy" came from her family, as it does for most of us.

I shared that observation with Warren, adding, "I was fortunate to have Grandma Nelson."

Grandma Nelson was my dad's mom. She was not a warm woman. Hardworking, yes. An excellent cook, absolutely. Most important of all, along with my grandfather, who did the tilling, she grew a large vegetable garden every year out of which we ate fresh and canned (and eventually frozen) food all year long.

Because there was a large garden and because Grandma Nelson did not believe in coddling children, I learned early on not just how to pick vegetables but also how to choose which ones were ready. Green beans, tomatoes, sweet peppers (always called mangoes), sweet corn, cabbage: she taught me how to choose and how to pick. The lessons I learned from her stood me in good stead when I discovered the vast extent of the world of produce.

Grandma Nelson has been dead for 36 years. She was not affectionate; she never once hugged my dad, let alone any of her grandchildren. She could be hard. But she nonetheless left me a legacy. After reading The American Way of Eating, I now realize just what a treasure it was.

End of First Quarter: Book Count

By the end of March, I had finished 69 books. Some books I toss off in a day or less, others take longer. One thing I am noticing is that I reading more fiction, both as a result of the booklists I am working off of and as a result of recommendations. It is probably also a result of not physically being in the library since February 7. When I graze the shelves, I lean heavily towards nonfiction.

Here are the new titles that I have read since the last book post:
60. Personal History by Katharine Graham (Graham's autobiography, which I read on the strength of seeing the movie The Post; so much of her life until her midyears was difficult that I was relieved when she took over leadership of the Washington Post and became a major force in the newspaper publishing world)
61. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (think Shirley Jackson meets a toned-down but still seriously twisted Stephen King; this novel is by the author of the short stories in #51)
62. The Other by David Guterson (by the author of Snow Falling On Cedars, think of Into The Wild written as a bromance from the viewpoint of the the friend who did not succumb to the lure of the wilderness)
63. East of the Mountains by David Guterson (the two Gutersons came from a male friend—this one he was particularly interested in my reading because the older male protagonist (a retired heart surgeon) has terminal colon cancer and sets off to stage his suicide—what did I think? I think the decision to stick with living as a result of delivering a difficult breech birth was a bit hokey, but if Anne Sexton could make that decision based on delivering dalmatian pups, who am I to quibble?)
64. Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading By Listening by Roger Nierenberg (remember the book Fish!, in which the fictional heroine changed her poorly performing department into a wildly productive team based on lessons learned from the Seattle Pike Place Fish Market? Everyone was reading it to get ideas on how to improve their workplaces. Substitute a baton and a podium for a twenty pound salmon being tossed across the store, and you get the idea)
65. The Witches by Roald Dahl (this was another stray Dahl hanging on my bookshelves: better than The Twits but nowhere near the spark and the charm and the anarchism of Matilda and Danny The Champion of the World)
66. The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory (a frothy romance featuring a white male doctor and a curvy black female attorney who keeps getting eyed by all the skinny white blonde women wondering why her? I'm not a romance reader, but I made it through this one)
67. Made For You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home by Caitlin Shetterly (this was a reread of Shetterly's memoir of her and her husband getting ground up in the Great Recession in 2008 and their retreat to Maine to rebuild their lives)
68. The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Field and Dinner Table by Tracie McMillan (I discovered McMillan reading her essay "Who Do We Think Of As Poor?" last year in the New York Times; on revisiting that essay recently, I realized she had written a book about food and access and food and poverty and poverty and nutrition and how we view those intertwined topics in this country. I'm so glad I did.)
69. American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander (superb poetry by the same author of the stunning memoir I blogged about earlier)

Many of the books on the list of titles by women of color are fiction (#66, for example), so I have a lot of heavy reading ahead of me. I don't dislike fiction. It's just not what I turn to first. It continues to be a fascinating year and my reading horizons are getting expanded in ways I could not have anticipated when I started in January.

March Finances

March was kind on the two fronts I am tracking for 2018: groceries (including household items) and eating out. Stunningly so.

March groceries (food)? $115.24. Household items? $9.38. Grand total? $124.62. Eating out came in at a whopping $13.94 and would have been even lower if Warren had not had an out of town concert and grabbed a Subway sandwich for dinner.

We've been homebound most of March. We ate out of our freezer and pantry a lot this month. We also had a gift certificate for barbecue for ten, and after our friends came and ate and talked, we ate leftovers for five more days.

What this low spending has allowed me to do is set aside extra money for April, which will have some heavier expenses. We head to Mayo and that means car rental, gas, hotel, and eating out. At the end of the month, the Symphony will wrap up its season and we will host a reception post-concert reception to celebrate the season, our wonderful conductor, and the guest artist. I expect to pull off the reception with excellent food for under $75.00, but it's still an atypical expenditure.

In case some of you are wondering, no, I don't spend money on consumer items as a rule. I don't buy clothes, I get my books from the library rather than buy them, and I am immune to the siren song of sales. When I come out of my walking boot in another week, I will have to invest in some new shoes for work/dress as my old ones are worn out. Shoes are a major expenditure. I cannot wear most shoes because of the neuropathy in my feet. The ones that I can wear are more expensive. I knew this expense was coming up, but the surgery and recovery pushed it off.

Let's see what April brings.