Plodding

Today (like the several previous days) was a very inviting one: in the low 70s, with a light breeze. Will power seemed to be required only to tear myself away from the puzzle our daughter had given us for Christmas.

Until I hit the street. Then I suddenly realized how stiff I was. Usually when I’m feeling a bit arthritic, it wears off after the first five or ten minutes, and I hit my stride. Not today. I did my usual 2.1 miles in 47 minutes instead of the usual 40 or less. It wasn’t even walking—just plodding. And it was torture. It took will power just to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Worse still, for the first half hour or so, I kept yawning uncontrollably.

Still, it was a beautiful day, and I won’t complain if we have another week of this weather (it will greatly improve our utility bill as well).

No Will Power Required

When I got up Monday morning, it was 31°. Although the temperature eventually rose to 50°, I got so bogged down in Christmas preparations that I never did quite make it out for a walk. Yesterday it was 42° when I got up and 59° when I went out walking in midafternoon (later than planned). By that time, the sun had gone in, and the breeze had picked up, so it was a bit nippy. This morning when I got up it was 69° and fairly clear—just a few fluffy clouds. Now it is 72° and completely overcast, and I still haven’t gone out walking. Why? Certainly it is a great day for it (if I can beat the rain), but another task took priority.

Today being Christmas Eve, it is the day I bake a pumpkin pie. In theory, this could be done anytime during the day, but I have an established tradition of doing it while listening to the BBC broadcast of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” from King’s College, Cambridge, which begins here at 9 a.m. Sure enough, as the selected chorister tremblingly began, “Once in royal David’s city…,” I was getting out my mixing bowl and spices, and as I write this, the pie is in the oven, and I am listening to the last of the service.

The pumpkin pie (as well as its creation) is one of the most immutable traditions of our Christmas. Some of the other trappings can be dispensed with (and many have been or will be this year), but we must have the pie! It is made from a traditional family recipe, and I receive compliments whenever I serve it, but every year as I make it, I wonder whether it is really better than the one printed on the label of the can of Libby’s pumpkin. It is certainly an inconvenient recipe, as it uses only 8 ounces of a 12-ounce can of evaporated milk, leaving a remainder that never gets used up before it spoils, but it is traditional!

For those who may be interested in the recipe, here it is as I received it:

Honey Pumpkin Pie

⅓ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¾ teaspoon ginger
¼ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ cup strained honey
2 cups cooked or canned pumpkin
1 cup evaporated milk
2 eggs

Mix sugar, salt, and spices. Stir in honey and pumpkin. Heat milk (to about 180°) and add with eggs. Beat well. Pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake at 425° for 10 minutes; reduce heat to 375° and continue to bake 35 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. The filling will not be firm but will continue to cook while cooling.

I usually find the mixture easier to stir (especially on cold days) if I add the pumpkin before the honey, and I beat the eggs slightly and add them before the heated milk, which I add a little at a time. Heating the milk seems to give the pie a head start that allows it to bake in a somewhat shorter time than indicated in the Libby’s recipe. I like to think that the honey adds something (and of course if you use something other than ordinary clover honey, you will get a distinctive taste).

Now the service is over, my pie is out of the oven, and it’s not raining yet, so I guess I can go for a walk!

A Christmas Parlor Game

Today as I was walking I amused myself by singing (or trying to sing) Christmas carols. This is an eye-opening exercise. I’m one of those who sing along to most hymns—but especially Christmas carols—with only half an eye on the hymnal because “I know the words.” What this boils down to in principle is that, given the first half of any rhyming couplet in most common hymns, I can supply the rest, so I can manage to follow along without noticeably losing my place.

It’s a bit different when you’re cast out entirely on your own. Try it. Start singing any familiar Christmas carol and see how far you get. If you’ve been attending church or listening to the radio or Christmas CDs during Advent, you’ll almost certainly manage the first verse without difficulty. But what comes next? How much of these traditional carols do you really know? And can you keep the verses in order? “We Three Kings” is a fairly easy one because it has a logical structure (though I did struggle trying to come up with the wording about frankincense); others are less well organized. And you may find that some are a lot more repetitive than you realized (and not always in a good way). The syntax of “Once in Royal David’s City” defeated me; I hadn’t realized that it begins with two dependent clauses and no independent clause, so I was looking for a word that wasn’t there. And very oddly (though perhaps less oddly if you realize I was once a Latin teacher), I had to resort to the Latin words of “Adeste Fideles” to come up with the correct ones for “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”

If you find yourself sitting around with a lot of relatives on Christmas afternoon, too full of turkey or ham or whatever to budge from the sofa, you might suggest this to them as a sort of parlor game. You might even divide up into teams and brainstorm to see which team can provide the most correct verses of a given carol. You may be surprised at what you remember—and what you don’t.

Blogging in the 1940s

It was raining when I got up this morning (and noticeably cooler than yesterday), so I thought I’d have an excuse not to walk. Now the sun is coming out, and the temperature has dropped five more degrees, so I’m even less eager to get out but have no excuse. I had hoped to have more time to peruse the Sunday paper—or to read anything else.

I seem to have very little time for reading lately, especially books. Twenty years ago I read three or four books a week. Now sometimes entire months go by in which I don’t read a single book. Part of that results from the necessity to keep up with so many periodicals, including a weekly news magazine, but most of it is due to the Internet. Twenty years ago I was not online (indeed, I did not even own a computer). The amount of time one can spend (I won’t say “waste,” though that’s probably true of much of the time spent) online is astounding, and I don’t pretend that it is more valuable than reading books.

Recently, however, I have been reading an amusing book. It’s an ideal book for picking up and putting down because it’s written (and consequently can be read) in short snatches. It is The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, by the late Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor Robertson Davies, part of a compendium titled The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks, published in 1986. The flap copy explains:

This fine book marks the first appearance in the United States of Robertson Davies’s mischievous alter ego, Samuel Marchbanks. During Mr. Davies’s years as editor and, later, publisher of Canada’s Peterborough [Ontario] Examiner, a regular column appeared under the name of Samuel Marchbanks, who, Mr. Davies claimed, “is one of the choice and master spirit of this age. If there were such a volume as Who Really Ought to Be Who, his entry would require several pages.” At once wit, litterateur, political theorist, philosopher, and all-around gadfly, Marchbanks became a popular figure in Canadian life, and some three volumes of his work were issued. Now, Mr. Davies has re-edited these earlier books—The Diary, The Table Talk, and A Garland of Miscellanea—for this handsome compendium volume, and throughout he offers comments on his friend’s tart and often curmudgeonly observations on the passing scene.

The Diary entries were published as daily newspaper columns, beginning in 1944; in 1947, Davies published a collection, choosing the best columns from 1945 and 1946 and adding a few new pieces. What struck me in reading them is how like blog entries they are. If Marchbanks were journalizing now, I thought, he would be writing a blog.

Any blogger who commits to a daily entry will occasionally be stumped for a suitable topic. Marchbanks was not immune; on the Friday of week XII (the entries are not dated), he writes:

How I abhor candid people! Today a candid friend told me that this Diary was drivel. What is the diary of any man likely to be but drivel? How many of us are able to record a deed of daring every day, or a ponderous reflection on the nature of the universe? How many of us are able to record that we have been reasonably honest, that we have kept our hands from picking and stealing, and that Lust and Covetousness have been strangers to our hearts? In my time I have read many diaries, published and in manuscript, and the noble and uplifting ones were invariably the work of men whom I knew to be engine-turned, copper-bottomed self-lubricating liars and hypocrites….One of the most irritating diaries I ever read was written by a fellow I know who used to pinch all the best remarks I made and attribute them to himself. Hell gapes for such villainy.

On Wednesday of week XVII, he writes:

A man who had been poking his nose into the MS. of this Diary told me he didn’t think it was very funny. This is the sort of comment which makes me secrete adrenalin by the bucketful. First of all, how did the ridiculous assumption spring up that my Diary was meant to be funny? What record of man’s life, shot through and through with toil and anguish, disappointment and shame, frustration and denial is ever funny? When Tolstoy gave up wealth and rank and, in an agony of pity and idealism, tilled the land with his peasants, was it funny? When Gauguin left a secure life in Paris and went to paint the beauties of Tahiti, casting his lot with savages, lepers and degenerates, was it funny? And when Marchbanks, furnace-fried and garden-torn [his furnace and garden were severe crosses to him], commits his reflections to his Diary, is that funny? No, baboon! No, donkey! Tragic, mystic, sublime, perhaps. But only a coarse and warty soul could find food for laughter here.

Despite this disclaimer, the book really is quite funny, though perhaps only in the aggregate, as I cannot seem to raise even the slightest smile with all the humorous excerpts I have persisted in reading aloud to my husband. The cumulative effect of Marchbanks’s curmudgeonliness, however, enhanced by Davies’s acerbic footnotes, is quite humorous.

Many passages struck a responsive chord. On Saturday of week XX, Marchbanks records:

It’s a strange world, and we are all more in the grip of primitive ideas than we care to acknowledge. The other day I saw a little girl trying to walk on a hardwood floor without touching the cracks. “The cracks are poison,” she explained, “and if you walk on them you’ll die.” Children invent magic; later in life we are still subject to this sway, but we invent “scientific” theories and “philosophies” to make it intellectually respectable.

Thursday of week XLI introduces a wonderful word I thought Marchbanks/Davies might have invented, but I see that it was first recorded in 1785 (though said to be obsolete in the 1890s):

Suffered an acute attack of the humdudgeon today; the symptoms of this illness are a sense of failure, self-contempt and mental fatigue; there is no cure for it; application to the bottle merely brings on a crying jag; a walk in the park suggests ideas of suicide; while the fit lasts all seems dross; sufferers from the humdudgeon should be left alone, though if they can be persuaded to lie down, with a pillow under the knees, it helps.

And of course he cannot fail to comment on the excess of commercialism surrounding Christmas (Friday of week XLVII):

Toronto is already in the toils of Christmas, and from several windows the hollow Ho! Ho! of a mechanical Santa Claus may be heard. Children watch these creatures with hard, calculating eyes, wondering if the old man is really crazy, or only pretending to be, like Hamlet….Everywhere I went Christmas preparations were going on, but they all seemed to be of a secular nature. Gnomes, elves, giants and Disney oddities abounded, and there were a few angels, but even they had been Disneyized, and made cute, rather than spiritual. A Man from Mars would never know that Christmas was a religious festival from what he sees here. Is it the final triumph of Protestantism that it has pushed the sacred origin of Christmas so far into the background that most people are able to ignore it?

From these few not entirely representative samples, you may gather that this is a book that would be worth your while, especially since it is the sort of book that even a busy person can read.

Our Fickle Weather

About a month ago I wrote that the fickleness of our weather makes it hard to become acclimated to the cold. Several times since then I’ve been tempted to post a follow-up citing actual temperatures to prove that I did not exaggerate. For example, on the day after I wrote that, it was 36° when I got up at 4:30 a.m. and (according to the thermometer in my car) 34° when I hit the road for Greenville at 6 a.m. It did eventually warm up some that day—the high (as registered by the thermometer over the furnace, so I’m always dubious about it) was 61°—and just two days later it was 52° when I got up, with a high of 72°.

According to a friend, last week our temperatures averaged 10 degrees below the average for the dates and this week 10 degrees above. We’ve definitely had a lot of fluctuation. On the theory that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” however, I present the graph below to illustrate what I am talking about. As you can guess, the red line represents the daily high and the blue line the low. I rest my case.

Walking (not singing, certainly not dancing) in the Rain

Yesterday was definitely not a day for walking. When I came home from my ballet class around 10 a.m., it was nasty out—cold, very windy, not actually raining but looking as if it might at any moment.

When I walked in the door, my husband was just stepping out of the shower. I said, “I guess you don’t plan to run today,” this implied comment on the weather being prefatory to telling him I didn’t think it was the ideal time to go look for a Christmas tree as we had planned. Before I had a chance to follow up, however, he said, “I’ll be ready in just a few minutes.”

I said I thought today would be a better day (it would have been). He said there would be less time today (he had commitments in Mobile this morning).

I said, “Think Stonehenge,” referring to our miserable hour at that godforsaken historic site last March—on an unseasonably freezing day with heavy rain and gale-force winds. He said, “It wasn’t that bad.” Ah, the blessings of rose-colored memory!

I said if he insisted on going, he could be sure that I would pick the first tree we laid eyes on. He was unmoved.

It had started to sprinkle by the time we left the carport. By the time we reached the Christmas tree farm, it was raining pretty hard. Areas at our latitude to the west of us (Houston, New Orleans, coastal Mississippi) got snow yesterday, but no, we had to get rain as the snow blew into North Alabama and bypassed us.

All the trees looked very far away. We usually get a Leyland cypress, but the only ones we saw claimed to be “Mostly 9–12 feet” (we have an 8½-foot ceiling). The Virginia pines were closer, so we decided one of those would do.

I would have liked to pick the first one we came to, but it was too tall. Others were too short. Some were obviously hideous. By the time we found one we were both desperate enough to settle for, we were a long way from the “shaking and bagging” area and pay point—and soaking wet. We cut the tree, loaded it on the cart, and lugged it back.

The owner of the farm, who had undoubtedly thought no one would be crazy enough to go tree shopping on such a wretched day, came out to shake and bag the tree himself and then to complain about the inadequacy of my roof rack (which has sufficed in three previous years and in fact bore this tree home safely as well).

The perfect way to get into the holiday spirit!

Feeling Like an Idiot

I could write a blog entry every day with the above title, but today was special. It started with my being thrown out of my normal routine. Ordinarily, I get up, note the time, temperature, and my weight in my Day-Timer, and then record the events of the past day. After that I may turn the computer on for something quick, but normally I go downstairs and bring in the newspaper, unload the dishwasher if necessary (we run it only every other night), pour milk and juice for both of us, and then fix my breakfast, which, most days, is a toasted English muffin with peanut butter on one half and butter on the other, with orange juice, milk, and coffee. Some days I’ll have Eggo waffles (Nutri-Grain with blueberries) or crumpets, but most days it’s an English muffin.

Today was different. My husband had baked bread yesterday, and one thing I love for lunch is a pb&j sandwich when the bread is still good and fresh, but this seems excessive if I’ve already had peanut butter for breakfast. Coincidentally, my husband had inadvertently run out of oatmeal, so he said he guessed he would have to have Cream of Wheat. I said that if I joined him for that, then I could have the pb&j sandwich for lunch. So when I got up at 6:45, leaving him in bed, I knew I wouldn’t be having breakfast right away and so didn’t rush to get downstairs.

When I did go down, about 7:15, there was no paper. When I called Circulation, I got a recorded message saying all circuits were busy, so I guessed there must have been a major problem—a press breakdown, perhaps, or a delivery strike. Now, however, I was stuck with no paper and no prospect of breakfast anytime soon. I came upstairs and read email and newsgroups for a while, then went back down an hour or so later and found that the paper had come. By the time I had gotten it sorted out, the dishes put away, milk and juice poured, etc., it was about 8:45, so I decided I’d go ahead and start the Cream of Wheat and get my husband up when it was ready.

As it turned out, he came down just as I was starting it, and, in retrospect, I should have just let him make it, but instead I pressed on. The directions call for 2/3 cup of cereal for four servings (which was what I was making, since most cooked cereal makers give proportions for side servings rather than main dishes), and, not finding a 1/3-cup measure in the Cream of Wheat container, I went to the cupboard to get the one from my set of measuring cups. I still do not understand how I could possibly have fumbled this, but somehow I did. I filled this measure twice, putting the contents in the one-cup measure until the water boiled (since I’d forgotten to turn on the eye, that took a while, too—I really was discombobulated!). How did I not notice that the one-cup measure was not two-thirds full?

When the water boiled, I sprinkled the cereal over it and stirred it in, then turned down the heat. Knowing how quickly it can reach a boiling-over state even at low heat, I made little dashes from the stove to other parts of the kitchen—to get out the sugar bowl, to top it off with more sugar, to find the sugar spoon and butter knife, to get out the butter—returning to the stove after each dash. I was a little surprised that the cereal didn’t seem to be getting to the serious seething point. I turned up the heat.

After about ten minutes of this, I was wondering aloud whether it usually took this long. I looked again at the measuring cup to be sure I’d gotten the right one. It seemed small but clearly said “1/3 cup.” When I put the jar of Cream of Wheat away in the pantry, I’d found the measure that usually stays in the jar. My husband now got this out, saying, “I usually use this one.” I looked at it and mentally compared its size to the one I’d used. No way they were the same!

I showed my husband the one I’d used, pointing out the “1/3 cup” label. As I did so, the penny dropped. The measures are old and worn, to be sure, but as often as I use this measure for two tablespoons, you’d think I would have realized that it was actually 1/8 cup!

With rapid mental calculations, not even really bothering to convert the 1/4 cup I’d actually used to 3/12 and the needed 2/3 to 8/12, we decided that an additional half-cup (total of 9/12) would be close enough. Naturally the added half-cup immediately converted itself to large lumps that I was unable to stir out, so the Cream of Wheat was not exactly a success.

I could say I need new glasses (perhaps true), but it seems more likely I need a new brain. I can’t even claim that I was still half asleep, having been up for two hours already. So I guess I’m just an idiot.

Well, this has nothing to do with walking, but I did actually feel a little foolish when I went out walking, too, having decided to risk ridicule by wearing gloves. It was a reasonably pleasant day—mid-fifties with no wind and quite sunny—but no matter how warm the sun is, my hands seem to stay cold. It was bad enough that I kept seeing people in shorts (I was bundled up in sweats), but I just really felt like a dork in those gloves. Still, my hands stayed warm! In fact, by the last block or so I had warmed up so much that I felt compelled to take the gloves off, but I have to say that, even though I was psychologically uncomfortable the whole way, I was a lot more comfortable physically.

Walking Fast, Walking Slow

It was 39° when I got up yesterday morning, so I was not sorry that a 7:30 board meeting and a 9:30 meeting with a client would prevent me from walking. The forecast for even colder temperatures last night made me regret (as usual) agreeing (as usual) to serve as a marshal in the City’s Christmas parade, but I figured I’d at least get some walking in.

I forgot how much of the job is just standing around. The parade begins at 7 p.m., but the marshals assemble at 5 for supper (sandwiches and cookies) and instructions. The instructions over the years have ranged from ridiculously specific to absurdly vague, but for the most part they are equally irrelevant to the chaotic situation the marshals will find when they go out to the staging area (sometime between 5:30 and 6, after the traditional visit from Santa Claus on his way to his place on the fire engine that will bring up the rear of the parade) to start dealing with their assigned floats.

Weeks before the parade, the City solicits applications for entrants, both floats and marching units. The total length of the parade is limited by a parade route that recrosses itself—too long and the parade will “eat its tail.” So each organization proposing to enter a float must indicate the total length of the unit. A City employee, with help from a civic organization, then works out the order of the floats, interspersed with marching units, to make up the entire parade. I don’t pretend to understand the principles of this organization, but the end result is that there are numbers painted on the pavement in the staging area that correspond to the numbers assigned to the floats, and each float is supposed to be parked in its designated area.

This would work fine if the floats with lower numbers showed up first. What actually happens is that later-arriving floats have to squeeze in between those that are already there, which is no easy feat, especially for drivers not expert in working with trailers. Last night we had one driver who, finding that his slot was already occupied, proposed to back into a place across the street. After numerous attempts, with the trailer obstinately going the wrong direction, he changed his plan and just drove around the block to head into the parking space. Another float that was supposed to be 60 feet long, upon arrival turned out to be much longer and had to be double-parked beside floats already in position. It didn’t help that the numbers from last year, though supposedly marked using “washable” paint, were still visible through the new ones, nor that, in the interim, angle parking places have been marked on one side of the street, and the police had not cleared parked vehicles from these spaces before the floats started arriving.

For the first time this year, marshals were not given lists of the parade order—just the numbers of the floats we were in charge of. So if someone was looking for a specific float, we had no idea where it might be and had to send them to one of the parade organizers (cruising around in electric golf carts with walkie-talkies). So here we are, standing around in our reflective vests, with our cool flashlights with orangey-pink cones on the end, feeling even more useless than usual, getting colder by the minute, and frequently consulting our watches, only to find out that it is over (or nearly) an hour till start time. About the only official duty I actually managed to perform during this wait time was to ask the drivers of floats with generators whether they had fire extinguishers on board as required (one in fact didn’t and had to send out for one). But I did have an interesting long chat with my partner marshal, whom I had just met for the first time.

Finally the magic hour arrived, and the parade began to move. I was in charge of floats 37–40 (of 58 total), so it took a while for that movement to trickle down to our area. I walked beside a float the length of the parking lot behind the K–1 Center till it made the turn onto Morphy Avenue. At this point everything went into overdrive. The float driver picked up speed to catch up with the float ahead, and those walking with it broke into a run to keep up. I just walked a little (well, a lot) faster, knowing it would have to slow down sometime.

When we reached the Fairhopers Community Park, where the bands were being staged, the middle school band slotted in behind the float I was accompanying. Even before we reached the official starting point of the parade route, the street was lined with spectators, and the tots on the float were showering them with candy and necklaces. (Yes, this was a Christmas parade. We were rather surprised, when we moved to the Gulf Coast, to learn that throws are de rigueur at all parades here, not just the Mardi Gras ones.)

Usually, after the official starting point, the parade hits its stride and proceeds at a fairly uniform pace throughout. In past years I’ve usually been ahead of a float that kept lagging, and I had to keep waving my flashlight to urge it to close the gap. This year, for whatever reason, the procession moved by fits and starts throughout the entire parade route. The middle-schoolers, with minimal marching experience, did not know how to march in place, nor were they able to lengthen their stride to keep up when the float ahead picked up the pace, so the gap between float and band was quite elastic, and it seemed the entire parade this year was rather ragtag.

The crowds this year were perhaps a little light (though it wasn’t really that cold), but the throws were more abundant, I think, than I have ever seen. From the amount of candy in the street, you would never know the economy was in recession, and I found that avoiding stomping on candy and necklaces was even harder than walking between the lines! It didn’t help that the float I was walking behind was filled with preschoolers, who, naturally, didn’t have very strong throwing arms (though I did occasionally, if I walked too fast and got beside the float, got stung by a sharply thrown hard candy). There was one babe of two or three who would dump a whole armload of goodies right beside the float, but even the best of them (including their mothers, who accompanied them) couldn’t seem to get the throws as far as the curb or barricade. The result was that, when the float had passed, the street was filled with youngsters (and many not so young) scrambling for candy and necklaces. It was my stern duty to clear a path for the band, holding up my official flashlight and occasionally saying, “Make way for the band” or “You’re about to be run over by the band!”

As for the band, bless them, they played their little hearts out. It is a common complaint of parade spectators that they never hear the bands play—just the drummers keeping up a beat. To be sure, the drummers didn’t get much of a rest during this parade (though occasionally when we entered a Dead Zone where there were no spectators, the band director would give them a break), but the entire band did play a good bit of the time. They played “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” They played it over and over again. It was the only song they knew. This is not surprising. What is surprising, really, is that they played it as well as they did given that many of the band members had never picked up a musical instrument before August, when school started. The young, attractive female band director (daughter of a longtime band director) had done a terrific job with them, and it was clear that the parents who were serving as marshals, though given to irony about the performance, were also very proud.

On the whole, this was a better parade experience than most. Although I heard “Rudolph” probably at least a dozen times, I’ll take that any day over walking behind folks from the Humane Society, one of them carrying a boom box playing “Who Let the Dogs Out?” over and over and over. And I found that I wasn’t as tired by the time I’d walked home as I was last year (when, I now recall, I vowed that I was never going to do it again). What I had forgotten, though, is that a parade is no substitute for a brisk walk. Although much of the time is spent walking fairly briskly, much more of it is spent ambling or even standing still waiting for a bottleneck somewhere ahead to clear. I’ll probably volunteer again next year, but, if I am honest, I won’t pretend that it takes the place of my daily constitutional.