Okay maybe step 3 technically happened in High School but even today I can't really tie my shoes correctly. My left shoe especially comes untied using this method.
5. I cannot wear slip-on shoes, only shoes that lace up and require tieing
6. I hate to touch the feet of other people
7. I once was a very successful lady's shoes salesman
If I was asked to assist someone with putting on her shoes I would reply in my most patronizing tone "We sell fashion, not fit." (Intimidation works really well at the higher end of the lady shoes biz.)
8. If I had to choose between being water boarded or a pedicure, I would yell "Strap me down Mr. Cheney and unleash the hoses!"
9. I wear the same pair of comfortable shoes to work every day and I am not a nurse or a Phys Ed teacher.
10. I have Moderate Pronation. This is not to be confused with Janet Jackson's 1989 album "Rhythm Nation."
11. I also have Plantar fasciitis. This is not to be confused with anything except the sweet, sweet relief of water boarding.
12. The Miracle Foot Repair Cream ("As Seen on TV!") works really well on dry, cracked feet and heels. It will not regrow the tip of your right big toe. Trust me on this.
13. I buy argyle socks but never wear them since I don't want to look all "matchy-matchy."
14. I have owned but never worn publicly sandals.
15. I have never owned Crocs.
16. I once sprained my left ankle while wearing cowboy boots.
17. I am sad that on Mother's Day I no longer have a mother to call and remind how my big toe was savagely wounded on her special day. Now I call and remind my sister.
18. A new pair of Keds never made me run faster or jump higher.
19. Unless you make your own pottery to sell at Renaissance faires or you are Judy Collins, you shalt not wear Earth shoes. It is wee too painful for me to explaineth how I learneth this lesson.
20. I wore Doc Martens for most of the 90s hoping to look like a hipster artist or renegade architect. In retrospect I looked like that sad, doughy accountant at raves who is always yelling "I don't think it's working yet!"
21. A dog that sleeps under the blankets on your feet is a joy in the wintertime but a particularly smelly hell in the summer.
22. At the height of the Age of Disco I had a pair or red and blue platform shoes.
23. In my medicine cabinet are two cans of "Cordovan" shoe polish. "Cordovan" was never a Crayola crayon color--not even in the big box of 64 with the crayon sharpener that my sister always got for her birthday since she was "the artistic one." Yeah, that was really artistic when you tried to hack my toe off on Mother's Day you demented junior Vincent Van Gouge.
24. Calling those heartless wretches at the Employee Assistance Program hotline to discuss your potential Post Traumatic Stress Disorder disability claim due to a childhood toe accident is a total waste of time.
25. My left shoe is untied as I write this.
Bonus Song:
Judy Collins who apparently has all of her toes, sings "Both Sides Now."
The "Menu":
Now I am just as mildly OCD as the next guy, and there is really nothing wrong with never setting the dryer timer at anything past 50 minutes (the house might burn down), or always turning the TV in the kitchen on regardless as to how long you are going to be in there (the house might burn down) or always carrying the green umbrella with you (the house might burn down). But I am starting to dread now the pressure each year of our OCD Christmas. What if I lost a recipe? What if I made a dicing miscalculation and the onions were found in the potatoes? Would I be the source of some sad future Christmas Movie of the Week "The Year Onions Ruined Christmas?"
Last year I did make a mistake with the breakfast casserole but one that I was able to eventually recover from. Smug in my knowledge that I had sneaked in a pinch of cumin and had the perfect cover story if discovered "That Jimmy Dean Sausage is just not the same ever since they fired Jimmy Dean!" I realized that something didn't look right as I was about to put the breakfast casserole in the refrigerator.
I had left out the two cups of milk. F***! It was Christmas eve and the stores were closed so I had to make it work. I poured the milk in but it just sat there looking very white like the rest of the state of Indiana and politely mocked me while refusing to mix with the diverse layer of egg, bacon, sausage and cheese.
I got three bowls out. I dipped out the cheese and bacon from one end, the cheese and sausage from the other end, and the highly desired middle section of cheese, bacon, AND sausage.
Swishing the milk around with my fingers I was able to mix it with the eggs, rearranged the soggy white bread and poured the meat and cheese back to their respective sections.
Everyone said it was the best breakfast casserole ever. And no one even noticed the cumin. It was the best brunch ever because it was exactly like all the others before it.
I will repeat this menu next week. Maybe our OCD Christmas isn't that bad. Traditions are what makes visiting family special over the holidays and with my family, I never have to worry about any surprises! Or Onions!
We wind our way past quaint houses...
and grand palaces.
Deep in the recesses of the forest we spy the ruins of ancient civilizations.
While changing trains I bought Grandma some chocolates from a local vendor.
Off on Train #2! Yes we can, yes we can!
The rest of the trip must be on foot. I check the map for the route to Grandma's. GRANDMA!!!
I made a wrong turn! Lost in the desert! It's as dry as Aunt Mary's turkey here!
If only I had GPS in my hat! But I will not stop and ask for directions. No man in my family ever has!
Ingredients
One bag of stewing vegetables from Giant (parsnips, leeks, carrots, turnip, celery, various limp herbs) (LIMP HERBS!!!)
2 cartons of reduced sodium chicken stock (like a little chicken juice is going to kill a vegetarian)
1 medium onion
2 cloves of garlic
Salt and Pepper
Olive oil
Half and Half
Pam cooking spray
Medium sized pumpkin (somewhere between a basketball and soccer ball)
6 pack of beer
Open first beer. Carve off top (of pumpkin not of beer) and place aside. Scoop out the pumpkin entrails and toss into trash. You could clean off the seeds and toast them but isn’t it easier to buy them at the Whitelaw market (undergoing a long needed renovation by the way)? Spread some olive oil around the inside of the pumpkin along with some salt and pepper. Use Pam for those hard to get at pumpkin g-spots. Giggle. Place top on pumpkin and spray with Pam for a nice orangey shiny glow like Jessica Simpson. Giggle again. Place in roaster pan in oven at 325 degrees for 45 minutes. Open beer #2. Call ex and ask when you can drop the dog’s ashes off.
Soup
While pumpkin is cooking open beer #3. Cut parsnips, carrots, turnips into finger sized pieces. Toss with olive oil and place on cookie sheet. Oh wait, Pam that cookie sheet first. Pull out the pumpkin when done, raise temp to 400 degrees and roast veggies for 20 minutes. Put Amy Winestock on the CD player. Hold on. You don’t have a working CD player. You know who took it along with your youthful innocence and hairline. Put on iPod headphones. Should have recharged the battery. "Hardball" it instead while cooking. Yes Chris I can HEAR you.
Meanwhile put the “vegetarian stock” in large pot and heat to boiling. Reduce to simmer. Chop limp herbs (LIMP HERBS!!!) and stir into stock.
Time for beer #4. Wow. Five freakin' years at that humanitarian non-profit and no promotion. Chop onions, clove of garlic, leeks and celery into little pieces. Really little pieces. Yeah I'm sure you are concerned about my Personal Development. What about my Personal Financial Development? Don’t forget to Pam that cutting board first. It keeps it from retaining the oniony/garlicy flavors. Five years? Really just Pam everything including the dogs and your updated resume. Pam a skillet and brown the veggies. Dump into soup pot and add roasted vegetables.
Allow soup to cook another 20 minutes. Add Half and Half (don’t ask me for exact measurements—I’m in the bag by now). Allow soup to cool and place in blender that your ex’s evil mother gave you the year you gave her a bottle of Shalimar. How could you possibly know she would develop a violent allergic reaction to it? What was her name again? Oh yeah, Pam. Well they do wonders with laser skin treatments these days. It could be worse. Think of the think of gifts her child gave you. Like Identity Theft.
Pop open beer #5. God I hate Caller ID. It really takes the fun out of drunk dialing. Is it *68 or *69 to hide my number? Remove soup from heat and let cool. In small batches run through that cheap ass blender before it breaks down. Return to soup pot and heat. Carefully pour into pumpkin and return pumpkin to oven at 325 degrees for 30 minutes.
Pull out pumpkin and take pictures. Ladle soup into Pammed bowls and garnish with any remaining limp herbs (LIMP HERBS!!! God I never get tired of that!!!!). Take pictures. Yikes! Get the beer cans out of the picture. Retake pictures. Call sister and discuss the shortcomings of various family members
Drink beer #6. Sniff the remaining Pam. Make a list of everything you are thankful for like easy access to another six pack. And my complete and total victory over Gourmet Magazine.
He was a race car driver in the 1920s and there are boxes of black and white pictures with him standing next to some of the early pioneers of auto racing like the Chevrolet brothers and Indianapolis 500 winner Jimmy Murphy. How did a kid from Kentucky get into auto racing at such venues as Indianapolis’s famous Brick Yards? I don’t know. Why did he quit? I don’t know. Somehow I knew even as a small child that you didn’t ask. Nice people don't pry.
The Charlie I knew was a sweet, gentle man who didn’t seem to have a lot to say. He would come home from lunch from his job as a mid-level engineer with the Kentucky State Highway Department and have a shot of whiskey with his hot lunch my step-grandmother made for him every day. You didn't actually see Charlie drink but as I got older I noticed that the bottle of whiskey on top of the the ice box on the enclosed the back porch would gradually be less and less full until suddenly a new bottle appeared. I remember that if no one was looking my sister and I would sniff the empty shot glass next to the bottle and the sweet acrid smell of whiskey both delighted and repelled us as it burned our nostrils.
During dinner he made solo trips to the back porch and spent the rest of the evening semi-asleep on the couch as friends and relatives chatted away around him in the living room. That’s what adults did in the early 60s in the South, talk politely about everything and nothing while puffing on their favorite brands of Kentucky's finest tobacco. My sister and I, the perfectly behaved children of people who don't pry, sat there on display under threats not to squirm in the heavy blue haze of smoke and avoidance in that living room.
Occasionally Charlie would suddenly ask a question or make a sly comment.
“Chaaaarlie”, my mother Pug would declare in her soft Southern accent, “You’re playing ‘Possum’!”
In my family we didn’t have drunks. We had people who played “Possum.”
After the first round of mouth and throat cancer they pulled out his teeth and cut out part of his jaw. He ate soup the rest of his life. Campbell's bean soup for the next 20 years and two more operations for cancer. Bean soup along with the secret shots of whiskey, cigarrettes and playing “possum” on the couch.
Many years after Charlie mercifully finally passed away my mother died suddenly from the undiscovered lung cancer that had spread to her brain. Pug rapidly regressed and went from her first signs of symptoms to her death in 19 days, two days after what would have been my parent's 47th anniversary. I knew that after watching her father slowly die of cancer that contracting cancer was her greatest fear. We didn't talk about it of course. Or ask.
Two years after mother's death, a historian was referred to my father, Herb Sr from a relative. The historian was writing a book about the early attempts to make Owensboro Kentucky, my grandfathers hometown, the new center of aviation manufacturing.
He showed us the yellowing newspaper clippings that described how my grandfather had taken up flying and had designed a new wing for airplanes. He and his business partner had grand plans to open a plant to build airplanes in Owensboro based upon Charlie's new wing technology.
In the late 20s, seeing a plane was still a rare thing in small towns and the entire town of Owensboro turned out for the first test flight. My grandfather's partner piloted the plane and as he slowly circled the town, one wing broke apart and the plane crashed onto Frederica Street, a street lined with grand homes and the street my grandfather grew up on, killing the partner and his passenger.
We had no additional information to offer. Herb Sr. said he had heard my mother mention this once or twice but he didn't recall many details. We didn't ask a lot of questions. Uncomfortable silence. The visibly disappointed historian gave me copy of the newspaper articles and I think they are in my filing cabinet today. I don't know for sure, I never looked at them again. Maybe tomorrow. Possums still live on my family's couches.
