Celebrating the States

Year End Wrap Up

2010-12-31T12:27:00.000-08:00

If I learned anything from "my year of reading year of books" it is that no year-of memoir is complete without a final reflection.

What I learned:
Of course I learned a bit of U.S. history. But the most interesting thing I learned was about the history of the civil rights movement. Several of the books I read about the south treated this topic and what surprised me the most was that much of what was made out to appear to be local law standing up to "the feds" was really staged - choreographed right down to how many deputies could have thier hands on their gun holsters, and how many could actually have their guns in their hands. These things were negotiated completely for show. If it looked like violence might break out, things were put on hold until another time.

What I would do differently:
I realized early on that the state anniversaries were not spread out evenly and caused a few crunches that I could not keep up with. If I were to give advice to anyone taking on a similar project I would suggest that they do one state a week, perhaps going in order of how they entered the Union - starting with Delaware and ending with Hawaii.

Cheating:
I tried my best to post something on the actual anniversary of statehood, a few times, though, I was late, and when I was on vacation I really didn't worry about it too much, I just caught up when I had a chance. If I had been true to the project I would have never let it slip. But, after all, it was just a goofy blog. Ultimately, though I did read books on all 50 states (plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) and watch a movie for each, and eat or drink something inspired by, or from that state before the year's end.

My next blog will be similar in theme to this one. "Una Nueva Receta Cada Semana" (One New Recipe a Week) is inspired by one of my former Spanish professors, Bob Phillips, who loved to cook. Mostly I will be blogging about food, but will include reviews of any food-related books, or movies I watch. I will be reading the food books aloud to James so he may have his own insights on those as well.

Finally, I have this to say - this project was a lot more fun because I had a great partner to help me with it. Thanks, James.

Texas Size

2010-12-29T18:44:00.000-08:00

To comment about the size of Texas may be to lack imagination, but as a geographer, scale matters almost as much as place, and I have thought a lot about the scale of Texas over the years. Years before living in Texas, I read an article -- I wish I could remember where -- that claimed that Texas is big enough that many Texans do not really consider a 100-mile buffer around the edge to really be part of the state. Too far to the east, and one is really in a spillover area of Louisiana, and the western point terminating at El Paso is really part of New Mexico. Similarly, the north is more like Oklahoma than "real" Texas, and the area within 100 miles of the Rio Grande is in many ways part of Mexico. With north-south and east-west dimensions exceeding 700 miles, there is certainly plenty of room to make this claim. (As I recall, the author was from somewhere near Beaumont, and felt a bit like an outsider when she moved to the center of the state.)

Most South Texans know -- though many Northerners do not -- that the 100-mile buffer is taken quite literally by the United States Government, which operates a checkpoint in Falfurrias, 70 miles from the Mexican border, at which persons and vehicles are searched just as though they were coming in from another country!

www.theodora.com/maps

The first time I was in Texas, it was to pass through the Dallas-Ft. Worth (pronounced WOH-uth) International Airport, known to all as DFW on our way to and from our summer sojourn in Mexico in 1989. When I started my County Map Project the following year, I learned that the sprawling DFW encompasses a significant part of two counties. By then I had passed through on several other trips, and had taxied so much around that airport that I felt justified in counting visits to both Dallas and Tarrant Counties. Years later, I realized that the enormous American Airlines double terminal was just one of several on the site, and that the small train that connects the two is complemented by another train that reaches distant terminals.

Some claim that visiting an airport does not "count" when considering the places one has known. I disagree, because airports are in places and hold lessons about them. The ample sprawl of DFW itself is distinctive, as are the accents, hats, boots, and belt buckles that can be found in the terminal. Equally distinctive is the tremendous number of in-state connecting flights being announced at any given time. DFW is a national and international hub, to be sure, but it is possible -- and common -- for people to be connecting to a couple dozen Texas destinations from any in-bound flight. That is a big state!

The first time I was in Texas outside the airport came in 1990, within a year of that first airport transfer. Dry cleaner investigations were among my specialties at the environmental consulting firm where I worked in Cincinnati, and when a project near the US-Mexico border in the small town of Mercedes became available, I quickly volunteered. This was also when a Saturday stayover would dramatically reduce airfare, and I volunteered for that, too. This gave me the opportunity to spend a couple extra days exploring the Rio Grande Valley. In the space of a couple days, I explored "the Valley" from McAllen in the west (where I had to visit the public library as part of my research) to South Padre Island in the east (where I enjoyed the waves and some great seafood). Of course, I also took time to park the car in Brownsville so I could walk across to the unfortunately-named city of Matamoros.

A few years later, we were living in Tucson and -- like most of our friends -- working as substitute teachers/librarians. We were searching nationwide and internationally for jobs, and I was scanning the few internet-based resources available at the time (this was before graphics or search engines, or even the Web itself, had caught on). I found a listing for a librarian in McAllen, Texas! Not only did I know where that was: I had actually been in the library! Before we knew it, we were making the long drive to McAllen. Actually, we drove to McAllen, then to visit Maryland back home to Tucson and then back to McAllen, with a couple job-search-related side trips thrown in. This is when we started to learn something about the size of Texas!

We lived in Texas just three years, but it made quite an impression in a number of ways. We settled in the Rio Grande Valley, in the town of Pharr, which had just opened a bridge into Reynosa in Mexico. Our idea of a reasonable distance to drive for something had increased when we lived in Arizona, but it really took on new dimensions in Texas. We lived close to our main jobs, as we've always tried to do, but I started taking on part-time teaching jobs -- just to gain the experience -- that were pretty far from home. For several semesters, I taught one night a week at Texas A & M University - Kingsville, Alice Extension. This met in a high school in a declining oil-service and cattle-auction town that was 108 miles from my house! I taught just one night a week for paltry pay plus a mileage allowance, and stopped at an interior border crossing each time. I eventually learned that a necktie and a university parking sticker made these stops much simpler.

I have lived in seven states, and Texas is nearly as big as all the others combined! With over a quarter million square miles in Texas, every family in the United States could have an acre or more, if they could just get to it.

We also started attending religious services more than 20 miles from home (Quaker meeting in private homes). Eventually we adopted an attitude that I was realizing was somewhat common in Texas, actually flying within the state to visit friends and/or a museum. It is a big place! We also explored quite a bit by car, eventually visiting a slim majority of counties in the state.

One night while driving to Alice (which is west of Corpus Christi), I heard reports on a national radio program of flooding in "southern Texas." I was 100 miles north of the border, and these floods were in Houston, more than 200 miles further north!

Because so much of the southern portion of Texas is north of our old home, I took to calling the place we lived (shown in blue on the map) Way South Texas. I eventually cut my teaching commute in half, when I moved to The University of Texas at Brownsville in Partnership with Texas Southmost College. That is the real name of the place: UTB-TSC, where I had international students who could walk to my class from Mexico!

One of our friends in McAllen once commented that Texas is so big that he had never left it. Driving, it would take a long day to reach any other state, it is true. We had to remind him that he had left the state, though: he had been to Mexico many times!

Texas is going to be the focus of a lot of political attention and speculation over the next couple years, as its already-large population has grown enough that it will be allocated four additional seats in Congress. My recent article on Gerrymandering (invented and still practiced expertly in Massachusetts) describes why I don't think all four of those seats will ultimately go to the same party.

Please note: Although we left Texas thirteen years ago after living there only three, it remains important to me in many ways. I stay in touch with some great friends there and follow developments, particularly in the border area. Search Texas posts on my blog for some of these stories.

Texas - December 29, 1845

2010-12-29T18:26:00.000-08:00

It seems good and right that our last celebration of the year is for a place to which we have some deep emotional ties. Although James and I only lived in Texas for three years, it is where we first attended Quaker meeting and began to internalize simple living. And, as we like to tell Paloma, although she was born in New England, she was conceived in Texas. Lately she has been embracing her Texas "heritage". I think the recent New England snow storm has her thinking that white Christmases maybe aren't all they are cracked up to be. We lived in the Rio Grande Valley (or just "the Valley" to those of us who are most familiar with it), in a town called Pharr, about 10 miles from the Mexico border, and 60 miles inland from the Gulf Coast. James taught at UT-Brownsville, which is also known as Texas Southmost College (really!) You may hear folks say Texas is like a whole other country, but the Valley, was like another country all together. The U.S.-Mexico border is a surreal place, rife with magic realism, and unexplained phenomema. We had a visit from the chupacabras during the summer of 1996: he sucked the blood out of livestock and left them dead. James also reminded me recenlty that the San Juan Shrine was hit by an airplane in 1970, and no one was hurt. There was also a story of some sort of big prehistoric bird that flew around during the 1970s. The Valley is also a place of extremes - temperature (heat), and poverty.

We were able to visit some other places in Texas during the three years that we lived there, including Houston, Galveston, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, Midland/Odessa, and Dallas/Ft. Worth. Each place has its own charm - some more charming than others. I expect that if we'd lived in Austin, we might have tried to find a way to stay. But what I can say about the Valley is that in this neck of "the friendship state" the people were especially friendly; I could get fresh, local produce year round; I had a great job there at the McAllen Memorial Library; and James and I learned a lot about our own spirtuality by attending Quaker meeting (a.k.a Society of Friends), where we also made some good friends.

Two things I did find to be true about Texans: one they really do like BIG things (be sure not to miss the World's Largest Killer Bee in Hidalgo); and two, they really like things that are shaped like Texas. You can buy Texas-shaped pasta, corn chips, and stepping stones for your garden.

Beware the Chupacabras!

Tinsel
My favorite thing at Christmastime is driving around the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights. When I found out that there was a book about over-the-top Christmas displays in Frisco, Texas I knew I had found the right book to end this project. Hank Stuever spent the Christmas of 2006 tagging along with Tammie Parnell as she decorated other peoples' homes; helping Jeff Trykoski set up the biggest light diplay on the block; and trailing along on shopping trips and church work with Carroll Cavazos and her family. The way this suburb of Dallas is described in Stuever's book reminds me of everything I don't like about Texas, namely that there is a lot of BIG AND LOUD there. Stuever begins by describing standing in line with Cavazos at Best Buy with Cavazos on Black Friday morning. Don't even get me started about Black Friday. That's Buy Nothing Day to me. Getting up before dawn on a non-work day to stand in line in the cold is one tradition I just don't understand at all. Later in the book he describes a similar scene at Target on the day after Christmas. Yeah, I'm in bed then, too.

Tammie Parnell makes about $30,000 each Christmas season helping her neighbors uber-decorate their homes for the seaon. Once again, I just don't get it. One client laments that she really needed help with the "theme". Huh? Isn't the theme of Christmas "Peace or Earth" or "Goodwill to all" or "God bless us everyone"? Something like that? I was reminded of the time I took the Bridgewater Garden Club Christmas home tour, about 10 years ago. One house had six Christmas trees displayed. Each one with a different theme. I remember the girl's bedroom had a Barbie theme tree; the boy's bedroom was "camoflague" theme; and the kitchen was Disney. I think the "media room" was probably a sports theme. I found it all pretty uninspiring, and was surprised to hear other people say what a great "decorator" the home owner was. A great consumer perhaps, but it isn't hard to decorate when you all you do order "one of each". I was not surprised, however, to read a description of a children's holiday shop experience in Stuever's book that was really no different from my own some 40-odd years ago; or that of my daughter when she was in elementary school - mini shops set up with cheap stuff so that we can train kids to buy at Christmas time, with a gift wrap at the end. Probably you think I sound a lot like a Scrooge from this, and I will admit to buying almost no Christmas gifts. I am neither a giver, nor a receiver. Which is not to say I don't like Christmas, I just don't like the gift exchange, so I don't participate in it. There are gifts for my daughter when she comes down the stairs on Christmas morning, but not the piles of presents that the folks in Frisco, Texas go for. Read my sermon The Best Gift for more insight on this.

There were two mentions of libraries in this book - one was of a school librarian, the other was a decription of Stuever's visit to the library's microfilm collection to read up on the history of Frisco.

I had a weird deja vu experience reading a passage about the Oprah Winfrey show in Tinsel. If you read my Illinois post you know that I read Robyn Okrant's book Living Oprah earlier this year. In it, Okrant describes learning that her poop should be S-shaped, and later describes the excitement she feels when she accomplishes this feat. Stuever mentions being at the Trykoski home when this exact episode is on. By the way, Oprah's poo is C-shaped. I have to be honest here, I don't pay that much attention to mine.

Screen Door Jesus
We saw a preview of this a few months ago and when I realized it was about Texas I added it to our Netflix list. It seemed like it would be a quirky, indie film - right up my cup of tea. It was full of quirky characters, but it was hard to follow. There were a lot of different stories going on, and they did not all appear to be connected. An image of Jesus on the screen door of Mother Harper creates an uproar in the small east Texas town of Bethlehem. The sick, the infirm, the faithful, and the curious come and stand on her lawn trying to get their turn in front of the icon. Although Mother Harper at first feels blessed she comes to resent all the people keeping her awake and ruining her gardens. She and a neighbor come up with a plan to run them off. This movie touched on themes of racism, fundamentalism, and hypocracy.

We found out while watching the credits that the film was based on the "short stories" of Christopher Cook, which helped explain why the film seemed so disjointed.

Of course the phenomenom of seeing religious images in windows is not limited to Texas. Two years ago, there was a lot of attention paid to the appearance of the Virgin Mary in a window at the Milton Hospital in Massachusetts. The image looks more like a ghost to me.

South Texas shares a deep connection with Mexico, and a Christmas tradition they both share is making tamales. It is a tradition we enjoy, and since Texas day fell during the holiday season we invited some friends over today to share tamales with us. James begins making tamales in the morning and spends most of the day working on them. This is after he spends an afternoon in search of corn husks to wrap them in. Each year he goes back to the store where he got them the year before, only to find that that store no longer stocks them, and he has to go out searching again. He believes he has found a "muy autentico" place this time, and may be in luck when he goes back there next year. We use a recipe I found online from Texas Coop Power in 2003. I was not able to find the link again, although Texas Coop Power does still have a website with recipes, they just don't seem to go back as far as the 2003 issue. This recipe calls for chicken, cooking oil, flour water, bouillon cubes, green chilis, garlic, oregano, chili pepper, cumin, tomato sauce and cayenne pepper. In addition The corn "masa" calls for lard (we substitue Crisco), salt, "harina" (corn flour) and water. The ingredients are wrapped in corn husks and steamed. To share in our feast we had seven friends over, including our favorite native Texan, Amelia.

Except for a final reflective post, which I will write on the last day of the year, this is it for my Celebrating the States project.

Iowa Memoir (Lite)

2010-12-28T18:38:00.000-08:00

"I" for Iowa -- the only entry in my County Map Project
in which my county map resembles the state initial.
At least, it seems to be the only one.

As the only member of the Hayes-Bohanan family who has been to Iowa, I decided I should write a bit about my experiences there. "Bit" is the operative word, since I have been there six times in the late 1970s, each just long enough to cross the state the short way (about 200 miles). Of the 99 counties in Iowa, I've managed to be in only 10, despite all those traverses, and since these were all in my high school years about a decade before becoming a geographer, I have to confess that I learned essentially nothing from the experiences.

For the teenage me, Iowa was just a place that needed to be crossed when going from Kansas City, Missouri to Minnesota, which I did for three distinct purposes. The first was to attend a camp at St. Olaf College in Northfield. The camp was sponsored by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, for which my mother worked in the Kansas City headquarters. I was much more a Christian than an athlete, but a scholarship was arranged for my brother (very much an athlete) and I to attend, so we took a school bus overnight from Kansas City. I remember that some of us tried to ride in the luggage bins, and I remember a rest stop on I-35 in Ankeny, and I remember that the scant accommodations there confirmed our chauvinistic banter about how little the state as a whole had to offer. Of course, that judgment says far more about our teenage selves than it does about Iowa, one way or the other.

The second crossing -- along that same narrow groove of I-35 -- was on a mission trip from Kansas City to the suburbs of St. Paul. A mission trip to the suburbs might seem like an oxymoron, but it reveals something of a different kind of chauvinism. We were young Baptists, after all, called by God to convert the Lutherans and Catholics of the frozen north to Christianity. Again, the experience taught me more about myself than I taught any Minnesotans about God. Iowa was just part of that journey, this time by day and in a church bus.

The third crossing was a bit more quixotic, as it turns out. As our church in Kansas City was developing its connections with a host church in Minnesota, my brother and I were developing connections with a pair of sisters there: the daughters, in fact, of the minister. We somehow convinced a young man in our church to drive us there for a visit in his Monte Carlo. Again, the trip was full of tough lessons, and what I remember about Iowa is that we could not get through it fast enough. I remember encouraging my friend to push that Monte Carlo along as fast as prudence -- and the proliferation of Iowa state troopers -- would allow.

Iowa - December 28, 1846

2010-12-28T18:07:00.000-08:00

Iowa is a state I have not yet been to, but my cousin Lori biked across it, twice. James has been there, but not much more than I have. He will have a supplementary post.

Dewey: the Library Cat
Dewey was found in the bookdrop of the Spencer, Iowa library on a freezing cold January morning in 1988. He was adopted by the whole town and spent the rest of his life living in the library, to the delight of the patrons and staff. Dewey always seemed to know who needed him, and had therapeutic qualities. The book tells his story, and that of Vicki Myron, the library director, as well as providing some historical, and social insights into the town of Spencer, and the rest of the world, which was fascinated with Dewey's story. Dewey was featured on national television and in a Japanese documentary about working cats. This book was written for middle-school readers and is based on Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat who Touched the World which was written for an older audience. This is a sweet story, and a bit of a tear-jerker. There are also several picture books for children about Dewey's life available as well. I am looking forward to seeing the movie which is due out early next year.

http://www.deweyreadmorebooks.com/

King Corn
Well, you know the old saying "you are what you eat" - it turns out college friends Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis are both giant ears of corn.This is not because the like to eat corn on the cob, or corn chowder, or creamed corn, or even corn chips, but rather because so much of their food is corn in disguise. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is the sweetner of choice for most soft drinks, and junk food. By an interesting coincidence, both young men have a great-grandfather from Greene County Iowa so it is there they choose to rent an acre of land to grow corn and find out where it goes. They team up with a local farmer who rents them the land and helps them to sow, cultivate and reap the crop. They learn a lot about farming, not the least of which is that Iowa corn farmers make their money from government subsidies, not from selling the grain. Also that what the government is subsidizing can hardly be called food. They taste test their corn and spit it right back out. Other locals agree that the corn is not edible. The corn they grow either used to feed beef or is highly processed to become HFCS. The two young men are unsuccessful in trying to get a tour of a processing plant, but do manage to find a scientist who will give them the formula to make it themselves - a nasty business that. They also manage to score an interview with Earl Butz, who was Secretary of Agriculture during the Nixon administration. Butz explains to them why the government subsidies evolved they way they did. I suppose some will watch this movie and say that they will never look at food again the same way, for me though, that boat had sailed. That is not to say I didn't learn some new things, and it did solidify my desire to eat more locally produced, unprocessed food.

Because HFCS has been given such a bad rap there is some movement to changing the name, as if that would make everything better. See this New York Times article to vote on the name you like best. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/help-rename-high-fructose-corn-syrup/

Although food containing HCFS would have been an authentic choice for today's consumable, we decided to eat real corn instead. James made corn chowder with my recipe of vegetable stock, onions, potatoes, corn, 1/2 & 1/2 and greens. The recipe has evolved from one I got out of the Boston Globe a few years ago, and only resembles it in passing now. He also made our favorite skillet corn bread - I hope everyone has learned by now the importance of the cast iron skillet. It is never too late to begin cooking with one. We like the recipe from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

The United States of Autocomplete

2010-12-20T06:11:00.000-08:00

James brought this item to my attention this morning from the Brainiac section of the Boston Globe. The United States of Autocomplete is a map made by Dorothy Gambrell by doing Google Searches on states' names.

New Jersey - December 18, 1787

2010-12-18T14:05:00.000-08:00

When I was a senior in high school my boyfriend went to Ryder College in New Jersey. I don't know how many times I asked my mother if I could take a train or bus up to see him, but was never allowed. I would like to go on record that I recently allowed my 13-year old daughter to take the train, by herself, to New Jersey to visit her friends from camp.

Jersey Diners
Peter Genovese's book is a kitschy, fun read, with a lot of photos. He visited all of New Jersey's 570 diners in operation at the time he was researching the book, which was in the mid 1990s. He talked to waitresses, cooks, owners, and customers, took pictures and otherwise researched the history of the diners. I had a lot of book marks in this one when I was finished. One of the first things I noticed was that he said there will be "no quotes from scholars..." by way of saying there won't be any of that fanciful languge but then, on the very next page he quotes Rutger's University professor Michael Aaron Rockland (let's call him a "scholar") as saying that New Jersey is "the roadside pop architecture capital of the world." I noticed one other comment by a scholar from a Yale University professor emeritus "Baeder's paintings differ from those of most of his photo-realist or magic-realist contemporaries. ' Bader is not haunted like Hopper by a sense of something empty, hollow and solitary in the American experience. Instead, he is hopeful, a painter-poet who makes us see the beauty of common things..." Nope, nothing fanciful here.

There was a bit about coffee in this book. My favorite quotes were these:
From a 1950s training manual - "Don't put salt in the coffee! If salt helped make a good cup of coffee, the coffee companies would be the first ones to add it."

From The Diner, a 1947 trade magazine - "Coffee has probably affected restaurant profits more than any other single factor. Good coffee keeps old customers and makes new ones; poor coffee drives the customers away"

From a customer at the Summitt Diner - "Drink too much. Have ten cups before ten. Couple when I get up, couple on the way over. And I'll bring five with me out of here." The following line in the book indicates that the Summit lines up styrofoam cups on the counter for take out customers. As for me, I'd rather skip coffee all together than drink it from styrofoam. Blech.

A turkish proverb: "Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love."

Other things I found noteworthy in this book were a mention of county maps as "something seen at too few diners."

One aptonym : Short order cook Lee Slingerland

One mention of Baltimore (my hometown) regarding "...Tim, a former 7-up plant manager in Baltimore..." Since I used to live less than a mile from said plant, it was made all the more exciting to me.

One mention of the Big Dig in Boston "the former Ono diner in Ono, Pennsylvania [was turned] into the Big Dig diner, to be located at the entrance to Boston's Harbon Tunnel." I felt a pilgrimage coming on, but found this blog post indicating that the Big Dig diner has already been moved since the publication of the book.

One mention of Cyndi Lauper's music video Time after Time, which was filmed in a Jersey diner.

And, one mention of librarians - Genovese knows that librarians are his friends and thanks especially "Winnie Zagariello and Betty Selingo, the best librarians in New Jersey", Well done my friends!

SherryBaby
Sherry Swanson, recently released on parole for drug charges, is looking to reconnect with her young daughter, Alexis. There are tensions between Sherry and her sister-in-law, Lynette, who has been caring for Alexis, and Sherry has a hard time keeping clean once she is released. While it is clear that Sherry wants to be a good parent, and do well at her job in a daycare center, we see a very disturbing side of her. Beyond the drug use Sherry uses sex to get favors from men who are supposed to be working to help her. The fact that they readily accept her offers is troubling as well.

Bonus Movie:
While I was reading Jersey Diners I saw several mentions of movies, commercials and music videos that were filmed in New Jersey diners. Since I was also planning to prepare a Jersey diner meal, I thought I would just go for the theme and watch an additional movie that was filmed in a diner. I picked Baby It's You. I should have just left well enough alone. There was a scene inside the Roadside Diner, but there is not much good to say about this movie. It is an upper-class girl/working-class boy movie. The relationship is abusive, but I think the audience was just supposed to think that the girl needed to lighten up. The young man -"the Sheik", named for a condom - alternately cheats, ignores, controls, and ransacks, but it seemed the audience was expected to still feel sorry for him when it was clear that his girlfriend outgrew him (or just got tired of being treated like crap). And she still gives him a last dance to remember her by. This was an '80s movie about the '60s and it is what one might expect. It stars Rosanna Arquette, which reminded me of her other New Jersey movie, Desperately Seeking Susan.

Best Tuna Melt (New Jersey Diner Style)
I couldn't resist this one when I found it once I read the Jersey Diner's book. Two changes I made to the recipe were using cheddar cheese instead of swiss, and leaving out the parsley. Otherwise I followed the recipe after some discussion with James about it. He is not generally a finicky eater, but when it comes to tuna salad he wants only tuna and mayonnaise. None of that celery business for him. I was prepared to make a separate tuna salad for him sans celery and onion, but he finally decided to make it a "cultural experience" and do it the Jersey Diner way. He wound up being "a clean plate ranger", although, I doubt I have converted him.

Alabama - December 14, 1819

2010-12-14T05:45:00.000-08:00

James got my day started this morning with Alabama-themed music from The Grateful Dead, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and The Five Blind Boys of Alabama.

Like so many other southern States, Alabama was one of my summer of 1997 "drive-thru" states. I was able to visit it again for a bit of a longer stay in 2000 after James, Paloma and I spent a month in Brazil. We had driven down to Miami to fly down to the Amazon, and when we returned took a 2-week drive back visiting friends along the way. At the time, our friend Bill-O lived in Birmingham. Although she was not yet three years old, Paloma still remembers the visit because Bill had two cats "one with a tail, and one without a tail" (when we visited Bill in Virginia this past summer he still had both cats). While in Birmingham we visited the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, site of the bombing which killed four girls in in 1963. Spike Lee's movie 4 Little Girls tells their story. Just across the street from the chuch we visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Crazy in Alabama tells the story orphan Peter Joseph "Peejoe" Bullis during the summer of 1965. Peejoe and his brother, Wiley, go to live with their Uncle Dove, the "whites only" mortician, in Industry, Alabama. I wasn't quite sure if Industry was a real place, but did find this reference to it on the internet. I am not sure, though, how much of the civil rights struggle described in the novel actually happened. The novel aternates between chapters from tweleve-year old Peejoe's point of view, and that of his Aunt Lucille, who takes off to California in hopes of landing a spot on the Beverly Hillbillies after murdering her husband and abandoning her six children. Peejoe's chapters were told in the first person, while Lucille's were told from the third person point of view. They also were contrasted in tone. Lucille lives in a fantasy world in which, remarkably, everything seems to go her way, while Peejoe is caught in the middle of a civil rights battle for an integrated swimming pool, and watches as his Uncle loses virtually all of his business when word gets out that he embalmed a black person.

One mention of a library in this book. Peejoe tells his Aunt Earlene "I'm going outside...Wiley brought me a book from the library."

I found out after I read the book that there is a movie based on it. I will add it to my Netflix list.

There were a few Alabama movies to choose from: Fried Green Tomatoes; Sweet Home Alabama; 4 Little Girls; Forrest Gump; The Miracle Worker; Norma Rae; The Long Walk Home, among others, but I revisited the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck stars as Attitcus Finch, an attorney who is appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white girl. The story takes place in 1932 and is told through the eyes of Scout, Finch's six year old daughter. Even as we see Finch go well beyond his duty to defend Robinson, and to treat everyone with respect, racial dynamics are clear. Calpurnia, his black maid, stays in the kitchen while the family has supper, and only comes out when called upon to bring something to the table. The courtroom drama is wonderfully done, very suspenseful, even though I knew what would happen. Although I always think the book version of any story is better than the film, this movie comes pretty close to being as-good-as.

After Paloma, I think Scout may be the second best name for a girl I've ever heard.

I made a baked macaroni and cheese recipe that I prepared for the first time a few years ago from Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook: Featuring : Fried Green Tomatoes, Southern Barbecue, Banana Split Cake, and Many Other Great Recipes. The macaroni and cheese recipe has a lot of cheddar cheese, and a milk / egg mixture that gave the dish a nice texture. I also made this simple squash recipe which came from an Alabama food site. I selected it because I already had some yellow squash frozen from the summer, and because of its insistence on the use of a cast-iron skillet. Although it was not called for, I also baked the mac & cheese in a cast iron skillet. We have three of them (plus a cast iron griddle) you can never have too many.

Pennsylvania - Dec. 12, 1817, no, I mean 1787

2010-12-12T17:18:00.000-08:00

Today's post is dedicated to my friend Anna, who grew up in Scranton.

Fantasyland map

My first memories of Pennsylvania are of going outlet shopping in York and Reading. Only about an hour from our home in Catonsville, Maryland, we could drive up there after school and be home before bedtime. We also occasionally visited nearby Gettsysburg, especially after some of our Maryland neighbors moved there. When I was very young my family loved going to Fantasyland, a now defunct theme park near Gettysburg. I went one time as a teenager and I very much wish I hadn't. I don't know if I had just become jaded, that the park wasn't being maintained properly anymore, or that I had simply outgrown it, or perhaps all three, but it seemed run down, and not nearly as fun as I remembered. My family also enjoyed HersheyPark, and my father and I stopped at the Leonard Harrison State Park a.k.a. the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania on a trip up to Niagara Falls. Although Philadelphia is not far from where I grew up, I actually didn't make it there until after I moved to New England. James and I spent a night at a lovely B & B in Amish Country a few years ago. Our most recent visit was a stop in Pittsburgh on our way to visit family in Maryland, to see one of Paloma's camp friends.

So, I really think I was the wrong reader for Speaking of Miracles: The Faith Experience at the Basilica of the National Shrine of St. Ann in Scranton, Pennsylvania by Fr. Cassian J. Yuhaus. I chose it for two reasons, the first was that it was about Scranton, and the other was that it was short. The target audience of this one though is clearly failthful Catholics. In two instances it mentions abortion as the same level of disaster as Katrina, war, and AIDS. There is also a passage on marriage which states that "marriage takes place between one man and one woman as God intended. Not one man and eight women, not between one woman and five men. And today, one must note with emphasis, marriage is not between two men or between two women." Yuhaus is clearly concerned about we here is liberal, and I might add, very Catholic, Massachusetts ruining the institution of marriage.

I did learn a bit about the history of Scranton from the book, and about the Catholic Church. It tells the history of the shrine, as well as relating stories from those who have experienced healing miracles after visiting the shrine and praying to St. Ann. Although I am not a follower of Catholism, I don't doubt the stories, and I do believe that prayer can help with healing. I have a very hard time believing, though, that there is any devine entity (God or Saint) who has the capacity to heal people, but will only do so when the faithful intervene through prayer, or that there is any one religion with a lock on it. This book was published in 2006, after the church's sex scandal broke. Since the book is a celebration I was surprised to see two references to the scandal. In one case it was in a letter which euphemistically mentioned the "priests who...[broke] their vows so long ago...a cross for all of us." Huh? Is the fact that priests broke their vows really what the problem is?

Anna suggested The Molly Maguires for today's cinematic fare, as the only movie she knew of that takes place in Scranton. She came over with her husband and daughter, and along with me, my husband and daughter we sat down to watch the film. I counted three people snoring before it was over (Anna was the first one out!). I don't think the movie was especially bad, just very slow moving. The first line of dialogue took place 15 minutes into the film. Prior to that there was a lot of mood-setting. We all agreed it was a bit hard to keep all the characters straight. It is about coal miners in the late 1800s and often we saw them with very sooty faces, and weren't quite sure which one was which. This movie was based on the true story of the Molly Maguires, coal miners who used terrorist tactics as a means of protesting their extremely poor working conditions. The Molly Maguires are infiltrated by a detective who seems to begin to understand their motivation, but ultimately rats them out.

I met Anna about 10 years ago. Ever since I've known her she has talked about making periogies whenever she visits her family in Pennsylvania. The only time I reemember having periogies myself they came frozen from the grocery store, and were essentially tasteless. Anna and I made some from scratch - the Scranton way, and then both our families sat down to nosh. We also had keilbasa, another of Anna's PA favorites. The fresh periogies were delicious. We filled them with potatoes and cheese. I also recently learned from this article that periogies are one a favorite in Pittsburgh, too. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/dining/17region.html

Dancing Pittsburgh Periogies

Indiana Time

2010-12-11T13:19:00.000-08:00

I'll add just a couple things to Pam's Indiana marvelous post.

As strange as the time-zone situation was, I kind of miss it. Indiana greatly simplified its time-keeping about five years ago, but the "What Time is it in Indiana?" web page is, thankfully, still available to assure us we were not making any of it up. It really was impossible to keep track of the time in Indiana through most of the twentieth century, since the state did not observe Daylight Savings time, except in some counties. And these counties were always changing. Having a watch was a liability, and I can only imagine what would happen to the clock on a cell phone, as a traveler passed from tower to tower through the state. See the page for an explanation of the map to the right, including the fact that some parts of this map reflect times that were officially "unofficial."

The time-zone situation had a couple of interesting implications for us. We lived in the border town of Oxford, Ohio for three years, mostly in the center of the town, but the last eight months house-sitting right on the line. Hoosiers were to us as Russkies were to Sarah Palin, except, as Pam points out, in our case it was literally true: we could see Indiana from our house. The practical implication was that my medical doctor was on the Indiana side of the nearby town of College Corner. Appointments were never as simple as "come in at 2:00 on Tuesday."

In that same town, school planners had gone out of their way to celebrate the odd situation. The inevitable "Stateline Road" has one interruption in town -- a gap where the local school is located. Not only did this school have the privilege of reporting to two, different state-education bureaucracies, but the classes in each side of the building would be on the same clock at the beginning and end of the school year, but not in the middle. The dashed line on the map below quite deliberately splits the school. I can only imagine that the principal's desk is on the line (I'd put it there if I were principal, just for the thrill of it).

View Larger Map

I was grateful that in Indiana, counties did matter, and that might account for part of my nostalgia. I've visited 60 of its 92 counties at one time or other, and certainly wore a groove in the Indiana section of Interstate 70, which is between several of the places I've lived.

As we've said, the time-zone confusion is all in the past. It made the state a bit more interesting than it otherwise would have been, and I guess all we can tease Indiana about now is its obsession with high school basketball.

Indiana - December 11, 1816

2010-12-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

Indiana - home state of my mother and father. I don't even remember my first trip there, I was so young. My family used to drive there to visit my grandparents. It only took about 8 hours back in the 1960s to drive from Baltimore to the northwest corner of Indiana because the speed limit was 75 mph. I do know that Indiana was one of the first states I could identify on a United States map. When James and I lived in Ohio we could see Indiana from our porch. It was an hour earlier there, except during Daylight Savings Time, except some counties in Indiana did observe Daylight Savings Time. When we drove into the state we would try to check out the time on the bank clocks to determine where we were. I think Indiana has since given up and now observes Daylight Savings Time across the state.

A Very Indiana Christmas
Sometime in the late 80s I remember sitting in a bar in Oxford, Ohio, and being drawn to the silent television set in the corner where I saw a drunk-looking Santa and scared little kid, with a button nose, being pushed down a fake-snow covered slide. Even without the sound I knew I was onto something special. How could I find out the name of this Christamas movie? I had to see it. I don't remember how I eventually found out. I'm pretty sure I ran across the movie by chance again later. I don't recall going on any kind of a "quest" to find out. The movie, of course is that classic tale of Ralphie, the boy who wants a Red Rider BB gun - A Christmas Story. I have since seen the movie dozens of times. A few years ago I was excited to learn that the ficticious town of Holman, Indiana, in which the movie takes place, is really based on Hammond, Indiana, hometown of Jean Shepherd, the narrator of the story, and author of the book In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash, which the movie is based on. Hammond is also my mother's hometown! So how lucky is it that the Indiana anniversary falls in December so we can just have overselves a merry little Christmas fest all based in Hammond, Indiana.

Herewith my "A Christmas Story" stories:

Whenever we see the scene in which Flick gets his tongue stuck to the flagpole my family must hear, once again, about the time I tried to lick the frost off the top of an orange juice can when I was a little girl. I'll spare you the gory bits, and just say - Don't try this at home folks.

When my daughter was little whenever we would watch this movie and the famous F--- scene came up she used to beg me and my husband to tell her what he "really said". We knew that someday she would find out, but we weren't going to be the ones to tell her. Then one year she just didn't ask. Although we had never heard her say it, we knew that sometime in the previous 12-months she had found out what the f-bomb was. Good times.

I bought this leg lamp from the "A Christmas Story" Gift shop online with Indiana Day in mind. Here Paloma stands next to it on her way to see her friend in West Bridgewater's Production of A Christmas Story. She was actually wearing a pink bunny hat, and changed when I pointed out how appropriate that was. I don't know why the picture is sideways. It is right side up in the computer file. I tried rotating it 90 degrees, but it flipped 180.

Since this week is lousy with State celebrations, a book that would be easy to read was what I was looking for in seeking an Indiana selection. I tried a search on Indiana Ficiton in my local public library catalog and was drawn to the title of a young adult novel: Here Lies the Librarian. This story takes place in the summer of 1914 and tells the story of PeeWee McGrath, a recent 8th grade graduate who lives in a small Indiana town with her brother, and works with him in a garage. This book not only features four living, and one dead librarian, it celebrates librarianship and libraries, and mentions Indianapolis (my father's hometown) Butler University (my father's alma mater) and Beanblossom, Indiana, which is not only home of Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Hall of Fame & Country Star Museum, it is named for one of my ancestors. My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Beanblossom (really!).

I chose Waynesboroughs as my Indiana meal because I thought the name was clever. These burrito wraps of egg, potato and sausage were filling, flavorful, and easy to make.

Mississippi - December 10, 1817

2010-12-10T19:43:00.000-08:00

Mississippi is another one of my "drive through" states. The only time I was there was while I was in a car moving from Texas to Massachussetts during my third trimester of pregnancy. I honestly have no memory of it.

Sons of Mississippi by Paul Hendrickson

In Robert Persig's classic book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Persig relates a story about trying to get a student to learn to write. She claims there is nothing to say when assigned to write about Bozeman. He sends the student back to town and tells her to write about one building and to start with one brick in the building. The student returns exhuberent and excited about all there was to write about. Sons of Mississippi is a book is about one picture - a picture taken in Oxford, Mississippi in the fall of 1962, just before the University of Mississippi "Old Miss" was integrated by James Merideth. Meredith officially entered classes on October 1 of that year. The picture, dated September 27, 1962 - the day my sister was born - was taken a few days before rioting broke out on the campus. The men in the photograph are six sheriffs and a sheriff's deputy who want to maintain the segregated status quo of the south. Intrigued by this photograph, which was published in Life magazine, Hendrickson sets out to find the subjects and the photographer decades after it is published. Most of the sheriffs are dead, but he is able to set up interviews with the survivors, or their widows, or their offspring, as well as with Charles Moore, the photographer, and with James Merideth and his descendents. It is amazing how much can be written about one picture - a thousand words? This book is over 300 pages! I was fascinated that so many people were willing to open up to Hendrickson, including the former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. I also never knew that James Merideth once worked for segregationist Jesse Helms and campaigned for David Duke when he made his run for governor. Libraries are mentioned occasionally throughout this book, beginning with the prologue in which Hendrickson describes another photograph, found on microfilm at the public library, of Ed Cothran, the sheriff with his back turned, when he helped recover the body of a Emmett Till a 14-year old boy who was lynched for making a pass at a white woman in 1955. There are a few mentions of the Ole Miss library including a description of the ceremony and reception that took place in 1997 when James Meredith turned over his papers to the university archives. What struck me the most, though was this passage about the university library :

"If a reseacher or pesky out-of-town vistor had gone through the [periodicals] aisles [of the library] looking for stories about what had happened at Ole Miss in late September and early October 1962, he would have discovered that most of the stories weren't there. The periodicals themselves exist-but almost all of the stories have been scissored or ripped out. Whole issues are missing from the shelves, including the the issue of Life containing Charles Moore's photograph." Hendrickson makes no guesses as to the disposition of these relics.

Published in 2003, Sons of Mississippi was written before Old Miss retired its Rebel mascot and the mascot is mentioned as something that still ties the University to its "apartheid" past. Colonel Reb was retired recently in favor of the Black Bear mascot. Some fans are upset over the change, and are fighting it. See this story in the New York Times for details.

This book is made all the more fascinating after watching Prom Night in Mississippi a documentary about Charleston High School. Although the school has been integrated for decades, the school has always had two senior proms - a black prom and a white prom- sponsored by the parents. In 1997 actor Morgan Freeman, embarassed to be a resident of a town with such a traditon, offered to pay for the prom if it were integrated. His offer was ignored. In 2008 he made the offer again and the school made preparations to have its first integrated prom. Even so, a group of white parents sponsored a separate "whites only" senior
dance. Some of the white students attended both events, others attended only one or the other. The filmmakers interviewed many of the students, as well as some teachers and administrators who spoke quite frankly about racism. Students and administrators expressed quite a bit of concern about security at the integrated prom, even though the students had grown up together and played on sports teams together. Ironically, the only violence occured at the "whites only" prom. The parent organizers of the whites only dance refused to speak for the cameras. According to their lawyer they were afraid of being perceived as racist...hmm... Events that were not allowed to be filmed were described by narrators with drawings as visual aids. The drawings resembled comic book art, which seems to convey how ridiculous the idea of a segregated prom in the 21st century is. The School's only interracial couple was delighted to know that they would be able to attend prom together, even as the young woman's self-proclaimed red-neck father expressed his disapproval of the relationship.

I noted that the High School was not actually integrated until 16 years after Brown vs. the Board of Education and I wonder when Charleston will get around to complying with the any of the Supreme Court's decisions against prayer in public school. Two different scenes from the movie showed the School blatantly ignoring this rule on the separation of church and state.

Library connection
Some of the students were interviewed in the school's library. Books are visible in the background - tenuous I know, but all uses of a library will be noted in my blogs!

I was actually a bit skeptical that I would like Crispy Coated Cajun Fries, but the recipe seemed simple enough, which is what I was looking for in this season of States. I didn't follow the recipe exactly. It calls for corn meal and corn flour and I don't know what the difference between them is, so I just used corn meal, which was all I had anyway. And after my Nevada doughnut disaster I wasn't about to try deep frying again, so I just pan fried. These turned out pretty good. We had them with crab cakes and homebrew, which made a fine meal.

Delaware - December 7, 1787

2010-12-07T05:18:00.000-08:00

My memories of Delaware are mostly of Rehoboth beach. While most of my Maryland friends were vactioning in Ocean City, my family preferred the more low-key Rehoboth Beach. We spent a week there the summer of my third grade year along with our friends the Vegas who came down from Quebec to vacation with us. I sure thought that was something special.

Haunted Delaware by Patricia Martinelli
I selected this one because it seemed like a good companion for the Delaware horror movie (which as best I could tell was the only available Delaware movie) and because it was skinny (118 pages). It is hard to believe that a state so small has so many ghost stories, but this short book is chock full of 'em. I was surprised to learn, also, that the prestegious University of Delware "pioneered paranormal research in the 1950s". Arranged in chronological order, starting with the pre-european invasion tales of the Lenni-Lenape and then moving on to the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. I actually learned quite a bit of Delaware history from this book. The stories were short, so it was a quick read, too. Some of the stories were ones I've heard almost everywhere I lived (i.e. "the vanishing hitchhiker" and "cry baby bridge") others were clearly more unique to Delaware. I was interested to learn that escaped slaves from the south who made it to Delaware on the underground railroad had to be careful of kidnappers who would resell them to send back. This fate sometimes befell free blacks as well. One of the longer stories in the book relates the tale of Patty Cannon who ran an inn in the early 1800s. Cannon not only poisoned weatlhy visitors who came to her inn, she also auctioned off escaped and freed slaves who she kept chained in her basement with the corpses until a buyer could be found. This saga ends with this surprising twist - Cannon's skull was donated to the Dover Public Library after being stolen by a grave robber decades earlier where it remains to this day!

The Stone House was released on DVD on October 29 of this year. I am not quite sure where I would have found a Delaware movie had this one not come out just in time. The State Movie map indicates Wayne's World as an option but I suspect that a very small piece of the action takes place in Delaware, since it is really an Illinois film. The Stone House was filmed entirely on location in Delaware with Delaware actors. And although the DVD container makes this clear, there is no mention of Delaware in the movie, in fact, it appears the filmmakers went out of their way to avoid mentioning Delaware. In one scene a gentleman is reading a newspaper. The paper's name was impossible to read - the paper clearly and deliberately sliced right at the top so that the name is flipped down.

The movie begins with a bit of (ficticious) exposition explaining that the Stone House was established in 1954 as a home for the mentally ill, and that it burned down in 1979. The patients escaped the fire, but only three were ever found.... From there we meet Rick and Joslyn Berlinger, newcomers to a small town, who are shocked to find a skeleton, dug up from a grave, on their property. Although the local sheriff assures them it is simply a prank, they soon find themselves in the midst of a much larger nightmare.

According to the "Making of Stone House" special feature included with my DVD all those who worked on this movie did so for free. Knowing that, I have to say I am pretty impressed. I don't normally watch horror movies, so I was glad to see that there was no budget for special effects in this one. There was a lot of hitting people with shovels, which could have been ghastly.

A lot of the recipes I choose for this project come from allrecipes.com which lists recipes by state if you search hard enough (from the Main page click "more recipes" under the Popular Collection heading, then click on "USA Regional and Ethnic" from there you can pick a region, and then a state within the region. I had a hard time finding Delaware this way though. My choices of region are Midwest, Mountain, Northeast, West Coast, and Southern. Northeast seemed the most likely, but Delaware was not listed there. Where could it be? It turns out to be under the Southern link. Woah! Let's check out where the Mason Dixon line is, shall we? Anyway, after finding the Delware recipes I chose the Spaghetti with Red Clam sauce. This was good, and easy to make. James and I were both a bit worried that it would taste too "clammy" but there were plenty of other flavors. I expect I will make this one again.

Hawaii Music Follow-Up

2010-12-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

It is too bad we did not know the story of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole back when we celebrated Hawaii Day. He was a gentle giant whose first recording became the version of "Over the Rainbow" most familiar to an entire generation. As Pam remembered, his version was the opening of 50 First Dates, a film that would have been a more enjoyable -- if less informative -- selection for our Hawaii movie.

Israel died at a young age of complications related to his obesity. In this story by Renee Montagne, he is remembered for his devotion to his homeland, reflected in music that eschewed the sounds of tourist-oriented hula tunes.

Illinois - December 3, 1818

2010-12-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

Not to be overly dramatic or anything, but I have Illinois to thank for my very existence. My parents met there, perhaps 50 years ago, when they both worked for the federal government in Chicago. Although they moved to Baltimore right after the wedding, I have been able to visit Illinois a number of times. I like Chicago a lot. It is a happening city with much to do, and I find the people there really friendly. I remember visiting once for a conference and going to the Museum of Broadcast Communication. Who wouldn't love the place? I still get a chill when I see my family's home movies of our visit to the Chicago zoo. And let us not forget that Illinois is so much more than Chicago. I have also been to Springfield to see Lincoln's home - another must do.

Living Oprah
Before Oprah Winfrey had a sindicated television show in Chicago she was the host of a morning news show for the local ABC affiliate in Baltimore, Maryland. Those of us who grew up in the area during the 1970s remember an Oprah who wore an afro, and clothes from JC Penney, and whose weight was not a never-ending topic of conversation. I don't remember her as the super-sensitive woman we know today, either. I remember her being a somewhat aggressive when interviewing Faith McNulty (The Burning Bed) and questioning why she would stay with an abusive husband. Winfrey bailed on Baltimore in the mid 1980s, about the same time the Colts did. Living Oprah, Robyn Okrants "One-Year Experminet to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk" makes one small reference to Oprah's time in Maryland, but Oprah clearly belongs to Chicago. Of course I could not resist a "year of" book about Illinois when I found out about this one. Okrant, who is not really a mega-fan, decides to go one year following all of Oprah's advice, and I mean all. Whatever Oprah says to wear, she wears, whatever Oprah says to buy, she buys. Of course any of the "advice" aimed at acquiring stuff I scoffed at, as well as anything I thought just seemed over the top, but I surely felt mighty smug at any of the things I was already doing. (Take the t.v. out of the bedroom? - Everyone knows bedrooms are only for sex and sleeping; Get out a hand mirror so you can become aquainted with your vulva? Ha! I already know mine so well I could pick it out of a line-up!: Declutter your home? snort! ) The project actually creates quite a bit of stress, and debt, for part-time yoga-instructor Okrant, but all in all I'd say it all turned out pretty well for her. I mean, she got a best-selling book out of the deal, after all. She does seem pretty surprized at all the attention her project receives during its run, and one friend does point out that perhaps it is because she is following Oprah's advice that she gets so much attention, despite the fact that she does not seek it. A fun read that, like Julie and Julia, will have a lot of bloggers fantisizing that perhaps someone will discover them and take them away from it all. Find out more about Okrant at http://www.robynokrant.com/

Oprah with Richard Sher on WJZ-TV in Baltimore

A Raisin in the Sun

A Sidney Poiter movie is never a bad thing. This classic film about a family living in the Chicago projects features Poiter as a man who has recently become the head of his household following the death of his father. The family consists of Walter Younger (Poiter), his wife, son, mother and sister, all of whom live in a two bedroom apartment, and share a bathroom with another apartment. We see the family trying to break free of poverty through the aspirations of Beneatha (Walter's sister) who is studying to become a doctor, in the meantime the family suddenly comes into a $10,000 insurance payment and must decide whether to risk it on a business venture that Walter is scheming with two partners, or save the money for education, and buy a house. Themes of civil rights, and not-so-thinly veiled racism, would have been very current for the time when the movie was made, and probably were especially challenging for white audiences of the day.

Interestingly, Okrant's book made reference to this movie. Apparently there was a remake? I am so out of touch I had no idea.

Could my "munchie" have been more of a cop-out than dining at Uno Chicago Grill "birthplace of the original deep-dish pizza" in 1943. An easy decision during a busy week, and pizza is always a hit with my daughter, and we had also had an additional child yesterday, so all the better. The pizza was okay. I liked my salad though - tossed greens with goat cheese, glazed walnuts and vinigrette.

50 State Television Shows

2010-11-23T06:43:00.000-08:00

One thing I didn't try for this project was watching a television show from each state, but apparently I could have. This entry from the "Thinking Psuedogeographically" blog shows one show for each state.

North Carolina Musings

2010-11-21T18:30:00.000-08:00

(This is my auxiliary North Carolina post. Be sure to read Pam's official post for North Carolina Day.)

My family is not from Cold Mountain, North Carolina, nor had the book or film been thought of during the many summer days I spent on what I called the "family mountain" on the edges of the Smoky Mountains. Our mountain -- known in the family as Scorpion Knob and to the U.S. Geological Survey as Poison Cove Top -- is located in the rural outskirts of Canton, North Carolina, just two miles across the East Fork of the Pigeon River from the now-famous mountain to the south.

View Larger Map

I never lived on Scorpion Knob, nor did my mother. Both of us were born in Washington, DC and grew up in Northern Virginia. But whenever she uses the word "Home," we all know that she is referring to this slope on Old Michael Road, between Canton and Crusoe, in the midst of Pisgah National Forest. I grew up slightly confused, thinking that it had been my grandmother's home, but that was not quite true either; only the youngest of the thirteen children in her family had lived in the place I visited as a child. Still, it was a place to which I have a strong connection, though I've only been a few times as an adult.

The last time was for the birthday of my aunt who now lives on the site where the old house burned down a number of years ago. I remember when that previous house first got indoor plumbing, which means I am just old enough to know what a chamber pot is for. By the time I was growing up, tobacco farming was no longer the mainstay of the family, though it had been, despite my great-grandmother's allergy to the stuff, even in its raw form. I grew up in a part of northern Virginia that I thought of as suburban, perhaps because I knew that "Home" was rural. The fact that my street was named "Owls Nest Road" after a hunting lodge and that part of the road was unpaved did not compare to the rural life further south.

Most of the time we spent in North Carolina was in the western mountains, not only on the old family property itself, but also in other towns around Asheville. I associated the area -- correctly, I think -- with deeply conservative religion, and though I only ever saw Billy Graham in big arenas in Baltimore and Kansas City, I always knew that I was in his territory when I visited. At the time, this was comforting, though in later years I came to associate that brand of Christianity with intolerance, and ultimately with brief but clear glimpses of a racism that was never far from the surface.

It is against that backdrop that recent visits have revealed so much change. In 2000, we passed through the area on the way back from Brazil (we had flown from Miami) and in 2008, we attended a birthday party for the only surviving sibling of my grandmother. By that 2008 visit, I noticed two things about the settlement patterns in the immediate area of the family mountain. First, we were much closer to town than I had ever realized, a ten-minute drive from the sizable town of Waynesville. Second, a very low-density form of suburban sprawl was overtaking the area. I am a happy to see from satellite imagery (below) that the scarring of the land by ranchettes, McMansions, and (gadzooks!) country clubs seems to be limited to the main road, but the visual impact was nonetheless jarring.

During the 2000 visit, we stayed with grad-school friends who were working at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, 20 miles ESE of Cold Mountain. Although they loved the home they had built on the forest-covered mountainside just out of town, they were already preparing to move to Asheville, because they found the religious climate stifling. As Jews, they were worn down by the fact that most introductions included the question, "Where do you go to church?" meaning "Where do you go to Baptist church?"

This, sadly, did not surprise me very much, but their solution did. They had decided to move to Asheville, a town that I did not think would be any more diverse or tolerant. Little did I know that in the generation that had passed since I spent any serious time in the region, things had really changed. We learned that by 2000 Asheville had become artsy. We even went to a Cuban restaurant there. I could not jibe this with the Asheville of my youth. During our 2008 visit, we learned that the whole area had somehow become trendy, leading me to add an entire North Carolina section to my page on coffee shops.

Before closing this long ramble -- I could go on for days -- I should comment on a couple of things that Pam mentioned in her post. The first is the movie Junebug, which I enjoyed tremendously. It was a movie that was focused not on its plot, but rather on its rich assortment of characters. Like Pam, I found it interesting that none of the characters really developed. Unlike Pam, I felt like I knew many of these people, and I knew one of the hymns they sang in church. (Common cinematic experience at our house: rural southern movie includes obscure gospel music; James sings along.) Of all the characters, I liked Amy Adams' "Ashley" the best. Tthough she is the kind of naive religious person I have tried so hard not to be, her faith is sincere (if severely blind) and her love for everyone -- including her loser husband and city-slicker sister-in-law -- is rooted in that faith. From her performance in Julie & Julia, we know that Adams is a terrific actress, but her own Mormon upbringing seems to have enhanced her work in this role.

The other is the breakfast. I associate homemade biscuits with my Aunt Ruby, who was married to my Uncle Brad and with whom we stayed on most of our visits. Brad was an overnight truck driver for Overnite (the company name used to be quite literal -- their trucks were rarely seen in the daytime, and he drove the equivalent of the moon and back on the same mountain roads for decades, all at night). He was a day sleeper, and weekend breakfast was a big deal, especially when there were visitors. When I read of a table straining under the weight of a feast, I think of breakfast in their house, and with the perfect biscuits being prepared, almost as an afterthought, just as the rest of the meal was coming together. I remember the aromas, the coffee (I wish any coffee actually tasted like that percolated Maxwell House smelled), and the room, but the only actual food I remember is the biscuits and the homemade preserves that went with them. The breakfast I prepared this morning was a pale comparison.

In the view below, Cold Mountain occupies the southern 2/3 of the image, with "our" mountain on the north side of Cruso Road.

View Larger Map

North Carolina - November 21, 1789

2010-11-21T18:22:00.000-08:00

When my mother-in-law talks of "going home" she means western North Carolina, although she actually never lived there. She grew up in Virginia, but spent a lot of time in North Carolina with her mother's large family. James, Paloma and I occasionally make it down there to visit the few surviving "Holcombe" aunts and uncles. The first time I met his uncle Charles he asked James why he married a "yankee girl", when I pointed out that Maryland was south of the Mason-Dixon line he informed me that "aroun' hera we draw 'r own lines." More about his family can be found on James' North Carolina county map page.

Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen
I pulled this from Maxwell Library's small "leisure reading" collection. I figured it would be a quick read, and I was right. The story wasn't too deep, and I didn't have to think to hard, and I liked it. It tells the story of twenty-seven year old Josey Cirrini, who is still living down the reputation she earned as a small child of being a spoiled brat. She has spent almost two decades repenting, through service to her overbearing mother. She finds escape from her mother through romance novels and candy. When a waitress from a local greasy spoon sets up housekeeping in Josey's closet, Josey begins a journey of self-discovery and starts a romanceof her own, meanwhile, she learns about some skeletons in her own family's closet. The book is full of magic realism, especially as it relates to books! One of the characters, Chloe Finley, has a collection of hundreds of books which just appeared to her. Each one's theme was relevant to her life at the time. Libraries are mentioned several times, both private and public, as favorite places to be. Perhaps my favorite book and movie of all time is Like Water for Chocolate, and this book reminded me of it in several ways - first was the magic that is part of the universe of both stories, and the other is the theme of young women expected to sacrifice their own happiness in order to take care of a family member. There are no naked young women riding away on horseback with revolutionaries in this one though. For more about the Mexican Revoluation and Like water for Chocolate see James' "Viva Mexico" post. If you have not yet seen the movie or read the book you should do so now.

Back to Sugar Queen, it did have a few surprises for me, even as I figured out some of the plot points. A good, fun, book in the tradition of southern literature.

The Netflix description of Junebug reads "[w]hen Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a big-city art dealer from Chicago, makes a trip to North Carolina with her new husband, George (Alessandro Nivola), he finally allows her to meet his small-town Southern family, which breeds more problems than either of them planned for". What I expected from this was a comedy of errors (espcially since it is listed as a comedy) with a dose of down-home southern hospitality. I was way off. In contrast to the book I read, this movie is really a "thought piece", and one must think about a lot. We were never clear on what made any of these characters tick. We see a deep rift between George and his brother Johnny, but never learn where it came from. The only aspect of Johnny's life that seems to satisfy him is his work as a shipping clerk. His pregnant wife, Ashley (played magnificently by Amy Adams) is an annoyance to him, and his work toward his GED makes him angry. Try as Madeleine might, her husband's family rebuffs her compassion, all except Ashley. As the relationship between the sisters-in-law begins to form crisis intervenes, and is then completely thwarted. The relationship between Madeleine and George seems to be based only on sex. For instance, Madeleine is stunned to learn that her husband has a beautiful singing voice, and that he likes mayonnaise. There is certainly no "small town hospitality sure beats big city living" theme here - mostly angry characters in a slice of life is what we see in this one. James and I talked about why we liked this movie, that really had no character development. Some of it was the quirkiness of the characters, but we also realized that while the characters weren't developed, per se, they chearly had dimension. We saw something to like and dislike about them all.

Since North Carolina was especially near and dear to James' heart he decided to make a down-home southern breakfast in the tradition of his Aunt Ruby. He said we would need hominy, and that he wasn't sure where to buy it, I asked if we couldn't just make it from scratch. Isn't it made from corn after all? "No", he replied, "you must buy it in a can". "How did the first hominy get made then?", I wondered. He didn't know but showed me the "hominy recpies" website he found which explains "most hominy recipes are simple, calling for the use of canned hominy". We did find some at the Stop 'n Shop in Brockton. After all that we discovered that we didn't like it anyway. Paloma completely lost her appetite for them when James told her "they're soaked in lye...the same stuff we clear our bathroom drain with." Her comment that "they taste like soggy popcorn" couldn't have been more accurate. However, to go with our hominy James cooked up some biscuits (from scratch), some Jimmy Dean sausage patties with gravy, and scrambled eggs. It was a fine meal, but he said the table was hardly as laden as Ruby's ever was. If he had done it right the table would have strained under the weight of the food.

We topped off our evening with a bottle of Chardonnay from the Bilmore Estate. It was a bit sweeter than we usually expect from a Chard, but quite good. Our friend Anna, who lived in NC for 10 years joined us for a glass.

A recent North Carolina Library story http://www.technicianonline.com/news/police-find-man-naked-wrecking-bookshelves-1.2403168

Oklahoma - November 16, 1907

2010-11-16T05:46:00.000-08:00

I have been to Oklahoma twice. The first time I flew there, to Lawton, somewhere in the middle of the state, in May of 1985 to visit a boyfriend who was stationed at Ft. Sill. It was very hot and humid during my three-day visit. I asked him why there was no air conditioning in his dorm. He told me that the army wouldn't turn it on until there were three days in a row of 90 degree heat combined with 90 percent humidity, and then he set me up in an air conditioned hotel, since he wasn't supposed to have guests in his dorm anyway. We escaped some of the heat by driving up to Mt. Scott, one of two mountains in the area, the other, a bit smaller was called Scott's boy. When I returned to Maryland my boyfriend told me they turned on the air conditioning right after I left, and I realized I was there for the three days in a row of 90 degree heat combined with 90 percent humidity. It was also on that trip that I learned that bartenders do not know about, or care about, your attainment day. You will not be served alcohol before midnight of your 21st birthday.

Mt. Scott

My only other trip to Oklahoma was driving through the panhandle on my way to moving to Arizona from Ohio.

An Oklahoma I had Never Seen Before by Davis D. Joyce
This collection of essays was inspired by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and explores some aspects of Oklahoma history that some might prefer to forget, or perhaps not think about at all. An exploration of Oklahoma's commonalities with southern states focus, not on a gentile lifestyle, but rather a look at racial segregation. Racism against American Indians also ran deep. Other themes include pacifism, domestic abuse, abortion, the gay liberation movement and unions. I was especially intrigued with the deep socialist history of the state, which several of the essays treated, including "The Road Once Taken: Socialist Medicine in Southwestern Oklahoma" by Alana Hughes. Where we see the roots of of the American Medical Association's campaign against "socialized medicine". We know that everytime there is any mention of health care reform the AMA will drag the same old argument out, and convince the general population that we just can't have it.

Some of the essays in this book were more personal, others were written by history scholars. I found the former to be much more "readable" and interesting. The one "library" reference I noticed came in the very last essay: "Even Among the Sooners, There Are More Important Things than Football" by Alan Ehrenhalt. Ehrenhalt explores the history of public higher education in Oklahoma. The "Sooner" state created a very large network of colleges and universities with virtually no admission standards, and low tuition, in order that all could have a chance to go to college. While OU's football team became a source of state pride academic standards languished causing Representative Carolyn Thompson to say "[w]e prioritized where we finished in football, and we never cared where we finished in libraries."

The Outsiders, a gritty story of rival gangs, by S.E. Hinton, was among my favorite books when I was in Junior High. I don't know how many times I read it, but I do know I had the opening paragraph memorized at one point, and that when my daughter read it for a school assignment last year I was able to help her with it without opening the book again myself. The film adaptation, directed by Frances Ford Coppola follows the story pretty accurately (although it leaves out a section at the end of the story) but I remember being disappointed in it when I watched it many years ago, and my mind was not changed by watching it again. I am not sure what it is that I didn't like about the movie. I was impressed that much of the scenery was so close to what I pictured in my mind's eye, indicating that Hinton must have described things very well, and that Coppola paid attention to what she wrote. I think the movie just didn't have the depth that the book did. The story takes place in Tulsa in what appears to be the late 1950s, although the book was first published in 1967 and it really could be set anywhere. The only indications in the movie that it is Oklahoma are an abandoned building with a company using Oklahoma as part of its name, and a shot of a black-and-white television set with a test pattern (remember those?) that says "First in Tusla".

There were no libraries in this movie, but this librarian, who likes to stay through credits, was rewarded for doing so with this golden egg:

"This film is dedicated to the people who first suggested that it be made...Librarian Jo Ellen Misakian and the students to Lone Star School in Fresno, California."

Although Oklahoma actually has an entire Official State Meal I did not have the ambition to prepare it. There are so many other state celebrations coming up and the holidays fast approaching. So picked my favorite thing from the state meal, cornbread, and made it. Cornbread should only be made in a cast iron skillet. Anyone who does differently is doing it wrong. Perhaps next year I will attempt the state meal.

Washington - November 11, 1889

2010-11-11T15:48:00.000-08:00

My first trip to Washington was as a vendor at a library conference in Tacoma. I was working for Hispanic Books Distributors in Tucson and it was the first time they'd sent me to work a booth solo. I brought my two Mexican-embroidered dresses to wear during the two-day conference thinking that I would make myself part of the display. I remember nearby there was a booth hawking "clean books" - they had no profanity or sex - and noticing that the woman who ran it wore a conservative pin-striped suit, and had a very severe bun in her hair. The woman in the booth next to mine was selling children's books and she had on a fun, colorful apron. I realized that coming "in costume" was something others had thought of as well. In those days (early 1990s) round trip plane tickets were cheaper if you stayed over Saturday night and flew back on Sunday. My cheapskate boss made me stay over on Saturday even though the conference ended on Friday afternoon. Luckily, I had a friend in Seattle who picked me up on Saturday afternoon so we could have lunch together and see the city. My most recent trip to Washington was to the University of Washington in Seattle to attend a library conference, but this time I was simply an attendee. It was early August of 2008 and the weather was absolutely gorgeous. The conference organizers demonstrated how they had checked the weather over the past 20 years to determine that the first week in August was the least likely to have rain.

In Washington, its all about the vampires.
The Brief Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella by Stephenie Meyer
I read the four Twilight series novels, each over 700 pages long in about a two week period of time. (Mind candy? You betcha!) This short work though, I really had to work at. It took me about a week to get through this under-200-page volume. I had read that this book had no section breaks, or chapter breaks, so I assumed that it perhaps took place in "real time" - giving a blow-by-blow of Bree's vampire life - but indeed, I was wrong. it begins when Bree is already about 3 months old (as a vampire) and takes place over several weeks time. I also knew that it was based on a character who was briefly introduced in the third novel, but try as I might I could not remember her, in fact, as I thought about it, I realized I didn't remember the third novel at all. I do remember the basic plot lines of the first, second, and fourth books, but have been waiting for the DVD of the Eclipse movie to come out so I could refresh my memory of that one. Fans of the Twilight series will probably want to give this a read, but will not find it nearly as sexy as the others. For those who have not read the rest of the series and thought perhaps reading this short book would give them some idea what all the fuss was about, don't bother.

Watching Singles again after 18 years made me feel old. I didn't really remember the movie much, but I remember feeling that I was somehow "simpatico" with the characters, who live in grunge-era Seattle. The actors (Matt Dillon, Kyra Sedgwick, Campbell Scott, Bridget Fonda, Shelia Kelly, et.al.) were of my generation - born in the early '60s. And even though I was a married graduate student in Tucson, Arizona at the time, I still felt some connection to them. After all, I did know people who had real jobs, and dated. Watching it this time around I felt no connection with the characters at all. Going out to clubs, dating drama, and working in cubicles just aren't things I even think about any more. I don't even have friends who put up with that crap any more. Ahh... I do enjoy being 46. This movie has a lot of sub plots, but ultimately it is a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back movie (x2).

I remember buying a bottle of Washington wine sometime in the past few weeks, but since I apparently did not put it in the "save for state day" department of our wine rack (yes, we really do have such a place) I guess we drank it. No matter Red Apple Martinis to the rescue. The recipe comes from a Washington bar. Tasty.

I had my doubts about Seattle Cream Cheese Dogs but decided to make them anyway. The recipe says the sauerkraut is optional, so we did opt out of that. Otherwise these were actually pretty good. I have always liked my hot dogs with mustard, the cooked onions gave it a bit of sweetness, and the cream cheese, was, well, creamy. James ate two.

Montana & the High Country of the Mind

2010-11-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

It is probably a good thing I do not live in Montana, for if I did, I would have this earworm in my head all the time: Movin' to Montana soon ... gonna be a dental floss tycoon, by the incomparable Frank Zappa, who did for Montana what Tim Curry did for Transylvania.

I have actually visited Montana -- once in real life and countless times in my imagination, with the help of Robert Pirsig's hippy classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig himself was probably no hippy, but generations of radical seekers have found both challenge and refuge in his autobiographical road story. Much of what I know about writing came from this book -- and only in part because I read it myself so many times. I eventually figured out that one of the two teachers who had really taught me how to write had been devoted to Pirsig. When I read Pirsig's descriptions of composition assignments he gave as an instructor at the University of Montana, I suddenly understood my own ninth-grade English teacher much better! Those who want to explore the geography of Pirsig's journey through Montana and the rest of the West will enjoy Mark Richardson's Zen and Now. I find that Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones captures the spirit of his thoughts on writing, though I do not know whether the connection is intentional.

As I've already mentioned in my Wyoming post, that brief foray into Montana was part of a cross-country drive in which my buddy -- and fellow geographer -- Mike and I did not stop for much. Even in Bozeman, I have to admit that I did not get much beyond McDonald's, where I remember Mike and I first started to think seriously about how to ration out the rest of our cash. We had about $600 for an 8,500-mile journey, with no plastic money of any kind, and we were down to a thin stack of dollars with a couple thousand miles to go. Not that we cared much; in fact, Mike has perfected this mode of travel into an art form in more than 50 countries, sharing a $2 room, for example, in Bombay.

Our drive through western Montana (which is the relatively populous part) took us through what might have been the longest stretch of Interstate highway without all-night gas stations. Running very close to "E" in a 1960 VW with no real gas gage, we wasted a few miles searching for stations off the main road. We finally got gas before dawn at a station we had decided would be our last hope -- we were going to simply park there and wait if it had not been open.

Montana - November 8, 1889

2010-11-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

Montana - Alas, yet another state I have not been to. I am pretty sure I knew someone in library school who was from there, though. I have this feeling that I might like the "big sky" and the wide spaces. James has been there and will write a separate post about his trip, as well as some Montana pop-culture references that are near and dear to his heart.

Montana Justice: Power, Punishment & the Penitentiary by Keith Edgerton appealed to me mostly because it was slim, and I only had to go up one flight of stairs from my office to get it since it was available in "my library". This history of prisons in Montana begins with the stories of J.A. Slade and George Dixon. Slade was the victim of early vigilatism in the Montana territory - lynched for not much more than public drunkeness. Dixon, a freed slave, became one of the first inmates of the federal penitentiary in Deer Lodge on a trumped up murder charge. He narrowly escaped a lynching, ironcially, by confessing to a crime he did not commit. The book tells the story of the Deer Lodge peniteniary, its prisoners, staff and wardens. Once the need for the penitentiary was clear, it was built, but not funded, for staff. Anecdotes tell of inmates chained to the sheriff's bed at night because there was no place to house them. Cover pictures show a turreted building, and a before and after picture of an inmate - one in street clothes with a thick head of hair, the other in sterotypical striped prison garb and a shaved head. One can almost believe from the position of the inmate that one is a "photoshopped" version of the other. One chapter of the book profiles warden Frank Conley whose corrupt practices would be the envy of some of today's politicians. Corruption sure is nothing new. The final chapter is a "tough on crime" chapter with history of the 20th century through the present. The depictions of solitary confinement, substandard food, and straw bed furnishings do a superb job leading up to the final chapter. It is true, though, that even here in east coast, pointy-headed intellectual New England no sheriff can get elected without a "tough on crime" stance. This book includes one mention of a prison library!

A River Runs Through It

I watched this movie for the third time. This is the truly magnificent story of brothers Norman and Paul Maclean growing up in Montana with their mother and minister father. Norman is down-to-earth, and rather cerebral, while Paul, the younger brother, is more of a rebel. A love of fly fishing is what binds the brothers together. James and I are especially drawn to this movie because it reminds us so much of James and his brother - preachers kids who grew up in rural Virginia, one of whom (James) left home to become a professor, and the other (Bob) staying close to home. The music and scenery in this movie are both majestic and soothing. The sheer perfection of this film made me cry.

After watching the film, I couldn't resist this Montana Trout recipe, although I wasn't at all sure I would be able to get trout. James took the request to a local fish market Fresh Catch and the fishmonger assured him that Steelhead Salmon was somehow related to trout. According to sources I found it appears to be a rainbow trout. Anyway, the meal turned out to be sublime. I do love salmon - such a rich flavor. It felt like a holiday, but I guess it is!

South Dakota Dessert

2010-11-04T09:51:00.000-07:00

Our oven mended we were able to enjoy our South Dakota fare.
I used this recipe for my kuchen, and used fresh apples rather than canned peaches. The recipe calls for use of a springform pan, so I dug mine out and followed the directions to "spread dough with hands over the bottom and 1 inch up the sides of prepared springform pan". There was not enough dough to go up the sides, so I only covered the bottom. I think I could have accomplished the same result with a regular cake pan, or even better still, my indespensible cast-iron skillet. The dough was quite dense, but nevertheless formed a rather thin layer, so I was surprised that it did take 40 minutes in a 350 degree oven to cook, just as the instructions said. This warm dessert was most welcome on chilly fall evening. It is more cookie like than cake like and best eaten immediately. I tried microwaving some of the leftover for lunch today. Rather unsatisfying.

South Dakota & North Dakota - November 2, 1889

2010-11-02T17:44:00.000-07:00

Although November and December represent only 1/6 of the year, we are left with 1/3 of the states still to celebrate! I normally do not write about two states in the same post, but since North and South Dakota became states on the same date from the same territory, since they are states that I have on my "yet to visit list", I decided to make an exception. James, however, has been to South Dakota.

South Dakota's state fossil is the Triceratops - my favorite dinosaur!

Since I have so much reading to do before the end of the year, I worked on it during the long hiatus between California day and Nevada day. I attempted to read a young-adult novel about South Dakota, A Year Without Rain by D. Anne Love, figuring, since it was short, it would help me keep up, but I didn't get very far before I put it down and started looking for something else. It seemed that most of the action actually took place in Georgia, rather than South Dakota. Fortunately, this NPR story clued me in to The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber. Set in the Badlands in 1917 (the "year without rain") readers learn about the especially harsh life the homesteaders faced that year. The DuPrees, one of very few "Negro" families to homestead, watch as their crops wither, their animals die and, their well runs dry. Meanwhile Rachel's memories of her previous life as a cook in a Chicago boardinghouse, and before that as a girl in Louisiana are jogged. Rachel faces her own prejudices against the "agency Indians", and begins to question her husband's loyalty to the land, and desiring a better life for her four daughters than an arranged marriage, she makes a difficult decision. Weisgarber describes some extremely cruel life experiences for these homesteaders, nevertheless, I couldn't help but feel a little bit jealous of Rachel's life - a hermit...with benefits.

As always, any mention of a library gets special recognition in my blog. In the case of Rachel DuPree the library passage couldn't have been more dear to the Hayes-Bohanan hearts. In a one-page passage Weisgarber manages to weave coffee, geography and libraries all into the narrative. "Every morning, Samuel, the delivery boy brought two five-pound sacks of dark beans to the kitchen door. Those beans...had traveled all they way from South America. I tried to picture South America from my geography lessons, but I couldn't place it...I took the streetcar and went to the free library. There I rounded up my courage and asked the white man behind the counter if he could tell me where South America was...He stopped at a table where there was a big globe of the world..."

The title The Plague of Doves (my North Dakota choice) piqued my interest because my daughter's name (Paloma) is Spanish for dove. It turns out that the "doves" to which the title refers, however, "were surely the passenger pigeons of truth and legend". Louise Erdrich's story has many narrators, which I sometimes could not keep straight, and the story jumped around in time, which also sometimes confused me. There were some "magic realism" moments that reminded me of some of the Latin American literature I've read. The narrators included members of the Ojibwe tribe, anglos, and those of mixed blood, giving the reader a sense of the variety of experiences. Ultimately, I was able to sort out the story and there is some resolution at the end.

There was one mention of a college library from the narrator named Evelina Harp who claimed to spend most of her time there.

Dances with Wolves (a rather long film!)
At just under four hours long, this one took us three nights to watch. We had seen it before, probably 20 years ago, but had forgotten most of it. Kevin Costner plays Lieutenant John Dunbar (a.k.a. Dances with Wolves - his Sioux name). When Dunbar is sent to a fort the Dakota territory during the Civil War he finds the post abandoned. He eventually befriends the Sioux tribe living nearby, and discovers that there is a young "white" woman, called Stands with a Fist, (played by Mary McDonnell) living with them. Through her, he is able to communicate with his neighbors.

This movie had me thinking a lot about the concept of "the other" and how the government and the media manipulate the way people feel about others. In the case of this movie, we are made to feel sympathy for the Sioux tribe, and as James points out, as anglos we found ourselves in the postion of rooting for the Sioux and against the U.S. governement. It is only recently that I have heard the word "genocide" applied to the elimination the Native Americans during the 19th century, but it is accurate. The idea of "the other" in the film was evident in two interesting ways: one was that we felt no empathy for the U.S. soldiers - they were portrayed as bullying, illiterate idiots who didn't know enough to bring paper with them to wipe their asses; the second "other" we saw in the film was the Pawnee tribe who were only seen as violent. Whereas the Sioux were portayed more multi-dimensionally, anglos and Pawnees are seen as evil. We see the Sioux mourn their loved ones, making love, and watch as the women cry as their warriors take leave. While we can assume the whites and the Pawnees expressed some of these same emotions, they are absent from the film.

I did like the film, it gave me a lot to think about, the scenery was beautiful, and that Kevin Costner sure isn't hard to look at.

Jesus Camp
Becky Fischer is a children's pastor who runs an evangelical camp for kids in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. This documentary follows Pastor Becky as she works to create a Christian Army of children, some as young as six years old. She does not deny that she is "indoctrinating" the children, rather she defends it by saying that our "enemies" (other religions) are doing the same. She is trying to save America from itself. Footage from inside the camp shows dozens of children driven to tears when confronted with their own sins. I was especilly disturbed by the discussion of abortion with children so young. The film follows a few of the children closely. Levi, a 12-year old boy, is being groomed for the ministry by the adults around him. He is clearly charismatic. The film also goes to Colorado Springs to visit Ted Haggard's "mega-church". This film came out in 2006, just before allegations that Haggard had paid a male prostitute for sex. The allegations proved to be true, which make his comments in the film against homosexuality all the more troubling.

North Dakota "short"
Evidently, I have a lot of company among those who have not yet been to North Dakota. Back in the 1990s Michael Moore (of Roger & Me fame, see my Michigan post) had a television show called TV Nation. In which he explored some quirky things. In one segment he questions why North Dakota is the least visited state in the country. Watch this YouTube video to find out. I am surprised that there are not more people going to visit Rugby, North Dakota, which has the honor of being the geographical center of the country. I will definitely be going!

I imagine the Bauernmomlett (Farmer's Omlet), our North Dakota meal made with potatoes and bacon, was never intended to be made with "fake-in", but in deference to our vegetarian daughter we made the substitution. It was pretty good, and simple to make, and our oven, which has been malfunctioning regularly of late, behaved long enough for me to put the broiler on in order to cook the top of the omelet. If you don't have a cast-iron skillet, I recommend buying one immediately. They are essential for making fluffy, non-burnt omelets. I cook the omlet, covered, on low heat for about 7 minutes, until it is mostly set, then put it under the broiler for one to two minutes. Perfect every time. We also enjoyed nice cold glasses of milk - the North Dakota state beverage!

Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned oven malfunction we have to defer our South Dakota food choice until tomorrow, when, hopefully we will have it fixed. We will be preparing kuchen - the official South Dakota state dessert. We will write a supplemental post, and James will write about his trip to South Dakota as well. He is among the ranks of the many who have not been to North Dakota. We can't wait to become some of the few!

An interesting article about North Dakota agriculture from the New York Times: North Dakota cattle get a new home. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/us/13cows.html

North Dakota's press release on the occasion of its 121st birthday!

State Movie Map

2010-10-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

Geographer James found this great map online: The USA in movies.

Nevada - October 21, 1864

2010-10-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

James and I drove to Las Vegas in the spring of 1993. We stayed one night and got to eat the the casino buffets pretty cheaply, and I won $5 in the quarter slot machine. We left after that. There would be more to say about the trip if I weren't trying to stick with writing only about positive experiences. (I used my "winnings" to do laundry). We made one other trip to Nevada during the 1990s while we were traveling around the Northwest. We made a quick trip across the California/Nevada border to pick up an additional county for our county map project http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jhayesboh/COUNTIES/County.htm

21: Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students who Took Vegas for Millions

I expect that to a gambler, professional or amatuer, this book would read like a fairy tale. I found it to be rather disturbing, however engrossing. The display of greed on both the part of the casinos, and the students, was what I found most troubling. How much is enough? When does winning money become more important than relationships? If casinos don't want gamblers to count cards why do they keep running games that can be beat in that manner? And why do they throw people out who have figured out how to beat the system if they haven't broken any laws?

The story followed Kevin, a member of an MIT blackjack team that traveled regularly to Las Vegas to count cards. The perspective of the story was decidedly male, although there were two women on the team. Kevin had two girlfriends, one for each side of his double life. Both were really made out to be accessories. His MIT girlfriend was described as someone who would be good to bring to Thanksgiving dinner with his family, whereas his LA Rams cheerleader girlfriend only ever met up with him in Vegas.

I was struck by the sheer genius of the students, which clashed with some typical adolescent mentalities. Although, given how dag-gone smart they were you'd think they would have caught on the the fact that their gambling days were over when the frequent casino bannings turned violent, but no, they still kept trying, thinking perhaps it was just a coincidence.

Of course any mention of librarians, especially sterotypes, must be given air time here: "Kevin didn't need to glance down the table at Cylan to see that he...was infused with good humor...he looked five years too young to know anything about card counting...He certainly didn't look like an advertising executive with developing marital troubles. And his wife...could have passed for a dowdy college librarian."

I think the book can be summed up with this comment from April, a dancer at the Crazy Horse 2 Strip Club: "Don't be naive. Nobody wins in Las Vegas. Kevin Lewis knows that better than anyone."

Pay It Forward
Most movies about Nevada are about Las Vegas, and Pay It Forward is no exception. What is different is that the movie doesn't focus on the glitz at all. The "Strip" is tangential to the story - it is simply the place where one of the characters, Arlene McKinney (played by Helen Hunt), works her two jobs supporting her son Trevor (Haley Joel Osment). At the behest of his teacher, Mr. Simonet (Kevin Spacey), Trevor attempts to make the world a better place by doing favors for three people, and asking that they, in turn, each do favors for three other people. The Pay-It-Forward experiment eventually takes on a life of its own, even as Trevor believes that it was a failure. This movie has terrific acting, a great plot, and is totally engaging, and has a good message without being too sappy. We even got our 13-year-old daughter to watch the whole thing. She said it was "pretty good". She doesn't readily admit that anything we suggest is any good, so this is high praise.

Since so much of what we ever hear about Nevada focuses on Las Vegas I wanted to find a recipe that would celebrate the more "western" aspect of the state. Nevada magazine provided this piece about chuck wagon cooking in dutch ovens. My daughter and I decided to try to make the doughnuts. The dough was easy to make, and otherwise the instructions seemed pretty simple. Unfortunately, I did not have a good way to test the temperature of the oil, which clearly was way too hot. The doughnuts became very crispy on the outside within about 10 seconds of being dipped in the oil, but remained gooey inside. We also managed to set off our smoke detectors. In a strange twist though, Paloma reported liking them anyway. James and I threw ours away.

Geography of The Garden

2010-09-09T23:17:00.000-07:00

Echoing the pattern we started for New York Day, Pam wrote about the film The Garden for this blog, and I wrote about it as a geographer -- in an article called "Garden Tales" -- for Wiley GeoDiscoveries.

I have not been in California for more than 15 years, but I had the good fortune of criss-crossing it a few times, as described briefly on my County Map Project page for California.

California - September 9, 1850

2010-09-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

My first memories of California are tied to my first memory of flying on a plane. The year was 1971. Iwas seven years old. My mother, sister, brother and I all flew to San Francisco to visit my grandparents, who had recently moved to Petaluma, California after their retirement. I have since realized that I must have flown on one of the original 747 "Jumbo Jets" during that trip, which started flying commercially in 1970. This was back when flying was a true "event" - people were excited to be going on a plane. Since that time I have lost count of the number of flights I've been on. Somewhere in the triple digits. Flying is no longer an event. There is no excitement - just something to be endured.

As a librarian, I really get a kick out of reading books about books. In Allegra Goodman's novel, The Cookbook Collector I got insight into the world of the rare book trade, as well an intimate look into the psyche of a collector. In an almost other worldly parallel plot line, I found out all kinds of things I didn't know that I didn't know about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

The Cookbook Collector is possibly the first novel I've read in which the events of 9/11 play a pivital role. I may have read other books which had the tragedy as a background to some other events, but in Goodman's book, the main characters are directly effected. It was especially jarring to read about the memorial services of two victims, major players in a "dot com" start-up company, and the callous way that the company then uses the government's new emphasis on security to roll out a new product on the same day.

Much of the action in this book takes place in Yorick's used bookstore, which tangentially leads to two mentions of libraries:

"He might of considered donating some of the acquisions to deserving libraries, but he preferred to play the open market...More than once at auctions, he broke librarians hearts, only to flip his purchases to other private dealers."

"...she was becoming a researcher, tracing gorgeous threads, preparing a catalogue raisonne of the McClintock Collection, corresponding with scholars and librarians at the Schlesinger and the Huntington, and at universities around the world." I must admit that this makes it look like librarians are not scholars, so I was a bit miffed about the way it was worded.

The Garden
This documentary relates the story of the South Central Farmers, who cultivated a community garden in the aftermath of the riots following the trial of the police officers who took part in the Rodney King beating in 1992. The land was bought by LA county from the wealthy landowner, but sold back (15 years later?) to the same person for the same $5 million dollars they paid for it. Following the sale, the Farmers received a notice of eviction, unless they raised $16 milliion to purchase the land. However, even after they raised the entire amount, the owner refused to sell. This movie brought up issues of classism, racism, and ultimately, loyalties. It was especially disheartening to me to see some of the people opposed to selling the farm to the farmers questioning the farmers integrities by suggesting that selling the food they grew was not an appropriate use of the land, as if (poor) people who didn't till the land themselves didn't deserve to eat good food. And more disheartening still: the farmers responded to this by telling those who had more than 3 plots of land that they could no longer cultivate all of their sections. This new "inside rule" tore into the Farmer's community in a way that outside forces never could.

For more on the South Central Farmers see http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/
For more information about the movie see http://www.thegardenmovie.com/

And for a related story see this from National Public Radio

California - It's all about the wine!
We jumped the gun on our California "meal" a bit, and celebrated on September 6, Labor Day, so that we could enjoy the company of some friends. We did not look into planning a menu so much as we planned the wine list. James couldn't resisit a bottle of Line 39 wine which included a map of California on the label. The name of the wine refers to the line of latitude where the grades are grown. We also enjoyed some Madria Sangria which I served with apple slices in my new Sangria pitcher, purchased from the Hostpial Thrift Store on Nantucket. We drank the wine and nibbled on chips. I thank my friends Brendan and Amelia for providing the homemade guacamole dip, and Lisa and Rob for the homemade salsa. Yum. We also had cedar-smoked salmon, and a gigantic "zuccanoe"stuffed with rice and veggies. The women sat around eating the chips and dip, and drinking the wine while the men, in the true California-Sensitive-New-Age-Guy tradition prepared everything else.

...and one more thing
I found this article from the New York Times regarding the State Rock (serpentine) truly disturbing. Are people really willing to go to the mat for getting rid of the state rock designation because the contains some harmful minerals? Do they understand that the rock won't go away by changing the designation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/us/14rock.html

New York supplement: More on No Impact Man

2010-09-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

Pam wrote about the film No Impact Man as part of the original post on New York Day. James wrote about the film from a geographer's perspective for the Wiley GeoDiscoveries blog.

HI: Wait, There's More!

2010-08-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

Source: USGS
Note: Vertical scale of mantle is greatly exaggerated for this illustration, as is horizontal scale of Hawaii

To Pam's main post about Hawaii, I would like to add a few thoughts and links about the state that is the newest and at the same time the most like part of another country. Like many people who are fairly well-traveled within the continental United States, I have yet to make it to Hawaii, which became a state just four years before I was born.

Hawaii's islands are geologically young, and although the youngest is still about 700,000 years older than I am, the theory that explains their origin is quite young: the Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson developed the theory of "hotspots" -- or thermal mantle plumes -- in 1963, the same year I was born in a tectonically tranquil corner of our nation's capital. The USGS This Dynamic Earth series includes a good introduction to the theory -- with Hawaii as the prime example -- in its "Hotspots" article.

Hot Rocks

When I wished one of my colleague's a "Happy Hawaii Day," he mentioned that he had recently been wondering about how the electricity demands of the state are met, as the state is far isolated from the North American grid and the islands are far too young to have their own deposits of fossil fuels. The Hawaii Energy Profile from the U.S. Department of Energy confirms what I suspected, based on my experience in other isolated places: as with Rondonia, most of Hawaii's electrical energy is generated by the burning of petroleum. Even though some conventional sources are more difficult to obtain in Hawaii than they would be elsewhere, the state does have some real advantages when it comes to renewable alternatives. In addition to wind and solar power, geothermal energy is already an important source of energy, and research into the expansion of geothermal-electric power is ongoing as part of a concerted effort known as Hawaii's Energy Future.

As Pam mentioned, coffee for our celebration was shipped directly from the islands -- in this case Maui. Who knew that Kona was not the only coffee-producing island in Hawaii? I didn't, until a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, one of my barista sources mentioned the recent all-Hawaii cupping, with winners from eight different regions. So for our celebration I decided to get coffee from the Maui winner -- a smooth and flavorful, medium-roasted coffee from Kupa'a Farms. This is an excellent farm that produces dozens of organic food crops along with the coffee; it is a farm I really look forward to visiting. In fact, one reason I chose this coffee is that we are thinking Maui is the most likely site for a Hawaii visit in the next couple years.

We enjoyed the coffee straight-up with our chocolaty luau dessert; delicious! Pam had suggested brewing it with some of the macadamia nuts left over from the stuffing, but I resisted. Even though we played a small role in the expansion of flavored coffees, I generally resist them. I especially resist flavoring high-quality coffee, since I know that low- to mid-grade "flavor base" coffee is usually used for this purpose. Nonetheless, on the morning after Hawaii Day, I ground three madadamia nuts (native to Australia, by the way) with our trusty mortar and pestle, and added the paste to the Kupa'a coffee in our press pot. (I like that Kupa'a looks a lot like cuppa!) It actually was quite delicious, the nuts lending a buttery mouth feel to the already excellent coffee.

In a couple of days, I will be serving the coffee to the students who studied Kona coffee in my most recent coffee seminar. I think I will set up a blind tasting with and without the macadamia to see what they think. Hawaiian coffee, by the way, was introduced (i.e., sneaked out) from Brazil in 1825, reaching Kona three years later. The Hawaiian Coffee Association describes the history of coffee on the island, which is now found over several thousand acres on all of the major islands. Incidentally, Hawaiian coffee is by definition not Fair Trade, but fortunately it does not need to be. One reason the coffee is so expensive is that it is the only coffee in the world that is produced under U.S. minimum-wage law. Of course, it is also expensive because it is rare and excellent! Because it is expensive, people who buy it are sometimes tempted to store it long-term, in order to save it for special occasions. I suggest the opposite approach: get a small quantity, and drink it up over a few days. Those days of Polynesian coffee bliss will then be the special occasion!

Hawaii - August 21, 1959

2010-08-21T18:54:00.000-07:00

Of the eight states I have yet to visit, Hawaii is the one I most yearn to see. I am not interested so much in watching surfers, or visiting a resort, but in getting away to a place that has to be so completely different than anywhere I've ever been. The book Chicken Soup from the Soul of Hawai'i made this desire only that much stronger.

Although I have a somewhat cyncial personality, I am actually quite a sucker for the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series of books origniated in the 1990s by Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield. These anthologies of feel-good stories can be sappy, but I eat them right up. The special collection of stories from Hawaii did not disappoint, and it made me want to go to Hawaii more than ever. All of the mysticism of the islands, and the aloha spirit of the people came through. What was made clear through these stories is the true sprit of sharing that is an important part of island culture. This spirit goes way beyond boosterism for tourists, it is part of the fabric of life there. The true evidence of this was the sharing of proprietary recipes from three of Hawaii's famous chefs (Sam Choy, Alan Wong, and Roy Yamaguchi) as part of the book, two of which we prepared for our meal tonight.

I was also glad to see one story in which the school library, and librarian played a role "Blueprint for a Dream" by Laurie Williams and Marc Lee tell of learning about a famous astronaut who graduated from Punahou school many years before them.

One final note is that I was actually uninspired by the sports stories. I am most decidedly not a sports fan, but I found the real problem was that sports "heroes" who write for the Chicken Soup series have a kind of wrap up of their story about believing in yourself and working hard to make your dreams come true. Believing in oneself, and working hard are good pieces of advice to be sure, however, almost all celebrity hopefuls started out doing just that. Only the very few who actually make it big will end up writing about it.

From Here to Eternity is a movie about Hawaii before it was actually a state. Most of the action takes place in the year before the Pearl Harbor attack, which is where the story ends. This is the movie with the iconic love scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr - the waves splashing over the lovers on the beach, which has been recreated in countless other places. This movie, surprisingly, really wasn't very romatic otherwise. The plot involves an attempt to get an army Private (Robert E. Lee Prewitt, played by the strikingly handsome Montgomery Clift) to box for his platoon. Said Private is essentially tortured by the other members, including his officer. The December 7 attack on the base only days before the big boxing match makes it clear how trivial it all was. It was a bit surreal watching Donna Reed play a "hostess" at a nightclub. A job her character called "two steps up from the pavement."

We created quite a few Hawaiian dishes for our meal this evening. James cooked Sam Choy's Roasted Chicken with Macadamia Nut Stuffing using our new Deep Dish Tumbleweed Pottery Chicken Cooker. It came out delicious and tender. In addition to the macadamia nuts, which James had some trouble finding at the grocery, the stuffing included onions, bacon, celery, apple, mushrooms, parsley, croutons and other seasonings. For our vegetarian daughter we made Maui Sweet Potato Bake, and for dessert we had Roy Yamaguchi's Hot Lava Souffle (or a variation thereof, anyway). No matter, this recipe with semi-sweet chocolate, sugar, cornstarch, butter and eggs was delcious. We had two friends for dinner and every bit of this tasty treat was gobbled. We had some Hawaiian coffee, shipped direct from the islands, to accompany our dessert. James will post separately about that.

My Missouri Interlude

2010-08-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

When I told my exuberant, wonderful 8th-grade science teacher that I was moving from the outskirts of Nokesville, Virginia to the metropolis of Kansas City, Missouri, he did the only think he could do: burst into song as he danced around the lab: “Kansas City. Going to Kansas City. Got some pretty little women there, and I’m a-gonna get me one!”

I was to live there for three years, while my father attended Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In those days, it was considered among the more liberal of the six seminaries operated by the Southern Baptist Convention, but it was already in the throes of skirmishes between thoughtful, erudite professors and reactionary trustees with little intellect but much power (that is to say, money). Happily, I was able to take evening classes with some of these amazing scholars, completing a Certificate of Christian Education with courses on archeology, theology, and even ministerial marriages. (When the reconquest of the institution was completed years later, this opportunity was renamed the Diploma of the Ministering Wife, making the gender biases of the new bosses quite clear.)

Through the wonders of the Internet – and especially Facebook – I am now in touch with some of my friends from my days in Kansas City, but over the 30 years I have been gone, there have been days, weeks, and probably even months when I would forget that I ever lived there. I consider the seven years I spent in Nokesville – my “Opie Taylor” years – more formative, but I do not know why those three years in KC can drop out of mind sometimes.

They were certainly formative years in a lot of ways. After seven years in one tight-knit community (and fourteen in the general vicinity of rural, northern Virginia), we moved a thousand miles away. This was jarring, to say the least. During the summer and fall of 1977, KC boosters were trying, ironically, to build on the “Virginia is for Lovers” campaign. For the first several months I muttered “I HATE KC” every time I saw the “I HEART KC” emblem. I guess this eventually purged my homesickness. The next move -- to Annapolis, Maryland for my senior year of high school – was much easier, though our family did try to figure out a way for me to stay in the excellent North Kansas City schools. In the end, I really think this experience contributed a lot to my adult life as a nomad.

Missouri was only the beginning.

Barely noticed her

When I do make associations with Kansas City, I sometimes conflate time and space. By this I mean that a memory will be triggered – perhaps by the music of R.E.O. Speedwagon, Styx, Kansas, or even Boston – and I will be transported back to some night in Kansas City. Likewise with any reference to Star Wars. I only ever saw the original one, and probably only 2/3 of that, as the first theatrical release was the destination for my first real date. As far as I know, neither the movie nor any of these bands has anything to do with Kansas City, but there the association rests for me. And what began in Missouri continues in my travels: I associate certain pop-culture details or linguistic or political fads with the place I lived at the time I first noticed them. If such a detail is no longer present, I have no idea whether it is because I left it in place, or that I left it in time. My wife, fellow vagabond and co-blogger Pamela has had the same experience.

Incidentally, I have taken a couple of geographic oddities for granted. Kansas City, Missouri (KCMO) is bigger than Kansas City Kansas. It is not the biggest city in Missouri, though: that is St. Louis (which I only know from numerous pass-throughs and a stop -- we really splurged -- at the former Noah's Ark restaurant in St. Charles). Also, North Kansas City is a separate city that is, well, north of Kansas City. But when the regional airport was built (halfway, it seems, between downtown and the corner of Nebraska), Kansas City, which had been south of the Missouri River, annexed every unincorporated bit of land between the river and the airport, adding scores of square miles, thousands of people, and not a few cattle to its tax base. So we lived in Kansas City north and had to go south to reach North Kansas City. I attended the excellent Northgate Junior High School in Kansas City and the even more excellent North Kansas City High School in NKC. Just north of us (but to the south and east of the airport) was the independent little city of Gladstone, which included a cleverly named park: Happy Rock. Get it?

I should not mention the Missouri River without pointing out an additional geographic oddity, which I learned from William Least-Heat Moon's excellent travelogue River Horse. The book describes his coast-to-coast journey by boat, which includes a harrowing journey during high floods along the lower part of the Missouri River. He makes a convincing case that the Missouri and Platte Rivers should properly be considered the upper reaches of the Mississippi, even though they enter the "main" stem at a right angle, and that by this measure the Mississippi is the longest river in the world.

Be sure to read Pam's main entry for Missouri, either by scrolling down or by clicking here.

Missouri - August 10, 1821

2010-08-10T06:17:00.000-07:00

My experience in Missouri is limited to two short visits with James' Uncle who lives in Kansas City, and a drive across the state on our way to moving to Arizona. I do remember quite a few fountains in Kansas City, and I know that it is home to Hallmark Corporate Headquarters, which according to its website, is celebrating its centennial this year. James, however, lived in the "Show-Me" state for three years while his father attended the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he will write a supplemental post about his experiences in short order.

Orphan Trains to Missouri
From 1854 until the late 1929 hundreds of thousands of street children from New York City (often referred to as "street arabs" by the police) were taken off the streets, or in some cases from their parents' homes, and sent to rural areas in what became known as the "Orphan Trains". Some children were sent to loving homes, others were simply looked upon as farm hands, and still others ended up abused and neglected, not much better off than they were on the streets. Children were often separated from their siblings and sent to live in places they knew nothing about. The "adoption" process was sometimes as lax as parading the children in front of prospective parents on a train platform who then chose a child or children. Those not chosen were put back on the train and sent to the next stop. As time went on committees formed to vet would-be adopters, and there was some recourse for both parents and children if a placement did not work out.

Over 100,000 of these children ended up in rural Missouri, and these were the focus of the research of Evelyn Trickel, Michael Patrick, and Evelyn Sheets (who died before the research was complete). Thier work, Orphan Trains to Missouri, includes historical backround explaining how European immigration caused the population of New York City to grow in the 1850s, why many of the children ended up on the street and how they survived in the area that came to be known as Hell's Kitchen. The book also tells the stories of several of the children who found their new homes in Missouri, some of these were positive, and some were negative, but it seemed that the authors, like the Children's Aid Society who were in charge of the children, focused more on the good stories.

http://www.orphantraindepot.com/

The World's Greatest Fair
When the St. Louis World's Fair opened in 1904 the automobile was a novelty item, the Wright Brother's first flight had been only months before, and seeing electric lights was a first for many of the Fair's visitors. The documentary The World's Greatest Fair tells the story of this enormous exposition through still photographs, historian interviews, along with a bit of grainy footage. The Fair boasted exhibits of arts; science; and anthropology, which featured native people from Asia and Africa on display. To call these exhibits "un-PC" would be an understatement. Racism was clear as tribes from Africa were called cannibals, and others were left "displayed" in their native dress, meant for warm climates, even as the fall weather set in in Missouri. The Fair, however, was indeed majestic and excitement in riding the first Ferris wheel (which had a 70-ton axle, and could hold over 2,000 people at a time) would certainly have stuck true awe in the people of the time. For many going to St. Louis for the fair would have been a "once in a lifetime" trip. The 1904 Olympics ran in conjunction with the Fair. I was especially taken by this part of the story. The 1904 Olympics was truly an amatuer sporting event. The story of the Cuban contestant who ran in his street clothes, including shoes, and who had hitchiked part of the way to the games was in such stark contrast to the stories of today's Olympians, who in many cases, really can no longer be called amatuers in any sense of the word. This was a fascinating film that gave a great snapshot view of the United States of 100 years ago. For more information about the 1904 World's Fair see the 1904 World's Fair Society page.

In honor of James' time in Kansas City we ordered Barbeque Sauce from Arthur Bryant. Due to his family's financial constraints, James says he actually never ate in one of the Arthur Bryant restaurants while he lived there, but he knew how famous they were, and that Jimmy Carter liked to eat there. We intended to have a couple of families over for a barbeque to celebrate, but the two families we wanted to invite could each make in on different days, so we had two separate barbeques, one with chicken, and the other with steak. Arthur Bryant's sauce works equally well on both.

Colorado - August 1, 1876

2010-08-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

I didn't much like my job as a cataloger at Hispanic Books Distributors in Tucson, Arizona, but one thing it did allow for me to do was travel a bit to conferences. I believe it was the mid-winter meeting of the American Librarian Association (ALA) in Denver that brought me to Colorado for the first time in 1993. It was also my first time attending an ALA conference. My name tag was blue which identified me as a "vendor". I even went to a special workshop on ethics for vendors who were members of the ALA. I remember another vendor, who also lived in Denver, asking me if I had noticed that the beer I drank hit me a little faster "here in the mile-high city". Indeed I had.

Fatally Flaky by Diane Mott Davidson

When I was a Public librarian I knew about bestselling authors, so I probably knew about Diane Mott Davidson once upon a time, but I really don't remember now. I read her latest book Fatally Flaky for my Colorado book because I wanted to try something in the Maxwell Library's new "leisure reading" collection. Davidson's book fit the bill. I don't read many mysteries, and this book reminded me why. The formulaic storyline, and the two-dimensional characters don't actually put me on the edge of my seat. I could tell which characters I was supposed to be sympathetic with by the way they were described physically. With few exceptions, ugly people were bad, beautiful people were good.

Fatally Flaky revolves around the wedding of one Billie Attenborough to Dr. Craig Miller. Billie is a difficult client for caterer Goldy Schulz, having changed her wedding date three times and the venue once. The word Bridezilla is used with wild abandon throughout the book. Billie is probably the least likable character in the story, we never see any redeeming features in her. Since the book is told from Goldy's point of view, I guess I can understand this device, but the constant negative portrayal began to wear on me. And I really should just stop reading things that involve weddings. I just don't see the appeal of a big white wedding. People should spend more energy on their marriages, and less on their weddings, imho.

Clues are provided throughout the book, but not in such a way that a reader could actually solve the murder , or maybe people who read a lot of mysteries would have been able to, but even our protagonist Goldy does not put all the clues together until the actual murderer "tells all", just as he is about to off her as well. Do criminals really do that sort of thing? Is it a pathological narcisiscm that leads them to tell how smart they were? Or is it just a fictional device after all?

Perhaps the saddest part of this book is that Goldy had to cater Billie's wedding at the Gold Gulch Spa, where "there is no coffee in the whole place".

About Schmidt
It took two tries for me to succeed in watching a Colorado movie. I had first selected Continental Divide, a 1980s romance with John Belushi and Blair Brown. When I searched the Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/ for the keyword "Colorado" Continental Divide was among the results, specifically under "Colorado Rockies". While the movie was filmed in the Colorado Rockies, it turns out that the setting was really Wyoming, so I did not count it as a true Colorado movie. I turned next to Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. Only part of this movie takes place in Colorado, but a significant enough portion that my concience allowed it. Nicholson plays Warren Schmidt, a recently widowed, and recently retired, actuary from Omaha, Nebraska whose only daughter is about to get married. He travels to Denver for the wedding where he stays with the grooms eccentric family, and tries to convince his daughter to cancel the nuptuals - "these people are not up to snuff" he tells her. Kathy Bates is perfectly matched as the aging hippie, mother of the groom, opposite Nicholson's character. Again with the weddings - the wedding and reception scenes were well done as stereotypes of what the wedding industry has convinced Americans that weddings should be, up to and including the belief that the father of the bride should pay for all, even if bride and groom are in their 30s and have real jobs. The whole scene was done just this side of tacky.

I made a most delicious Spinach and Sundried Tomato Quiche with a recipe I found on the Colorado Department of Agriculture website. There was one instruction that didn't makes sense which I changed. The directions indicate to use raw spinach, and never mentions cooking it before putting it into the quiche. There is no way 10 oz. of uncooked spinach will fit into a 10 inch pie shell, even if nothing else were going in. The spinach needs to be cooked before being mixed with the other ingredients. Anyway, I shared this at a Sunday brunch and it was the only thing that was completely cleaned out. A definite hit - a least among the adults.

New York - July 26, 1788

2010-07-26T17:44:00.000-07:00

As best I can tell, New York state is divided into two parts: New York City, and everywhere else - also known as "upstate". I am actually not sure which of these two categories Long Island belongs to, perhaps it is a third area simply known as "the suburbs". I have been to several places in New York, including the city, and Long Island, as well as Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Lowville (where my daughter loves to go to Camp Unirondack, the Finger Lakes, Pooughkeepsie, and Albany.

Crazy Unitarians visit the Niagra Falls UU Church in 2008

Paloma & Kit at the American Girl Cafe 2005

Pam, Paloma and "Kit" enjoy Times Square 2005

Pam & James on Keuka Lake 1986

No Impact Man
About 15 years ago I decided to ride the simple living wave. I really like it. My house is relatively uncluttered, I discovered I enjoyed cooking, and I made new friends. The waters of the simplicity wave are generally smooth, and occasionally I manage to get a friend or acquaintance to join me in riding it. I read everything I could about simple living, and within about five years I realized that there was no new information for me, all the simple living writers were just recycling all the other writer's ideas. So I was glad to learn about Colin Beavan - No Impact Man. Beavan lives in Manhattan and in 2007 decided to see if he could live for one year without any negative environmental impact. He did this along with his wife and baby daughter. The Beavan's go way beyond "simple living". Their experiment meant not only switching to cloth diapers, but also washing them by hand, and learning to live with the rythms of the daylight, and eating only local food, among a lot of other things. Beavan's book, No Impact Man came out last year, as did the documentary of the same name. Thus, my New York book and movie are tied together.

The Beavan's tried many different things, and they didn't give everything up at once, and some things they learned they really couldn't give up. They gave up on giving up coffee, for instance. No small wonder there. Growing peppermint in the windowsill in order to make herb tea as a substitute? I have made peppermint tea myself, from the mint growing in my garden. I've got nothing against it. It is pretty good, in fact, but I would never, ever consider it a facisimile of coffee. By the way, unless a beverage is made with plant camila sinensis it is not really tea, it is more correctly, an "herbal infusion", so we learned on our trip to the South Carolina tea farm.

I recommend watching the movie and reading the book. They complement each other. Each tells things that the other does not.

I am a little bit sad that I don't think either the book or movie mentioned was libraries. Perhaps Beavan did, but I usually note such a thing with a yellow sticky, so I remember to blog about it. I would think a person who is not buying anything new would be using the library more.

I will say I was most impressed with Michelle Conlin, Beavan's wife who was addicted to designer clothes, furs, and reality television before their experiment, and gives it all up, and likes it. When I first started reading the book I saw her as a person I didn't really want to know at all, but by the time I finished it I wanted to be her best friend.

It is a small world of "year of" experiment books. Beavan mentions two that I read: Judith Levine's Not Buying It, and Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet by Alissa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon.

In January of this year I tried the one-week No-Impact experiment as outlined by Colin Beavan. I learned that I could tolerate my house colder than I believed, and that I wasn't walking to nearly as many places as I could, especially given that I purposefully bought a house in the center of town so I would be close to things. Anyone can sign up for the one-week experiment. Register here.

I was tickled to find a recipe for Horn & Haardart's Macaroni & Cheese when searching for New York recipes. H & H was the original "automat"which "featured food behind tiny glass windows that was acessed by putting a few nickles in the slots." Baked macaroni and cheese is the original comfort food, and this recipe was especially good. We shared it with our friend Lisa, & Rob and their children (ages 13 minus one week, and seven). I don't think it is a coincidence that after eating this meal (in which everyone at the table became a member of the clean plate club) our two going-on-thirteen-year-olds asked to play Apples to Apples with both families. The recipe can be found here:

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/city-guides/new-york-recipes/

For dessert we had chilled Strawberry soup - simple recipe made with fresh and frozen strawberries, heavy cream, a bay leaf, cinnamon and honey. These were blended together in our trusty Oster blender. Again, it was enjoyed by all.

We also enjoyed Chardonnay from the Palmer vineyards in Aquebogue, (Long Island) New York; Ice Apple Splash from the Sheldrake Point which James picked up at the Ithaca Farmer's Market last weekend on our way back from visiting our daughter at camp.

Lowville Memorial Park - July 2010

Wyoming Glories and Wonders

2010-07-12T05:59:00.000-07:00

As Pam mentioned, Wyoming is one of four states I have visited that she has not. The others are Montana, South Dakota, and Iowa. Montana I first visited the day before I was in Wyoming and South Dakota, the day after -- during the longest car ride of my life (8,500 miles in 17 days in a 1960 VW bug). Iowa I know only from traversing it a half dozen or more times when I lived in Kansas City but had church-related activities -- and a girlfriend -- in Minnesota.

So my experience in Wyoming was brief, entering through North Entrance of Yellowstone National Park after a McDonald's breakfast in Bozeman, Montana -- where I should have stopped to look for ghosts of Robert Pirsig, or at least some landmarks from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My friend Mike and I were on a rather un-Zen tour, though, going as quickly as a 1200-cc motor could take us from one end of the country to another to another and back. (I later worked with lawnmowers that had exactly half the horsepower of that bug. I am grateful that the 62-mph top speed and lack of A/C did force us to take in a good portion of what we passed through. In fact, I can remember most of that brief transect of the northern edge of Wyoming, which would not have been possible had I been in a more modern car.

When we entered Wyoming, in fact, we were already in Yellowstone National Park -- its northern fringe is in Montana and its western in Idaho. The official park entrances on those sides are on the state lines, a few miles inside the park itself. Founded in 1872, it is the oldest of the parks and one of the largest (larger than the combined size of the two smallest states). It ranges in elevation from one mile at its lowest to over two miles at its highest, with annual rainfall ranging from 10 inches (drier than Tucson) to 80 inches (wetter than New Orleans). (See the Yellowstone Fact Sheet for more superlatives.)

During our brief stay, we of course went to Old Faithful and to the seven-story, log Old Faithful Inn. Because of some images I had seen in a calendar, though, our real interest was in the lesser-known ponds, pools, and mud pots, where very fine differences in temperature and mineral content have created features with an incredible array of colors, shapes and textures -- most notably the Morning Glory Pool shown above. Throughout our trip, we tended to drive by night and sleep by day, so that after visiting a few of these features, we simply took a nap along the trail -- enjoying our blankets recently purchased in Mexico (I still have mine) and oblivious to passersby. We were also oblivious to the warning signs for the area we had chosen to nap, which read DANGER: THIN CRUST. We were apparently risking a very serious geology lesson!

From Yellowstone we set to the east. I remember stopping in Cody just after dark for gas and coffee (we drank absolute swill on this trip, by the half-gallon). I recall a lot of trucks, something about a rodeo, and a lot of big guys with cowboy hats and short hair. Given the state of my hair at the time, not to mention my newly-acquired garb from Mexico and our tiny little VW, this whole scene made us a bit nervous. We gassed up and chugged away, through the Big Horn mountains, where we were treated to a fantastic lightning storm, which we followed from a safe distance. My last memory of Wyoming was another gas and coffee stop, possibly in Gillette, where I noticed some teenage boys playing behind the store. No basketball hoop was needed -- just a pole, with which they were getting some lariat practice.

Before it was even a state, women could vote in Wyoming. In 1869, the territorial legislature declared: "That every woman of the age of twenty-one years, residing in this Territory, may at every election to be holden under the law thereof, cast her vote."

The story -- including several theories about how and why -- is told in Wyoming: The Freedom State, one of the Women of the West online exhibits at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles.

Oblique reference is made to the Western suffrage movement in this educational video, at 0:17 and 2:33, a reminder that although it took several generations to succeed, the national suffrage movement did build on the success of Wyoming women.

Wyoming is known as the Freedom State because women earned not only the right to vote but also the right to serve on juries and in public office in Wyoming before they did anywhere else in the United States.

Wyoming - July 10, 1890

2010-07-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

Wyoming - one of those "yet to be visited states". I know this song from Wyoming, which I sang in the fourth grade chorus during the spring concert at Johnnycake Elementary School in Catonsville, Maryland:

As I went a-walkin'

One mornin' for pleasure,

I spied a cowpuncher

Come ridin' along;

His hat was throwed back,

And his spurs was a-jinglin'

And as he approached,

He was singin' this song.

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

It's your misfortune

And none of my own;

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

You know that Wyoming

Will be your new home.

It's early in spring

That we round up the dogies,

And mark 'em and brand 'em

And bob off their tails;

We round up our horses

And load the chuckwagon,

And then throw them dogies

Out onto the trail.

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

It's your misfortune

And none of my own;

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

You know that Wyoming

Will be your new home.

It's whoopin' and yellin'

And a-drivin' them dogies,

Oh, lord, how I wish

That you would go on;

It's a-whoopin' and punchin'

And go on-a, little dogies,

'Cause you know that Wyoming

Is to be your new home.

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

It's your misfortune

And none of my own;

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

You know that Wyoming

Will be your new home.

Some cowboys go up the trail

Just for the pleasure,

But that's where

They always go gettin' it wrong,

For nobody knows just what

Trouble they give us,

As we start a-drivin' them

All the way home.

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

It's your misfortune

And none of my own;

Whoopee ti yi yo,

Git along, little dogies,

You know that Wyoming

Will be your new home.

Our music teacher explained to us that the word "dogies" was pronounced with a long O and that it meant cattle. The closest encounter I have had with Wyoming was that when I was in libary school in Arizona I knew two people who were from there. I have asked James to write about his own experience in Wyoming, which he will do in a separate post.

Rising From the Plains
It is one of my great embarassments in life that I have not had a science class since 10th grade Biology with Mr. Germana in 1980. I have tried to make up for my lack of formal education in this area by taking advantage of informal educational opportunites whenever I can. Another advantage to living in Arizona, besides meeting Wyomingites for the first time, was that we could take weekend trips to the Grand Canyon. On two of these trips I took advantage of the free "Geology Talks" offered by the National Park Service (never let it be said I do not get my money's worth from my tax dollars)! From these half hour lessons I learned enough about plate tectonics, and how the Grand Canyon was formed that I can explain it to others, and I was also able to apply the knowledge about how the Canyon was formed to another gorge I saw that went straight down (it was made entirely of hard rock, whereas the GC is a combination of hard and soft rock). Anyway all this is a prelude to my discussion of Rising From the Plains by John McPhee, recommened to me by James, and available from our "top shelf" books at home (there is a letter from McPhee tucked inside this one, for more about our top shelf books see my essay "Rubbing Elbows with the Authors", but again, I digress). This book is about geology, and it was written in such a way that a layperson could understand it, and I am also glad I knew what plate tectonics were before I read it. McPhee artfully weaves the personal story of Wyoming Geologist David Love with the Geologic history of the state. The writing is nothing less than poetic. Wyoming is a state of extreme weather, especially when it comes to wind and snow, and the effects of such is clear through McPhee's travels with Love.

I learned a great new word from this book ananym - a name derived from spelling one's name backwards (i.e. Alemap). Also, I was happy to come across the word "lee" meaning shelter. Something I started doing earlier this year while I was on sabbatical was the newpaper crossword puzzles. A common clue I came across was "towards shelter". In short order I learned the word "alee". This book provided me with my first encounter with lee meaning shelter: "Moving farther from the interstate on the sub-summit surface, we came upon a granite pyramid, sixty feet wide at its base. It....weight six thousand tons-enough to prevent its blowing over. We stood in its lee." Reading doesn't get much better than that!

Although this is a great book for novice scientists, and experienced geologists alike, it is not a book for young earth creationists, which is driven home in this passage:

"We passed St. Matthew's espiscopal Cathedral, which also - as Love had reason to regret - contained in its walls brachiopods, crinoid, and algal buttons. He once taught Sunday school there. He took the kids outside and showed them the fossils in the church walls. He described the environment in which the creatures had lived. He mentioned the age of the rock. He explained how things evolve and the fit prosper. Here endeth his career in seimentary theology."
For more about Wyoming Geology see:
http://www.wsgs.uwyo.edu/

The Laramie Project
Has it really been 12 years since Matthew Shepherd was brutally beaten and left for dead, tied to a fence post in Laramie, Wyoming? The Laramie Project is a movie based on a play of the same name, which was based on interviews with residents of Laramie following the death of a gay, young college freshman. The movie comes off as a documentary, but recognizable big name actors (Jeanine Garafalo, Christina Ricci, Peter Fonda) make it clear that this is a dramatization. The film not only examines the lives of the citizens of Laramine, who were both directly and indirectly effected by the tragedy, but also how it effected the lives of the interviewers. Although there appeared to be genuine shock about the murder among the residents of Laramine, and the fact that it was perpetrated by two of their own, one telling remark near the end of the film resonated loudest to me: a year after the murder, after the trials and the sentencing, no new laws protecting gays had been passed in Wyoming. Have there been any changes since then?

One thing I have learned from doing this project is that America is most definitely not a vegetarian society. Although I am not a vegetarian, I do try to eat low on the food chain, and eat a lot of vegetarian meals. I look for meatless dishes when I research recipes for this blog, both for myself and in deference to my vegetarian daughter, but I didn't even try when it came to Wyoming (although you can find some vegetarian restaurants there, using this guide.) Wyomingites are a beef-eating people, indeed according to the Wyoming Cowgirl recipe website "Despite the advice of the 'food pyramid,' meat has always been our mainstay - the biggest portion on our plates - like a big, warm blanket smothering all those grains, fruits, and vegetables". I followed her homey directions for "Rib Stickin' Ranch Vittles" of steak, biscuits and gravy, and enjoyed some true comfort food. James had to help with the gravy, I didn't know how much milk to put in. My daughter is away at camp this week, so I did not have to offend her sensibilities with this meal. We also added some fresh peas to our plates. I just couldn't serve this meal without some sort of vegetable to go with it.

One final note: we shared out meal with our newest family member "Minnie" a one-year old Miniture Pincher who enjoyed her serving of beef.

Washington, DC - Signing of the Federal Residence Act July 6, 1790

2010-07-06T20:32:00.000-07:00

"Washington was a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm," said President Kennedy.

James works a lot with International Students. He likes to pose this riddle to them: I was born in the United States, but not in a state. Where was I born? Some will guess Guam, or Puerto Rico, or perhaps an international military base, and eventually one will figure it out: Washington, D.C. Although our Virginia post claims him as a Virginian (his family did live there when he was born) he is actually among a very elite set of people who were born in the Nation's capital. Look at those cute little feet!

Since we both grew up near Washington, going there for us was "just another field trip." We never had to fundraise to go there, nor was it a big deal to vacation there. Indeed, what kind of a vacation would that be?! And so it was that we realized, with some chagrin, several years ago, that our daughter had never really been to the land of her father's birth. We drove through it at least once a year on our way to visit James' grandmother, and each time we would dutifully point out the Washington monument. We eventually remedied this with a bus tour in 2007. We saw all the monuments, (even the ones James and I had not seen before) and visited the museum of Natural History, the Holocaust museum, and the Hirshhorn musuem of Modern and Contemporary Art. We had the opportunity to visit this last one again a few weeks ago, along with the Air and Space Museum. All of these are part of the Smithsonian Institution, and all are free of charge - always - thanks to the gift from British scientist James Smithson in 1826.

Community Garden across the street from Air and Space museum, downtown Washington, D.C.

So, why did I pick July 6 to celebrate Washington, D.C.? I actually had to do a little research today to remind myself! I remember thinking I could have picked other dates, but as it turns out July 6, 1790 was the date that Federal Residence Act was signed, which selected the Potomac River as the nation's capital in "ten years time" the capital would remain in Philadelphia until then. One thought I had for a date to celebrate was March 29. On that date, in 1961, that Washingtonians finally got the right to vote for President as the 23rd amendment was ratified.

1791 plan for the nation's capital

Horror in the Wind
Back in 1987 newlywed couple Pam and James, afraid that a televangelist named Pat Robertson might become president of the United States, contemplated packing up all their belongings and taking a U-Haul to Canada. The spoof, Horror in the Wind, which featured President (Pat) Robertson, was a manifestation of those fears. A pair of scientists, who are cheating with each other's wives, are looking for a formula to keep rats from mating. In his endeavor to win his "war on sex" President Robertson offers the duo a grant of $20 million to instead create an abstinence formula, which he says he will offer to parents to give their children. They are also to create an antidote to administer once said offspring enter into "a Christian marriage". After the entire nation is sprayed with the new drug it is discovered that what it actually does is change sexual orientation: gays are now straight, and vice versa. With the president enjoying his new vice-presidential partner and his approval rating at whopping 90% he withdraws all funding to create the antidote. The scientists, who are now lovers, nevertheless continue to try to formulate the antidote. The film is quite funny, it does make one wonder to what extent some would go instill their beliefs on others, though. For a more scholarly view of some of the themes this movie explores I recommend Marty Klein's book America's War on Sex: the Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty

Is My Armor Straight?
Well, I couldn't resist this one when I read the subtitle: "A Year in the Life of a University President". Not only was this a "year of" book, it is about college during the 1983-1984 academic year - when I was a sophomore at the University of Maryland - a time of leg warmers, Jane Fonda, Michael Jackson, and the Pretenders all of which are referenced in the book. The University in the case of this book is American University and the President is Richard Berendzen. This book is a real who's who of Washington from the time period. It was kind of fun to read this knowing now what happened to that up and coming congressman from Tennessee (aka Al Gore). And at the dawn of the computer age Berendzen wonders if people really will have social lives online, or shop without leaving their homes. I did have a hard time stomaching all the praise lavished upon then President Reagan in this work, however.

Since I work in a college now I could see that even 26 years later, some battles are universal. While I felt for Berendzen in some cases for the tough decisions he had to make, I could also sense my own tension growing as I recognized similar issues facing our college to which I am squarely on the opposite side of the fence.

As a President of an international University Berendzen is often called upon to talk about the state of education in the United States. Since he is a physicist and astonomer I was never quite sure what his qualification with regard to K-12 education was.

The best thing about this book was that there were too many mentions of the library to count!

The index is next to useless though. The only entries are people's names. While it is true that the whole book was about name dropping, a few other references would have been in order. At one point I wanted to re-read a passage about foreign language education, and found the index to be of no use in this regard.

Georgia Brown French Toast
"Washington is a big brunch town" so says this National Geographic article (with recipes), so James took the challenge and made the Georgia Brown French Toast. A heroic feat given Bridgewater's triple digit outside temperature, and our un-air conditioned home. This biscuit-based french toast though, with triple sec in the batter, was exceptional. We probably won't make it again until temperatures cool again, though. It does seem to be a feast for a "special occasion" so I have declared it our new Christmas morning meal. We also had some blueberry wine to go with this, one of the Virginia wines we picked up on our recent travels.

Declaration of Independence signed July 4, 1776

2010-07-04T20:48:00.001-07:00

Normally, an Independence Day celebration in Bridgewater for us involves a parade, an ArtsFest, a cook-out at our friends the Woods' home, and of course a big fireworks display. On this Fourth of July, however, we were driving our daughter to Camp Unirondack. This is a fifteen hour round trip for us, so we left at 7:00 a.m, before our street was closed for the parade (as it always is), and the extent of fireworks was what we could see of other cities' and towns' displays as we traveled along the Mass Turnpike. We got back to Bridgewater well after the festivities had ended here.

We did have a lovely day, though. After dropping our daughter off we took a slightly different route than we normally do in order to stop in Bridgewater, New York. Read abut what we found there on our Bridgewaters Project blog. The Village of Bridgewater, New York is just a bit south of Utica, where we typically hop on the Thruway for the ride home. Rather than making "good time," we opted for "good time" (thanks to Robert Pirsig for that distinction), and took a Blue Highways route toward home.

In the process we visited at least two New York counties we had missed previously, and will have to update our maps accordingly. The drive was lovely, as the sunset behind us seemed to last for hours, and filled the landscape with a golden glow. We enjoy old New England houses, especially those with great porches and other architectural treasures. This route was full of satisfying discoveries, as a beautiful agricultural landscape was punctuated with charming downtowns every five to ten miles until we reached the northeastern (and most charming) fringes of Albany.

We were reminded of an important lesson: sometimes it is OK to ignore the GPS. "She" is an optimizer, always looking for the most expedient route, and sometimes that is not the best route!

(Click to enlarge route map.)

Idaho - July 3,1890

2010-07-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

"Free 'Tater's for Out of Staters" read the sign outside of the Idaho World Potato Exposition when James and I were traveling through Blackfoot in 1993. Well, how could we pass that up? After visiting the museum which featured everything potato, including Mr. Potato Head, we were treated to a lunch of a baked potato, and the only payment we had to procure was demonstration our Arizona drivers' liscenses. You can't beat that for kitsch, unless it is a giant potato statue!

I also remember seeing some beautiful scenery and waterfalls all throughout our drive across Idaho, and some surreal landscapes at Craters of the Moon National Monument. This was my only foray into "the Gem State".

Idaho: A Guide in Words and Pictures
I've been thinking since I began this project that I should probably read at least one Works Progress Administration (WPA) Guide. The Federal Writers' Project WPA Guides were a project of the New Deal during the Great Depression to put writers to work. One guide was written for each of the 48 states in existence at the time. These guides include information on the flora and fauna, government, education, legends, history, and travel, among other things, for each state. Whenever I looked at a catalog record for one of these guides, however, my eye would be drawn to the page count, which is usually in the 500+ range. Given that I am trying to read 52 books in as many weeks I have, until now, passed on reading one of these guides. I was delighted to see that the guide for Idaho had a page count of only 300. It turns out it was the first such guide published, perhaps after it was published the WPA decided to start including other things. This guide is a real treasure trove of information, and I was surprised, too, to see the relatively sensitive treatment of the history of the Nez Perce tribe in something that was written in 1937. Likewise I was surprised to see lawyer Clarence Darrow's name show up twice. Short on photographs, which I imagine cost a lot to publish back in the day, exquisite descriptions of plants and animals were how these writers earned their bread and butter. While this book generally sings Idaho's praises, there are some instances in which the authors included less-than-favorable information about the state

"In the emphasis it has placed on education, in its scorn of illiteracy, and in its resourcefulness in stretching dollars to their farthest reach, Idaho had been educationally progressive. It is is still one of the most backward States in the care it gives to those unfortunates who do not fall within the normal curriculum. In progressive Eastern States the less extreme cases of emotional instability are not incarcerated until efforts have been made to restore them to serviceable citizenship; but Idaho is a young State and has not yet got around to a more charitable and enlightened view of neurotic persons."

One thing that kept me on guard reading this book, written almost three quarters of a century ago, was that references to historial time periods such as "the 'seventies" meant something quite different to the first readers of this book, than they do to me.

On a final note, I always include any mention of libraries or librarians in books or movies. I was pleased to see this volume praised a worthy librarian thusly:

"If a town can be summarized by a single quality, than perhaps the most notable characteristic of Blackfoot is the fact its indefatigable librarian made of this city not only probably the most book-concious one in the State but also lifted its taste in reading far above the usual levels. This circumstance is all the more remarkable when the books in this small library are compared with those in other public libraries in Idaho, and when it is remembered that all the books in all the public libraries in the State do not add up to more than half a million."

Latter Days
When party-boy Chrisitian makes a bet with co-workers that he can seduce one of the Morman Missionaries who recently moved into his Los Angeles apartment building he is just as surprised as Elder (Aaron) Davis is when they fall for each other in the film Latter Days. As we watched this movie which I had seen before, but James had not, he commented, "so this is an Idaho movie that doesn't take place in Idaho?" Most of the action does take place in California, but when Aaron is discovered kissing Christian he is sent back to his Pocatello, Idaho home in shame. He is devastated by the lack of support or love his family demonstrates for him, whom he mentioned earlier in the film that he missed...and liked. His church rather callously excommunicates him for his "alternative lifestyle" to which he responds that the Mormans, with their historically polygamist marriages were the founders of "alternative lifestyles." Ultimately his parents send him to an institution for "curing" gays. This is a movie about self discovery, and finding family.

Our feast today is based on a recipe from the Idaho Potato Comission brochure that we picked up in the aforementioned Potato Museum for Idaho Potato Crepes. We have held on to the brochure all this time, but this is the first we have made a recipe from it:

1 package (8 oz.) cream cheese
3 T flour
2 eggs
1/2 t salt
1/2 t ground pepper
1 1/2 cups grated cheese (the recipe calls for swiss, we used sharp cheddar)
4 c. grated potatoes
3 T heavy cream
4 T chopped green onions
butter or margarine
The recipe also calls for (optional) mushrooms. Unable to figure how they would enhance this at all, we opted out.

I topped mine with plain yogurt and honey. An absolutely sublime meal.

Virginia - June 25, 1788

2010-06-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

View Larger Map

Back when my family used to drive to our piece of land in West Virginia from our home in Catonsville, Maryland we would pass a sign that said "Welcome to Virginia" and see a small picnic area, then we'd see another sign that said "Welcome to West Virginia." "My, what a small state", I would think, "it hardly seems worth the bother." (The map above shows where we must have driven). What I didn't know, was that in the "Mother of Presidents", which is really 39,594 square miles, (bigger than Maryland and West Virginia combined) on a street called Owl's Nest road, in a town called Manassas, a little boy named James was playing with his brother, riding bikes, and catching frogs and that someday we would meet, fall in love, marry, and honeymoon in historic Williamsburg. We recently visited Williamsburg again, and our friends Bill & Karen who live there. Bill took us to the Botanical Gardens in Norfolk,Virginia where we got to take both the boat and tram tours, and see some juvenile bald eagles. We also saw our first camelia sinensis plant (where tea comes from). We would see many more a few days later in South Carolina when we visited the Charleston tea plantation. See James' update to South Carolina for more about that.

Virginia is also the only place I have ever caught a fish. I actually caught two there, in Lake Montresor, when I was at summer camp in Leesburg during the summers of 1976 & 1977 I used a stick, some nylon thread, and a paper clip for my rod, and a beetle for bait to lure the sunfish. I threw one of the fish back, the other I gave to the camp cats to eat. The camp is now defunct, but recently I discovered this nostalgia page for it. Below are some photographs and certificates from my time there.

James' grandmother still lives in Fairfax, Virginia, and we go out there once or twice a year to see her. We can always count on her having a bowlful of peanut M&Ms on her kitchen counter. There is a lot more to say about "Grandma's house", but I will let James tell that story.

Portraits of America: Virginia by John Bowen is a coffee table book with stunning photographs, and rather bland text. I suppose I wasn't expecting anything different. Coffee table books are really meant to be browsed. I pulled this off of our own book shelf, where it has been for probably two decades. There are seven broad geographic sections of the book, each with subdivisions touting the regions' treasures, history, and culture. It is sorely lacking in maps, though. I counted exactly zero of them. Geographer James found these useful links for those, like me, who need a map:
General regions: http://chalk.richmond.edu/education/projects/webunits/vahistory/images/regionsmap.jpg
Descriptions of phsyiographic provinces: http://csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/vageol/vahist/PhysProv.html
Detail of Tidewater region: http://www.chesapeake-bay.com/

The narratives in this work show a clear love for the state and gloss over less appealing aspects of the state's history. Slavery is mentioned a few times, but is not explored. I also noted that where this book mentions that William Henry Harrison (ninth president of the United States) was born at Berkely Plantation "despite [his] association with the frontier", I learned more about this from Tony Horowitz's essay in State by State. His passage makes it clear that Harrison "became...president after campaigning as a humble 'log cabin' candidate." The book celebrates many Virginia heroes including the nine presidents born there, and Civil War Generals Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert E. Lee. My Maryland schooling has made it very difficult for me to understand the southern predilection for celebrating a war it lost. There is more about this on my Maryland post. Virtually all of the heroes mentioned in this book are white males. Since it was published 25 years ago, I guess this shouldn't surprise me either. I was interested to see that both Bowen and Horowitz mentioned Edgar Allan Poe as a favorite Virginia son, although he was neither born nor died there. It is funny to me how many places claim him: both Massachusetts (where he was born) and Maryland (where he died) do, too. I noticed this even as I noted that Virginia seemed afraid to claim General Douglas MacArthur who was raised in Virginia from infancy, lived there most of his life and died there, but because his mother was traveling when she delivered young Doug prematurely, he was actually an Arkansan.

Bonus book:
The Virginia Night Before Christmas by E.J. Sullivan (another one that was on my own bookshelf) is a fun spoof on the Clement C. Moore's classic poem "A Visit from St. Nick" incorporating Virgina landmarks and historical figures. For instance the reindeer are named for presidents born in Virginia. This does seem like it a bit redneck-y, but when I read that Sullivan also wrote a book called The Redneck Night Before Christmas I figured he probably had some practice.

Bedford: The Town they Left Behind tells the story of the 116th unit of the National Guard in Bedford, Virginia during World War II. The reservists earned one dollar each time they completed their drills - a lot of money in those days. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 their unit was called up and sent to England, where they received additional training. The first fighting they saw was on the beach at Normandy on June 6, 1944 - D- day. Within the first 15 minutes half of the 39 men in the unit were killed. This documentary is based on interviews with soldiers who were there, widows, and other family members. Photographs, archival footage, and letters help to complete the story. The 116th is still active today, and the film includes interviews with soldiers recently returned from Iraq. Listening to family members talk about husbands, brothers and sons who never came back, after they spoke about how hopeful they had been, created a moving tribute, however tough to watch. Bedford, Virginia is home to the D-Day Memorial. I had not heard of it before watching this film.

Surry County Peanut Raisin pie was something I learned about in the Virginia book. I modified it a bit from the linked recipe, and used almond extract in the crust rather than going on a quest to find Frangelico liquer, and I also noticed that although the instructions mention flour (a necessary ingredient for crust) it is not actually listed with the other ingredients. So based on other recipes I found, I used 2.5 cups, which turned out to be enough for a top and bottom crust. I also substituted honey for sugar, as I am trying to use more of my own local ingredients in my cooking. This pie has a lot of texture, and is quite sweet. James and I shared it with our friend Anna. We all liked it, and agreed that one piece is all a person can eat at a time. It is quite heavy. I froze the rest of it to eat at a later time. James and I also had a bottle of Blue Crab Blanc wine with our dinner from the Ingleside Plantation Vineyards which we picked up on our recent trip to Virginia, along with several other Virginia wines that we plant to enjoy later. The Blue Crab was a bit sweeter than we usually like. We prefer dry white wines.

South Carolina follow-up

2010-06-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks after South Carolina day, we enjoyed a visit the Palmetto State. I have written about it on my South Carolina County Map page, though ironically I have not yet updated the county map.

Where is Our Town?

2010-06-21T21:10:00.000-07:00

Blogger "Coolspark" shared my curiosity about the geographic challenge in the opening line of Our Town, the play that Pam chose as our New Hampshire film. Like me, he wondered where exactly it might be, and included the answer in the opening paragraphs of his review of the ART production of the play.

Knowing that my own coordinates are in the same ballpark, it seemed plausible that Wilder placed the fictional town somewhere in New Hampshire. In reality, he did something a bit more clever: he placed it just about as close to New Hampshire as he could, without being on land. It may never be known whether he realized that in doing so, he placed it at the very tiny "Dodge Rock" in Rockport, Massachusetts.

The play gives the coordinates of Our Town as 42.40°N 70.37°W. Dodge Rock is the nearest feature, with an elevation of 0 meters (watch that boat hull!) and coordinates, according to the USGS, of 42.6668°N 70.6162°W. Because it is submerged, the rock does not actually show up on the satellite image below or on most maps.

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New Hampshire - June 21, 1788

2010-06-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

On June 21, 1788 the United States Constitution went into effect as New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify.

My most recent trip to New Hampshire was last month, when I traveled to New London, New Hampshire to visit the Library at Colby-Sawyer College as part of my sabbatical project. The town is charming, as is the New London Inn where James and I stayed in a jacuzzi suite that was decorated in blue and gold. We peeked in a few of the other rooms, each of which appeared to have its own decorating scheme. The Susan Colgate Clevland Library and Learning Center has its own rustic appeal as it is housed in an old barn - one enters through the silo.

Rear-View Mirrors by Paul Fleischman is the story of Olivia who meets her father for the first time when she is 17 years old. She travels from Berkeley, California to North Hooton, New Hampshire to spend a month with him at his invitation. The following year she returns to North Hooton, after her father's death, to honor his memory with a 70-mile bicycle ride that he had completed the year before. The story oscillates between Olivia's memories of the summer before, in which she and her father performed a sort of dance of one-upsmanship, and the bike ride during which Olivia reflects on her father and discovers some things about herself. This book has a lot of descriptions of New Hampshire flora and fauna, and a bit about the Red Sox, too.

I've heard Thornton Wilder's Our Town (the fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire) is one of the most-produced plays probably because the sets are sparse, and therefore it can be low-budget. The 1940 movie version, however, used more true to life sets, and I don't think it ended the way the play does. I know I've seen the play, but I don't remember when, and I also read it in high school. Am I misremembering that in the play that after Emily dies and gets her wish to go back for one day, she then goes back to being dead? Anyway, another reason this gets produced a lot is that even 100 years later certain things still ring true. James and I laughed when Emily started badgering her mother about whether or not she thought Emily was pretty, and her mother finally told her to shut up about it when Emily wouldn't let it go. We started the scene over again and then called our own badgering daughter down from her room to see it. We had to do the same thing when we watched the scene in which Dr. Gibb admonishes his son George for not doing his chores and leaving his mother to do them herself, on top of everything else she had to do because she got tired of asking him to do them. A timeless story indeed.

We celebrated New Hampshire along with West Virginia and Arkansas at dinner this evening. Read about our tri-state dinner here.

Tri-State meal

2010-06-21T20:17:00.001-07:00

We were on vacation the past two weeks - a trip down the east coast to Charleston, South Carolina which I will blog about later this week - and did not get a chance to have our Arkansas or West Virginia meals. Since today is New Hampshire Day, we supped on delicacies from all three states this evening.

Turkeys and rice are staples of Arkansas agriculture. (I had no idea that rice was grown in the United States.) For our main course this evening I made turkey burgers with a side of rice. These were not just any plain old turkey burgers, either. I found a recipe from the "Eat Turkey" website for Apple Turkey Burgers that turned ground turkey into a truly gourmet experience. Grated Granny Smith Apple added to the turkey before cooking, and a cranberry sauce topping gave these a combination of tart and sweet that may have me never going back. See the rest of the Arkansas post here.

Blackberry Cobbler made in our indespensible cast-iron skillet was a delicious West Virginia dessert. I cut the sugar by about 1/3 of the amount called for in the recipe. The fruit made this plenty sweet. See the rest of the West Virginia post here.

In December James, Paloma and I visited Bridgewater, New Hampshire where we bought some wine from the Candia Vineyards. We saved a bottle of Diamond white wine for just this occasion. This is a crisp, tart, satisfying wine that went down very well with the turkey burgers. See the rest of the New Hampshire post here.

West Virginia - June 20, 1863

2010-06-21T20:17:00.000-07:00

Astute readers will notice that the date stamp on this is a day late. We returned from a two-week vacation last night and I simply did not have the energy to post anything after being in the car all day on our return trip.

Almost heaven...

When I was very young my family bought a piece of property in the Shenandoah Valley of West Virginia. A few times a year we would drive out there, up the mountain with the guard rail that I never quite trusted. I got a thrill picturing our light blue Peugot rolling down the side of the hill. When we got to our piece of land we would have a picnic and talk about building a cabin there, or buying an camper. Then we would swim in the nearby lake, and then drive back to Baltimore. After a while it just seemed we stopped going, and stopped dreaming, and the property seemed to be forgotten. I know my father gave the deed to my sister and her husband at one point, then asked for it back. A few years ago when I really started dreaming about becoming a hermit I asked my father about it, and he told me he "got rid of that albatross a long time ago." Ah, well.

The Hayes children enjoying a piece of heaven c1969. Blogger is on the left.

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
When West Virginian Rosalee Futch wins a contest to fly to California and have a night on the town with her favorite movie actor, she never imgines how it will change her life. Although a "tad" predictable, this is a sweet romantic comedy with a twist on the old worldy-boy-sweeps-naive-girl-off-her-feet schtick. And it has a few good one-liners. I was interested to see that the focus of the story was not on the contest, or even the date, both of which are done within the first 20 minutes or so of the film, without much fanfare. We tried to get our almost 13-year old daughter to watch it with us, as she seemed to be the target demographic for this one, but since we picked it out, she figured it wasn't worth her time. Not a movie I would have picked out for myself normally, but it was the perfect thing for relaxing after a 10-hour car trip. There wasn't a lot to place this is West Virginia. It really could have been filmed in any relatively rural southern area with a Piggly Wiggly. According to imdb.com some of this was filmed on location, but I imagine the bulk of it was filmed in Hollywood.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake was loaned to me by my friend Brendan, who always seems to know what I will like (except when he taped The Great Race and suggested that I watch it). Anyway, this collection of 12 short stories gave a bit more insight into rural West Virginia culture that the Tad Hamilton movie did. I read about people who got their meat by hunting squirrel and deer, who kill beagles because they have nothing better to do, who hire teenage prostitutes, and who may dream of a better life than coal mining, but never find it. As I started to read I guessed that none of the stories would have a female protagonist, and was surprised to see that I was wrong on that count. The sixth story, "The Mark", tells of Reva, who is waiting to hear back the result of her rabbit test, a common pregnancy test back in the 1970s when this was first published. Breece Pancake (yes, the author's real name) killed himself in 1979 at the age of 27. I felt the same after reading this collection as I did after reading the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, another gifted writer who commited suicide at a young age. I can only wonder in both cases what great stories will never be written.

We had a meal tonight comemmorating West Virginia, Arkansas and New Hampshire. Read about it here.

Arkansas - June 15, 1836

2010-06-15T13:32:00.000-07:00

The only time I was in Arkansas was in the summer of 1997 when I drove through it on the way from Texas to Massachusetts. I don't think we even stopped there for any length of time. I do know that we drove through Hope, Arkansas, hometown of then-president Bill Clinton. My Godmother moved to Arkansas from Indiana a few years ago, but I have not been to visit her there.

I am going to go out on a limb and declare Inbred, Redneck Alien Abduction to be the worst movie reviewed for this blog, even though I am less than halfway through the year's celebrations. I didn't really expect it to be an especially sophisticated film, but I guess I did expect some kind of entertaining romp. Instead it is simply a very bad, low-budget movie that perpetuates backwards stereotypes of sex-crazed hillbillies. James told my father that the best thing about this movie was that although the envelope said that the movie was 2 hours long, it was really only 90 minutes. We were very glad to see the credits roll.

The Power of One: Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine by Dennis and Judith Fradin is a well-researched book about the integration of Central High in Little Rock in 1957. Nine black students under the mentorship of NAACP President Daisy Bates entered the school in late September, escorted by federal troops after previously being denied entrance by the Arkansas National Guard, under the direction of Governor Faubus. Once they enrolled in the school and started classes the students were constantly harassed and victimized, often while members of the National Guard looked on. Primary documents including photographs, newspaper clippings, and letters enhance this work which was intended for middle school students.

We are deferring our Arkansas dining experience until we return from our vacation next week. Look for a supplemental post.

Tennessee addendum

2010-06-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention a couple of wonderful things about the Scarritt Bennett Center: the wonderful Gallery F - an art gallery with a coffee shop and gift shop attached, and a meditation labyrinth right outside. I woke up early and walked the labyrinth in the emerging light with the winter grass crunching under my feet. It was very peaceful. And thanks to Ted Fischer at Vanderbilt University for reminding me that the Mediterranean Cafe was the Greek restaurant I ate at.

Kentucky Movie - Harlan County U.S.A.

2010-06-04T08:30:00.000-07:00

I suppose it is a universal wish of parents that their children have a better life than they did. The coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973 had this desire as well. What struck me about the miners, though, was that they were under no false impressions that their children would have any other options beyond coal mining. The subjects in this documentary never mentioned hoping that their children might someday go to college and get out of the difficult and dangerous work. They struck in order to improve the working conditions of coal mine that their grandfathers, and fathers worked in and where their sons and grandsons would someday get jobs. The simple truth was that men in Harlan County worked in the mine, and women married coal miners. This movie not only documented the lives of the striking miners, and the dangers associated with thier jobs (black-lung disease, and working with explosives, among others), it also told the story of their wives, and how the women came together to support the strike, and indeed, thier active role in it.

The 13-month long strike ended when one of the "gun thugs" (those hired by the coal miner to let the scabs through) shot and killed a young striker leaving his 16-year old widow and, five-month old daughter to mourn him.

This was a tough movie to watch. Not so much for the violence, which was actually pretty minimal, but just knowing that this took place in the 20th century, and being reminded of the serious dangers that coal miners still face today, especially in light of the recent tragedy in West Virginia in which 25 miners died at a mine owned by Massey Energy. Massey Energy had been cited frequently for safety violations in recent years.

RIP Saturn: Our Tennessee Connection

2010-06-03T22:53:00.000-07:00

Roger & Me, issued in 1989, remains one of the most important films in the formation of my world view, and though it takes place several hundred miles north of Tennessee, it was pivotal in creating an abiding connection between our family and the Volunteer State.

It was Michael Moore's first film, best known for his pursuit of General Motors CEO Roger Smith and some unfortunate business with rabbits. More importantly, it is about the demise of Flint, Michigan and General Motors culpability in that demise. More generally, the film explains how the social contract of the early twentieth century United States -- in which worker loyalty was exchanged for a reasonably comfortable lifestyle -- had been undermined by greed. The film included a brief interview with auto worker Ben Hamper, who in 1991 published Rivethead, a dismal portrayal of the ever-increasing cycles of greed and apathy, as management and labor worked against each other, the customers, and eventually against themselves (though management seems somehow to have emerged from this destructive cycle with its wealth intact).

These great works served as background in 1994, as the pile of degrees in our closet had grown, we had no child yet, and we could see the light at the end of the graduate-school tunnel. Like any good North Americans, this could only mean one thing: time to buy our first new car. But I was still in graduate school, so we were strongly interested in economy -- both in purchase price and in operating costs. And because of what we knew from Messrs. Moore and Hamper, we were in the market for a reasonably just car, if such a thing even exists. That car, it turns out, was a Saturn, and if you are wondering what this story has to do with Tennessee, Roger Smith -- yes, that Roger, along with UAW president Owen Bieber -- had driven the first Saturn off the assembly line in 1990 in Tennessee.

Spring Hill, Tennessee, to be exact, which became an icon for the entire Saturn experience. When General Motors executives -- together with leaders of the United Automobile Workers union -- decided to start fresh, they knew they had to be far from Detroit. They identified workers, engineers, and managers who were interested in creating a new, more cooperative approach. The changes were many, but among the most important was a focus on customers -- not only the ultimate customer buying the car, but also each "customer" within the company, as the interdependency of workers on each other was recognized. Simplicity and transparency were also key elements of the Saturn approach.

The result was "a different kind of car company" that generated tremendous customer loyalty, as documented in this short video of the first of several customer reunions at the factory in Spring Hill.

The story is told in considerable detail in Joe Sherman's very enjoyable In the Rings of Saturn, published in 1993. General Motors established Saturn in 1985, when it realized that its business practices needed very deep changes, in the direction of what is often thought of as "Japanese-style management." Treating fellow workers as customers, for example, meant that the plant was laid out so that engineers for a particular part of the car could work directly with the assemblers who had the most direct experience with that part.

In a documentary about the company, one of the assembly workers who made the move to Saturn said that he really enjoyed the opportunity to be more fully engaged and invested in this way. He said of his prior experience on assembly lines that GM had hired him only "from the neck down." This was really the beginning of my realization that there is no such thing as unskilled labor. Any work -- no matter how menial it might seem from the outside -- can be done in a more or less thoughtful way. And if it is more thoughtful, the worker, the enterprise, and the customer benefit. It was as if a car company had been modeled on the lessons about quality and caring that Pirsig teaches in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

As a geographer, I found the site-selection process -- by which GM arrived at the Spring Hill location -- particularly exciting. It is not often that the work of professional geographers is undertaken in such cloak-and-dagger style. It had become fairly common knowledge that GM was looking for a green-field site somewhere. Any hint that a site was being considered would draw speculators, so extensive research was done -- pre-internet -- in absolute secrecy. About ten general areas were identified on the basis of very broad considerations such as distance from the population center of the country and major highways. Then detailed maps were consulted within those areas for more specific criteria, such as work force availability and topography. Researchers visiting particular sites took multi-leg plane trips and made decoy hotel reservations, not even telling their families where they were actually going.

In the end, Spring Hill, Tennessee was chosen, and it became synonymous with the Saturn brand. To a surprising extent, the project worked. Young professionals who had given up on U.S.-made automobiles flocked to Saturn and to the dealerships, where the focus on simplicity, transparency, and fairness was extended. Some of the lessons were then applied elsewhere in GM, even as the company continued to export jobs. Gradually, the purity of the experiment was eroded. Saturn continued to have exceptional dealerships, excellent design, and high quality, but labor relations were at times strained, some production was moved oversees, and more components were shared with other GM brands.

Still, we remained loyal customers, as we were convinced that Saturn was still our best bet on the quality-justice-economy trade-off matrix. (Credit goes to the Magliozzi brothers for the phraseology I'm borrowing here.) When our 1993 sedan gave up the ghost after twelve years and 227,000 miles of criss-crossing the country, the only question was when to buy a Saturn, not whether to do so. We purchased a 2004 wagon -- the last for sale in New England, as Saturn made the mistake of abandoning wagons in favor of ~~gas-guzzlers~~, er, SUVs. Still, we were delighted to have the wagon for our family of three -- it was much bigger than the sedan, but still looked puny in the pick-up line at our daughter's school, where little kids were typically ferried about in behemoth vehicles that look like they should be carrying the president.

Anyway, we were still loving our Saturn -- which turned 100,000 miles last week -- even though the division never turned a profit. When the banking crisis hit U.S. car manufacturers, the sell-off of assets became inevitable. We crossed our fingers as we heard that Robert Penske might buy the brand, but that deal fell through, too late for any alternative to be found.

Where does this leave Spring Hill? It is not yet known the extent to which it might follow in the footsteps of Flint. When Saturn production -- which had already been reduced -- was shut down there in 2009, CNN referred to the town as "GM-dependent," which we know from Michael Moore is about a half-century removed from being a good thing. As recently as this week, GM offered some possibility -- though no promises -- of a re-opening of the plant in the foreseeable future. Let's hope that this is not the beginning of a period of yo-yo fortunes that have plagued other places that hitched their wagons to GM's star.

For now, we enjoy regular visits to our local dealership-formerly-known-as-Saturn, where we can find the same wonderful people who have taken care of our cars for the past dozen years. And what will we buy when we are ready to retire this car? We are not ready to think about that -- we are still in mourning.

NOTE: I put the quotes around "Japanese-style management" above because even though these practices are common in Japan, many of them originated with W. Edwards Deming, a U.S. scholar. Deming received an award from the Japanese emperor in 1960, a generation before U.S. industry was ready to take him seriously. Eventually, Deming's work was recognized more broadly. By the time I took a job in manufacturing in the mid-1990s, the focus on quality and listening to employees was making its way into our training -- using a lot of Japanese vocabulary words. I completed a small part of such a training course through APICS, as did many of my colleagues in manufacturing along the border.

Rhode Island follow-up

2010-06-03T03:06:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to Pam's main article of May 29, I suggest an article about Rhode Island that I just posted on my Environmental Geography blog. It begins with a spring-break walk along the cliffs in Newport, but includes a bit of political economy and ends with geology, and the incredible age range of New England landscapes.

Kentucky - June 1, 1792

2010-06-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

I actually think about Ohio when I think of Kentucky. When we lived in Oxford, Ohio we were in the "tristate" area that included southwestern Ohio, southeastern Indiana, and Northern Kentucky. I think my first trip to Kentucky was probably to the Cincinnati airport, which is really located in Covington, Kentucky. I missed my plane, but air travel rules were a lot more lax in 1987 and I was able to fly out on another airline within 30 minutes of the missed flight without any additional hassles or fees. The first time I spent any time in Kentucky was later that fall when James and I tagged along on an overnight camping/field trip to Mammoth Cave with one of the Geology classes from Miami University. What I remember most is that I had to pee really bad, but the professor saw no reason to stop for a bathroom break, although I was not the only one who needed relief. That evening when we were telling ghost stories around the fire one of the other students spotted the professor coming and said something like "so the scariest thing was that we had this professor who wouldn't let us go to the bathroom." James ended up taking the class the next year, and I was invited to come along on the field trip again, but I declined. Not only did I think I might need to use a restroom at some point during the weekend, I knew by then that we would be camping in a "dry county", and who needs that. I remember sending out some of the other students on a beer run and it took them over an hour to return.

When I select which books to read for this project there are several things I'm looking for. I try to find something that will help me to understand the culture of the state; I am looking for something with interest to me, but may also expand my horizons beyond what my usual tastes are; and in the case of Kentucky I was looking for a short book. Having the anniversaries for Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Kentucky and Tennessee come so close together it was essential that I pick something that I would have time to read. Besty Byars Keeper of the Doves is a short novel divided into twenty-six really short chapters, each representing a letter of the alphabet - starting with "A for Amen" and ending with "Z is not the end". The length of the book was not the only thing that drew me to it though. Since my daughter's name, Paloma, means "dove" in Spanish, the title caught my attention. Byar's book is the story of Amen (Amie) McBee and her sisters who live in Kentucky during the turn of the 20th century. Their family looks after Mr. Tominski, the keeper of the doves, who once saved Mr. McBee's life. When the family pet is killed, Amie's twin sisters insist that Mr. Tominski is to blame and Amie questions her loyalties. This book is intended for children ages 8-12 and I read it in about an hour. The brevity of the book did not allow for all of the characters to be developed fully, some seemed very two-dimensional, nevertheless, the story did bring out some emotion of sadness and joy.

Well, we just had no choice but to have mint juleps as an after dinner drink today (our main course was a Kentucky fish recipe). I made mint syrup with 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup water, and mint leaves from my garden. I strained the syrup into two mason jar glasses each containing 4 oz. of Jim Beam bourbon, a splash or water and a mint leaf garnish. Boy, were they good. We tried a bit of the bourbon by itself and it has quite a kick, but mix it with a super-sweet mint syrup and one could easily down a few of these.

I did not properly account for the 3-day weekend when I put Harlan County, USA on my Netflix list. It is supposed to arrive tomorrow. I will write a supplemental post after I have had a chance to watch it.

Tennessee - June 1, 1796

2010-06-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

Most of trips to Tennessee have been brief - driving through it on the way to somewhere else. We spent a night in Memphis when we were moving from Texas to Massachusetts, and I remember it as the place that I have encountered the scariest driving ever. I did get to spend a few days in Nashville in 2008 at a Library workshop - Immersion Assessement Track - at the Scarritt Bennett Center. Unfortuately I did not get a chance to visit the Grand Ole Opry or attend any concerts. I do enjoy country music, so it is on my to do list for the next time I visit Nashville. I did enjoy walking around the Vanderbilt University (where James is an affiliated scholar at the Institute for Coffee Studies!) neighborhood and eating at a lovely family-owned Greek restaurant next to the Center. I wish I could remember what it was called. I also remember reading a great women's newspaper called Her Nashville, which made me wish that I lived there.

In 1980 Woodlawn Sr. High School produced the play Inherit the Wind, based on the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial. It featured my sister in a bit part in which she had the unforgettable line "Don't have no opinions. It's bad for business". It was fun to hear that line in the classic film version starring Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly (in a non-dancing role), Fredric March, Harry Morgan, and Dick York (yeah, the one from Bewitched). I thought it was odd, though, that the names of the major players were all changed into something ficticious. It is not as if I couldn't figure out who they were supposed to be. It was easy to see why it was called the "Monkey Trial" though. Aside from the obvious allusion to Darwin's theory of evolution, the courtroom was really a zoo. Both the prosecuting and defense attorneys had to be addressed as Colonel, although neither held that military title. And the prosecuting attorney gleefully took the stand as a witness for the defense. I remember that after I saw my high school production of the play my father remarked that the reason the defense lost the case was that Clarence Darrow was defending the theory of evolution, rather than his client, who had, as a matter of fact, broken a law that prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in Tennessee schools. It is quite interesting that now, 85 years later, the same battles are still being fought. See this article from the New York Times about Kansas fighting Darwinism. There is a documentary about this trial (Kansas vs. Darwin) that I look forward to seeing.

One more thing I cannot resist adding: the players and stage crew of the aforementioned Woodlawn Sr. High production called the play Inherit the Lesbian Zombies amongst themselves. I never did find out why.
Peter Taylor's novel In the Tennessee County tells the story of Nathan Longfort whose first memory is of riding a funeral train carrying the body of his grandfather, a senator, from Washington, D.C. back to his home state of Tennessee. In addition to Nathan, his parents, aunts, and uncles and other extended family, on the train is a mysterious cousin named Aubrey Tucker Bradshaw, who also worked as an aide to the senator. Aubrey's dubious parentage and strange relationship with Nathan's mother and aunts seem to be the cause of his disappearance following the funeral. Nathan never stops wondering what happened to his long lost cousin, and in the meantime seems to just have life happen to, around, and for him. He doesn't seem to live his own life. He marries, has a family, and becomes a college professor, but one gets the idea that he does these things because that's what one is expected to do. Although he has some passion for painting, he teaches art history because that is where he can make his mark as a scholar. As a reader, and defender of academic freedom, I lost most of the sympathy I had for his character when he manipulates a faculty vote to disallow the invitation of a liberal speaker to campus. Because the story spanned many decades, it was somethimes hard to tell when things were supposed be taking place, but I can assume from the use of the word "Communists" in this section of the book that it was the 1950s. Longfort seems to have no compunction about his role in this. He does eventually learn about his cousin, but the resolution at the end of the book was only mildly satisfying.

For dinner this evening we had a favorite fish recipe, which we discovered is also a Tennessee favorite. Fish fillets dipped in egg, milk and tabasco and dragged in a mix of cornmeal, and flour before frying. James also added a bit of Old Bay this time. This recipe calls for catfish, but we used talapia, because we already had some in the freezer. I really like talapia. It doesn't taste fishy, and has no bones.

Rhode Island - May 29, 1790

2010-05-29T13:02:00.000-07:00

When we moved to Massachusetts, we could see about 5 fuzzy channels on our television with the rabbit ears. One of them was channel 10 out of Providence. (We can't watch any, now). We actually watched a lot of television back then. Our newborn daughter almost never slept, and we could not afford to go out in any case. TV was cheap entertainment. One night when we were watching the late news on channel 10 we saw a story about Barnaby Evans, the artist who created Waterfire. We immediately made plans to see this fabulous display. Seeing Waterfire is worth a trip to Providence in and of itself. It is set up about a dozen times a year. Pyres are set in metal holders in the river and the fire reflects on the water, this is combined with beautiful music and a festival atmosphere to create a magical feeling.The wood is regularly replenished by some lucky folks who get to ride in boats throughout the evening. (I want that job). There are also gondola rides to be had for a price. I have not yet taken one, though. From Bridgewater, Providence is easier to get to than Boston, and in some ways more interesting. I love the Cable Car movie theater to see independent films; and Paloma and I got to see Wicked at the Providence Performing Arts Center last Christmas. I also enjoy going to Newport, Rhode Island for its fabulous Cliff Walk past some elaborate mansions and Salve Regina College. T.F. Green airport is generally easier to fly in and out of than Logan. Green airport, is actually located in Warwick, Rhode Island

although it is called the Providence airport - go figure.

One night when we were at Waterfire James saw Providence's ex-mayor, Vincent "Buddy" Cianci through a restaurant window and pointed him out to me. He had actually net Cianci a few years earlier when NESTVAL (The New England and St. Lawrence Valley regional conference of the Association of American Geographers) met in Providence. After reading Mike Stanton's The Prince of Providence I am not at all surprised that the mayor made an appearance at this rather small meeting. The running joke about Cianci at City Hall was that he would "go to the opening of an envelope". His ego was both fragile and gigantic, a dangerous combination, which lead to his demise as mayor on two different occasions. The book was over 400 pages long and seemingly covered every underhanded manuver that Cianci pulled. Minor stunts, even those that were ethical or illegal, were just filler on the way to reading about the big stories, including beating up a romantic rival, which caused his first departure from office of the mayor, and bribe-taking, which caused the second. Although Ciani had plenty of money, and created a charity spaghetti sauce business (a la Newman's Own) in order to provide college scholarships, he was always on the take otherwise. No one could get a City contract without slipping something his way, and even a job at City Hall would cost the prospective employee several thousands of dollars. What was so fascinating about this book was that for many citizens of Providence, none of this mattered. They still loved "Buddy". He was affable in public, could talk as easily to the art students at RISD as he could to the ladies from the historical society, and he pulled off a Renaissance of downtown Providence that is akin to what I remember William Donald Shaeffer doing for Baltimore's Inner Harbor once upon a time. Quite a feat. Providence has become a destination.

James and colleague with "Buddy" c 2000

"All families suck" says the bartender to Italian-American brothers Anthony and Frankie in the romantic comedy A Wake in Providence. Anthony is humiliated in front of Alissa, his African-American girlfriend, whom he has brought to to meet his family for the first time to his grandfather's funeral, and Frankie reveals that he enjoys wearing women's undergarments to his extended family during dinner. This movie really could have just been a goofball comedy, and it did include the requisite "mob" jokes and some of the usual family jabs, but the story is more complex than that. I don't take complete stock in the bartender's philosophy, but I think his point, that if you don't expect anything from your family, you won't be disappointed is something to keep in mind. Although Anthony gets the girl in the end, this is not your typical "boy loses girl movie". It is filmed in Providence, so those familiar with the city will get a charge out of seeing familiar landmarks.

Several weeks ago one of our colleagues told James about the Pawtucket, Rhode Island Winter Farmer's Market which takes place every Saturday from November to May. Since today was the last day of the market, and Rhode Island day, it seemed like a perfect day to visit. We arrived in Pawtucket an hour before the market opened so that we could have breakfast at the Classic Cafe, which James found online. At the market we picked up some local rhubarb, strawberries, cheese, herbs, and greens. I also learned, from Stanton's book, that Del's Frozen lemonade got its start in Cranston, Rhode Island, so a stop at a Del's stand was also in order while we were in town. I know I've bought Del's for my daughter before, but I don't actually think I had tried one before myself. I had a bit of a sore throat and the cirtrus-y coolness felt really good. Stanton also mentions that autocrat coffee syrup is a Rhode Island original. One of James' students told him about it when we first moved here, and we did try it then. Coffee syrup in milk is a treat enjoyed by many, but as much as the Hayes-Bohanan's are a coffee drinking people, we are not crazy about coffee milk ourselves.

Wisconsin - May 29, 1848

2010-05-29T04:57:00.000-07:00

Ahh, Wisconsin. How I love Wisconsin. James and I began our day drinking coffee from our Lawrence University mugs. Lawrence is located in Appleton, Wisconsin where my favorite cousins live. You will find it on the map below right at the northern tip of Lake Winnebago

My first visit to Wisconsin was in 1978. My mother, brother and I drove to Appleton, from our home in Maryland, to pick up my sister who had spent the summer staying with my cousins and working in their store, Laurerman's Corner Grocery (the little store with more). Two years later I took my turn doing the same thing. I was 16 years old then and I remember that as it was the first time I flew unaccompanied. I was so nervous, and when I didn't see my cousins right away at the Milwaukee airport I panicked.

I don't get to Wisconsin as often as I would like, but often enough that in the 32 years since that first visit I have lost count of how many times I have been there. I have two sets of Wisconsin cousins, my mother's late brother Larry's six children; and her brother Dave's two son's. It was Larry's clan who owned the store. Dave was still a childless bachelor back then. I don't think he had even moved to Wisconsin yet. James, Paloma and I all love to visit the relations in Wisconsin. We have deemed them our "COWS" (Cousins of Wisconsin). My cousin Tami has a daughter the same age as Paloma and I am thrilled to see a second generation of cousinly love blooming. Tami and her sister Lori stood up for me and James at our wedding 23 years ago. Lori, along with her friend and fellow Wisconsinite, Sharon, met up with me in Spain in 1986 and we traveled on the trains to Belgium and France together. I think my cousins are golden.

When I remember my time in Wisconsin I recall hiding "True Confessions" magazine under the counter of the store so no one would know I was reading it off the racks. I can't even believe I used to read that crap. I also remember my cousins wanting me to experience everything about Wisconsin. We went canoeing, to a drive-in movie, and ate out all the time. We spent one evening at a church fair and I won about a dozen free coupons for root beer at the A&W drive-in, which I believe is still in business, even after giving away so much of its product!

We also went to a Brewers-Orioles game in Milwaukee, with me the lone Orioles fan in the stadium. I bet some kid that the Os would shut out the Brewers and won a dollar when Baltimore won (one to nothing!) Wisconsin is also where I learned the word "bubbler" meant water fountain, which would serve me well when I moved to New England - except here, of course, we pronounce it BUB-la. Other visits to Wisconsin have included trips Door County, (which members of the Extra Miler Club will tell you is one of the trickier counties to pick up) for winery tours and skinny dipping; and visiting my cousin Lori in Crivitz, Wisconsin the year she taught there. I will never forget spending the day with her class of learning disabled students, and the protests that ensued when she suggested they write haikus for the school's literary magazine. For many years I kept this one on my refrigerator, which was written by an elementary student named Russell:

Cows have big babies (5 syllables)
Cows eat grass and grain and wheat (7 syllables)
Cows eat flowers, too (5 syllables).

The poem was accompanied by a drawing of a very skinny cows with long legs and no ears. I sent it back to Lori many years ago. I don't know if she still has it or not.

Last summer when we were visiting Appleton I noticed that Lori was reading Coop by Mike Perry. It was a book that was on my list of "Year of Books" as a possibility for last year's blog "My Year of Reading Year of Books". (The subtitle of Perry's book is "A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting"). I asked if I could borrow it, but she wasn't done with it, and she gave me another of Perry's books instead: Population 485, about returning to his hometown of Auburn, Wisconsin and working as a volunteer firefighter and EMT. James and I both read it, and loved it, so I was glad to be able to get a copy of Coop from interlibrary loan to read for this project. Perry hasn't lost his touch. I read this 350 page book in two days, laughing out loud as much at the parenting foibles (that I could relate to) as to the farming fiascos (that I couldn't). I chuckled at Perry's description of taking his daughter with him to take two slaughtered pigs to butcher.

"I delight as usual in having Amy as my copilot. Bombing down a country road in a pickup truck with my daughter has become one of the signal joys of fatherhood. Throw a couple of dead pigs in the back and you've got yourself a Hallmark card on wheels."

This image is reminscent for me of the only time I was in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. I think it must have been 1988. James and I were returning to Ohio after the long weekend and at one point found ourselves driving behind a pickup with two Christmas trees and two dead deer in the bed! Talk about a magical Wisconsin holiday image! This blog post really wouldn't be complete without some mention of deer hunting, for which kids in the northern part of the state get an entire week off of school. I thought this was strange until I moved to Massachusetts and discovered that every school in the state closes during the third week in April in order to commemorate the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

Anyway, I suspect that Perry probably tries to put on a much harder persona to his fellow Wisconsinites than his heart-felt writing reveals. Now that I have read two of his books I will call him my favorite Wisconsin author. It looks like I have a few more of his books to look forward to, including Truck: A Love Story. Find out more about Mike Perry at http://www.sneezingcow.com/

American Movie looked like a "mockumentary", but it wasn't. I called it a meta-documentary as it was produced by an independent filmmaker who was making a movie about an independent film maker, Mark Borchardt. The film follows Borchardt as he attempts to finish a short horror film, Coven. Borchardt does not even pronounce the name of his own film properly, saying it with a long O, even after one of his actors tries to correct him. His friend Mike Schank, who provides music for the film, seems to be some kind of idiot-savant. He is rather inarticulate, one can assume this is thanks to the drug overdose he talks about, and always has a blank smile on his face when talking to the camera. He barely blinks or moves his head, which is quite eerie. In contrast he appears to be a quite a good musician. I had a hard time believing that the music I was hearing came from him. If this had been fiction I would have thought his character was overdone. But apparently, it was all real. Borchardt's Uncle Bill (aka his Executive Producer) was another study in extremes. The elder Borchardt lived a simple life in a trailer and yet had tens of thousands of dollars to loan to his nephew to produce the film. Upon Uncle Bill's death Mark is bequeathed an additional 50 thousand dollars in order to complete his movie. Classic Wisconsin.

Cheesehead!

I sent James out on a quest to get us some Wisconsin cheese to have with dinner. I was sure I saw some, clearly labeled as such, in the dairy section of our local grocery store. Perhaps I did, but James ended up going to the specialty cheese section and examining quite a few packages before he found two that came from Wisconin: one was an herb havarti, and the other a smoked cheddar swiss (the cheddar swiss combination is apparently what the official "cheesehead" hat is supposed to be, by the way.) In addition, we had one of our favorite dishes, potato pancakes. I didn't even realize that that was a Wisconsin favorite, too, until I saw it on this website: http://www.bratwurstpages.com/wisrecipe.html

I will close with a link to sweet Wisconsin library story. I love library stories. On November 18, 2009 librarians in Wisconsin documented their work through photography, which resulted in the Wisconsin Librarians say "Cheese" webpage.
http://www.wisconsinlibraries.org/saycheese/default.htm

South Carolina - May 23, 1788

2010-05-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

We were in Charleston, South Carolina on July 1, 2000. The day the Conferderate flag was taken down from the State House. I remember listening to the radio of a blow by blow as the flag was lowered and moved to a different location as part of a Civil War monument. It was a surreal day to be there. I couldn't even understand why the Conferderate Flag was still flying in the first place.

The South Carolina state flag has a crescent and a Palmetto tree. The Palmetto was added during the Civil War after South Carolina seceded. According to this site, the Palmetto played a significant role in the Revolutionary War.

Charleston is a beautiful city. I really liked seeing Rainbow Row and visting Folly Beach.

Dorothy Allison's Two or Three Things I know for Sure explores the author's abusive family history through photographs and memories. There is a kind of a stream-of-conciousness to it. It is not written in a linear fashion, but rather by topics. Interspersed throughout are maxims that begin with "Two or three things I know for sure..." but there are a lot more than two or three of these in the book, so I guess she really knows more than she claims. This is a slim volume that can be read in a few hours. It gives the reader a view of the more sketchy side of southern life, a world without estates or "coming out" parties. Fans of Dorothy Allison will only be disappointed by the fact that the book is so short it ends too soon.

The List appears to be nothing more than a poor facsimile of The Ultimate Gift. A young man feels dissed by his deceased father when he discovers that he was left only a key to a safe deposit box. The contents of the box lead him to a secret society formed during the Civil War, which invests the families' fortunes. Billed as a "thriller" the summary in the Internet Movie Database says "a list from the past leads to unimaginable evil". I wondered then about the PG rating, and, as it turns out the movie was pretty tame for something with claims of "unimaginable evil". I couldn't tell if one of the characters was supposed to have made some deal with the devil, but the conflict of "good vs. evil" was nevertheless pretty straightforward. I found the religious aspect of it too sappy, which was really disappointing. I picked this movie because the other movies I identified for South Carolina did look too sappy (The Notebook, and Dear John). I will refer blog readers back to Dorothy Allison for a non-sappy South Caroline movie - Bastard Out of Carolina.

In reading the South Carolina essay in State by State I saw reference several time to the Lowcountry, and heard it mentioned also in The List, but in neither case did I see what area it included. I found the Lowcountry homepage, but even it doesn't make it obvious. I get the idea that if you don't know where it is, you don't belong there. Anyway, Wikipedia to the rescue. The Lowcountry is the coastal area of the State. We will be visiting the Lowcountry next month when we see our friends in Charleston and visit the Bigelow Tea Plantation as part of James' tea research.

We enjoyed some delicious Pecan Pie as our South Carolina treat. All three of us liked this recipe, (James and Paloma each had two pieces!). The pie turned out to be not super sweet, which I find is too often true with Pecan pies. This recipe is really for "tarts" but since I don't have tart trays I just used the same recipe to make a pie.

Minnesota - May 11, 1858

2010-05-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

My first experience with Minnesota was probably watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s. I have good memories of my whole family lined up on the sofa to watch the show on Saturday night on our black and white television set, and eventually on our new color set. I really loved that show. Mary Richards was so cool, and she had that groovy apartment! Why she moved to that generic one-bedroom in a high rise is a mystery to me!

My first visit to Minnesota was in 1998. We spent my daughter's first birthday at the COMO zoo in St. Paul while we were visiting our friends David and Lesley who lived in the Twin Cities. We've been out one other time since then, but they have since moved to Australia. We have also visited Duluth where one of James' former colleagues lives and works at the University of Minnesota. I can say for sure that Minneapolis, St. Paul and Duluth are all great place to visit in the summer. I remember seeing lovely gardens in Duluth. I am not sure I would fare well during a Minnesota winter though.

I couldn't resist a Garrison Keillor book for my Minnesota reading. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 tells the story of young Gary, a fourteen-year-old boy who lives with his Sanctified Brethren family in Lake Wobegon, and lusts after his older cousin Kate. He listens to the Doo Dads on the radio and hopes for them to make it big. While Gary reads his clandestine copy of High School Orgies (which includes an obligatory story about a horny librarian), and writes his own ribald tales on the typewriter his Uncle Sugar gifts him, he imagines the conversations his grandfather in heaven must be having about him with Jesus. His typewriter also allows him to work for the local paper writing about the Wobegon Wippets. And we wonders what possessed his classmate Roger Guppy to run off across state lines with his girlfriend in a stolen car. The descriptions of "the older sister", whom he never names, are purely the work of an unsympathetic teen. As a reader I just couldn't like her, all the while I knew that if we read the same story from her point of view that young Gary would come off as a mean-spirited pervert. Keillor's descriptions of the house, the town, and the school were vivid, and the story was just plain funny. It was a great airplane read - really passed the time.

American Dream is the story of the Austin, Minnesota Hormel Packing Plant strike in the late 1980s. The begininng reminded me a lot of Roger & Me (see my Michigan post), but then moved away from it. James pointed out that what was different is that a Michael Moore documentary would give much more of the big economic picture, whereas this one told the story of a group of workers through a very close lens, and told the story well, and in-depth. A long strike forces some workers to go back to their jobs at a lower salary, those who tough out the strike are angry at the strikebreakers and scabs, fist fights and family rifts are some of the consequences. Sadly, the movie has a Moore-esque ending, with the corporation winning and most of the stikers out of a job. Watching the families pack, and seeing the "going out of business" signs posted on store fronts one can only hope that Austin will fare better than Flint. A final note that the Hormel Plant had leased part of its building to another company that was paying much lower wages prompted to James to say that this movie is really a pre-quel to Fast Food Nation, demonstrating how the packing plants became the destination of new, undocumented immigrants, and I had to agree.

The Minnesota State Fair is known for its Food-on-a-Stick, so after I chose two recipes from the Minnesota State Recipes website (Indian Fry Bread and Blueberry Milkshakes) I decided that I should attempt to make the Fry bread on a stick. I found three wooden chopsticks in our utensil drawer and wrapped the dough around them before putting them in the hot vegetable oil (I chose not to fry them in fat as the recipe suggests). It was a bit cumbersome to do it that way, and then hard to eat on the stick, so we ended up removing from the stick and just tucking in to them. All three of us enjoyed them, and they were so flavorful there was no need for butter or other condiments, plus, they retained their steamy heat for a long time. We will remember these next winter as an easy-to-make warm treat. They made the house smell delicious, too. As my brother-in-law would say, "they put the "come" in comfort food".

Fruit shakes are a common breakfast item at our house, usually made with a combination of fresh and frozen fruit, juice, and yogurt. The Blueberry Milkshake was made with actual milk and ice cream. I don't buy ice cream much, but I remembered that Breyer's had some sort of purity pledge involving using only all-natural ingredients, so when I saw a low-fat version of their vanilla flavor I bought it. When I got home James asked me why I bought ice cream with Splenda. Did I? Yep. All-natural? I don't think so. We may not be purists ourselves about everything we eat, but one thing we really avoid is artifical sweetners. Blech. The Regan Administration pushed those through in the 1980s even though the FDA advised against them. In any case that was the ice cream we had, and I have to admit it tasted good. James and I liked the milkshakes. Paloma tried hers, but after a few tastes informed us that she doesn't "tend to like things that are blueberry flavored and frozen". Well, who knew?

Cinco de Mayo - May 5, 1862

2010-05-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

Although not a state celebration, we always recognize Cinco de Mayo at our house. I am including a short blog post about it simply as an opportunity to point out that it is not Mexico's Independence Day (which falls on September 16) but rather the commemoration of the battle of Puebla in which the French Army was defeated. I am not sure how this regional Mexican holiday has made its way to be cause for celebration in the U.S., except that it gives people an excuse to drink Corona and Dos XX. We celebrated with a variation on the traditional Margarita, the Paloma, which we learned about from the Boston Globe magazine on Sunday. Paloma is our daughter's name, so we really had no choice but to prepare the concoction of tequila and grapefruit soda.

We didn't watch any Mexican movies or read any books about Mexico, but for both I would recommend Like Water for Chocolate (Como aqua para chocolate). The book is written by Laura Esquivel, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie. It is a beautiful, passionate love story with a lot of magic realism.

Louisiana Supplements

2010-05-03T04:47:00.000-07:00

In recognition of Louisiana Day -- which I enjoyed celebrating with Pam -- I would like to provide a few additional items, mainly related to the often-tragic geography of the coastal lowland area -- a vulnerable national treasure.

I first started learning about the complicated environmental geography of the region from John McPhee's masterpiece The Control of Nature, one-third of which is devoted to the precarious workings of Old River Control. In the late 1980s, shortly after reading that chapter, major floods were occurring a thousand miles upstream, and the news was focused on how St. Louis, Missouri was being affected. I thought of the far-lower Mississippi, and contacted the Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana to see if they were worried. I reached a person responsible for Old River Control, who said, "Sorry, I'm running off to a meeting." Meaning that the structure was indeed threatened.

More recently, of course, a lot of attention focused on the severe damage to the region from Hurricane Katrina. Last year, I posted a NY Times map on my blog that illustrates how Katrina caused Louisiana to experience a major job recession ahead of the rest of the United States.

Louisiana has been hit before, of course, and the nation that takes Louisiana so much for granted has let it down before. Aaron Neville sings about it in Louisiana 1927.

The BP spill of April 20 will deal the region a different kind of setback, as it threatens both natural communities and the livelihoods of residents. The first oiled bird was recovered a week after the explosion, on Louisiana Day in Venice, Louisiana.

For updates on the disaster, see the EPA Response page and the multi-agency/corporation Joint Information Centre, which posts the latest maps.

Louisiana April 30, 1812

2010-04-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

My very first trip to Lousiana was driving through it on my way from Texas to Massachusetts. I remember stopping for some Cajun food, but other than that, it was a blur. I was just beginning my third trimester of pregnancy and was mostly uncomfortable on the long car trip. My condition also allowed me to see a lot of Louisiana rest rooms along the way!

More recently, though, I presented a poster session on Information Literacy to the 2009 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association conference in New Orleans, and got a better chance to learn about this fantastic city. New Orleans is considered to be the most haunted city in America. I missed a chance to visit a haunted library while I was there, but I did take one of the Vampire Tours of the French Quarter. It was a nighttime tour, which wasn't just for the spookiness effect. There are some things that need to be shown at night to be fully appreciated. My tour guide, Jonathan, knew all about vampire lore, and could tell us where any story we might have heard about vampires originated. Many of course came from Hollywood, but others came right from the Catholic church and the Crescent City.

As a final wrap up to the Convention, I went to a party at Mardi Gras World. Conventioneers were able to walk through the factory where the floats are made, and then into the Grand Oaks Mansion for food and drinks. I felt like I was in the Hogwarts when I realized that the stars I was looking at were actually inside.

Food and drink are a big part of the New Orlean's culture. I enjoyed a walk throught the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, which gave a half price discount to convention goers. I learned about why red beans and rice were a traditional Monday meal - it was also laundry day and women could leave it to cook while they tended to the clothes, plus, they were able to use up the left over meat (usually pig parts) from Sunday's meal. There was also a display about chicory which is often added to coffee in New Orleans, and I remembered that a few years ago a fellow librarian from the area gave me a pound of Chicory blend Community Coffee when I told her that my husband studied coffee. It did taste good - made my pee smell funny, though. The museum is located in the Riverwalk Marketplace, which I correctly guessed was designed by James Rouse, the same person who created Harborplace in Baltimore and Faneuil Hall in Boston. For a great read about New Orleans food I recommend Chapter 16 in Simon Majumdar's book Eat My Globe.

I've mentioned before that I really like memoir as a genre of books. For my Louisiana selection I read In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. A journalist, and publisher, White was sentenced to a 18 months at Carville, a minimum security prison, in New Orleans in 1993 for a white-collar crime. Upon his arrival there, he discovered that Carville was not only a prison, it was also the last "leper colony" in the country, and home to over 100 patients who had suffered from what is now known as Hansen's disease. Reading this seemed a bit surreal to me. I can only image what it was like for White. I never really thought of leprosy as a disease of the 21st century. Who knew? Understandably, White is wary of mingling with the patients, and wonders how it can be that the Bureau of Prisons can put inmates in this kind of harm's way. A few weeks into his sentence he experiences a "Sisyphysian" moment and decides to do an investigative expose - no longer an imate, he is once again a journalist and has chosen to be in Carville. Through his work though, he befriends some of the patients and begins to reflect on his own life and how he can change, and starts to see things from others' points of view. Ultimately the table is turned on the question of who is safe within the confines of Carville - the patients had been there before it was opened to prisoners, what must they feel having to share the space with convicts?

This was a good read. I especially liked how often libraries were mentioned! I laughed when I read the description of the prison library which was "organized by book size" to keep things "orderly". As a librarian, I have had any number of patrons request a book that they know neither the title or author of, but could tell me the size of the book and color of the cover. Perhaps the warden was on to something.

By the way, did you know that the nine-banded armadillo is the only species besides humans to contract Hansen's disease?

Interview with the Vampire was fun to watch after having been on the New Orleans vampire tour. I had seen it many years ago, but only vaguely remembered it. I didn't recall Tom Cruise, or a very young Kirsten Dunst being in it at all. James has pointed out that each vampire movie we see has its own set of legends it follows. In this one, vampires are not afraid of crucifixes, but can be killed by sunlight. The sunlight legend was actually invented in the original vampire movie Nosferatu. The director had to finish it up quickly and came up with that ending because it was convenient. Not too gory, and a bit sexy (especially with that Antonio Banderas), this one had everything I like in a vampire movie.

Although there were so many uniquely Louisiana dishes I could have made for our Lousiana meal, I opted for simple red beans and rice. In deference to my vegetarian daughter I made the meatless version, who informed me after a few bites that she doesn't like kidney beans anyway.

Other dishes on my list of things to try later are:

The famous Hurricane cocktail
http://www.gumbopages.com/food/beverages/hurricane.html

And Whipped Sweet Potatoes with Pears
http://www.gumbopages.com/food/veg/sweet-pot.html

Maryland April 28, 1788

2010-04-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

What to say about Maryland? I guess the place to begin writing about my home state is with the flag. Marylanders like their flag. The alternating fields of yellow with black checkers, from the Calvert Family (Lord Baltimore) crest, and red and white crosses, from the crest of the Crossland family, may look a bit busy, but as an icon of Maryland, it is probably the most recognizable. Marylanders like their flag the way Texans like the shape of their state. The flag design is used on the state license plates, and highway signs. Travel through the Old Line State and you will notice the flag displayed on front porches as a symbol of Maryland pride. I first noticed this phenomenon a few years ago while visiting my family in Maryland. I hadn't really thought about it before, but it made me embrace my "Marylandness" in a new way. I have now lived away from Maryland for half of my life, and while some memories of the people and place there are fading, it has caused me to reflect on what it is to be from Maryland.

Entance to the Enchanted Forest

Marylanders of my generation are likely to recall trips to the Enchanted Forest in Ellicott City, a nursery-rhyme themed park. The park has been turned into a shopping center now, with the entrance left in tact as a marquee. I thank Clark Elioak Farm for transporting and restoring some of the memorabilia from this treasure. Old-timers also remember Hess Monkey Town, a barbershop at the Emondson Village shopping center in Baltimore that had real live monkeys in the window. I remember knowing even as a four-year old that that was something pretty special. Back before there were such a thing as malls, Edmondson Village was the place to shop in Balitmore.

One of the things I have been doing as part of my State Celebrations, that I have not blogged about before, is reading the essays in the bestselling book State by State edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. This collection has one essay from each state, with each written by a different author. When I read Maryland's entry, by Myla Goldberg, I was stunned at how her experience looking back at growing up in Maryland reflected my own. Like Ms. Goldberg, I grew up in the suburbs near Baltimore and Washington, D.C. But what struck me the most was that she wrote about not realizing that the Maryland state song, "Maryland! My Maryland!", is a actually a civil war era confederate lament, with lines like "She spurns the Northern scum". A few years ago my husband and I decided to celebrate Maryland Day for the first time (the impetus for this project) and for the first time I looked up the words to the State song. Well, who knew? In school we only ever heard the tune of the song (which is the same as "Oh Christmas Tree"). No one is ever taught the words. Small wonder. Maryland seems to be a bit touchy about its role in the Civil War. In history class we are taught that while we are south of the Mason-Dixon line, Maryland really fought on the Union side. While this is all true, there is much more to the story than what they taught us in 8th grade. There have been movements to change the state song. So far, no dice. This NPR story tells of a recent attempt by some schoolchildren to get the song changed. Perhaps they are finally teaching kids the words.

Joni Eareckson was a name I knew growing up. I remember seeing information about her, and her artwork when I was young. Joni graduated from Woodlawn Sr. High school in 1967 (15 years ahead of me) and that summer was injured in a diving accident which left her unable to move her legs and with limited mobility in her arms. By learning to hold pens and brushes in her mouth she became an accomplished artist. The movie Joni tells her story from the time of her accident through 1979, when she began speaking about her spirtual awakening in the aftermath of the tragedy. The movie stars Ms. Eareckson as herself. This movie opened in Baltimore in 1979, and I remember that my sister was there. As a member of The Woodlawn Sr. High Madrigal Choir, she was invited to sing at the premier. I also remember that she was then asked to review to movie for the school paper, the Calumet, and she really resisted doing it. Because she did not much like the movie, she probably felt that she was put in an awkward position. She did end up writing the review and I recall that she said she said she was "disappointed" that so much of the movie focused on Joni's spirtiual journey, rather than her recovery and artwork. We unchurched Hayes kids didn't cotton much to spirtual things. I had not seen the the movie myself until last week, and while I can say that the story is undoubtably inspirational, I agree with my sister that it is not a very good film. I cannot say I was disappointed, though. My sister's reveiw told me exactly what to expect. More information about Joni Eareckson Tada can be found at:
http://www.joniearecksontadastory.com/

My taste in Maryland movies runs more along these lines:

1969 - Starring Winona Ryder

Saved! - Written and directed by Brian Dannelly - Fellow alum of my alma mater the University of Maryland Baltimore County

Tin Men - The restaurant scene was actually filmed in the now defunct Westview cinema. This was probably the first place I ever saw a movie.
Diner - from a simpler time, when the Colts were a Baltimore team.
...And Justice for All - After I watched this the first time I remarked that "all the innocent people were in jail, and al the guilty people went free." My sister explained to me what satire meant.
The Accidental Tourist - Starring fellow UMBC alum Kathleen Turner

Anything for Director John Waters - Watch Cry Baby for a glimpse at the Enchanted Forest! Kathleen Turner appears in his moive Serial Mom
Avalon

I finally read a book that has been on my reading list for years: Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay by William W. Warner. First published in 1976, this Pulitzer-Prize winning book is a beautiful tribute to the crabbing culture of Maryland. Drawings by Consuelo Hanks enhance Warner's descriptive writing. I learned a lot about Maryland that I never knew and got an inside look at the work of those for whom crabbing is a way of life. This book also delves into some of the unsavory history of captains who offed their employees rather than paying them. I was particularly interested to read about dire predictions made when Hurricane Agnes hit the Bay in 1972. There were predictions of a possibly unsurmountable loss of crabs for the following season. The crabs, however, turned out to be much more resilient than anyone knew. I never knew about the National Hard Crab Derby Day run annually on Labor Day weekend in Crisfield, Maryland, with entrants from all over the country. Crisfield was also home to brothers Lem and Steve Ward, decoy carvers, or, as they preferred to be called, "waterfowl counterfeiters in wood". Although the Ward brothers were famous among decoy collectors, they gave up hunting themselves after a friend penned the poem "Remorse" which recounts watching a pair of wounded geese who died with their wings around each other. The poem reminded me very much of the story Paloma, written by Douglas Cox which tells a similar story of a pair of mating doves.

Like the flag, crabs are indeed an important part of Maryland culture. Until you have sat at a picnic table with a bushel-full of old-bay laden steamed crabs and picked out the meat in a truly messy, eat-with-your-fingers dining experience, you have not experienced Maryland. And, real Maryland crab cakes are unlike what you might see on restaurant menus in other states as "Maryland-style" crab cakes. Don't you bet on it. I find that outside of Maryland you get a cake made with way too much cracker or bread crumbs. If you want a real treat, the places to go to order crab cakes are Phillips restaurant, The Olive Grove or G & M restaurant. On a recent trip to Maryland, I found out from a sample lady at the Giant Food Grocery Store that Phillips recipe crab cakes are available in the frozen food section there. She told me, however, that I would not be able to buy them in Massachusetts because Phillips made them exclusively for Giant Foods. Since I was flying home in a few days, taking some with me seemed difficult. Not to worry, James was on his way to a conference in Washington, D.C. soon after my return. He was driving down and took a cooler that he stocked with the frozen crab cakes on his way home, this was a much more resonable substitute for having them shipped to us from the restaurant (which is an option!). We invited two other families over to enjoy the cakes with us, and served wine from the Boordy and Legends vineyards, and Clipper City Pale Ale, all of which James also brought back from his trip. I also attempted to make the official Maryland State Dessert, Smith Island 10-layer cake. I managed to get 8 pancake-thin layers from the recipe and build a very lopsided cake. Part of the slantiness of the cake was in thanks to my uneven kitchen floor. With layers that were so thin, the batter kept sliding down to one end of the pan. No matter, it did taste good, and was very stripey.

These Maryland shape cookies were given to us the first time we went to the Old Mill Bakery Cafe in Ellicott City.

Pam and Paloma discover a University of Maryland sweatshirt at the "Ropa Usada" market in Atigua, Guatemala.

Puerto Rico book - Por fin!

2010-04-20T09:33:00.000-07:00

Well,
James and I finally finished reading When I was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago. This memoir is about growing up in Puerto Rico, and about growing up. The story follows Santiago from what must be her earliest memories as a very young child in Macun, Puerto Rico through her audition and acceptance into the School of Performing Arts in New York many years later. Because of her parents tumultuous' relationship Santiago would be uprooted a number of times before her mother finally moved all the children to New York City, and away from their father, when Santiago was 13 years old. Readers get a taste of the Latin concept of Magic Realism through Esmeralda's experience closing the eyes of a dead baby so he can go to heaven. The ceremony and ritual surrounding this event are surreal. The chapter on "The American Invasion on Macun" in which she describes government officials during the Eisenhower administration coming to her town to explain the four food groups to the mothers, and the free breakfasts for children the government subsequently provides, gives true insight into why people need to be aware of cultural differences. It is both funny and sad that the government dismisses the food that was already being prepared and served, what we would now see as a local and organic diet, in favor of processed white bread, powdered eggs, and powdered milk which Santiago is ironically told was "made fresh this morning."

Santiago's audition at the School of Performing Arts must have been a real test of willpower for those saw it. Prepared for the auditon by a trio of well-meaning teachers at her Junior High school, one can only imagine how hard it must have been for them not to laugh at the "fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl jabbering out a monologue about a possessive mother-in-law at the turn of the century, the words incomprehensible..."

This is an appealing book with thoughtful insights into growing up, and descriptive passages that allow the reader a true glimpse into Santiago's world.

Other Puerto Rico posts:
Main Post March 2, 2010
Movie Post March 17

States that Didn't Make the Cut

2010-03-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

This story from National Public Radio's "Here and Now" shows some maps of states that have been proposed, but never became part of the U.S. map.

Florida Public Libraries

2010-03-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

Since this blog is about "Celebrating" the states, I try not to include too many negative things. I could not let this slip by, though.
State Funding to Florida's Public Libraries to be Eliminated!

Other Florida Posts
Main Florida Post March 3, 2010
Florida Book March 8, 2010

Puerto Rico Movie - Vampiros

2010-03-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

I finally got a chance to watch a Puerto Rico movie. I wasn't able to obtain a copy of the one I had intended to watch, Manuel y Manuela, either through borrowing, renting, or buying, so I picked Vampiros instead, which I was able to get through Netflix. I can only say this about the movie. It was bad - bad writing, bad acting, bad music, bad direction. Of course it also included some gratuitous nudity, and a vampire "cat fight". The best thing I can say about this one is that I got to practice some Spanish. I learned nothing about Puerto Rican culture. Even as vampire movies go, and I've seen a lot of them, this one bites (pun intended). Unless you are a vampire movie "completeist" you can skip this one.

And I almost forgot...this movie has a library scene. After Jonathan (Jorge Dieppa) gets bitten he and his friend Miguel go to the library to do some research about vampires. They ask at the "informacion" desk and are directed to some books by Anne Rice and Bram Stoker, when they say they want information about real vampires the librarian blows them off and simply directs them to the computer to figure it out for themselves. Jonathan attacks a young woman in the stacks while Miguel is looking up information.

Other Puerto Rico Posts
Main Puerto Rico Post March 2, 2010
Puerto Rico Book April 20, 2010

Maine - March 15, 1820

2010-03-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

Kezar Lake - Lovell, Maine

When I was growing up in Catonsville, Maryland Maine seemed like a very exotic place to me. It was pretty far away and nestled way up in the northeast there on its own. It was a place I knew my family would never go on vacation. I was well into my thirties before I finally got "down east". James and I drove up there the summer after we moved to Massachusetts and dropped in on one of James' former professors from UMBC, John Starr, who now runs The Bayview Gallery in Brunswick along with his wife Susan Robertson-Starr. I believe he is the professor I mentioned in my Ohio post who encouraged James to pursue graduate studies. Our next foray into The Pine Tree State was about two years later when a friend invited us to spend a weekend at his sister's cabin on the New Hampshire/Maine border. This was particularly exciting for us because we got to see Kezar lake, named for the late, great Ebenezar Kezar (really!), an ancestor of James (whose middle name is also Kezar). Maine is also where the first Bohanan landed when he arrived in America from Scotland in the 18th century. You can read a bit more about the family roots on James' county map page of Maine.

I don't remember when James and I first watched The Spitfire Grill, but much of the movie stayed with me, not just the story, but the beautiful images of New England as well, which is why I decided to watch it again for this project.

Percy Talbott (played by Alison Elliot) is a young, recently-released inmate from a Maine Correctional Facility. While in jail she worked for the Maine tourism bureau and decides that Gilead, Maine is the place to make a fresh start. She takes a job at the Spitfire Grill, owned and operated by a rather gruff Hannah Ferguson (Ellen Burstyn) and soon discovers that newcomers, especially ex-cons are not welcome in this small town. Ferguson has been trying to sell the diner for 10 years and with the help of her niece, Shelby; and Percy decides to run an essay contest and give the diner to the best entrant. Watching the movie I assumed that Gilead was not a real town, given the not-especially-positive way most of the characters are portayed, so I was surprised to find out that it is. Ultimately, though, this is a movie about redemption. I do notice that the Gilead Historical Society does not mention this movie at all on its blog. For my Unitarian Universalist readers this is the perfect movie for discussion the First Principle - the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Although the story takes place in Gilead, Maine, the movie was actually filmed in Vermont.

Last year I wrote a blog called My Year of Reading Year of Books, in which I wrote about memoirs that took place over a one-year period. There were many that I did not get to include last year, and one I didn't even know about then was Bernd Heinrich's A Year in the Maine Woods. Heinrich is a zoologist, runner, and artist who appreciates each season as it comes. Heinrich's descriptions of snowstorms are as awe inspiring as his description of burying beetles covering a dead mouse. Scattered throughout the book are some of Heinrich's sketches of plants and animals. A not-so-secret desire of mine is to someday become a hermit, Heinrich makes this idea ever more appealing to me through this narrative. He does mention on several occasions wishing to have someone to share his cabin with though, and missing his children (one of whom is away at college, and the other lives with his mother). I must admit that I would need to have a co-hermit if I were ever to undertake such a lifestyle. I have suggested to James and Paloma that we sell everything and go live in a cabin in upstate New York, but so far they have not taken me up on it. I think my favorite part of this book came very near the last page when Heinrich describes a taste-test he performed on white perch, yellow perch and sunfish after hearing from the locals that the yellow fish and sunfish were "trash". He discovers that they all taste the same. I think a lot about peoples' desire to have "only the best" and wonder how often what is considered "the best" is simply a matter of lore. It is certainly easier to just go along with what everyone else says, than to actually research something yourself.

It seemed we had no choice but to have lobster this evening. I was not in a mood to prepare them myself though. We took the easy way out and had lobster bisque from Costco. I have no idea if the lobster even came from Maine, but the soup was quite rich and creamy. Beyond heating it up, my only contribution was a bit of sherry. It is the perfect day for hot soup, though. The rain is falling heavily here in Massachusetts and the wind is whipping. It felt cozy to be inside with a nice warm bisque.

Florida Book

2010-03-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

Beware the bespeckled librarian!

I don't generally read true-crime books; I find them to be a bit voyeristic, but even I was tempted to peek into the life of a fellow polyglot librarian. Stella Sands book, Behind the Mask: A True Story of Obsession and Savage Genius tells the story of William "Bill" Coday who seemed to his co-workers at the Broward County Main Library in Ft. Lauderdale to be a model citizen and employee. A good-looking and extremely intelligent man who spoke five languages, Coday was head of the International Languages Collection. What people did not know about him was that he had brutally murderered his young girlfriend many years before while they were living in Germany. When he failed to report to work one day in 1997, without notice, friends and co-workers were stunned to learn that his glamorous Colombian ex-girlfriend, Gloria Gomez, had been bludgeoned and stabbed to death in his apartment. After Coday confessed to the Gomez murder his lawyers worked to keep him off of death row. Six psychologists testified that Coday was mentally ill and should be spared. Throughout the trial Coday was on psychotropic drugs. For a variety of legal reasons jurors were not informed of the previous murder conviction. As with any death penalty case there were several appeals. Coday's case was actually never resovled.

As with any true story, the reader will not necessarily satisfied with the ending, which is often left ambiguous. Such is the case with this story. It seemed both that Coday was certainly smart enough to have pulled off faking a mental illness, and that the brutality of the crime could only have been by a person who was mentally ill. The book is a quick read, but did not tempt me to read any more of the genre.

Other Florida Posts
Main Florida Post March 3, 2010
Florida Public Libraries March 18, 2010

Vermont - March 4, 1791

2010-03-04T19:27:00.000-08:00

Q: What is a Minuteman's least favorite day of the year
A: March 4th (forth)!

I had lunch today with my delightful Vermonter friend Lori. We did not eat any Vermont food, but we did talk about Vermont. I think my first trip to Vermont was to go to the Vermont Country Store in Rutland, probably in 1998. We had been getting their catalog, and ordering from in for several years, but once we moved to New England a trip there seemed like fun. We also visited King Arthur flour, where I had k-cup coffee for the first time. We've been to the Vermont Country Store several times since then. If you look at my profile picture you will see me looking especially groovy in a dress I bought there almost 10 years ago, that I still love to wear. I bought it on sale for $7.00! Our friends Julie and Mike have 2 off-the-grid cabins in Vermont and we have been up to stay there a few times. It is peaceful, and I really don't miss the television. Their cabin is also the only place on earth in which you can play "Rock Toad" - a game invented by Mike & Julie's daughter when she was quite young. The great thing about this game is there are no winners or losers, you just keep changing which rock you stand on when "rock toad" is yelled out. The game continues until you get tired of it. Once when my daughter was assigned to write an essay about her favorite place, she chose Julie and Mike's cabin in Vermont. Julie is a beekeeper and informs me that Vermont's official state insect is the honeybee. I will be sure to serve some honey with our Vermont meal!

The movie Shout It Out: Voices of Vermont Teens is a low-budget muscial based on interviews with over 1,000 Vermont Teens. In a movie just over 90 minutes long the themes of domestic violence, teen pregnancy, racism, interracial dating, homelessness, suicide, bullying and homosexuality were all explored with sensitivity. Of course there is only so much one can do in 90 minutes, but I would have been interested to have gotten a more in-depth look at those who bullied. There was only one-short scene in which we got to get some perspective on them. The overarching theme of this movie though was that teens want to be listened to. As an adult, I take the point. I just wish my almost-teen would listen to me, too. This is worth watching. It has to be taken for what it is though. Much of this was created by teens, including all the songwriting.

I do a lot of research about banned books. One book that appears often on the list of banned or challenged books is Buster's Sugartime by Marc Brown, part of the "Postcards From Buster" series. Most recently it was in the news in Union,Oklahoma "because it alluded to a same-sex relationship". The book is about maple-tapping season in Vermont (which is happening right now). In July 2000 Vermont was the first state to allow civil unions for same-sex couples, before any of them allowed marriage (Vermont now allows same sex couples to marry). Brown's book, published in 2006 refers to two same-sex couples, parents to some of Buster's new friends. The references to same-sex couples are made in passing, on two of the pages. Brown clearly wanted to create a story in which having two moms was normalized, and he did so.
To read more about this controvery see:
http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/tag/busters-sugartime/

See the television episode at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkgaS4x-NNE&annotation_id=annotation_8730&feature=iv (part I)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKszFvgfkks&feature=related (part II)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C73BCuhSPHk&feature=related (part III)

This episode was also banned from some stations

We are deferring our Vermont food fest until Saturday when our friends who summer in Vermont will able to join us. The "breakfast for dinner" menu will include pancakes with maple syrup, scrambled eggs with Cabot cheese, and Green Mountain Coffee.

Florida - March 3, 1845

2010-03-03T19:52:00.000-08:00

Every time I hear the song "Land Down Under" by Men at Work I think of Florida. My first trip to Florida was in January of 1983 to visit a childhood friend who moved there after graduation, and I had so much fun that I went back in May of that year. I remember that "Land Down Under" played over and over again on the radio. My friend and I had birthdays one day apart, her roommate also had a May birthday and so to celebrate (we were all turning 19) we drove down to Key West, lounged around, got sunburned, and I had my first margarita. I have been to Florida several times since then. My mother and step-father lived there for a few years (and still winter there; they are there now, in fact), and our friend McKell who lives in St. Petersburg is a native Floridian (although we met her during her brief stint as an Arizonan). We have been down for visits, and there is much to love about the state. We have seen alligators, and baby sand hill cranes there, collected beautiful shells, enjoyed beaches, and bars. This is the time of year that Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, and other resort areas are innundated with college students. I can't imagine what it is like for the locals right now. I do remember watching the movie Spring Break many years ago, which probably isn't too far off the mark. Sometimes when I go down there I think people move there because it seems like a big playground. But I imagine once you have to get a job, and go to parent-teacher conferences, and drive to little league, it stops being so much fun. I think I will save Florida for a vacation spot. There are enough people who live there, and too much development.

The Sunshine State seemed like a good choice for a movie because I usually like independent films, but I didn't really get this one. It did have some big name actors and actresses (Mary Steenburgen, Timothy Hutton, Angela Basset). However, I am not sure where writer/director, John Sayles, meant to be going with this. The David-and-Goliath theme of long-time residents fighting the big-time developers was resolved without judgement. There were so many characters that the movie only scratched the surface of their lives, so that when we thought something was supposed to be a profound statement, we couldn't really figure out why. We did learn a bit about Florida history from this, specifically as it related to slavery, and segregation.

I selected the book Behind the Mask: A True Story of Obsession and Savage Genius by Stella Sands for my Florida project - a true crime story about a librarian! I have only read about 60 pages though, for the reasons outlined in my Puerto Rico post. I will write a supplemental post later this month.

My favorite kind of pie is key lime, so today was a perfect chance for me to try to make it myself. I went all out and used Paula Deen's Key Lime Pie. I followed the directions exactly and made soft peaks and hard peaks when instructed. James was duly impressed with the perfect texture of the pie, and mentioned it without even being prompted to! It actually was not a hard recipe - the biggest challenge was finding the proper equipment: a springform pan. I knew I had one. I even remember the occasion I bought it for - James' 36th birthday when I made him a lemon cheesecake. I found the outer ring part with the other cake pans, but where was the bottom? I looked in the drawer underneath the oven where the cookie tins are kept, and it wasn't there. I then dawned on me where I might have ended up. Did I really want to look? There are some places you just don't want to have to go, and underneath the oven is one of them, yuck. But there it was, lying flat on the floor among the grime and dust. All I had to do was pull the drawer all the way out. It reminded me of the time we bought a new refrigerator. In that case we actually found a bunch of crap that belonged to the previous owner.

Although this recipe is loaded with fat, it does have a wicked-high fiber graham cracker crust!

Other Florida Posts
Florida Book March 8, 2010
Florida Public Libraries March 18, 2010

Puerto Rico - March 2, 1917 (Jones Act)

2010-03-03T06:45:00.000-08:00

Life is what happens while you are making other plans. Death happens, too. My post today is "Reflections on a Puerto Rican Street Dog". I have not been to Puerto Rico, but 9 1/2 years ago I adopted a plain brown dog through the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, Massachusetts. She was a rescue dog from the streets of San Juan - a "sato" as they are called there. Save-A-Sato is a group in Puerto Rico that rescues street dogs and ships them to the states for adoption. Our loyal dog, Clover, died last week.

Clover was a feisty little dog. For the most part she did not like men, except James, and my cousin Chris, whom she met only two weeks ago. She must have bitten at least a dozen of our friends (all men). She also was pretty aggressive toward other dogs, even those who were bigger and stronger than she was. We called her "one-woman dog" because she followed me around the house - couldn't stand to be on a different floor than I was. She was afraid of our basement for some reason, so when I went down there she would just stand at the top of the steps and whine until I came up. I thought of her more of a familiar than a pet. (If you are not sure what I mean by "familiar", well, muggles have pets.)

I have not yet seen the movie I selected for Puerto Rico (Manuela Y Manuel) or read the book I checked out from the library (When I was Puerto Rican). Part of this is due to the fact that too many celebrations came up at the same time, but it was also because we can't plan death. Tending to Clover and mourning her passing took much of my time the last week. I will write supplemental posts within the next few weeks as I catch up with my reading and viewing.

For dinner last night we ate on old favorite from The Well Filled Tortilla Cookbook by Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman. Made with chicken, walnuts, bananas, and with an orange-onion salsa these have a nice sweetness, and so many textures. Quite delicious. We hadn't had them for a while. Thanks, James for preparing them.

Some readers will correctly point out that Puerto Rico is not a state. And, by the way if I'm going to do Puerto Rico, why not Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the other U.S. territories. I guess I only have this to say - I never had a dog from those places.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory in the Caribbean Sea. The Jones Act signed by President Woodrow Wilson on March 2, 1917 gave Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship. This effectively created another population of men to draft as the U.S. prepared to enter World War I.

Barack Obama is their president, although the citizens of Puerto Rico were not given the opportunity to vote for him in the 2008 election, nor do they do not have a voting representative in Congress, nor do they not pay federal taxes. It would be unconsititutional to require them to do such: it would be taxation without representation. This status is in fact, not what the majority of Puerto Rican citizens want. Some would like to become a state, others would like to become an independent country. This question comes for a vote before the Puerto Rican citizens occasionally, but since there are three choices (status quo, statehood, independence) there is never majority for any one of the three choices, effectively leaving the status quo. Citizens of Puerto Rico are free to move to any of the 50 States and set up residency, where they can register to vote, (and would then would be required to pay taxes).

Clover 1999-2010

Other Puerto Rico Posts
Puerto Rico Movie March 17, 2010
Puerto Rico Book April 20. 2010

Nebraska March 1, 1867

2010-03-02T00:30:00.000-08:00

It is the unfortunate lot of Nebraska (one of the 8 states I have not yet been to) to share an anniversary with Ohio (March 1, 1803), a state I have actually lived in. So, while I have quite a lenghthy post about Ohio, I have virtually no reflections about Nebraska except to remember a friend from graduate school, Don, who came from Omaha. He and I both had relatives in Appleton, Wisconsin. I also remember that Julie Kotter, from the old television show "Welcome Back Kotter" came from Nebraska. Normally in a case like this, I would ask my geographer husband to guest blog for me, but indeed, Nebraska is one of only four states he has not been to.

I was glad to find this news item about Omaha libraries in my library newsletter last week, so I would have something more to post today. http://www.ketv.com/news/22533931/detail.html. True to form for any library story in the popular press, the comments section contains all kinds of negative comments about what a waste of tax money libraries are. I cannot understand why newspapers have no qualms about choosing and editing letters to the editor that appear in print, but allow any post to appear in the online sources. And to those who would post those comments I would keep this in mind: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Libraries are truly the "people's university". There is no admissions requirements and the reading rooms, and reference assistance are generally available to all. We get these services no matter what town we are in, even if we don't pay taxes there. I have one other comment about Nebraska Libraries which is to say that I am very pleased to know that The Nebraska Library Commission uses an article I wrote (Fear and Loathing: Censorship in All its Glory) about banned books on its educational website "Intellectual Freedom and the Core Values of Librarianship".

Goodnight, Nebraska by Tom McNeal tells the story of Randall Hunsacker, who moves from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Goodnight, Nebraska after he steals and wrecks the car he finished restoring in shop class, after he discovers that his sister is having an affair with his mother's tosser of a boyfriend. The sister and boyfriend move to West Virginia, and the mother follows in hopes of getting him back. Randall is left in juvenile detention until his football coach finds him a place on the Goodnight high school football team. This book has a lot of characters. They move in and out and through the story. For some, the reader gets more insight into than others. McNeal weaves back stories about some of the charcters into the novel, for others we simply get a "bonus chapter" that gives us a glimpse into what makes them who they are. In many cases, however, we don't get a wrap up for them. Widow Lucy Witt appears to play a major role when she agrees to board Randall when he arrives in town. She discovers something she finds distasteful about Randall, and from there she simply fades from the storyline. There is no grand epilogue to let readers know what happened to all the characters, only for Randall and his wife Marcy do we get a window into their future lives. This is how life is. We only ever get a window onto others' lives. Even those we know well have a frame around them that no one else can completely see around.

The Brandon Teena Story is a documentary about the murder of trangendered Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena who was born female, but lived as a man. After transposing first and last names to create a name more appropriate to the gender, Brandon Teena moved to Falls City, Nebraska. He dated women and made friends with people who did not know his history. When rumors about his identity began, he was raped and beaten by two of his male friends and humiliated in front of his girlfriend. Transcripts and tapes of the inteview between Brandon and the sheriff show he was further humiliated when giving his statement to the police. No arrests were made, and the two men tracked Brandon to his friend Lisa Lambert's home in another town, where Brandon, Lisa, and another friend, Phil Devine, were all executed. Lisa's infant son was the only one spared in the massacre.I knew about this case from seeing the movie Boys Don't Cry, a feature film starring Hilary Swank several years ago. I recommend watching both films. It is an unfortuate truth that transgendered individuals are much more likely to die of murder than the general population.

For dessert tonight we had Nebraska Raisin Bars. These cookie bars were lighter (less dense) than other cookie bars I've had. I used more raisins and less sugar than the recipe called for. My mantra for desserts is: Less sugar, more flavor. These are tasty.

Ohio - March 1, 1803

2010-03-01T23:53:00.000-08:00

Q: What state is high in the middle, and round on both ends? A: O-HI-O.

My first memory of Ohio is the summer of 1978. I was 14 years old and my mother, brother, were driving to Wisconsin to pick up my sister, who had spent the summer working at my aunt's store in Appleton. We stopped in Youngstown, Ohio the first night. After spending quite a bit of time looking for something to eat in this rust belt city we finally found a pizza place called Gina's pizza. I remember they sold t-shirts that said "Gina's pizza makes me passionate." I did not buy one though. We also searched in vain for some entertainment, but when we found the town's movie theatre, we were disappointed to see that it was boarded up. I immediately put Ohio in the number one spot of places I never wanted to live. So, imagine my reaction, when eight years later, when my husband (then-fiance), James came home one evening to announce that he had big news. His advisor had assured him that he could get him into graduate school at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio! If you say the word Ohio and draw out each syllable, and speak with a slight whine, you will have a pretty good approximation of what James heard. We intended to stay for two years while James did a Master's degree, and then move on, but the true irony is that after the first year there I decided to enroll in graduate school, too, and so we had to stay on an extra year in order for me to complete my studies! Being in graduate school sure beat working at K-Mart all to hell, which is what I did for the first few months we lived there. I whince everytime I remember getting on the intercom to speak the ubiquitous "Attention K-Mart Shoppers" and then announce a blue-light special in housewares. After a few months of that I found work as a nanny before deciding to enroll in a Master's program in Spanish Literature

Ohio had its charm and we have some good memories of it. The last year we were there we got to live in a great old farm house on 15 acres while the professors who owned it were abroad for the semester. The house was on top of a hill overlooking a creek and some more farmland. I remember once our little dog, Pablo, came home from a run smelling awful of something I never smelled before or since. He also had something sticky on his back. My theory is that he stood under a cow while it was peeing. Only in Ohio. We also have good memories of our two foster pets, Barbara (the dog) and Donna (the cat) who were the pets of the professors who owned the house. It somehow felt right to live in a big farmhouse and have two dogs and a cat. Donna used to kill field mice and bring them home. She would sit in the middle of the dining room and eat them, except for the teeny tiny liver. No worries, when she was done with her snack, Pablo would lap up what was left. The cat would never catch the mice in the house though, no challenge, I guess.We also started our first aquarium while living in Ohio, with a fish James won for me at a carnival. We had the fish for about 2 years and had to leave them behind when we moved to Arizona. We left them with the two professors, and their children, and they (all the fish) all died shortly thereafter when bleach was mistaken for bottled water.

While we were living in Oxford the movie Little Man Tate was filmed in Cincinnati, with a portion filmed on the campus of Miami University. I had not seen the movie since it first came out in 1991 (after we had left Ohio) so it was a treat to watch it again and recognize the campus landmarks. The movie is Jodi Foster's directorial debut and tells the story of Fred Tate, a-seven-year old boy genius who is the son of a working- class single parent (Foster). The conflict between Fred's emotional and intellectual needs are played out by his mother, and his teacher (Dianne Wiest). Although each tries to give him what he needs, it takes a lot of work and heartache before a balance between the two is found.

I don't remember what keywords I used in searching to come up with the book Good Roots: Writer's Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, but what a gem of a book it turned out to be! Exactly as the title suggests it is a collection of poems and essays by writers who are from Ohio. Authors include P.J.O'Rourke, a fellow Miami University alum; and Goosebumps creator R.L. Stine, who swears he really did have a normal childhood. I read this one out loud to James and we were both taken in by it. As editor Lisa Watts points out the stories are about a time as much as a place, but Ohio just seems to be the right place to have as a backdrop for the time when children did a lot more exploring, and a lot less soccer. James used two of the essays in his Frameworks class for would-be geography teachers in Massachusetts. (Don't get him started on that, by the way). Anthony Doerr's contribution "We are Mapmakers" about the mental maps of the places we grew up and how we create them was a particular favorite, and especially useful for James' class. We didn't know there was a place called Novelty in Ohio until we read this essay. It was just the right place name for such a reflection.

One thing I never had the nerve to try when we lived near Cincinnati was Skyline chili (served 5-ways!). So what could I do, but attempt to make it myself today. It is usually served over spaghetti, which seemed a bit gross to us, but was surprisingly good and filling. I found a recipe for it in the Boston Globe magazine, of all places, in an article about Super Bowl recipes. It calls for a lot of spices and a bit of unsweetened cocoa. James did try Skyline chili once, and said that mine was better. He recalls that there was no flavor to the bowl he ate.

Oregon - February 14, 1859

2010-02-14T17:18:00.000-08:00

James and I took a driving tour of the northwest in the summer of 1993. We stayed a few days in the hippie-dip town of Eugene, Oregon. We were actually staying with James ex-girlfriend and her husband. I played Garth Brooks' "Unanswered Prayers" on the cassette player of our car on the way there. http://www.lyricsfreak.com/g/garth+brooks/unanswered+prayers_20058116.html

Susan Butruille and her mother Ruth Hendricks Greffenius celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Oregon trail in 1993 by following the trail and stopping at the historic markers along the way. Butruille also read diaries of women and girls who make the trek in the 1840s and 1850s. The journey in those days could take as long as six months, during which time women gave birth, tended children, cooked meals, did laundry, had their periods all the while maintaining a sense of the "cult of domesticity" prevalent in the day. This cult had most of them wearing long skirts instead of pants, and ironing tablecloths along the way! I was quite interested to learn that the long skirts actually served a practical purpose on the trail. Women took turns providing each other with privacy using the big skirts as shields. This book is not specifically about Oregon, but rather the Oregon trail, which comprises several states. But Oregon was the promised land. Of course many of them died along the way, or lost children. Some of the children died, other simply wandered away from the wagon and were never found. This work was more "read-able" than I would have suspected. It was not too dense, yet it was scholarly. It did leave me wanting to take the same trip Butrille did. We did visit the Oregon Trail Visitor Center operated by the National Park Service in 1993, the same year Butrille made her trip.

Wendy and Lucy is an independent film filmed on location in Portland, Oregon.Wendy Carroll is having a bad day. On her way to find work in Alaska, her car breaks down in Portland, Oregon; she is arrested for shoplifting; and her dog, Lucy, disappears. With the help of a kindly Walgreen's security guard she is eventually reunited with her dog, but there is no happy ending here. This movie was depressing as all get out. That's why we watch indie films though. If we want the same old "boy meets girl" dreck there are always plenty of other choices.

For a more optimistic view of visiting Portland without money I suggest this post from one of my favorite blogs "My Year Without Spending" http://myyearwithoutspending.blogspot.com/2010/02/non-consumer-portland-vacation.html

And here's a bit of Portland trivia from my Oregonian friend Korin:

Portland was named by the toss of a coin. If the coin had fallen the other way, Portland would have been called...Boston!

So, hazelnuts are the thing in Oregon. For dinner I prepared hazelnut-crusted salmon with a side dish of sugar snap peas with mint and a blueberry walnut salad. All of these recipes were easy to make and quite tasty. We topped off our meal with some hazelnut decaf coffee.

More Oregon Trivia - Oregon is the only state with two different pictures on opposite sides of its flag.