Past Blogs

I’ve never understood why anyone would want to retire behind a wall, even a pretty wall. Walls close things out and trap things in. But no posh retirement community is complete without their bunkers.

Our warmer climates are dotted with retirement complexes and all are enclosed by high walls around their perimeters. Shrubs, trees and hedges planted in front of these walls make the walls appear to be more impenetrable. Then two freestanding walls of brick or rocks flank the main driveway. These walls announce the name of the complex.

If the resort community is extremely upscale, two gigantic fountains or other water features will also mark the entrance. Gates ensure that the enclave will not be breached.

Now comes my favorite part of these Versailles wannabes……their names.

“Someone”, I recently said to my husband, “gets paid a lot of money to dream up these faux exclusive sounding names. I could do this.”

Can you tell which of the following places are real and which only exist in my overactive imagination?

• Foxmoor at the Dales
• Eagle Crest on the Landing
• The Colonies at Dolphin Cove
• The Estates of Wolf Hollow Creek
• Pebble Point at the Brooks
• Arborwood at Summertree
• Cascades at River Hall
• Timber Greens

With a big bundle of cash, you could move into the last four on the list.

I spotted a small, framed quotation in my favorite pastry shop last week…

Technology becomes obsolete, chocolate never.

The sweet truth of this brought a smile to my face, even though I confess to usually favoring a caramel flavored dessert over a chocolate one. My preference for caramel doesn’t imply that I don’t like chocolate. In my opinion, anyone not liking chocolate is highly suspect.

People and all other mammals are hard wired to like certain tastes. It’s all about survival: we spit out the bitter tastes which might poison us and crave the tastes that might nourish us. For plant eaters and omnivores, carbs (glucose or sugar) are essential for nutrition, hence taste buds for sweetness.

Two genes are responsible for discerning sweet tastes. They encode two proteins that combine to form a sensor which detects sugar molecules. In some totally meat eating animals, these genes have mutated to be non functioning.

Cats, both large and small, are hyper carnivores and cannot taste sweets. So when kitty starts begging to lick the remains out of your ice cream dish, she isn’t craving sweetness, but fat. Spotted hyenas, bottlenose dolphins and many seal species also lack the ability to taste sweetness.

Some carnivores, those that sometimes stray from their meat diets, do retain their sweet sensing genes. Dogs know that ice cream is sweet. And every night the Tooley Cafe hosts a band of meat eaters with an incredible penchant for sugar. No burnt batch of cookies or stale piece of cake is ever wasted at our house. The raccoons always eat dessert first.

For those of us with 10,000 taste buds (cats have 470, dogs have 1,700 and cows have 25,000), here is a splendid and easy recipe for Chocolate Fudge Bars.

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter, melted
2 eggs
1/2 cup flour
5 tablespoons cocoa powder (unsweetened)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix sugar and butter until creamy. Add eggs, flour, cocoa and vanilla.
Pour into an 8 inch round or square pan.
Bake at 300 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes.
Cut into small squares.

Don’t feed to cats.

Our black cat, Taj, had a spectacular crazy time the other day. He raced up and down the stairs at breakneck speed, made several circuits around the entire first floor as if he were an Indy car and threw in a few howls for sound effects.

For those of you unfamiliar with pet behavior, these short bouts of literally off the wall (or climbing the wall) romps occur on a daily basis for many cats. This apparent insanity is a totally normal part of cat life.

Animal behavioralists hypothesize that the bursts of high speed action release pent up energy. A cat in the wild would make about forty attempts to catch prey each day. The chemicals in our house cats’ brains still say “go”.

While watching Taj go nuts, I had a revelation. We humans should take up the practice. With all the dismal news; the sad state of our democracy, world politics and the environment, we need to have an escape valve from our lives as concerned citizens.

I can’t be a Buddhist and be detached. Nor can I be a Pollyanna, an eternal optimist or a magical thinker. But dancing to Zydeco music, running around the block, doing jumping jacks or beating on drums for a short while might  induce a bit of temporary euphoria.

I’m leaning toward the drums.

I recently heard some pundit on National Public Radio say that we need to start teaching respect and moral values in our public schools. I started to seethe. The fallacy and intended manipulation inherent in those words is worthy of Fox News.

I have spent 50 years of my working life in hundreds of schools; public and private, rich, poor and middle class. In every school I have worked as a staff member or visiting educator, values are being taught in all classrooms on a daily basis. And private schools have not cornered the market on value based education.

I believe the reason outrageous statements about “no values” in our public school classrooms isn’t instantly challenged has an explanation. Many Americans, even parents, have never observed a class in action and many of them think teaching is easy……..anybody can do it.

There is a cure for this magical thinking. Just imagine yourself walking into any classroom, K to 12. Thirty children (or more) are in the room, plus you. Your job is to educate each and every one of them.

The children come from diverse backgrounds. The parenting skills of their families range from non existent to excellent. No education can happen in this room if you can’t establish order and respect, in other words, a moral foundation to create a small community of children working for the benefit of the individual as well as the group.

Schools teach values in order to be functioning schools. When people rant about “no values” in our public schools, they really mean “my ideology isn’t being promoted”.

The Golden Rule is the operating rule in our classrooms. Unfortunately, it is no longer the operating rule in our public discourse. Teaching children values that the society does not promote is an uphill battle. Bravo to all our teachers who keep championing fairness, decency, civility and respect.

Periodically, a perplexing post has popped up from a Facebook friend. The message simply says, “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit”.

For several years, I would puzzle over the post and then finally concluded that it was a private family joke of some sort. Had I been more observant, I would have noticed that the words always appeared on the first of the month.

The mysterious rabbits were explained recently when I encountered this comment in a blog, “My aunt in England always said ‘rabbit, rabbit, rabbit’ on the first of the month to ensure good luck all month long.”

Being a lover of folklore and language, I decided to find out how all this rabbit business started.

Rabbits being bearers of good luck can be traced back over 2,000 years and in many cultures. For superstitious folks, the rabbit’s ability to jump represented leaping into the future, moving forward in life. Prodigious breeding habits made rabbits a natural fertility totem. They were also symbols of prosperity, supposedly making riches multiply profusely.

The rabbit, rabbit, rabbit superstition originated in England and migrated to the United States where it is most popular in northern New England. Written references to it first appear in the early 1900’s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Gilda Ratner were among practitioners of the saying.

Since February first is approaching and it is a leap year, you might wish to join the rabbit ranks. The basic formula is to have “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” be the FIRST WORDS out of your mouth on the first…..not an easy task. Variations are acceptable such as “white rabbit” or “bunny, bunny”. And for those of us who know we will never remember this on rising, luck is not all lost for the month. Say “tibbar, tibbar” right before you go to sleep on the first.

That’s rabbit backwards.

For my personal feeling on the luck of rabbits, click here.