Past Blogs

I recently read a fascinating book, A Solemn Pleasure, The Art of the Essay, by Melissa Pritchard. The writings were on serious and thought provoking topics until I came to the piece called “Doxology”.

I had to look that word up….Doxology, an expression of praise to God. The essay of that name was thirty pages long and was entirely about dachshunds. Since I had enjoyed the first seventy-one pages, I kept on reading despite feeling like a victim of bait and switch.

May I never subject you, dear readers, to thirty-one pages in praise of dachshunds, or anything else for that matter. I only subject you to one minute of reading even when discussing cats.

After having been drowned in dachshunds, I challenged myself to write a few words (emphasis on “few”) on the topic.

Dachshunds were bred to ferret badgers out of their holes. These dogs are best described by H. L. Mencken: “A dachshund is a half dog high and a dog and a half long.”

Dachshunds come in six colors and five sets of markings. The fur can be smooth, long haired or wire haired. Wiener, sausage and hot dog are common nicknames for these low slung creatures.

I have had one memorable experience involving dachshunds. Walking into Washington Square Park in New York City one April day, I spotted several people walking dachshunds. Soon the park was filled with hundreds of dachshunds. I had serendipitously discovered the annual Dachshund Spring Fiesta. In case you need a dachshund fix, the date for 2016 is April 30th.

My favorite dachshund is named Pretzel. He only lives in a children’s book entitled Pretzel and the Puppies. The book was written and illustrated by Margret and H.A. Rey and published in 1946. They are the same couple who created Curious George. As a child, I read my Pretzel book so many times that the illustrations are permanently cemented in my brain.

I need to begin by saying that I do know how to cook dinner. Having had 51 years of practice coming up with nightly meals, I’m experienced.

Last week I came home from work, scrubbed up two huge baking potatoes, pricked holes in them and shoved them in my oven which I set for 400 degrees. Then I turned the timer on for an hour and wandered off to do other things.

Coming back when the timer went off, I opened the oven door and a blast of heat dried the mascara off my eyelashes. Instead of two baked potatoes, two coal black rocks were sitting on the oven rack and the temperature in my kitchen was rapidly rising to hellish degrees.

“What have I done?” raced through my mind. We women all are trained to blame ourselves for anything that goes wrong. I immediately checked the temperature setting I had chosen and it was gone. Instead, the temperature screen said F9.

I whipped out my stove’s instruction manual to decode the inscrutable F9. Convoluted instructions were given to reset the temperature sensors. No translation for F9 was given.

Now I was in perfect control of the situation. I knew exactly what to do. I yelled for my husband to come fast. My stove is mainly a giant computer with a few incidental heating components. He is a computer guru.

He quickly arrived in the torrid kitchen, whipped out his computer, brought up the stove’s online repair manual and diagnosed the problem. F9 was the failure code for “a runaway oven”. The temperature was in excess of 650 degrees. As soon as the patient cooled down, my guy could do a computer repair job and I would be back in the baking business.

Dinner, however, was now the immediate problem. I pulled the black rocks out of the oven and was about to toss them in the garbage. And then a story from decades ago popped into my head.

My father was from an extremely poor family. One of his happiest boyhood memories was of going to a vacant lot, setting a big bonfire and roasting potatoes in the red hot coals. He had watched the homeless (who were called hobos then) do this and he was imitating them.

I got out a sharp knife and cut the potatoes in half. The insides were snowy white and steaming. I quickly made a cheese omelette and a big green salad. The baked potatoes were the best we have ever eaten.

For twenty years I taught at a creative arts school for young children. Playing Saint-Saen’s musical piece, Danse Macabre, was an annual Halloween tradition. The kids and I would dance to the music, starting out as sleeping skeletons under the ground, rising up and dancing faster and faster as the night progressed and melting back into the ground when the rooster crows and dawn arrives. What child doesn’t like whirling madly around while pretending to be in a spooky graveyard?

Anyone thinking children should be shielded from any mention of death might be surprised at this historical fact. In the 1800’s cemeteries were used by families as parks are now, for picnics, family gatherings and nature walks.

Consider this quote from a book on the history of cemeteries in America:

“The rural cemeteries laid out by horticulturists in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York in the 1830’s were romantic, pastoral landscapes of the picturesque type. Planned as serene and spacious grounds where the combination of nature and monuments would be spiritually uplifting, they came to be looked on as public parks, places of respite and recreation acclaimed for their beauty and usefulness to society…by their example, the popular new cemeteries started a movement for urban parks.”

Our massive municipal parks such as Central Park in New York and the Chicago lakefront parkway were a direct result.

One of the most famous cemeteries in America is Sleepy Hollow Cemetery near Tarrytown, New York. Dating back to 1849, it is the resting place of Washington Irving who wrote the famous tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with its headless horseman.

I recently mentioned to a cousin of mine who is also our family genealogist that I have been in Tarrytown.

“Did you visit the cemetery?” he inquired. “We have an ancestor buried there.”

I had not known this piece of family history and am grateful to our scholarly historian who has spent many vacations wandering around in graveyards looking for our roots.

A visit to Sleepy Hollow cemetery is now on our travel list. We may even bring a picnic.

“How was your shopping experience?” the cashier at Office Max asked me the other day. I was momentarily flummoxed. Foolish me, I was not aware that I was having a shopping experience. I thought I was dashing in the store to buy a box of envelopes, one of a number of stops on my long list of errands.

I had just come from my grocery store which trains their employees to be pleasant to customers. If employees do not say hello to every customer and are not genuinely helpful, they are let go after one month. A young man who was stocking the dairy case said “hello” to me three times as I walked back and forth searching for the blue cheese. Then, right on cue, the check out lady inquired,”Have you found everything you were looking for today?”

Do not misinterpret my remarks here. I find this grocery store far superior to the one where I previously shopped. When I asked a cashier there which aisle an item was located, she snapped, “I don’t know I never shop here.”

Before the grocery store stop, a barista had asked me how my day was going. Knowing these poor employees are forced to ask this question, I always resist the urge to say, “the cat threw up fur balls all over the kitchen counter, I was late for work and I’m coming down with a cold.”

So when I was asked the quality of my shopping experience, I gave my standard answer, “fine”.

“Is that all?” was the cashier’s reply.

And then the goddess of truth inspired me and I said,” Actually my shopping experience would have been greatly enhanced if you were making a living wage, your job was full time, you had sick leave and health insurance and you didn’t have to ask me inane questions.”

Now the cashier was the flummoxed one until she recovered and said, “We should go out for a glass of wine together.”

Japanese woodblock prints are among my favorite types of art. Two women are responsible for opening my eyes to the subtle beauty of these prints, and I am grateful to both of them.

My mother decorated the walls of my childhood home with reproductions by famous artists. She believed that art was meant to be part of the everyday environment. Like the pictures in a beloved childhood book, our household art was imprinted in my brain. And a small reproduction of a big wave made one of the deepest impressions. I was fascinated by Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa…the ornate wave rising over the tiny boat of cowering men.

When I was an eighteen year old college student, our art department took a field trip to Chicago. The famed Art Institute was the main focus, but our teachers also planned a stop at a tiny shop that sold handmade Japanese paper. Aiko’s Art Materials was started in 1953 by the diminutive Aiko Nakane (link to a startling bio) who became known as the “grande dame” of Japanese paper, or washi, in America.

The teachers wanted us to know of this treasure trove of papers which we could use in our art work. But I fell in love with the paper itself and only wanted to frame it (many sheets were enhanced with dried leaves or stenciled patterns) or buy prints by contemporary Japanese artists on washi papers. Aiko also had a small, exquisite selection of prints displayed in her store.

My husband and I frequently visited Aiko’s for decades and decades. We pinched pennies and through the years were able to buy several beautiful prints to mark the seasons. Aiko retired at age 94 and died a year later in 2004. The store closed in 2008.

Last Friday we were in St. Paul, Minnesota, and stopped in their big, new Goodwill Store. I was making a quick scan of everything including the framed pictures. And then I couldn’t believe my eyes. I spotted a print in a dusty frame with filthy glass for $2.99. The woodblock print itself was in good condition….a lovely fall scene by Kiyoshi Saito, a prize winning Japanese printmaker.

Thanks to my mother and Aiko, I knew what my eyes were seeing. If I believed in karma, I would have thought these ladies had brought me to the spot.