Scoop

My father once bought a half gallon carton of Sealtest New York Cherry Vanilla Ice Cream every week for thirty-two weeks. When my father discovered something good, he saw no reason to change course. It took me about thirty-two years to be able to put a spoonful of that flavor in my mouth again.

We always ate out on Saturday night, and my dad’s unbroken record in this department outlasted the cherry vanilla siege. My mother would ask, “Where would you like to go to eat?” Breaking into a huge smile, my dad would say, “How about a nice chop suey dinner?” Year after year we were faithful weekly patrons at La Choy Chinese Restaurant on North Avenue in Milwaukee. By the time I reached high school, I knew I would never willingly enter another Chinese restaurant for the rest of my life. The words “egg foo yung” still strike terror into my heart.
But genes are tricky things. After I bought my twentieth consecutive box of Trader Joe’s Ginger Granola, my husband delicately suggested that there might be other flavors available. He chides me when I am unabashedly my father’s daughter. I laugh at myself, too.
I know I’m being completely unadventurous when I discover a favorite dish at a restaurant and order that dish every time. But for me, a dependably great entree trumps the unknown one every time. So if The Flying Star Restaurants ever take Pasta Pomodoro off the menu, I know I’ll stage a protest right on the spot. Life is too short to waste a meal and calories on anything else.

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Aliens

My husband came home one day last week and said, “You have to drive past the big cow when you go into town.” Although prodded, he declined to elaborate.

A few hours later I drove past the gigantic fiberglass bovine which graces the front lawn of our local ice cream plant. She was wrapped in aluminum foil, shod in foil moon boots and had a green inflatable alien riding on her back.
A drive further into town revealed more aliens looking out of store windows and taking over the townfolks’ lawns. Obviously, our closest town, Manitowoc, is giving Roswell, New Mexico, a challenge to their alien supremacy.
The occasion for the invasion was Sputnikfest, the brain child of the new head of our art museum. I applaud her; she apparently reasoned that if art won’t get people in the doors of the museum, maybe aliens will.
Sputnikfest memorializes the night of September 5, 1962 when a 20 1/2 pound piece of metal from Russia’s disintegrating Sputnik IV was found embedded in the street in front of the museum. A capsule account follows:

Two police officers on routine patrol spotted what they thought to be crumpled cardboard on the roadway at 5:45AM. Passing by again at 6:45AM, they noted the object was metal and stopped to move it. It was too hot to handle, so they shoved it to the curb with their feet. Cruising by once more at 8:00AM, they noted it was still warm. At noon the officers learned that the Milwaukee Astronomical Society was asking for reports from anyone finding pieces of the disintegrating Sputnik Satellite. The officers returned to the spot, loaded the suspicious, smoldering metal into their patrol car and brought it to police headquarters for questioning.

It is only logical that the anniversary of this event makes a perfect excuse to drink beer, listen to 60’s music and view spacey art.
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Endings

My husband has been increasingly more morose lately, and I know exactly what’s wrong. He abhors fall. What I view as the glorious signs of late summer, he sees as the ominous portents of winter.

I have to use every feminine wile I possess to keep him from ripping out all our beautiful yellow plumes of goldenrod. He is unfazed when I point out that our local nursery sells a small pot of it for nine dollars. To him those glowing plants are sure signs that blizzards are on their way.
I love autumn and see it with different eyes. All the plants and animals have been working at peak speed all summer, growing and reproducing. Now is the time to ratchet down and relax for a while.
The prairie grasses have given up on pumping out their chlorophyll and are content to bask in shades of gold. The tree leaves forget about green as well and reveal the glorious colors they were hiding all summer long. The giant sea grass that lines our front drive are sporting white plumes. No more pushing to the sun for them. The cup plants are also at their full eight foot heights and have invited all the finches and butterflies over to drink and dine.
Meanwhile, the sun has noticeably given up its northern journey and is content to set much earlier. Monarchs and many of our birds begin following it in pursuit of never ending summer. Those of us who stay behind gather up the largesse from summer and cache it. I use my freezer; the squirrels and jays prefer holes in trees.
My husband will never believe this, but, if we are lucky, these lazy, generous days can last all the way to Halloween. It’s not over until the last leaf falls.

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Raucous

This summer two crows have taken up residence in the small pine woods next to our house. Every morning in the predawn and dawn hours they proceed to organize the neighborhood for the day. Crows have 23 distinct calls, and strident variants of these calls shatter the morning silence.

Fortunately, corvids (ravens, crows, magpies and jays) are definitely my favorite birds. I can handle the morning cacophony.
Corvids are highly intelligent birds – no “bird brains” among them. A raven, for example, is half the size of a chicken but with a brain five times bigger.
Years ago, I observed a terrific con game pulled off by a pair of crows. Our neighbor’s dog was fed chunks of liverwurst in his outdoor dog dish. One day crow number one flew right over the dog and then took off on a low flight path down the alley. Of course, the dog rocketed after it. That’s when crow number two neatly scooped up the sausage chunk in his beak and retreated to the top of our gigantic willow tree. Crows share food, so crow number one soon joined in on the feast.
Ornithology books abound in observations of clever corvid behaviors. Ravens drop clams and walnuts on highways and let the cars crack the shells for them. Northern crows haul up the fishing line at ice holes when people aren’t watching. A bird pulls some line up with its bill, steps firmly on the line and keeps pulling until the fish comes up. And, at one memorable Easter egg hunt in Alaska, the ravens made off with over 1,000 hidden colored eggs before the kids arrived.
Raven looms large in all Pacific Northwest Indian mythology. He is the creator, but also a powerful trickster. When the sun was stolen from the sky by an evil magician, raven is credited with returning it to its proper place. Perhaps that is why my neighborhood crows are so talkative in the morning. They are just welcoming back the sun they so generously returned to the heavens.

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Wine

One of the greatest openings of any book I’ve ever read is from Glitz by Elmore Leonard.

“The night Vincent was shot he saw it coming. The guy approached out of the streetlight on the corner of Meridian and Sixteenth, South Beach, and reached Vincent as he was walking from his car to his apartment building. It was early, a few minutes past nine.

Vincent turned his head to look at the guy and there was a moment when he could have taken him and did consider it, hit the guy as hard as he could. But Vincent was carrying a sack of groceries. He wasn’t going to drop a half gallon of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, a bottle of prune juice and a jar of Ragú spaghetti sauce on the sidewalk. Not even when the guy showed his gun…”

These lines pretty well sum up my feelings toward wine. Dinner isn’t complete without a glass of wine, but Gallo red is just fine. I’m a wine lover not an oenophile.

If given a taste test, I would only reject wines like Boone’s Farm and Mogen David. Wine should absolutely not be a stand-in for NyQuil cough syrup, nor should it taste like some solvent in my art room.
This concise discussion of wine leaves time for the topic of wine glasses. We drink our daily wine out of slightly upscale juice glasses. Why? Because one memorable night our 26 pound cat, Gato, jumped up on the dinner table knocking a stemmed glass full of red wine over on to the back of his brother below. Alarmed, cat 2 proceeded to run all over the house shaking red wine everywhere. I donated all my wine stems to Goodwill the next day.
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