The Subtle Art of Not Saying F*ck

Friends, it's time to create our own uplifting expressions for when we are frustrated and inject them generously into the population. My hope is that a surplus of wholesome expressions will drive out nasty ones.

Because, y'all, I am sick unto death of being blasted with the F-word and then the perpetrators hiding behind the excuse that it is "adult language".

REALLY?

So adult means that you retreat to the lowest common denominator and call it good? I thought adult meant that you were conquering your weaknesses and accepting your responsibilities so that you are actually a role model for children. 

Anyway, if the F-word is your go-to expression, it's high time to get over it. It's a lazy way to express yourself--like using "nice" and "very". "F*ck" and all its coarse iterations is overused, worn out, and scummy. Let's categorize it as word pollution and erect billboards demanding its defeat.

My grandparents used expressions like "Land o' Goshen!"; "Holy Hannah!", and "Lord help us and save us". They edified instead of dragging one down. 

But that was a Christian culture.

Welcome to Haught Air

And so the big day has finally arrived. Dear husband is in the air, getting the hours he needs with an instructor to get his new-to-us Beech Bonanza V-tail insured. The policy requires that he have ten hours flying in his plane with a certified flight instructor.

Herb got his pilot's license back in the early 80s, but he hasn't flown in 20 years until this year when he renewed his license with an instructor in Bartlesville, OK. His parents and mine owned planes, so he used to fly a lot. He and my dad logged tons of hours together and had a blast doing some limited aerobatics. When Herb and I were at college in Auburn, Dad would take us to faraway places for breaks. I think a lot of the motivation was that he just loved having Herb as co-pilot, someone he could talk physics to who shared his passion for flying.

But I digress. Herb got his license renewal completed last week in a rented Cessna 172. A recent furlough of Cessna test pilots in Independence, KS, about 20 minutes north of us, blessed him with a local pilot with experience "out the wazoo" to get him checked out in his Bonanza.

It's been a long wait.

Herb was building a kit plane, an RV-6, but he just never had the time to complete it. One of the big drivers for purchasing our last home in Texas was that it had a grass strip and a hangar. Sadly, the runway never got used. Last year we started looking for property with a building on it where Herb could finish the RV-6. We even had a contract on one that would have been perfect and solved some other storage problems we have now that we live in a subdivision instead of on rural acreage. But the seller decided that he did not want to remove the "junk", and so the deal fell through. At that point I told Herb that I would rather him buy a plane that is ready to fly rather than spend money on property and still have to invest so much time and money in getting the RV-6 completed. Herb jumped on that suggestion. I feel bad now. I think that is probably what he wanted to do all along, but I am always so careful about money that he didn't even consider that I would be open to it, much less encourage it.

I can't remember exactly when the Bonanza purchase was made, but it was right when the Rona was descending on this country--middle of March, I guess. Its home was a small town in New York. By the time we had the inspection done, the country was shut down, and no one wanted to fly to New York to ferry the plane back for us. It was pretty awful. As the weeks dragged by, I began to wonder whether we would ever be able to get it. Herb was never worried, though. God bless him. I need his steady confidence so much.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the pilots that Herb had dealings with in New York let him know that a plane was being ferried into the airport where Herb's plane was, and that the ferry pilot would like to fly the Bonanza down to Coffeyville for us. O happy day! Herb made all the arrangements, and we met our plane for the first time at the Coffeyville airport. We stood on the tarmac, pretty much vibrating with anticipation, and watched it approach and land. It was so exciting! When the ferry pilot taxied toward us, tears sprang to my eyes--a combination of relief, happiness for Herb's dream coming true, and poignant memories of my dad and his beloved Bonanza.

The ferry pilot was surprised to learn that Herb had never seen the plane in person, and so right away he offered to take Herb up in it, even though the ferry pilot had been flying most of the day. Herb accepted, and I was overcome with joy watching them take off. They invited me to go, but I just wanted Herb to have that experience.  I guess they were gone for about 20 minutes. The sun was setting as they landed, the perfect ending for this historic day. Herb reported that everything about the plane was as advertised and that it flew like a dream. Since then, he has visited it three times, twice taxiing it around and imagining what it will be like to be able to take off as pilot-in-command.

Herb getting in for the first time.

I'm hoping that Herb gets at least two hours with the instructor today. We are eager to fly to Florida to visit Herb's parents. The test pilot has ten days completely open starting next week. So many possibilities flood my mind now. And gratitude, heaps and heaps of gratitude.

My Wild Week of Weading

So here are the books I have been chewing on this past week: The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World by Lynne McTaggart; Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse by Timothy P. Carney; and A Manual of Catholic Action by Monsignor Luigi Ciardi, published in 1935. I also read a popular work of fiction by a New York Times bestselling author that ended up being an advertisement for divorcing your husband if he doesn't make you happy and thinking of yourself as a doormat if you live to serve your family. I happily tossed that one in the library book return yesterday.

The Power of Eight is divided into two parts. I read through Chapter 4 in Part 1. So far it is all about the experiments that were conducted trying to show results from a group of people concentrating/praying on one intention.  I am not inclined to read the remaining 17 chapters to complete this part. I've got the idea, and what I am really looking for, the implementation, appears to be in the one chapter that comprises Part 2, "Creating Your Own Power of Eight Circle".  I want to read it with a Catholic lens and see if I can reach a deeper understanding of prayer from looking at it from McTaggart's perspective.


Alienated America: I got interested in this book after listening to a long interview with the author. I find the goal of restoring Christendom highly motivating, and so I am deeply interested in what makes communities thrive. Carney posits that those places that have strong community bonds through a shared culture believe they are living the American dream and therefore did not vote for Trump in the Republican primaries. His "Make America Great Again" mantra did not resonate with them. My take on that is that those communities have the basics of a medieval Christendom village via caring for each other through a shared religion, even if that religion is liberalism, as in the case of Chevy Chase, MD. The rest of the book looks at the communities that did vote for Trump and examines the actual circumstances of their daily lives that have brought them to see America as broken. It's not discussed, but I know that the American government worked to destroy the close-knit Catholic "ghettoes" in the 1960s. Also, Vatican II caused huge losses in Sunday Mass attendance. I'm still in the first chapter, but I did jump ahead and read some of Chapter 2, "Progress at a Price". Here is a tantalizing excerpt from that chapter. It's about the 1950s era and serves as background for exploring our current situation:

Good breadwinner jobs for white-collar and blue-collar men allowed 80 percent of wives with young children to stay at home.

America was fairly equal, economically, and inequality was shrinking. The average household was within striking distance of the top 10 percent of households, with income about 33 percent lower (these days the shortfall is about 60 percent).

That relative equality extended beyond the economic and into the social realm.

Marriage was the norm. Nearly 90 percent of all adults were married by age thirty in the mid-1950s. This norm applied roughly equally to both white-collar adults and working-class adults. Almost all babies were born to married couples. Ninety percent of al first births occurred after the parents' marriage (about one in nine of those infants was conceived before the marriage).

Wealthy Americans were a bit more likely to go to church than middle-class and poorer Americans, but that difference was shrinking. Religion was on the rise. "Ever since the nation's founding," religious historian Phillip Hammond would note, "a higher and higher proportion of Americans have affiliated with a church or synagogue--right through the 1950s."

"Churches and synagogues were packed," sociologist Robert Putnam would write decades later, "as more Americans worshiped together than only a few decades earlier, perhaps more than ever in American history."

I can't wait till I get to Chapter 7, "It's about Church: America's Indispensable Institution".

I've read the first two chapters of the Catholic Action book, "The Idea of Catholic Action" and "The Ends of Catholic Action". It's wonderful how clearly and logically the material is presented. I especially enjoy the papal quotes from letters and encyclicals like this one:

"It is clear that Catholic Action merits every favour and support, not only from bishops and priests, who know well that it is to us as the apple of our eye, but also from the heads and magistratures of any and of every State. And if it indeed shall rejoice in this common support, it will certainly issue into a magnificent abundance of fruit for Catholic peoples, and, by reawakening the religious sentiment in souls, will forward not a little civil prosperity as well" (Letter to Cardinal Bertram).

Pope Pius XI is simply stating that Catholic Action benefits the State as well, as it works to restore all things in Christ, which idea is really the unifying element of the three books I am reading this week.

Bananafana-bo-bagel

So last week I decided to bake some banana scones and a loaf of sourdough Einkorn Walnut and Raisin Miche. At the same time. With my phone beside my work area. While answering texts and replying to Facebook comments about tasty recipes that would use up my excess supply of ripe bananas.

Needless to say, I was distracted a tee-weency bit.

But I didn't realize it till 4 hours into proofing the bread. It was not rising at all. I raised my head after peering down at the dense dough mound and looked directly at the covered bowl with the sourdough levain in it. "No way," I said to myself, but I knew it was true. Painfully, painfully true. I had never added it to the mix.

A cold chill ripped through me as I tried to retrace the steps of the recipe. "Oh, no!" my poor brain shrieked. "I must have used my sourdough starter instead of the levain! And it was all I have!"

Frantically, I started searching the internet for a solution to my crisis. Maybe I could convert the levain back to starter. I felt sick. As quickly as the fear had consumed me, my reasoning brain came back and whispered, "Why don't you check the refrigerator and see if your starter is there?"

I felt like slapping my forehead in desperation.  I took a deep breath.

I dropped my internet query and quietly searched the Inner Sanctum of Chaos, otherwise known as the interior of my refrigerator.

There it was. The starter. Just where I had put it the night before after I made the levain.

If someone had offered me a measuring cupful of whiskey at that moment, I'm quite sure I would have tried my best to gasp it down, so keenly did I feel the need of a balancing shock to my system.

Not surprisingly, no one appeared with the longed-for libation. And so I returned to the limp dough, plunged my hand in, snatched back a goodly clump, and glommed it into my mouth.

It was delicious and deeply, awesomely comforting. Only a dough eater would understand. A faint hope rose in my grieving breast.

I grabbed another clump and baked it for ten minutes on a cookie sheet. I removed it, drenched it in butter, and consumed it, steaming hot.

It reminded me of a cinnamon raisin bagel. I snatched my doughnut baking pans from the cabinet and started rolling segments of dough into the desired size. I was able to get nine "bagels" out of the forlorn loaf. No one would guess that they weren't bagels unless they picked one up. I tossed one of those rings on the scale: "Holy bagel, Batman!" It weighed in at 6.5 ounces!

Presently dear hubby came home and devoured one greedily, grunting, "good" as he chewed.

"Huzzah for the Wholy Heavyweight Champion of the Whirl!" (Don't worry if that doesn't make sense to you. It's just me entertaining myself.) I hung up my oven mitts and exited the ring, triumphant but utterly exhausted.

And after all that, I didn't like the banana scones.

I'm Back and Blooming in Kansas

I'm always at a loss for what to say when I've been away from blogging for a while, but I'm determined to start. Please bear with me while I find my voice again! For any longtime followers who are still miraculously about, we sold our house in Texas in February of 2017 and moved to southeast Kansas.

We bought a large house in a subdivision just north of town because it has a mother-in-law suite, and it is so close to the refinery where Herb works that it only takes him ten minutes to get to work. He doesn't even have to get on a highway! At the time we needed a place for my mom and dad, and this space worked perfectly so I could take care of them at home.  In February of 2018 my dad passed away, followed in September of 2019 by my mom. I was blessed to be able to be at their bedsides at home as they passed. I saw a report yesterday that said 60% of elderly people die in the hospital, 20% at home, and 20% in the nursing home. I am so grateful they were in the 20% at home. But more than that, I am grateful that they both died as Catholics.

I am still trying to figure out my focus since the death of my mom. It's the first time in 28 years that I haven't had anyone to take care of besides dear Herb. Happily, I have a chapel within an hour's drive of my house, and this morning I am getting ready for a ladies rosary in the chapel followed by a potluck lunch and visiting in the hall.

I'm finishing this post while the iron heats in front of a window looking out on the backyard. It's getting ready to storm, but I like the way the green leaves sort of glow in the gloom. I moved the ironing board out here to the family room during Holy Week when I was blessed to have Sister Mary Catherine and Sister Josephine Marie of Congregation Mater Dei stay with us. We all three took turns at the iron. On Holy Saturday we were quite busy getting ready for the Easter Vigil. Sr. Mary Catherine worked on making covers for the baptismal water container and jar. Luckily I had an old twin bedskirt trimmed with Battenburg lace that she was able to utilize. And thank goodness my sewing machine was in good working order! Sister Josephine Marie ironed tablecloths for the statue tables on either side of the altar. And I had washed a priest's surplice and needed to iron it. It was such a joyful experience having these two nuns with me that now I am loath to take the ironing board back to the laundry room. It helps me remember their sweet presence here and their singing at the piano.

Here you can see a glimpse of Sr. Mary Catherine's handiwork for the blessing of the baptismal water.

I hope you have a lovely day and check back in as I get back into the habit of posting. I plan to create a brand new blog soon. I'll keep you informed.

The Gluten-Intolerant Family Member and Holiday Food Traditions

One of the hardest things about taking control of your own health is that it often requires that you eat much differently than the way most Americans eat.  It can be extremely isolating, especially when it comes to family traditions, gluten intolerant family members, and celebrating the holidays.

Sharing a meal together is one of the primary ways we celebrate community.  So I have favored ditching old family favorite foods and replacing them with something that everyone can eat and enjoy.

For example, my family, both nuclear and extended, always expected to have a Buttermilk Pound Cake at Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Unfortunately, it requires white flour to make it.  This ingredient has been stricken from our kitchen since we learned six years ago this month that Emma is allergic to it.  A couple of months later we learned that she had to strictly avoid corn and rice as well.

Now, the Lighter Than Air Chocolate Cake has replaced the Buttermilk Pound Cake as our go-to celebratory cake.  Everyone loves it, and it is completely flourless.

Just so you know, I have tried baking with white flour for other family members, but the stuff goes everywhere.  You open the container and scoop, and a cloud rises up and dissipates on countertops and appliances.   Trying to clean everything perfectly afterwards to prevent cross-contamination is time consuming and stressful.   And you are expending more precious energy cooking twice.  I finally decided it just was not worth it.  Family members who want to eat white flour have endless opportunities to do so when they are not at home, whereas Emma can eat at very few places away from home with peace of mind.

If there is one place where a person with food allergies should feel safe and supported, it is in their own kitchen.

Believe me, the support is incredibly important, because many folks think that gluten-intolerant people are just selfish troublemakers who want attention.  And they let you know it by their expressions.  The nay-sayers fail to realize that gluten-intolerant people would like nothing more than to be able to eat the white flour with no concern for the consequences!  Giving it up is hard, but being able to function normally on a day-to-day basis makes it worth it.

I believe that a lot of people who are gluten-intolerant don't even know it.  My neighbor down the road stopped in yesterday with his wife to tell me that he had found enormous relief for his interstitial cystitis since I recommended to him that he do a Whole 30 elimination diet.  He had struggled with it for years under the care of urologists, had undergone surgery seeking relief, and had to take early retirement because of it.  I gave him the original Whole 30 book and a companion recipe volume last month, and he told me yesterday, "I absolutely did not believe that this would work, but I was so desperate for pain relief that I started it the day you gave me the books."  He took out his phone and showed me his log of taking serious prescription pain medications and how over the course of the 30 days it diminished to none.  He also explained that his energy has returned.  He is able to work on building his house again, and is now going to drive to his daughter's house in San Antonio for Christmas, a trip he could not make prior to the Whole 30.  His wife is amazed at the change in him.  She is going to do a Whole 30 herself starting in January.

So I encourage you to adapt your celebratory foods to ones that everybody can enjoy together.  Make new traditions.   The family celebrating together is more important than the individual menu items.

Dreams Worth Keeping: Two Suckling Pigs, a Goose, and a Duck

"We need red solo cups, paper plates, napkins, a tablecloth, and a lot of lunch meat for sandwiches," my mom advised me shortly after learning that my sisters and some members of their families would be joining us for a five-day Christmas visit.  Some of them will be sleeping at Mom and Dad's house and some at ours, but Emma and I will be preparing both houses.

"And canned biscuits.  Lisa and her children like canned biscuits," she added, thinking hard.

My dad started telling me about how he wanted me to order hickory nuts and how delicious they are. By the next day he had been shopping for nuts online and discovered Black Walnuts coated in dark chocolate.  He asked me to order them.  His face would light up like a child's every time he mentioned them.  So far that has been two to three times a day.

"They're going to go pretty fast once everybody finds out how good they are,"  he confided to me, grinning happily.  "Make sure you order enough."

Where were my thoughts?

I began dreaming of pig roasted outdoors on a spit with all the menfolk gathered round in the heady smoke, talking and laughing and speculating on the doneness of the meat.

And I dreamed of succulent goose and duck.  I could see them each in a roasting rack in my oven, dripping juicy goodness into the pan.

And I dreamed of moving our dining room table into the living room in front of the fire and placing silver goblets of wine and heavy tankards of ale at each place, and...

I don't actually own any silver goblets or heavy tankards, but I imagined them just the same.

And purple cabbage and collard greens and sweet potatoes and cranberry salad.  And dogs under the table!  Flickering candlelight and ancient Christmas carols playing in the background with all my dear ones gathered round about.

Dear Baby Jesus in his manger at last.

O the giddiness, the tingling, the soaring anticipation of the Feast of Christmas!

I grew restless to begin.

So this morning Emma and I bundled up in sweaters, jackets, hats, and gloves and hurried to the farmer's market to arrange for the procurement of the desired delicacies.

First stop, the duck and goose booth.  We decided on a ten-pound goose and an eight-pound duck.  We put down a deposit and were instructed to return to the market early Christmas Eve morning to pick up the freshly-slaughtered birds.

Next we visited the pig man.  I've bought pork from him many times before but never a whole pig.  I arranged with him to pick up two suckling piggies--a 15 and a 16-pounder--at the market on Christmas Eve morning when I pick up the birds.  He said he would send me a picture of the lil porkers so I would know what to expect.  He promised to put a coin over each of their eyes because he feared I would be disturbed by their missing eyelids, which for some reason are removed during the butchering--surely a most creepy practice.

Maybe crispy-fried pig eyelids are a delicacy somewhere and they sell 'em separately to make more money!  At least they left the pigs' heads on.  I wouldn't want any headless pig.  That would ruin the whole dream for me.

Our business with the pig man completed, Emma and I sampled juicy sweet Satsumas at a booth across the way.  We bought ten, and we also bought a bag of Navel oranges from another vendor.  I plan to put some in everybody's stockings.  Then we found these delightful long and thin sausages that I thought would be great in the stockings too.  So we bought an assortment of those and added them to our bag.  We stopped at several other booths for individual little gifts.  Such great fun!

Unfortunately, we couldn't linger, as we had to hurry home to give Grandma and Grandpa lunch.   While I did that, Emma worked on decorating the rest of the gingerbread cookies she had baked for St. Nicholas Day.  Seeing her handiwork along with all the goodies we had brought home from the farmer's market made me think, "This is good.  This is very, very good."

I am looking forward to lighting the pink candle this Sunday and the fasting of the Ember Days next week.

And contemplating the fullness of time.

Come, thou long-expected Jesus!