Today's cd/Worrisome Heart

Did you happen to hear the NPR interview with Melody Gardot the other day? Her new cd is called Worrisome Heart, and you may listen to her wonderful voice here. She was hit by a car when she was nineteen, four years ago. It left her with many, many problems, such as sensitivity to light and sound and short term memory loss. Because of her physical problems, she gave up the piano for the guitar, and began music therapy on the advice of her doctor. This album is the result. She's a genuinely nice woman who said she doesn't forget her good fortune:

I'm not one to wake up in the morning and forget that, Gardot says. I forget a lot of things, but I don't forget that.

Her songs are gentle, meaningful, and inspirational. A wonderful new talent with a great future ahead.

Today's picture/Black and white

Today's picture/Raya

Clotheslines

If you are beginning to think about hanging clothes out on the line, here's the place to go! This catalogue arrived today with wonderfully nostalgic, yet practical items for hanging clothes in the sunshine and wind. Here is a direct link to the website. One of the best things about the coming of spring!

Today's cd/Pine Valley Cosmonauts

What I'm listening to this Tuesday afternoon isn't exactly a cd, but a compilation of Pine Valley Cosmonauts songs which Laura sent me a while back. This is great stuff. You might call it good-timey music, Americana, western swing, real country. They are out of Chicago, where a while back a radio station, WLS, used to broadcast a show calledThe National Barn Dance.

Back in 1924, before Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry went on the air, WLS in Chicago started broadcasting the National Barn Dance which became the most popular Country music & variety show in America thanks to the giant 50,000 watt lightning bolts of sound that a mighty radio tower shot out across rivers & plains and into the newly electrified parlors & sitting rooms of rural America. The show ran uninterrupted for 36 years, drew huge crowds to its Saturday night live broadcasts, as its stars became household names. On stage at the 8th Street Theater the country rubbed shoulders with the city, there were cowboys & angels, hymns, reels and polkas plus cornball humor so hilariously bad it took the roof off.

And some of this feeling comes through in their songs. They feature a terrific fiddler in his eighties who played on The Barn Dance. They sing songs with titles like Little Red Barn and I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart, and one of my favorite songs of all time, San Antonio Rose. Their albums are available at record stores, and on iTunes. Go take a listen and have yourself some fun. I love this band, and thank Laura immensely for introducing me to their music.

Quote du jour/Alan Titchmarsh

Church attendance at matins and evensong on a Sunday brought a kind of calming routine to the end of the week. Though we were always told that Sunday was the first day of the week, it seemed more like a sedate finale.
Alan Titchmarsh, Nobbut A Lad

Chocolate Chip Bars

Because it looks like this outside:





I made some chocolate chip bars. What is it about a dreary, rainy day that positively beckons one to bake?

Chocolate Chip Bars

Mix together:
1 cup flour
1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup softened butter

Save 1/2 cup of the mixture, and put the rest in a greased 9 x 13 pan. Pour a 14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk evenly over the crust. Sprinkle with a 12 oz. package of chocolate chips, and top with the remaining oat mixture.

Bake at 350º F. 25-30 minutes. Let cool before cutting.

Easy and delicious. The perfect antidote to the weather.

Today's poem/Poetry in the weather report

This is Tim Belford. He may not call himself a poet, but each morning when I turn on CBC radio's Quebec AM, I hear the most beautiful words spoken in almost a litany by Mr. Belford. I am referring to the weather report. My heart thrills as he goes through the names of the towns.

Abitibi
Témiscamingue (Temiscaming; Temiskaming)
Baie Comeau
Chibougamau
Blanc-Sablon
the Gaspé
Beauce
Kamouraska
Laval
Matagami
Saguenay
Drummondville, which you might not think particularly poetic, but its sound fits in perfectly.

These aren't necessarily in the order he lists them, but they are the ones in my mind as I now write. Oh, the beauty of these spoken words. My heart leaps up, quite literally. If you tune in to the above link and the weather is given along with the news, you, too, may hear the poetry which begins my day.

Today's picture/Down the road

The photo was actually taken yesterday in the late afternoon by Tom. I just love the light and the mud and the footprints. At the bottom of this dirt road is the 'main' road, about .2 mile away, where the mailbox is.

Today's picture/Who needs a beach in Florida?

Plenty of sun right here in the north for these two! Check out the nose marks on the glass. :<)

Book Report/Address Unknown

Address Unknown
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
fiction, 1938
finished 3/5/08

Address Unknown was prompted by a startling experience. Kathrine Kressmann Taylor writes:

A short time before the war, some cultivated, intellectual, warmhearted German friends of mine returned to Germany after living in the United States. In a very short time they turned into sworn Nazis. They refused to listen to the slightest criticism of Hitler. During a return visit to California, they met an old, dear friend of theirs on the street who had been very close to them and who was a Jew. They did not speak to him. They turned their backs on him when he held his hands out to embrace them.

This was originally published as a short story, and it is very short, but its power demands it be a book unto itself. The publishers of this edition did a wonderful job with the cover and the endpiece, showing photographs of the "real" letters.

In 1932, one of the partners in a San Francisco art gallery has moved back to their native Germany. The story is told through letters, one of my favorite forms. We learn early on that Max, the man remaining in America is Jewish, and the other, Martin is not. The first letters are of course full of warmth and longing for one another's companionship. Max writes:

But there is another realm where we can always find something true, the fireside of a friend, where we shed our little conceits and find warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence. There we have made something that no falseness can touch. We are at home.

Isn't that lovely?

The first letter from Germany to mention Hitler is dated March, 1933. Martin writes:

The man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be. But I ask myself, is he quite sane?

Yet he goes on to say that he cannot express this doubt in public, only in this letter. By July, he writes of Hitler as "our Gentle Leader."

As often happens in short stories, there is a twist at the end, when the reader thinks, "oh, my gosh." This little book is a treasure, which was very important in its time and in all time.

Book Report/The Good Rat

The Good Rat
A True Story
by Jimmy Breslin
nonfiction, 2008
finished 3/5/08

Reading this right after Nobbut A Lad, I will begin the book report with the old Monty Python line, "And now for something completely different." The lives in this book are as far away from Alan Titchmarsh's childhood days as any could possibly be. For Jimmy Breslin's focus in this book is the Mafia.

I was driving along in the car the other day, and suddenly heard the wonderfully unique and familiar voice of Mr. Breslin on National Public Radio. He was talking about this book, and the interviewer couldn't praise it highly enough. I haven't been able to find the interview online, but I think it may have been with Tom Ashbrook. When I got home, I did something I don't do terribly often; I went online and ordered the book. I knew that both Tom and I would like it, and it is such a thrill to buy a brand new book and read it immediately. This is not the piece I heard, but it still is a nice interview.

This book came about sort of accidentally. Breslin was supposed to write a piece on two cops who were on trial for doing murders for the Mob. He found that he just couldn't stand them and didn't want to write about them, but he did want to write about the man testifying against them, Burton Kaplan, the man he refers to as "the good rat." Breslin writes:

The American Mafia was founded when, back in the 1920s, Meyer Lansky, young and vicious, Jewish and from Eastern Europe, went around the streets of downtown New York looking for somebody he had heard about, Charles Luciano, nickname "Lucky," equally young, just as vicious, born in Sicily, in a village that was waterless at noon.

He says:

The Mafia became part of public belief because of movies with stars who were Jewish. This dark fame began with Paul Muni playing Al Capone. After that came Edward G. Robinson, Tony Curtis, Lee Strasberg, Alan King, and on and on, part of an elite industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, sound men, location men, casting agents – all on the job and the payroll because of the Mafia. Finally two great actors, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, put a vowel in there.

It started with great Jewish actors, and now it fades on the words of one of the greatest Mafia witnesses ever, who comes up Jewish. As the obsession with the Mafia slips away, Burt Kaplan gives it a final shove.

Breslin uses actual testimony which adds a lot to the book. Kaplan's memory for detail is astounding, but I've known people like this. My father, for example, had a car dealership, and all his stories could be dated from the car. It was 1955 because so-and-so had such-and-such a car. When something is at the heart of your life, you can remember events if you have a compass point. Obviously, Mr. Kaplan had his own; that of Mafia life, with details you don't forget.

Q. What got you into the garment business?
A. A friend of mine came home from prison, and he needed clothes...

Q. How had you met [a man]?
A. I got involved in a diamond deal in Africa with an African fellow that was a friend of mine...

I had a little trouble keeping all the names straight, and remembering who had done what to whom, but Mr. Breslin probably knew this could be a difficulty for his readers so he has a little chart in the front; you know, like a cast of characters in old detective mysteries. I referred to it frequently.

There is a lot of talk about the Mafia in decline. It is not what it was. And the reasons Breslin offers made me shake my head in amazement.

I do know that illegal gambling, which was once a glorious fountain of cash for the outfit, is now a government-owned lottery machine that buzzes in every newsstand and deli in the city. Years ago the state looked upon gambling as a low vice, a depravity, and those who profited from it were no better than cheap pimps and deserved years behind bars. That opinion held right up until the government took it over, at which point it became a civic virtue to lose the rent and all other money you didn't have on rigged games of chance.

As I read along, so fascinated by both the subject and the way Breslin writes, I pondered why we are most of us so interested in this group of people. It is almost a kind of voyeurism. We can read about the Mafia and watch The Godfather and The Sopranos from the safety of our own homes and lives. Most people do not come in contact with them. And because they are organized crime, usually the innocent are not harmed.

[They] called their trade in murder "work," or "a piece of work." It was all done with the smoothness of an assembly line. Their kind of homicide gave organized crime its name. The other kind of crime, disorganized and angry, filled with missteps, left dead innocents all over the city...

On the very day I read the above passage, I heard on the radio about children at a bus stop in California who were inadvertantly killed because of a gang conflict. This may help explain why the Mafia is "safe" for the rest of us to take an interest in. Mostly they were after one another - not the general populace.

Breslin writes so well of these now-old men who have had heart bypasses and who shuffle home from court to take a nap. In the radio interview we hear a proprietor in Little Italy in NYC saying that tourism is what now keeps businesses alive . No mobsters in the bars or restaurants or social clubs. And here's a story which puts the icing on the cake.

In 2006, a woman comes up to a Mafia boss, standing on the corner of Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street waiting for a ride, who has just gotten out of the hospital for a knee operation. She rushes over saying, "Oh, Poppy. How's my Poppy." Because all the nurses loved him, he thought she may have been a nurse whom he just didn't remember.

Hey, now what is this? Hands all over him. He steps back. "Good-bye Poppy. You get better." He went for his wallet. It was still there. He looked inside. The money was there. I guess she was a nurse. Now he put his hand in his pants pocket for his roll. Which was gone. Four hundred eighty-five dollars.

How could such a thing happen to the boss of a Mafia family from Brooklyn? For a girl to dip him is past anything we even imagined. It is the end of 2006. They are mugging Mafia bosses on the street.

I just loved this book, and couldn't read it fast enough. Breslin is a great writer. Crisp and clear and to the point, with some humor thrown in. An excellent reading experience.

Jimmy Breslin

Lemon Cake

This is from the March issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine. I love lemons, and this cake is excellent.

Lemon Cake

1 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
3 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (I used mostly white, with 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup soft butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
3 eggs plus 3 egg whites (so that is 3 yolks and 6 whites - we gave the extra yolks to the dogs!)

Preheat oven to 325º F.
Spray nine-inch round cake pan with cooking spray (the recipe said to use parchment paper and butter it, but this worked great, and the cake popped right out)

Combine sour cream, vanilla, zest, and juice.
In a separate bowl, mix the flour, powder, soda, and salt.
Beat butter and sugar in the mixer until pale and fluffy.
Add eggs and whites, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition.
Beat in sour cream mixture.
Reduce speed to low, and add flour mixture, beating until just combined.
Transfer to pan, and smooth top.
Bake until a toothpick comes out clean, 40-45 minutes.
Let cool in pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then turn out cake onto rack to cool completely.
Before serving, dust with confectioners' sugar.

You may see that I frosted the top instead of dusting it, with a mixture of confectioners' sugar, vanilla, and lemon juice.

This is so delicious! Highly recommended.

Today's pictures/Flowers

These are some of the beautiful flowers I was given on my birthday. What a blessing at the end of February to see such color. They're gone by now, but they lit up the house for a week.

Book Report/Nobbut A Lad

Nobbut A Lad
A Yorkshire Childhood
by Alan Titchmarsh
Memoir, 2006
Finished 2/29/08

When I came to the end of Nobbut A Lad, I closed my book, and said, right out loud, "wonderful." Alan Titchmarsh seems like the kindest, gentlest soul, who would never knowingly hurt anyone. Add to this a quiet sense of humor, and he's quite the appealing fellow. He writes in a very conversational manner, as if the reader is sitting around the living room listening to him tell stories. His first memoir, called Trowel and Error, covers more of his life, coming right up to the present day, but this book is about his Yorkshire boyhood, when he was "nobbut a lad."

A dictionary says of "nobbut" -

Northern England only:
just or only

We see the kindly parenting which very likely made him the man he is. We read about the beginnings of his love of the outdoors and plants. It doesn't follow along an exact chronological path. Rather it is made up of episodes and various facets of Titchmarsh's upbringing. The book is not only interesting because of the author, but also as a snapshot of that time in that place. It doesn't exist anymore. Nobbut A Lad is nostalgic in a way, but not really so much. He doesn't bemoan present-day life, and extol the "good old days." He simply and beautifully tells his story. You'll not find horrific details of a terrible childhood here. This is more the type of book that could have as its motto the words from Bye Bye Birdie: Spread sunshine all over the place, and just put on a happy face.

He writes:

I am not naturally pessimistic. Whenever I'm asked, by some newspaper interviewer, what's the worst thing that's ever happened to me, my mind goes blank. I can never think of anything that might be acceptable, except for the loss of my parents, and that seems far too heavy for their needs. Most of the 'little local difficulties' along the way I've expunged from my memory. It seems more rewarding to save space for happier recollections.

Is it better to dissect bitter feelings and lay them bare for the benefit of others than to soldier on and forget they ever happened? Not in my case.

But there I can blame my mother. At the end of her life, her mobility curbed by arthritis, her once-beautiful hands swollen and deformed and most of her body gripped by pain, she would answer the question 'How are you?' with a single word: 'Fine.'

And I suppose most of us are 'fine.' A bit battered by this and that. A bit bruised. A bit odd. But basically fine. And growing up in a pleasant town in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1950s was, for a child who liked to be out of doors, the best of all possible worlds.

Alan Titchmarsh willingly and joyfully shares this childhood with us, and I am most grateful he did.

At home with squirrels

These are red squirrel tracks between the woodpile and the wood splitter. We aren't sure if one or both places are "home" or how many squirrels are making the tracks. I just love the way they look and the circle they make. And see how deep they are! That's from running back and forth. We have a lot of deer tracks in the fields but the squirrels live quite close to the house since they eat from the bird feeders.

Quote du jour/from Lilies

Happiness isn't always getting what you want. Sometimes it's accepting what you're given.
Ruby, in the television drama Lilies

Lilies on dvd

We've just finished watching the first, and only, series of Lilies. This was a really terrific drama set in 1920s Liverpool. It tells the day-to-day life of a working family. The father is a "sort of" veterinarian, the mother has died, the brother is shell-shocked from the war, and another brother was killed in that same war. The three sisters work to keep the family together; one makes chocolates, one works as a maid and lives away during the week, and the youngest gives up her dream of being an Olympic swimmer and sells ladies' undergarments. It is not an easy life, but there is a tremendous amount of love and support and family feeling. The mother was "Roman" as are the daughters, but the father is an "Orangeman" along with the son; the way of life decided upon by the parents. We loved these shows, and cared deeply about the characters. Highly recommended.

PS If you do watch this, take a look at the extras. It's wonderful to see how it was made.

Mille Grazie!

I am writing to thank each one of you who wrote such nice notes on my birthday. They mean so much to me. As you may have seen, I responded to the first few, but then the day(s) got busy, so I'm going to reply to the rest of them here.

Bonnie, I'll go to that site and try and find you. :<) Thank you for your kindness about my mother. Nice to know there are daffs in bloom somewhere. Ha! (as my friend, Kay says)

Margaret, that was so true. We are lucky to have reached this age.

Joanne, thank you. I love the idea of celebrating "the little things that fill our days."

Thank you, Cath. Gee, think of me at 120! Why not?!

Wish you could have been here, too, dear Aisling. Someday, I hope.

Thank you, Mari-Nanci. It was a wonderful day.

Jeanne, thanks so much. I like that: "wonderful journey along the coming year's path." A friend once said her year began on her birthday, and I like that.

Joanne in Ontario, wow, what a nice thing to say. So good to hear from you.

Nancy, does this mean you are a Pisces, too? Do we share a name, and an astrological sign?

K, when in April is 'your' day? Thanks for your nice words.

Anita, thanks so much.

Tara, thank you, and I didn't see the Oscar song, but I bet I can find it on youtube. I am so happy they won.

Patrice, that's a great idea to "wrap your arms around it (the year) and call it your own."

Robin, I was amazed to find the Emerson quote which went along so well with what I was trying to say. Thanks for your wishes.

Barbara, how nice to 'see' you. I did have a great day.

Thanks for your kind words, Kris. I hope my mother would feel that way. I'm looking forward to flowers myself, but gee, it will be a while.

Wendy, thanks so much. Good to have you stop by.

Lynda, thank you so much.

A bouquet for my dear, gentle readers.
Love, Nan

Quote du jour/Anne Herbert

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
Anne Herbert, The Whole Earth Catalog

I love libraries and librarians. The ones I know are simply wonderful. Tom just picked up some books I had asked for through Inter Library Loan, just about the best program I can imagine. I ask for a book. The librarian looks for it throughout the US, orders it, and I have it. Anyhow, the librarian said, "oh, just in time for the snowstorm." (supposed to come tomorrow) Of course. That's exactly what we need if we are cooped up inside while the snow is falling outside. Librarians understand this love, this passion for reading we have. The titles, you may ask?

A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen
A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban
Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
Iris, Messenger by Sarah Deming