Oooh, Veggies

Every Monday, I stop by the alley at the back of our local whole foods store a pick up a large crate of vegetables, a bag or two of fruit, a large loaf of bread, and a dozen eggs. They're delivered in beautiful sturdy plastic crates, but then I've developed a system where I transfer them all to a hefty box for transport home. You're of course not supposed to take the crates home.

This bounty comes from across Colorado. We belong to a CSA farm (community supported agriculture) that also gathers produce and other goods from around the state. So their eggs and veggies are from their farm but often their fruit is from another orchard and they get their bread from a local bakery. You can also get mushrooms and cheeses and other things.

CSA is a new model in farming. You pay a lump sum at the beginning of the year and then you get weekly deliveries of goodies. There are also winter shares where you can get one box every month of just winter veggies.

I both look forward and am a bit daunted by our weekly pickup. First of all, you don't get to choose your veggies. You have to eat what's in season, things you may not be familiar with, and it may be a lot of daikon radish or kale and how many recipes do you have on hand for kale? Well, I may not have, but now by god I have a lot. That's the thing. It can be a lot more time consuming because you have to plan and find recipes and cook a lot more from scratch. And believe me I'm just as busy as you are. I find that I cook a lot on weekends and freeze some.

But the thing is: I love to cook. So this forces me to make the time. Plus we're eating so much better, so many more veggies. You can't really justify stopping at the store for frozen pizza when you have a whole shelf of lucious greens and carrots and fresh tomatoes and home-made saurkraut. Tonight the kids happily ate salad (happily!) along with big meatballs I'd made from meat we get from our local university, in which the ag department sells meat. That loaf of crusty bread we get every week makes wonderful toast, which I take to work every day. I also take big salads or wonderful veggie stew from a whole bunch of different veggies. Did you know that radishes can be added to stew? Cabbage and kale and beets are very good in stew too.

But I have to admit there are times when I face the fridge and groan. What am I going to do with all this. Especially as we have a garden too ~ one that did quite well this year. Some goes to waste at times. But all I have to do is look up a new recipe and I'm off to the races.

Kevin Clash Is a Nice Guy

Kevin Clash

Over the weekend, I watched Being Elmo, A Puppeteer’s Journey, a documentary about Kevin Clash, the puppeteer responsible for Elmo. A great documentary.  You should definitely check it out.

A couple of things struck me about Kevin.

First of all, he always always knew he wanted to be a puppeteer.  He was fascinated with puppets from a very early age and he immersed himself in it.  He knew all the great puppeteers by heart, like most boys learn basketball or baseball players. He continued to pursue his love of it even in high school, when you know it had to be tough.  A young black man in the 70s playing with puppets.  Course, he was also voted most likely to be a millionaire by his graduating class. That has to say something about both his drive and his likability.

His parents were so supportive.  You have to think that a lot of a kid being able to pursue his or her dreams is related to how much the parents not only allow but encourage the kid.  I mean, his parents let him shelve his extra puppets in their bedroom. 

And then he went on to work with the god of puppetry, Jim Hensen, who died very suddenly at the young age of 53.  But it wasn’t a smooth trip.  He actually turned down Jim Hensen when Hensen first asked him to work for him (on Dark Crystal) because he had two series going and he didn’t want to let those people down. Talk about your integrity.  Sure, you could argue that he was afraid to lose it all, but I think it was more than that.

And then when he created the character for Elmo, he’d gone back to his parents’ house in Baltimore and watched the kids they had in the daycare they ran.  That’s when he came up with the idea that Elmo is all about love.  Nothing but love and hug and unqualified acceptance.  He tapped into something basic not only in kids but in us all.  We want to be the center of love, of others’ worlds.  There’s always this little kid inside us wanting nothing but pure love.

Of course, you wonder if the documentary left any dark bits out.  Kevin worked so much that he didn’t have much time for his wife and daughter.  But nothing darker is hinted at.  And from what I saw of Kevin on the screen I’m fully prepared to believe he is such a great guy.

It’s like Nora Ephron ~ the New York Times reported that she was just this really nice, generous person.

I get a little choked up when I hear things like that, that there are people at the top of their creative game, pinnacles in their field, who are also nice people.  When I was a kid ~ and still now ~ I wish the world was a place where everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten and all there is is love.  And isn’t it great when some little piece of that is affirmed?

Rest, for God’s Sake

via

I went back and forth about what to write about today, after taking a week off in desperation.

It comes down to this:  You (I) really need a certain amount of mental and emotional space to be able to write.  Well, for sanity, really. 

I don’t think it’s just because I spent A LOT of time alone as a child and I crave alone time.  I think everyone needs a certain amount of down time ~ unless you’re one of those people who keep frenetically busy because you’re running from yourself.  Even then you need it but can’t stand it.

Due to one thing or another, I was pressed so close on time and feeling very stressed and boxed in.  I had to let go a bit.  Plus I had a migraine over that weekend, so that didn’t help.

But over and above simple mental health, you need an imaginary but very real quiet space around you in order to be creative.  You need to have a view up and over, a feeling of being above the trenches ~ because if you’re in the trenches you’re too busy dodging bullets.  Certainly you can keep it up for a bit as they whiz by, but after a while the stress gets to you.

So the good news is I’m much more laid back now and have come back to all my projects with a renewed sense of purpose.  I got a huge project done over the weekend that had been weighing on me, and I even got some writing done on the novel!

So let me remind myself ~ and you, if you need it ~ the world will not end if you take a break.  You might, however, if you don’t.

 

MIA

I apologize for being MIA this week.  I found I needed a little mental space.  See you next week!

And Now for Something Totally Different

Sorry I've been short this week.  A lot on my plate, what with school starting along with the kids' sports and board meetings at work and ten million other things. 

You all know exactly what I'm talking about.

And so today something totally fun.  Love, love Monty Python!

 

 

Caroline Lockhart

Caroline Lockhart (via)

"What I found out myself by groping and experimenting—that the best results come out of monotony. One’s mind is most active in dullness and he can concentrate.  Cody here is my workshop.  I go East to play and enjoy it twice as much as though I live there all the time.  Besides, I like this country, the mountains and the sagebrush plains, the stimulating air, and the amusing episodes in town.  Excitement isn’t necessary to my existence.  I’ve been bored in Paris for that matter.” ~ Caroline Lockhart

'Patriotism,' by Yukio Mishima

Warning: If you click through and read this whole story, it is gruesome.  But amazing.  I read this short story last night, and it is somewhat overwrought but amazing in its detail. It starts with this introduction, but then jumps back and goes through the seppuku feeling by intimate feeling.  BTW, the author Yukio Mishima committed a sensational seppuku in protest against what he saw as the degradation of samarai ways.

via

Patriotism

by Yukio Mishima

1

On the twenty-eighth of February, 1936 (on the third day, that is, of the February 26 Incident), Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama of the Konoe Transport Battalion—profoundly disturbed by the knowledge that his closest colleagues had been with the mutineers from the beginning, and indignant at the imminent prospect of Imperial troops attacking Imperial troops- took his officer’s sword and ceremonially disemboweled himself in the eight-mat room of his private residence in the sixth block of Aoba-cho, in Yotsuya Ward. His wife, Reiko, followed him, stabbing herself to death. The lieutenant’s farewell note consisted of one sentence: “Long live the Imperial Forces.” His wife’s, after apologies for her unfilial conduct in thus preceding her parents to the grave, concluded: “The day which, for a soldier’s wife, had to come, has come. . . .” The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep. The lieutenant’s age, it should be noted, was thirty-one, his wife’s twenty-three; and it was not half a year since the celebration of their marriage.

2

Those who saw the bride and bridegroom in the commemorative photograph—perhaps no less than those actually present at the lieutenant’s wedding—had exclaimed in wonder at the bearing of this handsome couple. The lieutenant, majestic in military uniform, stood protectively beside his bride, his right hand resting upon his sword, his officer’s cap held at his left side. His expression was severe, and his dark brows and wide gazing eyes well conveyed the clear integrity of youth. For the beauty of the bride in her white over-robe no comparisons were adequate. In the eyes, round beneath soft brows, in the slender, finely shaped nose, and in the full lips, there was both sensuousness and refinement. One hand, emerging shyly from a sleeve of the over-robe, held a fan, and the tips of the fingers, clustering delicately, were like the bud of a moonflower.

After the suicide, people would take out this photograph and examine it, and sadly reflect that too often there was a curse on these seemingly flawless unions. Perhaps it was no more than imagination, but looking at the picture after the tragedy it almost seemed as if the two young people before the gold-lacquered screen were gazing, each with equal clarity, at the deaths which lay before them.