This Christmas...

My Dad passed away in January of 1990 after a long battle with cancer; we knew –so, I think, did he - that Christmas 1989 would be his last. Despite our best efforts, it was a dreary one. Christmas last year was fine – we had no inkling at all that Mom would not be with us for the holidays this year.

I always thought I’d have some warning that her time on earth was drawing to a close – an illness, some loss of faculties – but the God she so faithfully believed in took her mercifully between one breath and the next, without suffering, on a lovely Sunday evening last April, shortly after she enjoyed a serving of her favorite seasonal dessert, strawberry short cake. What a way to go.

The front door of Mom’s cottage is barely five feet from my own back door; the proximity that we enjoyed over the years now keeps her memory as fresh as if she were still sitting in the living room in her big easy chair watching FOX news, or curled cozily in her bed listening to late night radio. It seems like I still ought to be able to slip next door and kiss her good night, and it hurts all over again when I realize those sweet moments are gone forever.

Author Susan Howatch wrote one of my favorite quotes about grief in her epic novel The Wheel of Fortune:

“There is no timetable for grief. Grief isn’t a train you catch at the station. Grief has its own time, and grief’s time is beyond time…time is a circle… one day you’ll look across the circle, and hear her echo in time. “

And yes, as the year passes, I am indeed hearing my mother’s echo in time.
Faced with a surfeit of tomatoes from the summer garden, I remembered a little plastic kitchen gadget Mom had bought from a television advertisement - a simple hinged chopping device with interchangeable blades. At the time I’d teased her about buying “TV junk” and she gave me her “wait and see” look, peeking over the tops of her glasses with raised eyebrows and a grin. In desperation I pondered the piles of tomatoes and decided I’d give it a try – and now dozens of bags of neatly diced Romas sit in our freezer waiting for some good Italian winter cooking projects. As we were chopping away I looked heavenward and said “ OK, you were right. Thanks, Mom.”

The week before my birthday, the old, tattered Chex Party Mix recipe that I thought I’d lost fell out from between two cook books. This is the real deal, that first made its appearance back in the 1950’s, and is not for the faint-hearted. It is redolent with garlic and reminds me of my parents’ holiday parties when, as a kid, I’d eat it till my lips shriveled up from the salt. Yum. Mom always made several batches of this treat starting around my November birthday, and took care to include a big bag of it in my finals-week care packages when I was a college student. As the recipe fluttered down onto the counter I shook my head – she hadn’t let me down. Thanks, Mom.

Most recently, after a long healthy spell, an evil respiratory crud attempted to do me in. I am not a person who does “sick” well, and the day had finally come when I could no longer look to Mom for a serving of warm milk toast and sympathy. I woke up hot and pitiful and slouched dejectedly around the house, trailed by the dragging tail of my bathrobe and several worried dogs. Worst of all, when I could no longer postpone the moments of contact between my fevered bum and the icy toilet seat – why is it always colder when you’re sick, anyway? - the temperature differential resulted in a shock that shot up my spine without stopping till it reached the neighborhood of my ears. I perched miserably and prayed for a respite.

At that point an image appeared in my brain: a fluffy knit item that had arrived in the mail last year, another purchase that I’d teased Mom about. I tottered over to the now-quiet cottage. Sure enough – there it was in all its pink splendor, laundered and waiting – Mom’s toilet seat cover. It may not have been exactly the comforting touch of her hand on my cheek…but then again, maybe it was.

This Christmas, Mom will have a ringside seat at the celebrations in Heaven; as for me and mine, we’ll have tomatoes for the spaghetti sauce on Christmas Eve, Chex Party Mix – the real deal –to munch on, and maybe not a ringside seat exactly – but a comfy warm pink one, anyway. Thanks, Mom.

All In a Day's Work...not..

Being closed in a small exam room with at least one other person and one or more pets many times each day allows ample opportunity for embarassment in the course of any given day at the clinic. Stomachs growl, gas is passed - and I'm talking owners, not patients - you get the idea. You laugh it off and carry on. (For the record let me just say I have yet to emit anything more audible than a stomach growl in front of an owner, in case you're wondering - although not without considerable effort on occasion...). However once in a while something happens that there's just no good way to ignore.

Last night I was speaking with a couple about their dog's allergy problems when I happened to glance down and noticed...my underwear lying on the floor. The following train of thought thundered through my head at lightspeed : "Oh, here's the dog's toy, no wait, it's a cleaning rag, no wait this looks familiar it's got a Victoria Secret logo on the wasteband omigod it's my UNDERWEAR, WHAT THE----!!!"

Well, now what to do? Do I kick it into a corner and pretend no one has seen it? Nope, too late as I'm already picking it up and alllllmost handing it to the owner while thinking it was some item the dog brought in. Then I stopped, mentally shook myself, looked them squarely in the eye and said "ok, I'm going to explain this because I can't think of any other way to handle it."

What had happened was this: I dressed as usual in the morning - when it was fairly warm out - and went on to work. When I came home for lunch, the temperature had dropped about 20 degrees and I had to go out to the barn, so I shucked off the layers on my lower half and threw on some long underwear and sweats. When I hurriedly changed clothes to go back to work, I decided to leave the long underwear on, so I slipped the chinos on over them and off I went.

Little did I know the morning's uns were still lurking in one of the legs of the work pants.

We all had a good laugh about it - they'll sure remember me! - but in retrospect what ticked me off was my choice of apparel. I had been wearing the one pair in my drawer that most closely resembled "granny panties" - plain, off-white. Why the heck couldn't it have been the leopard spots? Or would that have been worse?

Hacking Away at the Family Tree

Sunny days at the back end of winter generally find me heading out to the woods laden with chainsaw, gasoline and bar oil, looking for fallen trees, broken branches and other dry timber to augment our dwindling woodpile.

This winter’s bad weather pastimes, however, included scrounging around for an altogether different sort of deadwood; in the wake of the recent television series Who Do You Think You Are, my husband and I have been researching our family trees.

In case you’ve been hibernating, or perhaps vacationing in someplace completely lacking technology (and where exactly is that, in this day and age? Even the nomads of outer Mongolia have satellite dishes), each episode of Who Do You Think You Are - which is essentially a glorified infomercial for the genealogy website Ancestry.com –researches the family of a famous person, the kind of celebrity you might run across in the pages of People magazine; so far we have learned that actress Sarah Jessica Parker is descended from a woman who survived the Salem witch trials; country singer Tim McGraw’s colonial ancestors rubbed elbows with George Washington and - in a delightful coincidence - the ancestors of Elvis Presley; and comedian/talk show host Rosie O’Donnell’s family immigrated from a Kildare workhouse after surviving one of the worst plagues in history, the Irish potato famine of the mid 1800’s.

Pretty thought-provoking stuff. Who are we? We took the bait and signed onto the Ancestry.com website for our two week free trial. Keith wanted to learn anything he could about his family; however, being a consummate Anglophile, I had a definite goal in mind: I hoped to find at least one link to Britain.

So to our respective computers we retired on a recent cold and windy Saturday. On the website’s blank family tree, I typed in all the ancestors I knew – the Sicilian grandfather on my dad’s side, the German great-grandparents on my Mom’s side.

Grandpa Ippolito – who changed his name to Burk when he came to America in the late 1800’s - never listed his parents so that line was a dead end for the present. Family legend has it that he may have come to America to escape something or someone. Do I really want to go there?

In any case, the rechristened Frank Burk became a grocer in 1920’s Middletown. He owned Burk’s Grocery on the corner of Broad Street and Girard Avenue, and married a gal of German descent whose maiden name was Buerkle. I followed the Buerkle line as far back as Switzerland in the 1600’s. That was interesting, and probably explains my penchant for chocolate (now at least I have an excuse).

Mom’s mother, who grew up in Rockport Indiana, was German through and through. Great-great grandfather Balthazar Wetzel came to this country in the mid-1800’s from Baden-Baden, I learned, on a ship called the Duetschland. Baden-Baden is located on the edge of the famous Black Forest, and I’m entertained by the thought of being a daughter of that primeval woodland. Bonus: I actually have a relative named Balthazar. I just like how it sounds.

Balthazar’s son Jacob was a pastry chef who studied the art in St. Louis before coming back to Rockport. As seems appropriate for a baker, he was a rather robust individual, and after his funeral – which was held in the old family home in Rockport – the pallbearers, coffin and contents all went crashing through the porch when the wooden floorboards, literally in this case, gave up the ghost under the strain. This is stuff you don’t find on Ancestry.com, but it was another family legend I remembered when I ran across Jacob’s name in the records.

What did all these people have in common? To my chagrin – not one of them was English. That left Mom’s father, whose last name was Cape.

Sidney Newton Cape was a papermaker who was born in Lincoln Nebraska and raised in Coffeyville Kansas; he came east and met Rose Wetzel, my grandmother (who worked in the family bakery in Rockport as a kid, and could wrangle a big pan of yeasty dough into a mean loaf of bread well into her 80’s). In their old age, when they lived next door, Granny would wheel Gramps out to the patio in his wheelchair where he would smoke his daily cigar allotment -two, on a good day- and reminisce. He remembered seeing the notorious Dalton Gang “layed out on the street” after they attempted to rob a bank in Coffeyville and met with a crew of outraged citizens who collectively uttered the 1890’s equivalent of “oh no you didn’t, ” ambushed the Dalton boys outside the bank and blew them away (if you google Coffeyville and go to the town website, you can learn all about the Dalton Defenders museum).

Sidney’s parents were Charles Edward Cape Sr. and Jennie Hinch Cape and..that…is..where…it…stopped. There I was – floundering around in the mid-1800’s with nary a Brit in sight. The little green “hint” leaves beside the names on the Ancestry.com family trees waved mockingly at me. I was Germanic, I was Sicilian…but not a Celt. I had no link to Shakespeare, Robin Hood, William Wallace, Sir Walter Raleigh, William B. Yeats, either Queen Elizabeth, Lily Langtry or Jack the Ripper, for that matter. Rats.

I tore myself away from Kansas and wandered over to Keith’s corner of cyberspace. He swung his computer around to face me, and I beheld a veritable forest of family trees. To make matters worse, they were all…ALL! British!

Honestly, the guy is so WASP-y it’s a wonder he doesn’t buzz when he walks.

Not only that – the branches of his tree were loaded with some really succulent fruit – great names like William Tell Lewis and Truthful Lewis; a family member who began as a missionary and ended up a pirate and even a famous ghost, Ocean Born Mary (yes, you can google her, too).

I retired to the living room couch in defeat. Eventually Keith joined me, not defeated. We watched television, and I stewed. Ghosts. Hmpf. I replayed his oh-so-british family names in my head. He’d gotten back as far as Cary or Carey in the 1500’s, and I knew that name from somewhere. Then it hit me. Anne Boleyn, the unlucky second wife of Henry the Eighth – and the first one beheaded –had an older sister named Mary, who had been Henry’s mistress before he fell in love with Anne. Mary was married to – wait for it – one William Carey. And if contemporary reports can be believed, neither of their two children resembled Mr. Carey.

I sat up in dismay, staring over at Keith as he sprawled dozing on the couch. Could it possibly be that my lanky, easygoing WASP-y husband was related to the evil, megalomaniacal Henry, my least favorite English monarch? I was intrigued and horrified at the same time, and spent the rest of the weekend addressing him as “your Majesty.” He took it well.

As of this writing, I’m still in 1800’s Kansas; a real, not virtual, trip to Coffeyville is probably in my future if I’m going to figure out my past. In the meantime, around my husband at least, I’m going to watch my neck.

Summer 2010 - In Search of the Perfect Cream Soda

Despite my best intentions to write this piece over Labor Day weekend, summer ended and autumn arrived, and circumstances abysmally failed to provide me with either the opportunity or the inclination to put it all together. We turned back the clocks , and sailed the river of time past the chronological twin pillars of Halloween and Election Day; then the merciless, inescapable current plunged us, ready or not, into the Holiday season….which of course then diligently sucked up all available free time faster than a new Sham-wow soaking up accidents at puppy training class. Eventually the holiday vortex spewed us out into the lazy eddies of January Sunday afternoons, and so, caught in the throes of a rare moment of ENTIRELY FREE TIME, as the sunset burns orange through the bare tree branches and the woodstove answers with a like-minded glow, I find myself thinking of SUMMER. Again. (Incidentally I’m considering entering this paragraph in some Bulwar-Litton competition, in the Most Bloated Opening for an Essay Category…Hmmmm. I could delete it entirely but I think I’ll leave it exactly because it’s so ridiculous.)

Some months ago, when the weather was heating up, I experienced a hankering for a good ol’ cream soda and shortly thereafter, during a weekly trip to the supermarket, I grabbed a bottle labeled Jones’ Cream Soda. What started it all , in fact, was that I liked Jones Cola labels, and the cream soda suddenly sounded good. If you have seen Jones’ Colas, you will know what I mean: those black-and-white “candid” photos of things like cows in a pasture sniffing a camera lens, dogs in cardboard boxes, kids playing – “feel-good” photos. So. The taste was interesting but – to borrow a phrase from the late great author Douglas Adams, “almost but not entirely unlike” cream soda. And then, in a flash of inspiration, the enquiring mind wanted to know: just what IS “Cream Soda” – the teeth-curling sweet “redpop” of my childhood, the pale brown carbonated beverage my upstate New York friends claimed to be the real deal, this strangely labeled liquid I was tasting at the moment, an eclectic drink on a gourmet market shelf, or a battered bottle from the cooler of some out of the way diner, whose owners last took inventory around 1954?

My first impression of Jones’ Cream Soda, as I typed hastily onto a Facebook status line, was “like liquid cotton candy.” I swear. It made me remember a day at the Great American Ballpark a few years ago when I foolishly decided I wanted a taste of my childhood and ordered a big pink cloud of cotton candy. Ten minutes later I was acting like a kid, too: “Hey, let’s run up the steps to the topllevelandwhenwegetherelet’slookoverattheconstructionandoohlookattheriverdoesitlookanydifferentoverhereandheyyoucangeticecreamuponthislevelllllllllllllllllllllllllll…………………….” and on in that vein for the better part of an hour until the sugar high wore off and I slumped back exhausted in my seat, munching on salty peanuts in an attempt to incapacitate the rush and beat it to death. So…Jones Cream Soda, while interesting - and almost as exciting - as real cotton candy, and definitely displaying one of the cooler labels, did not finish first on my list by a long shot.

I next tried Stewart’s Cream Soda, also available at the local supermarket. The embryo of a systematic method for comparison was developing , because I wrote on Facebook: “color: light amber. Taste: Sweet, with a little sparkle and a little spark. A bit more sophisticated than Jones' Cream Soda….” (I was obviously well on my way to becoming quite the cream soda sommelier. ) As it rolled and fizzed across my palate I discovered that this soda was closest to the one my upstate NY friends had introduced me to thirty years ago, and it evoked a memory of walking across a dry grassy field with friends at a tiny village’s “Fireman’s Club Field Days;” playing that delicious mental game in which you wonder if one of these people you’re with is going to make some gesture indicating that he wants to be more than just a friend, and what is it going to be, and what are you going to DO about it, and yet not really sweating it because you are happy in the moment (for the pruriently curious among you, he did, I did, we did. Hey, I was young and it was summer!).

******brief interlude while I think about summers long past******

Ahem, yes. Well. Where was I? Oh yes. Following Stewarts : Faygo Cream Soda. It was time for another installment in the “In Search Of” commentary, so on the fly and looking for anything to write about, I nabbed a couple of bottles at the IGA in Germantown. Obviously I was really working on the methodology by this time because I wrote “Color: Clear. Calories/serving: 110 (the lowest of the three so far). Taste: crisp but a bit too sweet and faintly chemically. Will try it again when it's a bit colder.” (I’m not sure if I meant the soda or the weather, but it wasn’t enough to motivate a second try.) However, although the whole it wasn’t too bad, I found its clear colorlessness disconcerting. Some “oopmf” was missing. Hmmm. Bland. Gelded cream soda, that’s what it seemed like.

Next on the list : IBC Cream Soda. I wrote: “ Wow! Color: Deep gold. Flavor - seriously but not overpoweringly vanilla- light! Tingly but without eliciting that choking, bubbles-up-the-nose sensation. 180 calories/serving.... HF Corn Syrup is the sweetener.” The comparison system was essentially in place at this point, because not only was I scrutinizing the appearance and describing the taste – I was also evaluating the contents. And noting in particular, this cream soda is some pretty high calorie stuff. In retrospect, I should have consulted a professional sommelier’s notes first – then I’d have been able to address other elusive issues such as “nose” and “body” – but hey, what did I know? I started out just interested in slamming back a cold cream soda. Little did I suspect that this whole tasting episode would evolve.

At this point some friends were getting in on the game; a friend/former employee brought me the next entry: Wegmans, from upstate New York: - a "grocery store brand" that was quite surprising! - calories 110; color, dark gold. Not as tingly as some of the others, and I expected it to be like Faygo ("why shouldn't this be red") - instead, it was like "Jones CS" lite! Very nice!

(One of my horseback riding buddies also brought me some “maple seltzer” from New England which, while interesting, didn’t quite fit the criteria for cream soda. Pretty good though, and certainly rather unique.)

In mid-July we made our annual pilgrimage to Cape May New Jersey, where I found sample number 6: Olde Philadelphia Rittenhouse Square Cream Soda - Light gold, 190 cal/serving, "high f. corn syrup and/or cane sugar". Pleasant, not too sweet but not much sparkle either. Pretty smooooooth, overall not bad. And yes, made in Philadelphia. BUT…how do you have syrup “and/or” cane sugar? This from the city that was definitive enough to produce a Declaration of Independence – so NOW you can’t make up your mind? “Corn syrup and/OR cane sugar?” Huh??

Taste tested next: Sprecher Fire Brewed Cream Soda. Calories 125. HF Corn syrup. Light amber, made with HONEY and vanilla, has a creamy head on it like old fashioned A & W Root Beer. A tad less sparkly than IBC, not as sweet as Jones - unique, different, and very nice. This one was made in Wisconsin and purchased and Dorothy Lane Market, as was :

#8: Frostie BLUE Cream Soda. Calories 190. HF Corn Syrup. Clear Blue. (Ingredients include "artificial flavor" - DUH - and "Blue 1.") It was sweet, bubbly...and well, pretty. No distinctive taste. Definitely at the bottom of the list. But hey...it was blue – thanks to “Blue 1.” Was this an old Star Trek prop, or perhaps the official refreshment endorsed by Smurfs? Or worse yet, was it liquefied Smurf? (Perhaps that was what the label meant by “artificial sweetener.”)

#9 - A & W. Calories 190. HF Corn Syrup. Light Golden. This was a nice surprise - light and sparkly, nice taste but not too overpowering. My favorite of the "big" commercial entries.

Almost last tasted..and least liked - #10, Faygo Redpop. 120 Calories, HF Corn Syrup and yeah, it's RED. Memories jogged by this confection did not even vaguely resemble those elicited by Stewarts - unfortunately! - but it did send me time traveling again; I flashed back to moments in my childhood when I was being chased out of my sickbed by a well-meaning parent trying to con me into swallowing some vile cough syrup that was passed off as “cherry flavored.” Bleah.

And #11, the final one: BIG RED! Calories 100 - in a 8 oz can! HF Corn syrup. Color: RED! Taste - liquid Bubble Yum. The thing is, I LIKE Bubble Yum. It’s my go-to vice when I’m stressed out and want to…well, grind away on SOMETHING, if not some body. Even now. Fifty three years old and on occasion I may still be seen blasting down the road in my grey truck blowing BIG bubbles. As an aside, I do NOT advocate blowing bubbles while on horseback; some of them take exception to the snapping sound (guess how I know this). So while Big Red is, shall I say, blatently jazzy and perhaps suggestive of, if it were possible, chewing on a vintage Saturday Morning cartoon, I have to admit I liked it.

Summing things up in an embarrassingly untimely attempt to finally fling this exposition to the winds of cyberspace….where do they all stand, these bottles of liquid recollection?

Well, I’ll tell you. It wasn’t as easy as it first seemed, summing them all up. And no doubt there are more out there waiting to be sampled, so in all likelihood there will be a continuance THIS year, particularly if my travels or those of friends yield some formerly undiscovered possibilities. Watch Facebook with baited breath for updates. In the meantime, here’s my list.

In 11th place, Faygo Redpop, if only because the only medicine I was fooled into believing was “tasty “ as a child - labels notwithstanding - was Cheracol cough syrup, and Faygo decidedly lacked the richness (and maybe the mental side effects!) of THAT concoction. Unfortunately.

In 10th place, Frostie Blue Cream soda. Blue. It just ain’t right.

In 9th place Faygo Cream Soda. Clear, colorless cream soda ain’t right either.

8th place: Jones’ Cream Soda. Just too sweet. If I want a cotton candy rush, I’ll order cotton candy. Besides, if you’re drinking liquid cotton candy, you deprive yourself of the true sport inherent in eating the real thing, which is avoiding either wearing it yourself or getting it in the hair or on the person of the unsuspecting ball park fan sitting in front of you. (Then again, maybe not.)

7th place: Wegman’s. A little more spark would have placed this one higher up on the list.

6th place: Rittenhouse. I have to admit I like the idea of drinking cream soda made in such a historic place, but you’d think that having been formulated in that hotbed of revolution it would have had a little more definitive taste.

5th place: A & W – just not too shabby for a “commercial” blend.

4th Big Red. Because, admit it, sometimes you WANT a little jazz!

3rd Sprecher Fire-Brewed – just an interesting and intriguing mixture, what with that honey and all. Worth the trip to DLM to find. And you can treat yourself to some pastry or “farmhouse bread” while you’re there. And the honeycrisp apples…oh, and the cheese counter..and…uh…well, plan to take all afternoon, anyway…….

And last – I have to say it’s a tie for first and second place, between IBC and Stewart’s. They are both oh, so close to that elusive Upstate New York blend that I enjoyed. The brand, I believe, was Adirondak Cream Soda and I have yet to find it locally, so if you run across some, pick up a can for me. My friends supplied me with “the real deal” by the caseload through vet school, so I have to admit some good memories of THAT time in my life resurfaced when sampling any of the gold or “brown” cream sodas. Studying histology and falling asleep, waking up to find a big highlighter splot on my notes where I dozed off holding the marker; trying to get everything done before 8 p.m. on a Thursday night to watch the iconic, never-yet-beaten lineup of TV shows: Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court and St. Elsewhere. Giggling about “sniglets” (words that ought to be in the dictionary but aren’t) with friends when I should have been looking at Pathophysiology of Disease slides (Singlet example: Blibula – BLIB-yoo-la: the place on a dog which, when scratched, makes him rhythmically flap his hind leg). The weight-lifted –off-your-shoulders feel of finishing finals and heading home to Middletown late on a December afternoon.

I really didn’t anticipate a walk down memory lane when I started this taste test research back last June – but it has been an interesting little jaunt and it makes me wonder where it’ll take me THIS year. I’ll get back to you in June.