White Horse in the River

One or two or three times a week, I drive a bit under twenty kilometers to Pacolet, SC, where I spend time with the folks at the Pacolet Senior Center. I always have a pleasant time there, talking to the seniors, listening to them, playing games or doing little artsy projects that I bring. I am happy for the company, and unlike so many of my friends these days, they aren't too busy or sick of me yet to not enjoy mine. On Thursday, I was encouraged to follow one of them down the road a little ways to see some Christmas decorations for sale that a local millionaire dying of cancer donated to her church. The decorations were the kind of high-end stuff that's available in malls, and they were quite nice, but the real treat for me was not in being offered a chance to preview what was to be sold last Saturday and to choose some things first, but in getting to see Pacolet Mills. It is a stunningly beautiful old mill town. In addition to a large variety of well-cared-for mill houses on gently curving streets, there's this white horse on a pylon in the middle of the river and a riverside amphitheatre to rival ones I know in Verona and Rome. Because it was raining, I didn't walk down to take a good photo of the amphitheatre or of the houses, but I hope to soon have some to share with you.

Free on Election Day

Of course, we're free; it's America! And we aren't all that was free today. We got free coffee from Starbucks, a free waffle (the Belgian type, not those nifty wafer-like ones you can get from Czech spas)from Waffle House, a free doughnut from Krispy Kreme (I'm sorry I can't explain Krispy Kreme donuts to you, but when you visit, I'll buy you some-I promise), and my favorite, a free chicken sandwich from
Chic-Fil-A. We aren't interested in any kind of government handouts, but hey, we would be fools not to take handouts from big business. After a busy day of chasing down the freebies, we are watching the election returns. Because of Thomas's tremendous election excitment, I have been saved from having to cook, and we are feasting on junk food for dinner. I am even being treated to a bottle of my favorite Yellow Tail red wine. It ain't Christmas, but it's damned close. If Obama wins, it will be like Santa came early. And if not, I am going to need more wine, lots and lots more wine.

Happy Hallow-GREEN?

This year, the usual things happened for Halloween: Wal-Mart and the other merchants put out the Halloween decorations and candy some time around Labor Day, a full two months before October 31st. There was, once again, enough Halloween candy, decorations, and costumes to fill at least two trams, plus even more Halloween underwear, this time for men and women, than last year (though I still gave the thongs a miss). Not everything is about the same. For one thing, for the first time in more than twenty years, I didn't carve a jack-o-lantern for Halloween, and putting a small wreath on the door and an electric artificial jack-o-lantern in the window was the extent of my decorating.
Bram was as amenable as ever about having a homemade costume, and this year we made it completely with recyclables and things left over from previous years' costumes. He really wanted his costume to make a statement about the environment, so he went as the endangered American Crocodile. We used some of the fabric I bought at Goodwill nine(!) years ago, cardboard from the box his trampoline came in, leftover paint, duck tape from 9/11. For the eyes we used earplugs we got from one of the airlines.
Bram's school has embraced "Going Green" with such enthusiasm that they had every student and teacher make costumes from recyclables and items that were headed for the landfill. On Friday, they staged a New Orleans style parade around the quarter-mile running track. It was the first Halloween Parade I had ever heard of. It was cute, and it reminded me how much Halloween has changed since I was a child. Halloween used to be only about dressing up and going door to door to get candy. Sometimes there was a Halloween Carnival, though we rarely went. (Remember: for us, it was all about the free candy). Halloween was very much a children's celebration. These days, however, there are just as many, if not more adult costumes in the stores and adult activities in the community. It seems that visiting haunted houses--really scary haunted houses-- and going through corn mazes at midnight are overshadowing Trick-or-Treating as the primary ritual for the day. I find this change interesting because it seems not so much a new invention in ritual as a reversion to the original focus of Halloween rituals: messing around with the really scary spirits of the dead. But I still get the biggest kick out of seeing young children in costumes at my door, shouting "Trick-or-Treat!" and then craning their little necks so they can see what they got. It's like magic, isn't it? Say three words and you get candy from stangers.

Beach Companion

I moved from my spot at the shoreline and into the sand dunes to get away from the breeze that kept blowing the pages of the book I was reading only to be constantly and happily distracted by the activity of this Ghost Crab.


And this the marsh I bike pass to and from the beach. Every time I go by here, alone or not, I say, "I want to go kayaking in the marshes."

Dreams Do Come True

I spent most of the day reading Milan Kundera and George Singleton and thinking about the chores I should have been doing, like cleaning the front porch. I weighed the merits of just leaving the dust and spider webs along with the good sense of saving the fifteen dollars or so I would likely spend for pumpkins, and for now I am thinking about just hunting down some plastic spiders to toss into the webs with the current eight-legged residents and calling it decorated. Of course, we all know I won't be able to forego the pumpkin carving. We hiked to a florist to buy a pumpkin and I made Thomas haul a giant fifty pound gourd back to our apartment when we lived in Brno; it's clear that I am incapable of living without carving a jack-o-lantern for Halloween.
This past weekend was fall break for Thomas and Bram, so we headed south to celebrate Columbus Day with my parents. I'm sorry that I don't have any interesting descriptions of the rituals and activities about tradtional celebrations for this holiday. Like a lot of our government holidays, Columbus Day has become just another excuse for merchants to have sales and for the residents of the most wasteful country in the world to spend money that many of us don't really have on things we don't really need. But I digress.
So, we drove (sigh) the five and half hours to the beach. Along the way, we were treated to fields of cultivated wildflowers in the medians and along the sides of the highway. We owe this unexpected beauty to Lady Bird Johnson, First Lady of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.
So, it was most satisfying to see such useless loveliness. Truly, it isn't necessary for roadsides to be pretty to look at, but isn't it nice that Lady Bird's dream to beautify the highways and byways of America has come true, at least along some roadways. The flowers are some kind of Cosmos which grow an impressive five and half feet tall with blossoms the width of a man's hand. You can see their solid patches of color from more than a mile away..
On Saturday, we drove up to Lumber City, where my mother is buying the house she has dreamed of living in since she was seven years old. Even though we teased her about being the only person in America actually buying a house in this economy, I was heartened by her ability to make this dream come true. It makes me happy to think about her as a little girl stopping in front of the house on her way to school, wishing she could go inside, could have such a fine place, and that now, more than sixty years later, it's hers. Although it will need a little work, it's going to make a comfortable happy getaway for her and my father.

Dangerous Chocolate Cake

I got an email from my mother today with "Dangerous Chocolate Cake" in the subject line, and in spite of my trepidation at the possibility of learning that chocolate cake is now some form of terroristic threat, I opened it anyway. Then I spent the next ten or fifteen minutes making this.>
It's chocolate cake that you can make really fast with basic ingredients and the microwave. Here is the recipe:

4 tablespoons (60ml)flour (use self-rising or add 1/2 tsp pracek do peciva)
4 tablespoons(60ml)sugar
2 tablespoons(30ml)cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons(45ml)milk
3 tablespoons(45ml)oil
3 tablespoons(45ml)chocolate chips (optional)
A small splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly.
Pour in the milk and oil and mix well.
Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla extract, and mix again.
Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts.
The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed!
Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.

I opted to tip it out onto a plate and slice it. It didn't turn out as sweet as I would have liked, so I microwaved a little butter, cocoa, powdered sugar and milk in a mug for about a minute and poured it over the top. It is in fact, quite enough for two or maybe even three people, especially if you served it with ice cream. (What's in the photo is about half of the cake) Of course, to self-medicate after a bad day, you could always just stick a knife handle into the cake while it's in the mug and fill the hole up with chocolate syrup and eat it all yourself. Bad, bad World! Poor, poor me.

This Place is a Dump

But it's called a landfill because the great huge (about 600 thousand) tons of garbage that go into it daily fill giant multi-acre pits, level the valleys and build small mountains. And on top there are inocuous-looking pipes, somtimes topped with tiny turbines that vent the methane gas from the rotting trash below.
Our guide pointed out the area that marks the approximate spot that is at least partially filled with the diapers from the children born ten years ago; a few of the fifth graders gasped immediately, and those who didn't, stared open-mouthed and wide-eyed when they heard that it takes hundreds of years (some say 500 or more) for those diapers to decompose. I now have new respect for my friends who chose cloth diapers over disposable, and I'm sorry I didn't.
We drove by a big pile of discarded metal things and saw in there several children's bicycles. I remembered the bike that I learned to ride without training wheels: it was one that my father had rescued from the county dump and refurbished for me. He painted it gold, put new tires and chain on it, bought a 'banana seat' and hand grips to match in red glittery vinyl that sparkled like those red shoes in The Wizard of Oz. I loved that bike as much as my brother loved the classic chopper bike my father found and restored for him. His was green with great chrome forks,a black seat. It was painted green with a very cool black smoke effect on it. It isn't that we were so poor that my parents couldn't or wouldn't have bought us new bikes. Rescuing mechanical things and restoring them to a state of usefulness has always been a hobby for my father. I think he likes the feeling of accomplishment he gets from improving something, and I know it makes him happy if his efforts make someone else glad, too. He still saves a bike from time to time, though there are few children around who care for a bike, especially a used one, and he gives them to the local animal shelter which auctions them off to buy food and supplies for the animals there.
After seeing all of those green grass covered hills, with trash lurking beneath them, producing methane, which will eventually be used to fuel a local industrial plant, and percolating some awful liquifaction that we can only hope won't taint the groundwater, all I could think was what a shamefully wasteful culture we have here. I started using those t-shirt bags I made for shopping, so with very few exceptions, I haven't brought anymore of those plastic store bags home since April. We recycle everything that we can and try to reuse at least a time or two the containers that don't recycle before we commit them to the trash. I think now I'll start avoiding as much plastic packaging as I can, which may mean learning to make yogurt since those yogurt cups don't recycle, and can't be used for anything else. I hear it isn't hard to do. One thing is for sure, I have got to do more.

Something to do on a Saturday

My new and only reason to like Diet Coke. There's just something about men in lab coats and goggles in synchronisation that makes me smile. Or maybe it's all the wasted soda.

The Bringing of Food

In the American South, it has long been the custom to bring food to someone whenever there is a family emergency or event that disturbs the most basic household routines. The illness or death of a family member, and even the happy occasion of a new baby is very likely to elicit the bringing of food to the home. This is not an activity reserved for family members or close friends, but one which is often embraced by thoughtful co-workers or neighbors, some of whom barely know your name. It's just another of those things that we do here.

When I was pregnant with Bram, even one of my former students, a dear Japanese woman, brought me sushi when I couldn't eat a thing. Miraculously, I ate the entire dish in one sitting and felt stronger and better. When my son was born, my neighbor baked muffins from scratch for us. And when my father-in-law was in the hospital, friends, family, neighbors, and people who barely knew my in-laws delivered food on a daily basis. Even after the funeral, the food continued to come, because, well, grieving families need comforting.

The food is always someone's idea of comfort food; for Southerners this is fried chicken, potatoes, macaroni and cheese, chicken and dumplings, ham and something with gravy, some kind of casserole or fruit cobbler, cake, pies, trays of fresh fruit or veggies or even sweet tea and coffee. Now that our society has changed and so few of us live with or even near extended family, it isn't unusual for people to bring paper plates and disposable utensils, so there is less worry about cleaning up.

While my father was in the hospital this past week, my friend Gloria, a generous and thoughtful soul, brought us food: chicken, peas and cornbread, corn on the cob, and black eye pea salad. Even when things are going well, Gloria's cooking is a special treat, and because we were all a bit stressed, her offer of food was a delight. Bringing food is one of those gestures that we Southerners understand, like saying the name of an ailing stranger in church, or having prayers said for us, that gives us comfort and makes us all feel better. It's doing something for a fellow human being with no expectation of an immediate return. And THAT is another thing I love about the South.

Nejsem Tady (I'm not here!)

Ahoj, Darlings. I hope you will forgive my absence from the blog for the last month. I have been a bit busy with my other writing and preparations for our trip. Now, I am happy to tell you that I am now back in the Czech Republic, home, among Czechs, and that I have been commissioned to write a column about my Czech travels for a newspaper in South Carolina. My editor says that I am to "sell the Czech Republic." I hope I can do you and your lovely little country justice.
I won't be posting here very often, if at all, but on the Czech Summer blog. You can find it by clicking on the link in the column on the right.
Tak, mej se hesky!