There's No Place Like Home

Since Tuesday, I have been awash in homesickness for Brno. I am especially feeling the lack of the serenity I felt at Smidkova, in the little dining room where I used to study, write, and say my prayers. I felt close to God there, where the eastern light slashed through the high windows to light the tiny cross I had made one fidgety morning from an olive twig brought from Tunisia. When I lifted my head from my work, I could calculate the weather by the number and colors of the rising chimney smoke against the sky. I knew that if I stood up, and the day were cold enough, I could see that haunting Dormitory where Nazis tortured and executed Jews and other enemies of the Reich, jailed behind the pale gray bars of smoke and time. It isn't a threatening place now, though it will always loom.
In my sanctuary, I could anticipate the upstairs mid-morning coffee routine and track the sounds of wooden chairs scraping lightly across the ceramic floor, the muffle of conversation, and hearing these things, feel safe and comfortable, at peace and unalone.
This is all in contrast to the peace and security I now lack. I am betrayed and heartsick, longing to click my heels like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, of returning to a better time and better place, both literally and figuratively. There' no place like home...there's no place like home...

Hedonistic Saturday (Požitkářský Sobota)

Our son has been dreaming of today all week because today is going according to his plan. I know it's indulgent of Thomas and me, but we like to give Bram the chance to have just the kind of day he wants every now and then. So, today's plan is to spend all day in bed. Who among us hasn't dreamt of such a day when the alarm had gone off? Our shifts as butler have been scheduled so that no one gets taken advantage of; whoever is butler is to be called "Jeeves", and the means of summoning the butler has been determined (Bram taps his lamp; Thomas and I yell "ding ding!") Bram has set the tone for interactions with Jeeves, and it's extremely polite, so for now, we're all laughing our heads off every time Jeeves is summoned. I've had my coffee and a corndog for breakfast, my computer, books, iPod, and telephone beside me, so I'm enjoying it. I know how ridiculously silly and self-indulgent this is of us, but as there's no harm in it, why not just enjoy it? After all, we have permission to lie on the bed rather than in it, and to fetch things for ourselves if we want, to even get dressed. Now if we could just get snow on Christmas... .

Our Thanksgiving

For the first time in a very long time, I cooked the entire Thanksgiving feast myself, and we stayed at home. We had turkey, gravy, dressing (stuffing), cranberry sauce, green beans, corn, collard greens, congealed salad, sweet potato souffle, cherry pie, and oatmeal cookies. I was a little worried I had forgotten what to cook and was out of practice, but it turned out just fine. Thomas helped a lot ahead of time and even said the blessing! Now for the first time ever, we might even go get our Christmas tree this week. Either I am over my culture shock or I have caved to the pressures of American consumerism.

Thanksgiving Already Creeping Away

I should have known something was up when I walked into Wal-Mart the day before Halloween and had to veer around the huge Christmas tree the employees were putting up. There was Halloween candy on the shelves to the left and right of the tree, and the Halloween aisle, well, half of the Halloween aisle(this would be about one tram long) was still overflowing with jack-o-lanterns and hundreds of costumes. Did everybody go for the homemade costumes this year? Is poor costume sales some reliable indicator about consumer faith in the economy? But I digress. The other half of the aisle was already filled with Christmas candy. Red and green, orange and black and purple. It makes me cringe to think about it.
So, today, I went in search of a little something, well, with a turkey or a horn of plenty on it---a tea towel or fingertip towel or a dish sponge to send to a friend. About half of the Halloween stuff is still there, and there didn't seem to be any more Christmas decorations up, at least. But there was no sign of Thanksgiving! No turkey dish towels, no horns of plenty centerpieces, no turkey cups or napkins or paper plates, not even a turkey platter. I have kind of gotten used to those tacky platters as harbingers of the feast. (I even own one and like it LOL)
If stores begin Halloween in August (so much for fresh candy), and Christmas at Halloween, and then just skip Thanksgiving, what is that? Not holiday creep. Holiday leap? Holiday warp? Whatever it is, I really ought to just hush since I am always kvetching about the over-commercialism of holidays. It's just that it would have been nice to have seen at least a cardboard turkey or a couple of pilgrims or indians with feathers or something like that stuck around. Thanksgiving is still a week away.

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.