On Friendship

I'm not very social, outside of a very small circle of friends with a shared past, some here in Chicago and Indiana, some out West, one in Pennsylvania, and several in South Carolina.  I tend to hole up and write in my spare time; my hobbies are singular.  I'm perfectly happy being by myself for days on end.  But it's always interesting when you meet someone in person that you'd only encountered peripherally, seeing them but not really talking to them.  Then you meet and feel like you have been friends for years. 

I met Partner in Grime after we'd been the best of friends online, having met through family and mutual friends.  That switched to lots of long phone calls for a couple of years. One day, I met him in person. However, I would have never, with my scientist's brain, said "love at first sight." But as I waved to him under the fierce August sun, it was as if the earth had released some secret store of its fiery heart, and I think we both knew. Two years later, we were married.

But there is always that bit of uncertainty when you meet someone where you finally have time to exchange more than pleasant banter.  Sometimes, you find you don't have much in common, and part on a kind note, knowing you likely won't talk much again.  Still, there's some sadness there, as you wanted a connection, yet in meeting them, you felt they had such wonderful things in their heart to say, but you couldn’t decipher the words.

And then, sometimes, you are blessed to discover someone whose life stories mirror your own, not just in some shared deeds and events but in how those things made us into the souls we are today. When you have a moment, between family, rescue dogs, and careers, to sit down and share a meal with them, you realize how truly blessed you are.  

As I sat here last night, watching the moonglow seep like liquid into the newly fallen snow and the spreading crowns of trees outside slowly withdraw into the night, I realized that even if I'm alone this week before Christmas, I’m not alone. I have old and new friends who enrich me in ways I can’t articulate, offering with their kindness a tremendous healing balm to those wounds that a lifetime can lay down and a single year can reopen.  

As people who have lived life fully, sometimes recklessly, sometimes isolated by our own accord, we all have had our hearts broken at one time, sometimes more than once. In that brokenness, so many things can enter our hearts - fear, shame, betrayal, anger, hope, faith.  But when gathered in friendship in a room or at a table and saying our prayer of gratitude, there is only acceptance of those bits of those elements of light and dark that find a home in a human heart.  That is our blessing at our own table, just as it's our forgiveness at the Lord's. 

Holiday Kitchen Failures

A few of my girlfriends were sharing "cooking disaster" stories recently.  None of my personal stories ever matched the one of my childhood. Mom had read somewhere that cooking the holiday turkey in a bag would render the turkey very juicy (this was in the 60s, long before they sold bags specially made for roasting). Except she missed the part about low temperature and the type of bag. So Mr. Turkey went into the oven in a Safeway paper shopping bag, pop-out timer side down.

As the turkey roasted, the juice and grease pooled in the bottom of the bag. When the timer popped, "turkey's done" it popped THROUGH the bag, releasing all the hot grease onto the hot burner.

WHOOSH!

My brother calmly said, "Mom, the turkey blew up!"

It was the first and only time I heard my Mom say a four-letter cuss word. Dad told her to leave the door closed and the oven off until it ceased burning. He then just stood in the corner of the kitchen, muttering "Oh, the Humanity", like the narrator of the Hindenburg disaster, tears rolling down his face as he was laughing so hard. We had KFC that year as the remains were removed in a bucket.

When Mom was fighting cancer and sick from the chemo, there was another memory that stayed with me. A time at the vacation cabin on the Oregon Coast where Dad cooked pancakes. I'm unsure how he did it, but you could hardly cut through them. He gave one to our dachshund Pepper, who took it outside and buried it in the sand along the shore. My brother threw another one in the fire. It didn't burn.

I can picture that as if it were happening now, the splash of sunlight on cedar, the memory of the smell of wet dog, and the taste of laughter, of where people have lived and will always. Good times.  

The Dogfather

While working on her training, Sunny learned "trade" - when she picked up something she shouldn't have, she would drop it in exchange for a toy.  Wise to it now, she grabbed a good shoe and wouldn't trade it for a toy.  No, she had to have a toy AND a treat.  That's not trade - that's paying for "protection." 

WELCOME TO THE DOGFATHER:

Me: “Come on, Sunny, give me the magazine.”

Sunny: “That was going to be 1 treat; it’s 2 treats now.”

Me: “No, I already paid you.”

Sunny: “Dem's some nice-looking slippers - be a shame if something were to happen to them." 

Me: (sigh) hands over treats.

When Waste Baskets Attack!

Life, Labs, and Lodestar

My husband travels a lot in his job, though not as much worldwide since COVID changed the dynamics of meetings (there are still those calls from the Australia facility at weird hours, but they're a great bunch, and I don't mind). But he is often away from home, and the dog and I have our own routine, especially during winter. After coffee is brewing and I'm showered and dressed, she gets playtime in the yard or a walk once it's light out. After work, evenings are quiet, with a few chats with friends on the phone or the computer and a cup of tea while she sets up a watch by the back door, hoping, against hope, that "Dad" will come home early.

Last night, she was expecting him, but work extended his trip another week, so it was only with a little coaxing that she left her position by the back door, came, and lay by my side with a huge sigh.  But God willing, he will be home.  

We get to expect such things -  the sound of a car in a driveway, perhaps the phone call from a child or grandchild that they too made it home safely with the giant load of clean laundry they did at your house, or most of the contents of your wallet. But I only have to look at a flag carefully folded into a triangle on the mantle next to three spent rounds and three small wooden boxes with a favorite dog toy on top of each to be reminded that getting home is never guaranteed.

It makes me cherish what times we have, all of us, my female friends who run the gamut from a beautiful blond with long blue-tipped hair to an author/equestrian who crafts her creativity from a small homestead out west to an African American minister who grew up in the inner city. All completely different women, but alike in what we have overcome, the fears we have vanquished, and all having lost too suddenly, and with little warning, someone we loved, that sharp edge of a horizon that suddenly vanished like an illusion.

The young don't seem to comprehend such moments, not the youth of childhood which knows no pauses and introspections, the world one large play station, but the "youth" that when I was a child, I would have considered "ancient." That time of life when you are busy with your own young children, jobs, parents, subdivision turf wars, and the constant undercurrent of needing to be liked, acknowledged, clicked on, hit on, and validated by people that 30 years from now you won't even remember the names of.

Don't miss it. At all. Especially those moments of boredom, of bone-searing weariness from wearing four hats, of dissatisfactions that could be relieved by only the rashness of staying out too late, having one shot too many, giving up a job or a relationship, like a bird leaving the safety of a comfortable perch for no other reason than you "felt like it." Only years and more than one empty bottle of regret put such days in their perspective.

You wake up one day to an empty bed, a silent phone, and a cold house, and it's as if you'd suddenly heard a whisper, a soft cryptic uttering that cuts deeper than any rogue tool in your shop can, one of your mortality.  But instead of being something to fear, it's a way to savor your day, whatever it brings. It may bring a day of doing little or a lot, but it doesn't matter. What matters is the little scratching made on paper, of fingers on a keyboard, of a clear, undistanced voice across the phone from another soul who needs your support, wisdom, and ear as they count their own days.

I had a meeting with my tax guy, getting ready for this coming year, and as always, he lifted an eyebrow at my 17-year-old truck and said, “You still live there,” noting the address in an old working-class village in the city. Like always, I didn’t say anything but smiled, and he said, “You know, you’re a millionaire, you could live anywhere?”  I just shake my head. I’m happy here in my fixer-upper with my elderly Veteran neighbors, writing a check any dang time I feel like it to support an animal shelter or the less fortunate. I have no desire in the world to live in one of those overtaxed, glass-walled, neat, and orderly homes that blot out the sky, as cozy as a dental lab.

No thanks. I smile and pour another cup of good coffee, not because of a pounding head of a late night, but because it simply makes me feel right with the world.  I look out an old window, the aged glass, milky with frost, coalescing a view that is as old as time, a sound, a whisper, murmuring from outside of time, a time as old as an ancient tree, the smell of the forest here in the middle of a city. A view as old as a hundred years ago, or maybe only ten. 

On the worn rug lies a yellow dog, her head on her dad’s slipper, left underneath a table. Her comfy dog bed is disregarded, it's not the most comfortable setting but one in which she is secure, knowing that he will come home, living unaware that it’s so very fleeting, that time that waits for us all, as inescapable as lodestar. 

Outside stands a hundred-year-old spruce tree, one of what used to be more than half a dozen, reduced to just two due to blight, age, and storms.  It has survived, it endures; it has its inevictable part in the memory of this place even when it too is felled.

 -LBJ

Snow Daze

 

Frosty Snoot.

Incoming Human Frosty Snoot
 

The Troublemint Twins

Trouble comes in two - but Sunny and her best friend Napoleon (who lives 3 doors down) had a great play date in the yard.  

Forecast: Frosty with a Chance of Hot Cocoa

When you come in from playtime when it's 15 degrees out.

 Mexican Hot Chocolate

2 cups milk (I use full-fat goat milk)

2 Tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

2 tablespoons granulated organic sugar

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/8 teaspoon chili powder

a pinch of ground cayenne

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate

Add milk, cocoa powder, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla extract, chili powder, and cayenne pepper in a saucepan over medium-high heat.

Mix with a whisk, add the bittersweet chocolate, and heat until the chocolate has completely melted and the mixture is hot but not boiling.

Divide hot chocolate into 2 mugs and serve with marshmallows or chocolate shavings and a cinnamon stick.

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

 

Sunny's First Snow

We had our first snowfall of the year (a little late for Chicago; it's often snowing on Halloween). We were wondering what Sunny would think of it - we got her at 10 months from the rescue organization.  She'd lived that whole time on an Amish Farm where they bred dogs to sell.  Since her front legs were bowed, no one would buy her, and she was released to the rescue, for which we are grateful.

But coming from a much more southerly State, we figured she had never seen snow.

Let's just say the snow was a BIG hit!

Afternoon Walkies - Waiting on the Rain

That Look

That look you get when you make wild blueberry sourdough pancakes and don't fling one like a frizbee at the dog.