Retro Kitchen Food Aggression

It seems the kitchens of yore were not the cozy culinary preparation areas of today, where one coaxes conscientiously-grown and harvested local produce into tempting morsels to feed both body and mind. ("I am a Good Person who Eats Thoughtfully.  I am saving the world, one bite at a time.") Rather they were deceptively innocent-looking chambers of food torture, where pearl-clad housewives could vent their frustrations by employing such tools as the . . . Blitzhacker!

From Greyhounds and Great Books

I uncovered this jewel while cleaning out Mom's kitchen for the upcoming estate sale, and I decided to keep it  for therapeutic purposes.  Yes, denizens of today's granite and stainless steel food preparation areas might titter a bit at the implied violence of the Slap Chop™, but that device is but a shadow of the linoleum-counter slamming Blitzhacker.  The name and the lightning-bolt graphics on the box are enough to subdue the toughest celery into dainty minces for a ladies-luncheon chicken salad.  Fruitcake pans await the pummeled pecans.  Hot oil anticipates hashed soon-to-be-browned potatoes.  Who knew that beneath that crisp cotton blouse (with Peter Pan collar) lurked a veritable kitchen dominatrix?

I now recall the blam-blam-blam sound of Mom's chopping some innocent foodstuff into submission; it is ironic that this was usually near Christmas, that season of peace and goodwill to all.  One of Mom's specialties was Kentucky Cherry Pecan Loaf, a semi-fruitcake made with cherries, pecans, and bourbon (hence the Kentucky part).  If made in a conventional loaf pan, an electric knife was required for slicing, so Mom made gift-sized mini loaves.  Needless to say, like most dense fruit cakes, they could be cryogenically preserved for at least a year.  We would often extract a cake in mid-July (allowing an entire day for thawing).

So I intend to make a space for the Blitzhacker (not to be confused with Howitzer or Luftwaffe) in my own 2011 kitchen.  What could be more appropriate for our multi-tasking world than food prep and frustration release?  
Faculty meeting . . . BLAM . . . Phone call to insurance company . . . BLAM . . .

Practicing Graciousness

At one time or another we have all received a gift for which we have had to feign gratitude.  I was given many chances to hone this skill, as my Mom loved nothing better than to wrap an extraordinary number of presents for my birthday and for Christmas.  She thought I would enjoy the unwrapping as much as the actual contents.  My birthday is shortly before the traditional start of school, and I remember several instances of eagerly tearing open an alluring package to find . . . a half-dozen spiral notebooks.  Really.  I tried to act pleased, but I must not have been terribly convincing, as Mom would hasten to explain that she just wanted me to have "something else" to unwrap.

Mom is now in an assisted living facility, and her days of shopping for gifts of any kind are past.  Her memory is unreliable; her days are no longer filled with board meetings and accounting work but with bingo and Animal Planet.  But even as her world is narrowing and parts of her are slipping away, there are moments of grace and graciousness.

One day last week she called to tell me that several women had brought bags of new books to her facility and had given them away to the residents.  Mom was one of the first on the scene; as an inveterate bargain hunter, she was drawn like a moth to a flame.  But she did not want the books for herself; she said, "I know you like to read, so I got them for you."  She proceeded to read me the titles, and I could tell they were from a genre I generally do not care for, but I promised to remind her to give them to me the next time I visited.  I was so touched by her gesture that I could not bring myself to tell her that the books were really intended for the residents and their library.  I felt a bittersweet pang at her remembering that I like to read, and at her childlike assumption that ANY book would be one I would enjoy.

Saturday Mom was enormously pleased to present me the books, still in their bright gift bag.  A quick glance confirmed that two of the three would be secretly returned (unread) to the facility library.  I will read the third one, so that I can honestly tell her I've done so, should she ask.

This time, I did not have to feign gratitude.  The books are immaterial; the true gift is my seeing the happiness Mom drew from being able to give.

Oddly enough, out of all of the birthday gifts Mom gave me over the years, I cannot recall any specific items other than those spiral notebooks.  Perhaps the opportunity to practice graciousness was the "something else" for me to unwrap.  Thank you, Mom.  Really.

Spine Tingling

I grew up in a household of books.  There were large bookcases in our living room, Dad's study, a hallway, and my bedroom.  Some of my earliest memories are of my parents' reading to me from not only my own books but also from books I selected from their shelves.  I recall the multi-volume gardening encyclopedia that was one of my favorites; Daddy patiently read the names of the plants and flowers while I pored over the photographs.  The shrubbery volume was my least favorite . . . too plain!  I also gravitated toward some sort of home health encyclopedia: the four red volumes with gold spine lettering drew me like a beacon.  Hindsight tells me these were from the 1950's when polio was still a very real spectre on the health scene.  I was fascinated by the article about polio and the accompanying photograph of the "iron lung" machine.  Looking back, I'm sure Daddy didn't read the article word for word, but rather wove a story around the various photographs of a young girl who had contracted that feared disease. 

One particular two-volume set captured my imagination like no other, but I never selected them for reading (no illustrations!).  The art on the dust jackets formed the silhouette of a "robber" as I termed it, and I was fascinated by how these two books fit together.  Sometimes I even took the liberty of rearranging them so that the silhouette was split.  Daddy had a lightweight black raincoat, and one particularly gusty rainy night as he came in the door the wind caught the back of his coat, whereby I announced excitedly that he "looked like the robber on the books".  For that sheer sentimental reason, I brought those two books back with me during the summer my parents were packing for their big move.  I was delighted to discover that the title of this set is A Treasury of Great Mysteries, with full-length novels, "novelettes", and short stories by such greats as Dorothy L. Sayers,  Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, and Mary Roberts Rinehart . . . all authors I love as an adult. 

Coincidence? Fate? No, just the good fortune to be raised in the midst of the written word, freely and lovingly shared.

The Captivating Spines

Note the red eye on the "robber"!

Part of the title page

No Jacket Required

As a child I spent many summer hours in the fabulous public library in my hometown.  After I was old enough to be left alone for a short time, Mom would drop me off at the children's entrance and then go about her grocery shopping.  From my perspective it was a jackpot situation:  having time to poke around the enticing collection of books and NOT having to endure the grocery store.  (I wish I had that same option today!) 

I do not remember much about how I selected particular books, but I do recall having a strong preference for those without dust jackets.  Something about the exotic geometric prints on the buckram covers must have triggered a subconscious "here lies a story" reaction; a bare book was also a reliable predictor of pages whose edges had acquired a downy softness, almost to the point of being frayed.  Those pages turned with a pronounced gentleness, each one floating to meet the cushion of the others.  Said books also possessed that peculiar "old library book" smell, which to me was as alluring as the scent of a fresh Christmas tree.  Both the tree and the book promised unknown treasures. 

I did not gravitate toward books with colorful cellophane-covered dust jackets; I did not like the crinkly sound they made, I did not care for their crisp pages and hard edges.  They appeared sterile, cold, and unwelcoming.  Their full-color cover illustrations seemed to rob me of my right to imagine the characters as I saw them.  I passed over them and sought the comfort of books softened by age and use.

After what seemed like two or more delicious hours in the library, but which was probably closer to 45 minutes, Mom would reappear, and together we would carry that week's selection of mellowed jewel-toned treasures to the checkout desk.  I felt the promise of their pages.

Living Outside the Box

For the time being, I am firmly planted in Congested Suburbia, USA, because
1. I need my job
2. My husband needs his job.
I am the Library Media Specialist (fka "librarian") in an elementary school in a very large suburban school district.  The position of LMS has been eliminated with alarming regularity in a number of districts nationwide, and I don't relish moving to Open Spaces, American West where my position might be a year-to-year gamble at best. But I have discovered a mystery series that lets me live, if even for a few hours, in the wide open spaces of Wyoming, imagining a place where human settlement is dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the land.

I happened upon the Joe Pickett series by C. J. Box while searching for an audiobook for my car time.  Since I was at the mercy of what was available for free through our public library, I began with the sixth book in the series, In Plain Sight.  I thoroughly enjoyed the strong sense of place, the compelling plot, and the three-dimensional characters.  I immediately started reading the series in order, beginning with the first book, Open Season.

After doing so, I would impress upon others the importance of reading the series in order.  Without revealing too much, I will admit that having listened to In Plain Sight first, I knew how some situations were going to turn out in earlier books.  This knowledge wasn't enough to spoil the other books, but I didn't feel the full impact of the events. 

C.J. Box has created a most believable character in Joe Pickett, a game warden in fictional Saddle String, Wyoming.  Joe is far from perfect, and he sometimes suffers from errors in judgment, but this makes him more real to the reader.  Box also brings in environmental and conservation topics, and he does a fine job of showing the reader that there are very few pure black and white areas in these issues.  The shades of gray often provide fodder for many plot twists. 

There are few series where I try to have the next installment in hand before turning the last page of the current book, but this is one of them.  If you are longing for a literary escape to the West, try C.J. Box.

Grounded in the Truth

As the daughter of a career newspaper writer, I feel compelled to maintain my subscription to the daily print paper.  I enjoy perusing it in a leisurely manner over breakfast, confident that a squirting grapefruit will not cause any electrical device to short circuit.  This past Saturday, however, I nearly experienced a short circuit of a different type.  I could not believe what I had just read.  Audio of the formidable "Miss O" (Miss O'Sullivan) at St. Mary's Episcopal School for Girls began playing in my head; she was a veritable Grammar Czarina, and the governing document of her domain was Walsh's Plain English Handbook.  My copy is dutifully shelved in the "language" section of my nonfiction bookcase, and I consulted it for confirmation of my observation.

The following sentence appeared an article about a suspect's surrender after a hostage situation:

"Officers quickly surrounded XXX as he lied on the ground."  

My mental image was of the suspect's telling falsehoods in the dirt.  But why would he talk to the dirt?  Perhaps he was fabricating some story while on the ground?  Then I realized that the Associated Press writer most certainly meant that the suspect was prone or supine as he was surrounded.  In plain English, he LAY on the ground.  I hope that perhaps some overzealous copy editor made the "correction" and that an AP writer did not commit this grammar infraction.  One of the disadvantages of print is that the error lives in perpetuity unless the story is corrected and reprinted.  In the electronic world such sins can be wiped clean without a trace.  Instant grammar absolution!  "Miss O" would have liked that.

And that's no lie.

Confessions of a Middle-Aged Nerd

Books, dogs, music . . . okay, lots of people have these hobbies.  Some truly cool people have these hobbies.  I am here to confess that I am not one of the truly cool.  I'm not even marginally chilly.  I am, and always have been, a nerd.  Oh, I tried to deny it through my teens, and I could belt out "Louie Louie" with the best of them at college fraternity/sorority pledge swaps, but deep down in my heart of hearts, I KNEW that I was a nerd.  By some stroke of lucky fate, I found another nerd to marry.  He watched me eat green jello in the dining hall for almost a year before introducing himself, but that is fodder for another post.

A couple of years ago I discovered what must be one of the Quintessential Nerd Pastimes:  jigsaw puzzles.  I confess to shopping for them the way many women shop for shoes, and I have the boxes stacked in a closet to prove it.  Perhaps working on a puzzle triggers some region of the brain that releases Happy Nerd Serotonin, but I find these puzzles rather addictive.  It is amazing that this type of concentration can actually be extremely relaxing; maybe it is because the visual and spatial reasoning required is outside the realm of my workaday world.

Only a certain type of puzzle provides a respite from the daily grind; a fine balance exists between challenge and frustration.  My balance point seems to fall in the 300- to 500- piece range, especially if the pieces are categorized as "Easy Grasp" or "Oversized" (often touted as perfect for those "older or less agile" puzzlers).  Detailed artwork and multiple colors are the most enjoyable.  The fisherman and mountains with reflection in a lake was abandoned after a few hours.  There was nothing relaxing about sorting all blue-green pieces.  In duplicate.

Here is one of my favorites from last summer; this photo does not do it justice, but the details inside the diner were just plain fun.  So, if you are stressed and looking for an inexpensive, non-fattening path to relaxation, clear off the dining room table, turn on a good light, and feel a tiny triumph with each interlocking peace piece.

FX Schmid makes fabulous puzzles.

Book Clubs of Yesteryear

How excited I always was when my teacher distributed the new book club fliers each month!  They were printed on the cheapest of newsprint, which made them almost impossible to mark with pencil, but oh, the wonders those leaflets contained.  The listing of books seemed positively endless at the time, but looking back through adult eyes, I am sure the titles only numbered in the twenties.  Most books were priced either 50 or 75 cents.  I would make my initial selections and take the form home for money and most likely a parent's signature.  Our teacher must have dreaded sorting out the returned slips and their attendant coins, but she dutifully submitted our orders.

In a couple of weeks the box would arrive, and our treasures would be distributed.   Two books from book club days stand out in my mind: the red and gray book about Abraham Lincoln, and the book of Baba Yaga stories.  I remember reading and rereading both of those titles many times.  The Abraham Lincoln book was certainly interesting, but I must admit that much of its appeal lay in its being printed with red ink.  I have no idea why it was manufactured in such a way, but the novelty drew me to it time and time again.   

The Baba Yaga stories captured my imagination in a way few other folktales ever did.  I was mesmerized by her house's being built on chicken legs, and I thrilled to her traveling in a mortar and pestle.  Why were the chicken legs so memorable?  Was it because I loved drumsticks as a child?  Nowadays we educators would try to prompt the child reader to "make connections", and this would be termed a "text-to-self connection".  BAH! I enjoyed the image and the stories, plain and simple.  They fired my imagination and made me eager to read even more.  Reveling in a tale well told is reading's own reward.

The Bibliohound

Welcome to my blog. I have absolutely no illusions about its ever being read by more than a handful of people, if that many. This is more of a personal project, a place to set forth my ramblings and reflect on things literary and canine: hence the "Bibliohound". I am by no means an expert on either subject, but they both bring great joy to my life.

So, who is the Bibliohound? I am a school librarian by profession, an avid reader (when I don't fall asleep after a busy day), and the human leader of a pack of sighthounds, currently three greyhounds and one whippet. I adopted my first greyhound in 1995 and have been involved in greyhound adoption ever since. That same year I discovered lure coursing with my first greyhound, and I still help out with trials for a couple of local clubs. Four of my five greyhounds completed basic obedience courses, and three of those earned their CGC (Canine Good Citizen) certification. Max, my red boy, is my most recent obedience student. He is surprisingly motivated for such a laid-back fellow, and he is a lot of fun to work. If I can scrounge up the time, I would love to pursue beginning agility or perhaps rally obedience with him. It's amazing how the human-hound bond grows when training.

On this blog (in this blog??) there will be musings on books, dogs, and music, with no pretense of authority and no desire to enter into academic debate. Oh, and current education buzzwords are strongly discouraged (collaboration, Professional Learning Community, assessment, differentiation, chunking, scaffolding, rubric, portfolio, and the one that makes my every nerve jangle . . . best practices).