Chocolate Roll Festival - Now they tell me...

             Seems a favorite expression in NE Arkansas is “I’ve had worse.” The first time I heard it, I was shocked into silence. What is that statement saying? The concoction is terrible, but there are things that taste worse, like NyQuil? This recipe tastes like shoe leather and most likely has some in it, or worse (think The Help and Minny’s Pie Recipe).

That phrase (I’ve had worse) is uttered only in this northeast corner of Arkansas, as if it’s a “Well, she tried, bless her heart.” Nothing remains to be said after the remark, "I've had worse." The reason I was on the receiving end of this remark: chocolate rolls.

Chocolate Rolls: the ultimate chocolate-fantasy, NE Arkansas delicacy. Cooks auction big jars of chocolate rolls, one jar going for an astronomical price.  The winner hoarded the stash and did not pass the jar among friends, instead secreted one for himself when he thought no one was looking.  I was looking, hoping. 

No one claims to have a recipe for chocolate rolls and if there is a family recipe secreted away in a family Bible, written in Old English, no one shares.

So, I attempted chocolate rolls with no recipe. I had seen one and tasted one. What the heck, I’ll just make it up.  How hard can it be?

Well, they were not too bad.  There was warm, gooey chocolate involved. Though they were not sweet enough and the roll part was not soft, smooth and pastry-like enough, Marvin said, “the second one tasted better.” Now, there is a man who wishes to live to taste a third one.

My neighbor-teen said, “Hmmm... I’ve had worse.”

 

Watching Dysfunction in Someone Else's Family

            Meryl Streep is a brilliant actress.  How does she reach into herself and pull out the main character in August: Osage County?  Meryl Streep brings to life a wretched and brutal woman at the head of a dysfunctional family, including Julia Roberts who gives a deeply emotional performance, herself. The language  in the movie sets ears on fire and the secrets that vomit onto the scenes are shocking.   

           When I saw the ad for August: Osage County starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, Sam Shepard and Dermott Mc... with a headline “Wickedly Funny” I was thinking “adult comedy.”  My friends, this movie is funny as a funeral is funny when a family member rises to dance to music no one else hears.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a movie as un-funny as this one.  Nevertheless, I laughed – primarily in shock at the revelations, the situations, and the vile, though fitting, language.

              August: Osage County won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play also won a Tony.  Originally a stage play and then a screen play, the author, Tracy Letts was totally involved, but John Wells is the director.  George Clooney is one of the producers.  The movie is powerful, as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Death of a Salesman are powerful dark dramas adapted for the big screen.

                August: Osage County is an adult comedy, a film about family for adults who have lived long enough to understand how families become completely dysfunctional, and are grateful their families are not as screwed up as the one on the screen.  It’s  brutal, it’s darkly funny, and I’d see it again.  The Broadway play must have been a powerful experience to witness; after three hours, a patron would be emotionally exhausted. 
               
                  I remain mesmerized by Meryl Streep’s enormous talent.

Laid Out in Lavender

With the sweetest of voices, I can tell a person about a cabbage eating cow and will be thanked for all my words.
Additionally, I can spring forth as Evelyn Couch, driving with lots of insurance.  Take that, you heffer, and while you’re at it, enjoy this, too. Fannie Flagg told us all about it in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.

[Evelyn is cut off in a parking lot]
Hey! I was waiting for that spot!
Face it, lady, we're younger and faster!
[Evelyn rear-ends the other car six times]
What are you *doing*?
Are you *crazy*?
Evelyn Couch: Face it, girls, I'm older and I have more insurance.

Legendary tales of miraculous survival are told around campfires. Those who have had their guts stomped out and their legs cut off by my tongue share hair-raising details.  Car salesmen spring to mind.  I once made a furious U-turn, drove back to a car dealership, and said what I’d forgotten to mention.  Nothing was welling up inside that was not allowed to escape.
I’ve explained to business owners how their establishments would go up in flames and their livelihoods down the toilet when I finished the incantation they deserved, how nothing would remain of  the brick and mortar but a bad memory. One particular Shoney’s burned within weeks.        
Did you know that telephone operators pull the plug if language wounds their hyper-sensitivity? That was a time before cell phones, and I needed money, right then. The ATM would not comply. How a telephone operator got between me, my ex-husband, and $30 I don’t recall. When I’m on a roll, I tumble head over heels, picking up speed as I race down-hill to the cesspool. Just don’t get me started.

Evelyn Couch: I never get mad, Miss Threadgoode, never, the way I was raised, it was bad manners. Well I got mad, and it felt great. I felt like I could just beat the shit out of all those punks! Excuse my language. And then when I finish with those punks, I'll take on all the wife beaters like Frank Bennett, machine gun their genitals.
Towanda will go on a rampage, I'll slip tiny bombs into Penthouse and Playboys so they explode when you open them. I'll ban all fashion models who weigh under 130 pounds! And I'll give half the military budget to people over 65 and declare wrinkles sexually desirable.

I’m reading Sullivan’s Island by Dorothea Benton Frank.  The narrator, Susan Hayes, shares an episode involving her Catholic school’s bus driver who prayed, said Hail Marys, and alternately cursed at the rough-neck boys causing holy terror in the back of the bus.  She, according to narrator Susan, was “pissed off in purple.” There’s a new one.
She further explains how she politely told her soon-to-be ex-husband’s floosy to leave tales of sexual adventure out of conversations with their daughter.  I was highlighting on my Kindle and laughing until tears ruined my eye makeup and the black drippings blinded me.  The end of the conversation, with sweetness dripping from her lips:  “You’ll find concubine and repugnant in the dictionary – if you own one- which I seriously doubt.” I’d say she “laid her out in lavender.”
“Laid out in lavender” is new vocabulary for me. Shared with me by a sweet friend, this phrase once meant to physically beat someone unconscious.  How rude. The lavender masked the smell of the dead body.  Ruder, still.  Today, it means a verbal tongue-lashing.
I'm told that if a person uses a word (phrase) frequently, it will cement to the memory. I don’t think there will be a problem.

Holidays and Houseguests

         My ex-father-in-law, long deceased, quipped, “I feel like the Army moved out.”  He had 5 children, all married; his oldest son had 6, and daughter had 2 who had 3 each.  You get the picture. Family from out of town visited and stayed a while over the Christmas holidays. Where are those ruby slippers?

          My situation is not at all like his, but I, too, feel like the Army moved out.  It’s marvelous to have family visit, have them with me for Christmas. The delight with houseguests is that they have homes of their own– their own adult abodes where they enjoy their own routines.  I'm sure they are in agreement: there's no place like home, your own. 

           I’ve become very comfortable in my routine, busy on my schedule.  Morning coffee (2 cups), newspaper, and Facebook to check on the comings and goings of people I care about.  If I’m industrious, I might start a load of laundry and think about what I’ll cook for supper. And, I’ll write something, perhaps just a paragraph, each day. All from my chair in the living room.  And suddenly, it’s 10AM.
           Heavenly Days, it’s the week of Christmas: D-Day and the invasion.  I’m excited, like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. I’ve thought about it and planned for it, dreamed of sugarplums and sighed over landscapes and snowy beauty.  The cars roll in, the Griswolds pile out and the fun begins. And continues. One batch goes home and another arrives.  My shoulders get higher and higher, closer and closer to my ears. I want it to be so perfect as if I'm expecting Norman Rockwell, smiling and painting the scene unfolding before him.
            We are not perfect, and neither are the holidays. Norman Rockwell's Americana series  captured one moment of time, the second before the turkey blew up.
            The holidays have passed into memory.  The artificial, pre-lit trees are boxed up and the ornaments have been wrapped and sorted into their nesting places.  We’ve enjoyed the last of the desserts and cookies, except for the cheese balls, a hidden stash, for later.
                    The houseguests have gone home and we resort again to weekly telephone calls, photos, short visits and Facebook to stay involved with each other’s lives.
                    When spring signals the arrival of budding trees and flowering shrubs, when there’s more sunshine than icicles, we’ll remember the special time we spent together during the holidays and, of course, plan to do it all over again.

Voodoo Priestess Conjurs Polar Vortex

The Estate Sale ad in the Commercial Appeal promised “Selling Mother’s Things. Attic Emptied. Everything Must Go.”  My friend and I fortified ourselves with early-bird McDonald’s coffee and were certain we’d be first in line for this promising sale.  As we pulled up to the house of treasures, we were excited about a great parking place.  Something was amiss, though. The sign in the yard:  Sale Cancelled.

“Doooo…not…sell…my…things…,” intoned Mama who must have risen up to add some clarity to the situation. Enough said.

It’s been a few years since that adventure with antiques and archeological finds, so many years that I must have forgotten the lesson from Mama, the voodoo priestess. I’m currently researching the possible sale of my mother’s furs. She unloaded the fox stoles belonging to my grandmother, the stoles that had kept my grandmother fashionably warm and me occupied in church during my single-digit years.  It was the chomping mouth hanging on to a fox tail or a little girl’s finger that provided the entertainment.  PETA, forgive me for thinking it quite hilarious and glamorous.

I wore Mother’s coat once (a stroller, it’s called) in a NYC blizzard and felt both quite warm and quite unfashionable. Looking like an “autumn-haze” polar bear cloaked in what Mother purchased in the mid-1980’s, I sported no Coca-Cola smile and felt out of sync with fashion and the eco-friendly world.

 I wonder how much I could get for her stroller and the fitted stole?

A trip to Memphis and a noted furrier explained the racket.  I can’t get squat.  The trade-in venture for a nice stroller-length coat with modern style or a possible remake is a daunting procedure and almost price prohibitive since I don’t play the lottery.  Ebay or Etsy pricing is ridiculously low for these pieces. Driving home, I felt pin pricks. 

I think Mother has decreed what will be. When she moved in with me, she brought two moving vans to Memphis, each loaded with her treasures and family heirlooms. Regardless of the era to which these treasures belonged, heirlooms are not to be sold.

Consideration of such a capitalistic venture calls forth the voodoo priestess who wags her finger and says, “You might be glad you have that coat. What if there’s a polar vortex?”

“Ouch!”

Waiting for Snow

           

Waiting for snow requires patience.

The silence of falling snow is a powdered sugar dream, making all things new and fresh. A silver-white glow radiates across the landscape. Window expanses reveal a frosted field, just as delicious in appearance as ice cream atop a warm dessert.  The white vision, the quiet of a snowy blanket beg for a cup of hot chocolate, topped with whipped cream. 

It'll be worth the wait.

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week, you can begin paving hell with them as usual. (Mark Twain)

              Mother believed my arrival would come a full month earlier:  December, 1948.  I refused, I guess, bullheaded and stubborn within the womb. Instead, I greeted 1949, 13 days in, 1 day after my mother’s own birthday. We share the warm, bright garnet as a birthstone, in contrast to this cold month.

                              The Roman god Janus reigned at the passage between then and yet to be.  His faces, two of them, looked to the past and to the future simultaneously. His name is etched into the Gregorian calendar that we use:  January, the first month of the New Year celebrating opportunity for fresh beginnings.
                    Perhaps it is because I’ve spent the better part of my life with a school calendar that I treasure January.  Shutting down the old and starting up the new is a pattern inherent within school calendars. January boasts opportunity to start anew.
                       I look for opportunity to right the wrongs of yesterday with a chance to get it right “next year.” Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow, according to Albert Einstein(e=mc²).
                   The traditional Southern New Year’s Day meal will be served all day January 1 with ham and cornbread on the side.  White beans with ham, boiled cabbage, black-eyed peas are mainstays each New Year’s Day.

 According to folklore, this Southern tradition dates back to the Civil War, when Union troops pillaged the land, leaving behind such as might be used as animal fodder. Rich in nutrients, these were the humble foods that enabled Southerners to survive. Each dish combines to celebrate a communion bound by grateful hearts and renewed hope for good things yet to come.
                       Today, January 1, 2014. I look back and am grateful. I’ll correct what went awry. No “do-overs” but a chance to “do-right,” or at least better. Being realistic, I rarely make resolutions, for I know my tendency toward weak will-power.  I do, however, plan to learn from yesterday’s goofs and attempt to do a better job regarding health and relationships.
                       When my birthday arrives, I’ll follow the trail blazed by friends’ footsteps, friends whose encouragement will continue to shout that age is just a number.  I will glide gracefully into age 65, displaying that Red, White, and Blue ID the next time I’m “carded.”