Fruitcake

            It was my first Christmas in Greece. Christmas in Athens in those days was a minor holiday; there were no carols, trees or decorations to speak of. I was pregnant and homesick and couldn’t understand much of anything. The kind Trimis family called me their nyphi—their bride—and used another word which sounded like Ka-ee-men-ee. When I began to understand Greek, I discovered that the word meant “poor little thing.”

            I had dismayed the family by having to excuse myself from the dinner table when I saw the treat they had prepared  in my honor for American Thanksgiving: Octopus.             Now I wanted to redeem myself by making an American treat for them: Fruitcake.

            With a great deal of help and with notes scribbled in phonetic Greek, I assembled all the ingredients. I had  karidia (nuts), phrouta (fruit), zahari (sugar) voutero (butter) and alevri (flour.) There was no Greek word for baking powder, which was simply called bay-ek-keen.

            The enormous kitchen was well-appointed, with a European range and oven, a point-of-use water heater, and a real ice box for which a block of ice was delivered every week. I mixed my ingredients according to a recipe I had come by somehow, put the cake pan in the oven, and was perplexed that the heat settings didn’t go as high as 350 degrees.

            The family suggested I use the highest setting and cook the fruitcake a little longer, but after about twenty minutes, it became obvious that something was burning. That’s how I learned about the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit. 350 degrees Fahrenheit is 662 Celsius.

            The Trimises were very sorrowful that my American cake looked like a very large charcoal briquette. I wrapped it up in a napkin and took it to my room. Sometimes I would nibble on it, occasionally finding a piece of candied fruit which had survived the cremation.

Dragon

The Dragon and I are just beginning to become acquainted.

I resisted the idea of voice recognition software. My way of writing involves a fair amount of back-and-forth  about word choice. I'm not as bad as Flaubert, who supposedly rolled on the floor, gnashing his teeth, searching for just the right word. However, I do like the sensation of trying out words, rather than composing entirely in one's mind and dictating the result. When I'm writing poetry, I actually have to do it longhand because it is such a slow process.

The Dragon for me is a byproduct of carpal tunnel surgery. Because my problems with carpal tunnel syndrome involved years of piano playing and typing, my surgeon suggested getting voice recognition software in order to reduce typing and therefore to reduce some repetitive motion. "Save your hands for the piano,"  he said.

Coincidentally, I am looking at a news article which says SAT reading and writing scores have dropped to a 40 year low this year. The College Board, which administers the test all college-bound students must take,  estimates that only 43% of SAT takers in this year's freshman class were well prepared for studies at four-year colleges. Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, said when “when less than half of kids who want to go to college are prepared to do so, (the preparation) system is failing.”

My Dragon is quick, accurate, can spell correctly. Even if it did make Mr. Caperton "Mr. Coppertone" before I corrected it.. 

Sometimes, playing a really good, responsive piano, I get the impression that I am dealing with a frisky animal which is anxious to please.  My initial impressions of Dragon are the same. I think it is trying hard, even though I know that a team of clever engineers has tweaked it and tweaked it until it could pretty much type what the user spoke.

 Imagine, however, if some of those students making such miserable scores on the SATs were able to compose their essays with a voice recognition program.They could give the impression of being literate when in fact they are not.

In such a hypothetical case, you might even call voice recognition software a an attractive nuisance.

As for me, I am willing for a while to try being a talker rather than a writer.

Another Side of Mother

            She could only play one song on the piano: “Home, Sweet Home.” But she played it with both hands and an Alberti bass.

            As a little girl, she liked to draw and write poetry.

            She played in a ukulele and harmonica band in grammar school.

            She knew all the words to “The Prisoner’s Song.”

            She kept a scrapbook on the Status of Women for her WSCS Methodist group long before anyone ever talked about feminism.

            Her purse smelled like chewing gum because she kept treats for a child who grew bored at church.

            She would have been valedictorian of her high school class except for me.

            As it was, she was voted the Flappingest Flapper.

            She ran away to marry Daddy when she was 17 years old on August 4, 1935. They were married 50 years.

            She named me for her sister Elizabeth and for a Civilian Conservation Corps boy named Michael who was allowed to walk her to church. She said she just liked the name and didn’t care whether it was a girl’s name or a boy’s name. Elizabeth had too many syllables, so it was shortened to Lysbeth. She called me both names when I was in trouble.

            When I repeated a racial epithet I had heard at school, she said in her scariest voice “I don’t ever want you to say that word again.” I still can’t say it.

            The strongest word I ever heard her use was “Criminy.”

            She was little, but she was brave and physically strong. She could lift boulders. And she could be fierce, a quality I have admired all my life.

            She listened to Roosevelt’s third term inaugural address on the radio. She cried when he died. She hardly ever cried.

            She never really got over my brother Lindle’s death.

            She only had one cookbook.

            She drew the line at cleaning fish.

            She didn’t care for off-color jokes. She couldn’t really tell a joke because she always garbled the punch line.

            She read every Erle Stanley Gardner mystery ever written.

            When my sophisticated college boyfriend said he thought she had good taste, I was astonished. I didn’t know she had any taste at all.

            I overheard her having a political discussion with a smart lawyer. “You can’t beat City Hall,” she said.

            She had three older sisters with college degrees, but she had us instead. When I asked her what she would have studied in college, she said “Why, History, of course.”

            On my 76^th birthday this June 8, she phoned me up and said “I just wanted to tell you that I think we did a good job with you.”

           (Frances Ensor Benedict, May 16, 1918-September 2, 2012)

            

Writer's Block

            “What’s that in the bowl?”

            My journalist friend and I were looking at a photo taken at my first real job, when I was a copy boy at The News-Sentinel in Knoxville. I was the first female copy boy they’d ever had, so the reporters often shouted “Boy! I mean Girl!”

            “It’s a paste pot,” I said.

            “A PASTE pot?”

            “We pasted the pages end to end and cut off the bottom with a column rule. I was probably doing television listings.”
            “Well, we all had to do television listings,” she said, laughing.

            A couple of years ago, I started a mystery novel set at a big newspaper in the old days. I have a large binder full of notes, lists, and false starts. The story is about a crazed concrete worker who wants to be a famous artist, and a cub reporter who winds up naked in a vat of plaster of Paris.

            What I really wanted to write about was how newspapers used to be in the days before computers, in the days where almost everybody read newspapers and most people took them seriously. The crash of the Linotype machines, the sucking sound of the pneumatic tubes which delivered things between the newsroom and the composing room, the throb of the presses: That's what I wanted to write about.

            The first poem I had published was about those sounds. Graphic Arts Monthly bought the poem and sent me a check for what it called my “filler.”

            I don’t much care about the story line of the mystery, and it shows. The reporter’s name has changed several times, her grandmother has moved from Knoxville to San Francisco and back, and even the seasons have progressed rapidly from spring to winter. I have a dozen Chapter Ones.

            We had five deadlines a day at The News-Sentinel (as well as a policy that the “T” in “The” had to be capitalized.) I pestered C.W. Orcutt, the managing editor, for a job while he was on the Home Edition deadline, and I think he hired me just to get me out of his chair. I joined the Newspaper Guild. Once a week I picked up my paycheck, $49 minus Guild dues, for five eight-hour days a week on swing shift.

            I still dream about The News-Sentinel. Sometimes I have been away on assignment and haven’t been paid for a long time. Someone in the newsroom tells me where the cashier is located, since the building has changed. Sometimes I have moved back to Knoxville and the paper has hired me back, the way they did when I came back from Greece. Some times I am worried because I have lost my notes or missed a deadline.

            Maybe that’s what I need in order to finish my mystery novel: A deadline. Or maybe a paste pot.

            

Queen Anne's Sign

In the days when newspapers were known as the Fourth Estate, copy editors sat around a U-shaped desk, cutting, clarifying and checking whatever the reporters and news services put out.

We were known as the Masters of Little Known and Useless Facts...such as the fact that the word restaurateur has no “n” and people from Ghana are Ghanaians, not Ghanans.

I have accumulated any number of new little known and useless facts since I started doing crossword puzzles (the definitions of “olla” and “etui” among them), and during a game of Bananagrams last week I learned that there are names for the Solfège notes between Do, Re, Mi, Sol, La and Ti. Imagine!

But the most interesting useless fact I’ve come across recently concerns Queen Anne’s Sign or the Sign of Hertoghe. It is the thinning or loss of the outer third of the eyebrows, a sign of hypothyroidism often disguised by women with a clever stroke of the eyebrow pencil. Wikipedia demonstrates Queen Anne’s Sign with a 1612 portrait of Anne of Denmark.

The Fourth Estate, the press, by the way, came after the First Estate (clergy), the Second Estate  (nobility), and the Third Estate, commoners. The term implied an importance and dignity which not everyone would accord newspapers since journalism became media.

Precious Ramotswe

Precious Ramotswe, the creation of Alexander McCall Smith, is one of my favorite fictional characters. She's right up there with Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey, E.F. Benson's Lucia and Dostoyevsky's Myshkin.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection is the latest in McCall Smith's series which began with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. In Mma Ramotswe's Botswana, nobody dies; they instead may become late. An orphan farm figures prominently in the stories, but the thing which has created so many African orphans is never named. Instead, we hear how house mothers try to take care of all these children of late parents and how Precious steps in to solve the mystery of a board member who wants to replace the households with a dormitory to save money...and get a kickback from the contractor.

The books are full of quiet courtesies, kindness, good versus evil, sanity and wisdom.

Preparing to go out into the bush in search of the orphan farm matron who, despairing, has gone back to her lands after being fired by the crooked board member, Precious tries to reassure her husband, Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, that she will be fine despite the dangers of driving her ancient little van to the edge of the Kalahari desert.

"I have known many cars that have died out in the bush," Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni says. "And that has meant a very long walk for their drivers."

"That is a risk we shall take," Precious replies. "It is the same with people. People can become late at any time--just like that. But that does not mean that we should not do anything and not go anywhere just because there is a possibility that we may suddenly become late."

What I Did for Love

 May 10, 2012: Got up at 4:45 A.M. after cat reached Stage Four annoyance level (walking on glasses). Groggy, lost balance but caught self on ikon, of all things. Ikon did not pull off the wall. Good. Fed cat. Went back to bed.

            Got up for real. Straightened ikon. Made bed. Went to computer to check on baby falcons atop the PGE building in San Francisco. (The two males, Perry and Sutro, have fledged, but the girls, Amelia and Electra, are still in the nest on the 33^rd floor.)

            Began looking for “What I Did for Love” for the Chorale.

            After searching in the studio, opened heavy oak library ladder and climbed up to put sleeping bags and pillows back in the eaves (Our last house guest left a month ago.) Put away ladder, replaced music stand, stand light, boxes, etc.

            Sneezing from studio dust. Took antihistamine.

            Watered the yard with hand-held hose. (The yard is a quarter-acre.) Tried to think of other places that sheet music might be.

            Answered e-mail.

            Moved couch to get at music books behind couch. Lifted couch to replace wheel which came off. Moved more furniture and searched old files and four more bookshelves for “What I Did for Love.” I guess I lent my Broadway Music book to somebody and never got it back. Looked in car trunk. Found AP Music Theory book which had been there five years, but no “What I Did for Love.”

            Ordered “What I Did for Love” on line.

            Checked falcons. Girls still afraid to fly.

            Answered e-mail.

            Washed dishes (by hand).

            Ate breakfast.

            Watered house plants.

            Resolutions:  Make donation to the falcon rescue people. Throw out five thousand pages of photocopied music which I never play and can’t find anyway.