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Doin’ the Lighten-Up

Nov28

What kind of country schedules four major annual holidays within a period of 60 days? Answer: America the Bootiefull. Every year we spend ten months a year trying to recover from and lose weight gained during two consecutive months of seasonal stuffing. Beginning with Halloween and ending with New Years, traditional holiday goodies are more trick than treat, more jowl-ly than jolly.

Actually, even if you don’t eat a lot of holiday goodies, the odds are you’re ingesting thousands more calories than usual for you. This is because holiday foods were invented by people who thought butter, sugar, and eggs constituted their own food group. What other time of the year can you consume a 2” cookie containing more calories than the daily allotment for an NFL linebacker?

Over the years, I’ve become adept at lightening up my mother’s holiday recipes. Believe me, it can be done and without altering the flavor. Most of the ingredients I substitute are empty calories you never miss. For instance, replace eggs with egg substitute, and in some cases, melted butter with reconstituted Butter Buds™. These two changes function beautifully in Mama’s dressing, eliminating a truckload of calories, a blessing because I haven’t figured out how to lighten up the cornbread and dried white bread. Applesauce can be substituted for oil in baked goods, which brings my pumpkin bread into the realm of reason. As I mentioned in my Thanksgiving blog, killer pies can be replaced by manslaughter mini-pies, eliminating much booty-bound fat.

My point is, if you just think about it, you can probably lighten up your family’s traditional recipes, too, and even your crabbiest relatives will never know the difference. It’s unrealistic to expect people to pass up holiday foods in favor of a sensible diet, but you can minimize the impact with a few simple changes. And when you’re finished, you won’t feel so much like that stuffed turkey.

I’m still working on lightening the menu for Christmas and New Year’s Day. I haven’t decided whether our traditional Christmas chili will be a tasty vegetarian version or made with lean bison in lieu of beef. The tamales will certainly be of the vegetarian or chicken variety. (You don’t really want to know what the traditional ones are made from anyway.) And as for my New Year’s blackeyed peas, I can’t do much about those calories, once I eliminate the slab bacon my mother cooked with hers. I’m open to suggestions.

So do your family and yourself a favor this year. Do the lighten-up with those holiday recipes, before your clothes do the tighten-up. You won’t be deprived of the holiday munch-down, and you’ll feel a lot better afterwards.

 

We Gather Together…Cautiously

Nov19

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, but it has evolved over the years into something quite different from the ones I remember from childhood. Those were gatherings of family members who rarely saw each other the rest of the year, after the force-fed camaraderie of November and December. In those days, I was part of a large and cautiously friendly family.

The family backstory is long and complex, and I’m not sure I ever really heard it all or got it straight. And that was just on my mother’s side. My father’s relatives were equally absent most of the year, although at least they had the excuse of living out-of-town. I liked most of my relatives on both sides, but I heard a lot of grumbling from my older siblings. I think they would have preferred to be invited to Gettysburg for holiday dinners with the Eisenhowers. The result is I never learned to be part of any family, even my immediate one.

Lest this turn into bona fide cheap therapy, I’ll move on to talk about the type of Thanksgiving we have engineered to suit our needs, which we will enjoy again this year. We prefer to approach the holidays carefully. Part of the family is on the same basic diet and likes mostly the same foods. That group, which I’ll call Team Kale, will gather on Thanksgiving Day to eat lots of vegetables and lightened traditional foods.

My daughter is part of Team Kale, and every year she and I have our one family tradition moment with the raw dressing. The recipe has exact measurements except for the moistening chicken broth, so every year I add and stir until it looks right. At that point I call my daughter into the kitchen and say, “See, Megan, this is what it’s supposed to look like.”

“Right, Mama, I see” she replies as if answering ritual questions at a seder. I smile, having  fulfilled the tradition, and we don’t discuss dressing again until next year.

Over the next few days, we will visit the rest of our family groups, hopefully as less a part of the problem and more solution-oriented. We’ll visit calmly, with decorum, making tentative forays and returning before dark. It may be odd, but it works for us.

The point is, we have looked into the abyss that is a ridiculously closely-spaced holiday season in America, and we have blinked. Because there are no longer aging grandparents (other than us) to accommodate with a gathering of the clan, we have managed to bring a very Kilgorean sense of order to the chaos.

Christmas will be approached with the same caution. Gift-opening was an orderly business in my childhood home. Everyone sat and watched as one person opened all their presents. Order was determined by age, progressing from the youngest to the oldest. When I married Bryan, he threw this rather Prussian approach out the window, and we adopted his family custom of taking turns opening gifts, which also ensured reactions were seen by all, but in a more happy-go-lucky format.

I’m here to tell you, holidays are complicated, family dynamics are byzantine, and neither is for the faint-hearted. I wish all of you a wonderful holiday season, starting with Thanksgiving this week. Don’t be concerned if you come to my house and see signs in the yard that say, “Slow—Rough Pavement Ahead,” or “Reduce Speed—Loose Rocks.” It’s just our way of proceeding with caution.

Texas History for the Birds?

Nov4

This monument stands in a charming little park in San Antonio. It shows Old Ben Milam asking who will follow him into Bexar (San Antonio). The row of pigeons resting on his rifle struck me as funny, but I reasoned it was better to be for the birds than go to the dogs.

Being Texan is a fulltime job. At work or play, we are Texans. When traveling abroad, if asked where we hail from, the answer is always, “Texas!” Not America or the U.S., but Texas. Only the most remote Amazon natives would fail to recognize the name, and even they might get it, given a few additional hints like, “Dallas! The Alamo! Willie Nelson!”

Texans aren’t just born; we’re made. We teach Texas history in elementary and middle school.  Prospective teachers have to pass a course in Texas history to get certified. We won’t let you near our kids if you don’t Remember the Alamo.

Texas history classes also serve to educate those seeking naturalized Texan citizenship. In the 19th century, Texas was the destination for thousands of settlers who wanted do-overs on the American Dream. My own mother was born in Tennessee. She travelled via the great Tennessee-Texas Turnpike, a little-known piece of infrastructure used whenever that state was tilted, causing about half its population to roll downhill into Texas. This explains why most Texans know that “holler” doesn’t only mean “to yell,” a fact unknown in New Mexico or Arizona.

Many of our early Texas heroes were known for glorious, lopsided battles in which they were killed. Later on they were known for glorious, lopsided battles in which they did the killing–of bandits, rustlers, Native Americans, and shepherds. Still later, they became famous for glorious, lopsided mineral rights deals, which brought millions of dollars to the oil companies and gave the landowners a fine down payment on a new chicken.

Like Willie, my heroes have always been cowboys. It’s hard to view them in their natural habitat, the working ranch, but if you avoid the interstates and take smaller state roads, you will see them in the towns. You don’t have to hang out in ranch stores where they sell exotics like squeeze chutes and calving chains. All you have to do is drop in at the local café VERY early in the morning. About 6:00 a.m. they meander in, take their usual chair at their usual table, and greet their look-alike friends with a nod and as few words as possible. The waitress doesn’t ask for their orders; she just brings their coffee, hot and strong, and keeps the refills coming.

Their lives are etched on their faces. Eyes crinkle at well-worn stories, while they stir their coffee to cool it down. After a while, displaying true telepathy, they shift their eyes from one to another, unfold themselves from their chairs, and leave, a ritual repeated in a hundred little cafes every day.

No Texan questions teaching our kids Texas history. Crockett, Houston, Travis, et al are prologue to history still being made. It’s not being made in Dallas or Houston but in little cafes in tiny towns that dot the state. The people in those towns remember the Alamo, the Dustbowl, when local oil fields played out, and the years they found a way to feed their livestock when it would have been smarter to shoot them. Texas history isn’t for the birds. It’s for Texans.

Time Machine Tune-Up

Oct29

On September 23, I wrote about plans to attend my 45th high school reunion. I had doubts I’d made the right decision, but my husband and I went this past weekend. I’ll be stopping by Sonic tonight for an order of crow with a side of fries.

Bryan and I decided to play tourist in San Antonio, my home until 1980. We checked into the Country Inn, a very nice mo/ho/tel a stone’s throw from the site of Saturday’s soiree. Then we went for dinner at Adelante, a surprisingly Austinesque, healthy(er) Tex-Mex restaurant near my old high school. Their lard-free policy helps lighten the cuisine, and the menu offers vegetarian and vegan delights, as well as real-deal-just-lighter favorites.  After vegetarian enchiladas and tamales, we went back to the hotel feeling self-righteous and light on our feet.

I grew up in San Antonio, but for once I was grateful for the GPS’s whiney instructions. It’s been a long time since I could navigate the city on autopilot. We headed downtown, bound for El Mercado to shop Mexico without going there. It took some effort to figure out where to park, but after a few false starts we found a place. Enjoying one of  San Antonio’s annual Five Days of Perfect Weather, we walked the couple of blocks to the market. We shopped for treasures unfindable just 90 miles to the north and ate lunch at Mi Tierra. Undoing all the benefits of the previous night’s supper, we pigged out on the delicious-but-deadly version of Tex-Mex.

Fast forward a few hours, after a little rest and a lot of primping, and it was time for my reunion. Checking in and getting a nametag with my full name, Janet Wheeler Kilgore, complete with a black-and-white senior photo of a girl with pretty eyes and an improbable bubble of very dark hair, I was unsure of myself, making mental notes of all the exits. Taking a deep breath, I stepped into a lovely room full of old people. Not that I expected to see the place full of teenagers, but when time-travelling into your past, shouldn’t people at least look familiar? Obviously, my time machine needs a tune-up. The nametags helped tremendously, but even with glasses, by the time I got close enough to read them, I felt obligated to say something, like, “Nice tie!” or “You really need to get that heart murmur looked at!”

People seemed genuinely glad to see me, and I really enjoyed seeing them and catching up. I’d thought of most of them over the years, wondering what became of them. Somewhere between our teens and dotage, I guess we’ve all learned a thing or two. I spent the evening saying, “Hi, I’m Janet Wheeler,” a sentence I hadn’t uttered since my first marriage and name-change in 1971. Questions from our younger days (“Are you going to Prom?” “Is the punch spiked?”) were replaced by, “Do you have grandchildren?” and, of course, “Do you know where the restrooms are?”

I stopped in my tracks at the list of 45 classmates who have passed on. That was definitely the epiphany of the evening for me. My husband was terrific, mingling with ease in a room full of total strangers. He said he enjoyed hearing stories about a time in my life he hadn’t shared, and recalling names and faces was all on me, another plus.

So, I was wrong about my reunion. My memories of high school now have a different quality—lighter, softer, sweeter. I’m so glad I went, and assuming the Mayans were wrong, I’m even looking forward to the next one—the 50th. Groan.

Life’s a Funny Old Dog, or Two or Three

Oct15

Dogs have always been integral part of my life. The few times I was between dogs, I marked the days until had one again. If I’m not careful, I find myself preferring the company of dogs to people. They don’t lie, they don’t complain, and they’re always overjoyed to see me come home, even when I’m just returning from the bathroom.

My husband and I love big dogs, and we had three until a few years ago. Eventually, our home turned into an assisted living facility for geriatric dogs. We coaxed them into living another day, each day, until they creaked into their sixteenth and seventeenth years. The dogs weren’t in pain, just very, very old, and we didn’t want to say goodbye. But finally, when they could no longer stand up, we bowed to the inevitable and had them put down. The first time I saw my husband cry was when he came from work to the vet’s office to say goodbye to Smokey, our coffee table-sized old friend.

We didn’t know it at the time, but that marked the beginning of a new dog era for us. On that day, we accidentally switched to small dogs. The first was my mother-in-law’s dog, which came to us when Mom went into a nursing home. Angie, age 15, is an endearingly unattractive little brown dog. She has an overbite and an overbite and eyes that remind me of Yasser Arafat. She actually came to us in the last days of the dinosaur-dogs, and she seemed so little!

Before long, we rescued two more dogs from a bad situation with a relative. Annie, age 14, is an affectionate piece of fluff, mostly shih tzu, not terribly bright but totally adorable. The only male in the group is Taco, age 4, a black-and-white Chihuahua with a Napoleon complex. Angie, all seventeen pounds of her, was promoted to Big Dog, and she glories in her status. The other two are still duking it out for second place.

Admittedly, it’s like living with the Marx Brothers. These dogs provide the comic relief and chaos missing since our kids grew up and left. They are perfect children. I don’t have to worry about turning them into responsible citizens, no one cares about their politics or religion, and they’re always sorry when they mess up.

Angie, Annie, and Taco are impressed with my opposable-thumb adroitness and relative mental superiority.  If they notice my slower step or creaky joints, it just makes them love me more. They know the old girl unintentionally drops more food on the floor these days. My dogs don’t care that my ancestors didn’t arrive on the Mayflower, or that I can’t trace my lineage back much farther than theirs.

The point is, life’s a funny old dog–not pedigreed, not a show dog. Mine resembles Annie and Angie more than Lassie, Taco more than Rin-Tin-Tin.

And I like it just fine.

 

Politically Incorrect

Oct6

I’m fed up with politics. Everywhere I turn are people telling lies and half-truths. I have to check with PolitiFact.com before I can believe anything any politician says. One candidate says he didn’t mean anything he’s said for the past five years. One says if he can raise as much money as his opponent he can win. So, we buy public office now? I’m no innocent. I know you need money—lots of money—to win a campaign, but I’d like to see a few ideas thrown into the pot, too.

My father had no respect for politicians. He defined elections as the process by which we “take some rascals out and put some rascals in.” I always suspected he cleaned up that aphorism a bit for my benefit. He always told my brother he could be anything he set his mind to, except a politician. (We girls were to get married, learn to cook really well, and raise kids. It never entered his head that one of his daughters might go into politics.) My mother never said much about it, but I think she would have disapproved of my becoming a politician for the same reason she disapproved of a career in nursing: I would see naked people. She was inordinately concerned about that.

You know things are bad when you look back with nostalgia at the election of 1960. I was just a kid then, but I could understand the Kennedy-Nixon campaign. It made a lot of sense that some miner in Appalachia asked John Kennedy if, as president, he would obey instructions from the Pope even if he thought they were bad for the country. We were much less politically correct in those days. Today, only a barbarian would question a candidate’s religion, race, or birth certificate. Right? (The Birthers don’ t scare me much. They will, eventually, find out Hawaii is a state, too.)

Politics is inherently full of pitfalls. Nixon lost a lot of ground after his debates with Kennedy, because he looked like a crook on television, which, as it turned out, was type casting. George (Daddy) Bush lost points for what the media called “the wimp factor.” He came across on television as a milquetoast. Frankly, as a former head of the CIA, he certainly had backbone and was dangerous. If you go all the way back to the campaigns of Eisenhower and Stevenson, Adelai Stevenson lost the 1952 election because he came across as too smart, an “egghead.” Only in America are you denigrated for being too intelligent. (At least we seem to have put that issue behind us.) And considering Richard Nixon made the “egghead” comment, we should have been forewarned.

So, when I can’t stand another minute of today’s rhetoric, I’ll remember the good old days and a presidential campaign that was cogent, dignified, incisive, and even inspired memorable poetry:

Since Kennedy says “cawf,” then Johnson must agree,

That a Texas calf is now a “cawf,” as any fool can see.

So when you go to the market, do not snicker and “lawf.”

Just go in and say, to be quite genteel, “Please give me hawf a cawf.”

Twitter-pated

Sep30

In my never-ending quest to catch up with the 21st Century, I attended a Writers League of Texas workshop this weekend, and it was great. “Social Media 101” was taught by author Shennandoah Diaz, who is smart, funny, and not condescending. She raised my technology comfort level in a way unequalled since Carl Sagan almost managed to explain relativity to me on “Cosmos.”

My career spanned years of breathtaking technological advances for the masses. I was amazed when copiers nudged out carbon paper. Then my IBM typewriter lost out to a personal computer and WordStar. Although fearful of change, I had to make a decision: would I get kicked to the curb of the Information Highway and left for dead, or would I pull up my old lady panties and try to keep up?

Fortunately for me, I took up with my husband at a time when most people thought computers were more voodoo than advance. He was a “systems analyst,” which I spent several years defining for friends and family. First he had to explain it to me, and I dutifully memorized his words and repeated them mechanically when necessary. It didn’t really matter that I didn’t understand what he did; very few people did.

Years passed and technology took over: computer terminals, pc’s, copiers, faxes, scanners, laptops, netbooks, smart phones, and above all, the Internet. As a technical secretary at a high tech research consortium, I encountered the Internet before my husband. At that time there was nothing much on it but researchers and academics sharing esoterica. It’s not like you could turn to it to find the location of the nearest chili dog stand or anything of real importance.  For about fifteen minutes, I was actually ahead of my computer-jock husband on matters technical. That wouldn’t last.

Fast forward to now. I’m a writer. It’s no longer enough to write words for the ages; you have to build a media platform. I heard the other day that some employers won’t consider an interview if you don’t have a Facebook page; Shennandoah said there are lots of publishers who look for your Facebook page before they read your manuscript. If you don’ t have a presence on social media, your work of genius gets tossed, because they want writers who have the wherewithal to sell their books, and nowadays that means Facebook, Twitter, and whatever else rises to the top of the media bog thirty minutes from now.

I feel like someone turned up the speed on my treadmill and left me to fend for myself. If you’re reading this, you know I have a website and a blog. I also have a Facebook page. All of these wonders are courtesy of my daughter, who set everything up for me. Well, after all, I taught her to cook and use the bathroom, not in that order. Turnabout is only fair.

The next step will be Twitter, just as soon as I can deal with the idea that I tweet. It may take a while.

Blue and Gold and Shades of Gray

Sep23

My 45th high school reunion is scheduled for the last weekend of October. Aside from the irony of holding it so close to the Day of the Dead, I find the thought of attending somewhat daunting. The last reunion I attended was the tenth.

I’m glad I went to that reunion. Most of the Ugly Ducklings had turned into lovely swans, whereas most of the Popular Kids looked like they’d been drinking heavily for the past ten years. Hmmm. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

I attended Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio, the old Blue and Gold, home of the fighting Mules. Cheering for four years for that mascot was equaled only by my next four years when I tried to ignore the TCU Horned Frogs.

I don’t have the kind of high school memories that trigger wistful smiles. My life started at college, and high school was just a prerequisite purgatory. The people I’ve stayed in touch with from that time in my life can be counted on one hand, and still have enough fingers left over to crochet.

There are three factors pushing me to attend. Firstly, the pictures of alumni I’ve seen show benign-looking grandparent-types. How scary can a roomful of senior citizens be, assuming you don’t favor cutting Social Security and Medicare? Secondly, I’ve reached that precarious perch in life where the certainty of being around for the next one is a bit more uncertain. And finally, I won’t get any better-looking from here on out, so I need to let them see me while I’m riding this crest of disintegration.

Sure, I have a few good memories, such as: transforming Dairy Queen slushies into daiquiris by adding ill-gotten rum; getting an invitation to attend Georgetown University, even though I was too afraid to go that far from home; scraping together all the snow deposited in my front yard by a rare snowfall to make a two-foot-tall snow lady, and taking pictures of white-white snow on my very-red Malibu SS.

For the most part, however, I was nerdy and unpopular. I was in some sort of larval stage, waiting for the fun to start. Do I really want to revisit those days? On the other hand, I may go this year and never again. I definitely need to put those years into perspective, deposit those bones in an ossuary and inter them forever in the past.

Now all I have to do is decide whether to ask my long-suffering husband to attend, too. On the one hand, I’d be much less likely to find a comfy corner and stay there. On the other hand, going to someone else’s reunion is second only to watching whale poop settle to the bottom of the Marianas Trench on the Scale of Fascination.

I’ll have to let you know how this turns out.

Droughts and Druthers

Sep16

I’ve been enjoying the latest spate of rainfall. There will always be a part of me, buried deeply under the years, which breathes a sigh of relief every time it rains. Even if we’re in the middle of El Nino plenty, it still looks good to me.

I grew up in Texas during a drought that began in the Fifties and lasted, to the best of my memory, well into the Sixties.  Now when we slip into even a dry spell, much less a bonafide drought like now, something stirs in my brain, and half-remembered images and snatches of overheard adult conversation come back to me.

We weren’t exactly farmers living in a soddy on the Plains. We lived in comfort in San Antonio, but my father was a gentleman farmer and rancher. In Texas, that meant we had “a place” about an hour outside of town that we visited most weekends. My father would hunt, fish, and eventually meet with Felipe, his foreman, to see how the crops and cattle were coming along. During that long, dry time, the cattle herd got smaller and the crops had to be irrigated just to keep them alive.

Not that I worried much about it, since it had no apparent effect on my little life. I was just aware that Daddy got up even earlier than usual, made the first pot of coffee of the day, and doodled numbers on more pages than usual on the Yellow Transit pads his brother gave him. Uncle Charlie was a salesman for YT, having the family gene for selling ice boxes to Eskimos, and replenished my father’s supply when he hunted at the ranch. I could never understand my father’s notes, but when he stopped writing numbers and started drawing boxes filled with criss-crossed lines that resembled the struts of oil derricks, I knew everything was under control, and he would soon start the second pot of coffee that day.

I remember so clearly when that drought broke. I was away at college and had heard on the news that it finally had rained in Central Texas. I called Daddy to congratulate him. It was always good to hear his laconic voice.

“Yeah, it rained three inches down at the ranch. But now we’ve got another problem,” he explained.

“Oh, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Well, the grass has grown up so tall, we’re afraid it’s going to lift the cows up off their feet, and they won’t be able to walk to water.”

If I could see him and read his face, I could usually tell when I had wandered into one of his minefields. But over the phone, he drew me in every time. I heard him chuckle just a bit, and then my mother groaned. She never really appreciated his sense of humor nor his gift for laying verbal booby-traps.

I inherited his sense of humor to a great extent, but I can never quite bring myself to make jokes about that topic. Rain is still very serious business to me. Rather than make a joke, I’m much more likely to smile and whisper, “It’s raining, Daddy!”

Granny Vigilante

Aug27

As men age, they tend to mellow out, becoming less aggressive. As muscles turn to mush, anger turns to grouch, until they rarely get “all het up” about much of anything. Women, on the other hand, tend to become more aggressive, drawn to violent sports and true crime shows, especially if they contain an element of comeuppance.

If I looked at the demographics for smack-down wrestling and the Murder Channel, my husband’s generic name for the cable channels I often watch, I’d find them chock-full of peri- and post-menopausal women. This is no new phenomenon.

My grandmother and I used to watch wrestling, “live from the Wrestlethon in San Antonio, Texas,” rooting for her favorites and booing the villain of the week. She really got off on the violence. Of course there was little if any real damage done to the wrestlers, and she knew it was all for show. I was only in kindergarten, and we hadn’t studied psychology yet, or I would have pondered her deep-seated anger and explored what caused it. Now I kind of understand.

I only watch true crime shows in which the miscreant is caught and punished. I can’t watch “America’s Most Wanted” for a couple of reasons.  First, I’m left very unsatisfied knowing the criminal is still out there somewhere having fun. Second, everyone I see at the grocery store reminds me of someone featured on the show.

As men chill out, women develop a taste for payback. If you want to hunt down a deadbeat dad, a bank robber, or a war criminal, put an old lady on the trail. Being a bounty hunter, vigilante, or crime-fighting superhero weren’t career choices I remember having when I was young. As a matter of fact, my mother believed there were only two proper occupations for a woman: being a teacher or a nurse. She vetoed nursing for me before I even considered it, because I would come in contact with naked people. She was convinced that if a woman worked at it, she could go her whole life without ever seeing a naked person. I still wonder about that.

Sometimes I think I should start a second (or third or tenth) career as an outside-the-box crime fighter. I like the idea of tracking down despicables, giving them a fair trial followed by a first-class hanging. I can see making “Granny Vigilante” a valid occupation, worthy of its own number for the IRS 1099 form’s occupation box.

First I’d go after the Nazis still living in South America. They aren’t getting any younger, and I think I could catch them in a fair chase. Then I’d go after terrorists and traitors and make them confess. I’d have no need for waterboarding; I’d just schedule a colonoscopy and they’d sing. Finally, I’d hunt down the sadist that brought back pointy-toed shoes. The possibilities are endless.

So move over “CSI” and “NCIS”, and even “Law and Order,” in all its incarnations. There’s a new sheriff in town: Mad Maxine, Granny Vigilante.