I’ve been thinking about the assumptions that we make in the absence of knowledge lately.  A couple of days ago, I wrote about two examples where a person was assumed to be uncaring or irresponsible, when in actuality something terrible had befallen them.  Then yesterday, I wrote about a time during my terrible teens when I illustrated the cliche about making an ass out of you and me, with the emphasis on the “me.”  Here’s another story from my early twenties to make absolutely sure that everyone knows that I was a mess in my youth and my early supposed “adult”hood.

When I got out of college and began working several part-time jobs to pay the bills, I chose to spend my entertainment and food money on being a barfly, when I wasn’t following my boyfriend around like a puppydog.  After five years of break-ups and make-ups, the relationship finally ground to its conclusion when I found my beloved in the bathtub with another babe.

So I started hitting the bars on a regular basis, and there was one particular dive where everyone knew my name.  I knew that I could go there at any time and there would be at least one regular there I could talk to.  My roommate and I gathered a little group of peeps and we closed the place about two or three nights a week.  Some of these new friends orbited the place, stopping in to play a game of pool and have a drink before checking out the next stop.  In a way I kind of miss those days. If you could remove the heavy drinking, smoking, emotional trauma of mating rituals, intense headaches, and money vacuum, it was a fine life.

One guy that drifted in and out of this group eventually became my good friend.  We were both walking wounded, since he had been dumped fairly recently by the love of his life.  We worked for the same company and double-dated a couple of times - the first time he was with my roommate and I was with another guy, and the second time I barely remember, except that I didn’t really consider it a date and he disappeared for two weeks afterwards.  Mainly we were drinking and pool buddies, and he was intensely interested in my roommate.  I knew this because he was the question man.

During these years, I seemed to attract two kinds of guys: geeky stalkers who called me to read poetry, talk dirty, or threaten suicide, and great guys who were friendly with me to scope out the chances of nailing my friends.  The question man and I hung out together a lot, and he always had the same queries about my roommate - where was she, how was she, what was she doing these days.  I didn’t even see him as a prospect, because it was so clear that he didn’t see me that way.

One night we were out together, just the two of us, and he asked me the usual questions about my roommate.  “Oh yeah, I know how you feel about B****,” I said, surprised at the faint bitterness I heard in my voice.

Surprised also, he looked me in the eyes and said, “I don’t feel anything about B**** - I was just wondering where she was.”

I felt a bit wobbly so I walked over to the jukebox and studied it.  I was wearing a blouse that came off the shoulders (this was the eighties) and he walked up behind me and kissed me softly, once, on my right shoulder.

In May, we’ll celebrate our twentieth anniversary.

Yesterday I told two stories from way back in my past about assumptions. Here is another, also from long ago.

It was Christmas Eve, 1978, and I was mad. I was almost eighteen, and most of my friends were in college. In my view, I was ready to hang with my adult siblings and their spouses, and I worshipped my sister-in-law. She and I had become close in the last few months, but when my older sister was around, I became the odd one out. So when the four of them kept slipping off without me that day, I was bitterly hurt. I went out to the Gator Disco Lounge that night, drank screwdrivers with my friends, and shagged (which is a relaxed jitterbug, for the benefit of you Brits) to “Ay-yi-yi-yi’m dreaming of a white Christmuh-us…”

Consequently, I didn’t feel so great on Christmas morning, and as I walked outside to my rusted old Ford Fairlane to retrieve a Christmas present stashed in the trunk, my sister grabbed my arm. She offered to go out to the car to get it because she had to go out there anyway, and being sleepy and hungover, I thought nothing of it.

I was looking forward to opening presents because I had asked for a cassette deck to replace the 8-track player in my car, which only worked when my lights were on thanks to my headbanger friend’s installation. Besides, cassettes were cool again, and 8-tracks were out. My parents had missed the boat once before on Christmas, but I had made absolutely sure that they knew that I desperately NEEDED this modest purchase. I opened my brother’s present, which was a cassette case. There were a couple of tapes from my sister and brother-in-law. Everything else was clothes. I looked all around the tree and there was nothing else. My parents were so busy remodeling the house and taking care of my senile aunt that they FORGOT about me. I was odd one out again, and I sulked.

My mother reminded me that I hadn’t looked in my stocking. Oh great, I silently pouted, yanking out the usual orange, banana, peppermints, hairbrush, socks - whoopteedoo. I was in such a self-absorbed funk that I didn’t even notice that my sister-in-law had positioned herself in front of me with a camera. So what, a keychain. They engraved it with my initials, I guess that’s nice. I put it aside. Wait a minute. There’s a set of keys on it.

I grabbed it back up, looked up and the camera flashed. The photo showed me with my eyes wide and my mouth open. I ran outside to the side of the house where my new 1979 red Mustang was parked.

Now I know that I didn’t really enter adulthood until I was around 26 years old, and some would up that estimate by about ten or twenty years. There was a period of time when I cynically thought that by expecting the worst, I’d never be disappointed. I would like to think that I’ve matured enough to give people the benefit of the doubt and not make so many negative assumptions. I would like to think that, but obviously I still have some work to do. People tend to live up to your expectations, so I think that if I work on my habit of jumping to conclusions that it will improve my relationships as well as my outlook on life, which definitely needs some natural uplift if I am to stay off Prozac.

By the way, I totaled that car two years later. But I do have a cassette deck in my 1992 Tercel.

Well, the first pet-sitter called.  I had sent him an email this afternoon telling him that I was concerned about him not returning my calls and giving him a deadline of tomorrow to contact me.  I’d considered just forgetting it but the brochure that he left in my door bothered me.  Why would he drop it off if he didn’t want the business?

It turned out that he had just switched cell phone services and there was a problem with the messages.  He hadn’t gotten them.

This made me think - how many times do we assume the wrong thing and never give a person a chance?  I mean, there could have been all kinds of reasons that he didn’t call.  Most times you’ll never know.

There have been two instances in my life that I can recall at the moment when I found out that the assumption was wrong.

One was when I was in college.  I met a great guy at a club that I really hit it off with.  He was not good looking, but his sense of humor was wonderful, and it was dark in the bar, so who cared?  But I was with some girls, we were going to a party, he had to be up early, so I gave him my number and assumed that I’d hear from him later.  I didn’t.  I looked around for him on campus, but all I remembered was his first name.  I assumed that he didn’t actually like me after all.

A couple of years later, I became friends with a guy in a wheelchair who was paralyzed from the waist down.  One night we were talking and we suddenly recognized each other and were both surprised and delighted.  He had gone hunting the next day and had been shot in the back.  By the time I met him again, I was with someone else, but I was drunk enough the night I found out that I sat in his lap and kissed him, big time, right there in front of my stunned soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and all our friends.  We stayed just friends, though, and after about a year, I lost track of him for good.

The other time was when Sandy and I lived in a duplex and the guy next door was getting rip-roaring drunk.  He was all pissed off because his wife was out with her buddies, having a good time, while he was sitting home “worrying” about her because she hadn’t called.  The last time he had done this he had just forgotten that she was going Christmas shopping, so we shrugged it off and went to bed.  A little later this man knocked on our door, white-faced and shaking.  His wife had been abducted in the parking lot of Four Seasons Mall as she left work, and had escaped after three hours and hitched a ride to a friend’s house.  He was too drunk to drive.  So we drove him over there where the police were waiting for him so that he could go with her to the hospital.

I mean, how many times have I been mad because someone who was late was “making me worry?”  Why do we assume the worst about people?

Those were two negative assumptions in which the reality turned out to be much worse.  Tomorrow I’ll tell some stories when the reality turned out to be much better.

All right, I know it’s late, but I reseeded the lettuce, and put what wire fencing I have over them. I didn’t have any more spinach seeds, but hey, spinach is overrated in my book anyway. Who needs it when you have chard?

The petsitting situation is getting thorny. The person I chose will not return my phone calls. I started trying to contact him last week. Now, normally I would take that as a sign of disinterest. But he left a brochure and references at my house when I was at work. It wasn’t mailed - he dropped it off. Which means my house didn’t scare him off. If he’s not getting his messages, that’s a problem. I want to wrap this up, and I want someone I can actually GET IN TOUCH with.

So I tried to call some old friends who we had forgotten that they had a service. I kept getting a message that said that due to network difficulties, the call could not be completed. So I wrote them an email. Now either it’s a race or I’m in trouble.

There’s still one person who returned my initial call, but I feel obligated to wait for a couple of days on these two. How frustrating. Why on earth would someone not jump at cleaning our nasty litterbox for two weeks? Maybe I should look under M for masochist.

I see the future of the Back Forty, and it is this - a constant, relentless battle with squirrels and raccoons. Planting anything these days is a signal to the squirrels that a bed has been prepared for their walnut/pecan crop and to start digging. My carefully placed newspaper and cardboard/straw mulch has a thousand holes dug in it. It looks like a mine field.

The damn raccoons even stole one of my cheapo garden sandals that I left on the deck. They were only ten years old and I was just beginning to get them broke in good. A couple of years ago one stole the cat food dish. We finally found it way back under our crawlspace. That’s been blocked off now.

We do have firearms in the house, but unfortunately they are 18th century replica black powder muskets and so are good for targets, say, as big as the side of a barn.

Anyway, there are just a few lettuce seeds and maybe one spinach seedling germinating. The beets, as usual, wimped out. Leeks are coming up though. Before I go to Italy, I’ll plant fava beans and garlic and perennial yellow onions if they come in the mail before then.

I’m harvesting lots of field peas and butterbeans still. I haven’t had enough butterbeans to cook one pot so I’ve been mixing them in with the field peas. That will be addressed next year. A few green Brandywines are left on the vines and the Pomme d’Amour and cherry and grape tomatoes have continuously produced. The peppers have been great this year - one mystery kind that I picked up off a free shelf at the hardware store is especially good - spicy and sweet and thick-walled.

Next year I will invest in lots and lots of chicken wire or hardware cloth. I hate the way it looks but…

There is a Army Navy surplus store around the corner. Do you think they might sell grenades?

The other night I had one of those lovely dreams that I have occasionally. The basic theme is that we buy a house, and then find a section of it that we didn’t know about. Sometimes it is spectacular - in the previous dream we decided to rent it out during furniture market season because it was too rich and sumptuous for us! In the latest version, though, I opened the door to a small two-story two-room section. The lower room was a small but beautiful weaving studio, with a Jacquard handbuilt loom, sinks for dying and felting, and shelves filled with yarns and books. It was totally neat and clean and lent itself to sitting right down and getting to “work.” The upper room was empty and sunny - that seemed to be exactly the way it should have been, and I was happy with that.

This dream resonated with me all day yesterday and probably will color my days for some time. They say that house dreams are dreams about your life and how you feel about its structure. Years ago I dreamed about houses that were falling apart on their upper stories, and boy did that ring true at the time.

One way it has influenced me in a practical way is that I’ve decided that the clutter has GOT to be controlled in this house. So I’m going around, recycling old magazines, picking up bits of debris, putting books on shelves, etc. It is a lost cause in a way because I’ve done this before and there are two of us involved. We are both packrats in our own ways. But I can control the things I do, so it will get halfway better. And Sandy will occasionally get on board.

Today I’m going to clean the refrigerator, freeze basil for the winter and spring months, clean up the piles of clothes, books, coupons, change, hair thingies, and other junk that has accumulated in the bedroom, and Sandy has promised to clean the floors. Once I get the main part of the house in order, I hope that will help me get out to the studio and either weave or paint.

Alton Brown on the Spinach Monster.

“21 states affected by spinach grown not only in one state but in one region of one state. Had the spinach stayed near home odds are good this would have been caught sooner. But packaging and trucking just gave the 0157:H7 time to grow. (For some reason I’m reminded of Charlie Sheen in Apocalypse Now talking about “…every minute Charlie squats in the bush he gets stronger…”.) What’s my point? Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened. But don’t blame them. Nope. Blame us. By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create the monster. It’s like Dan Akroyd thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghost Busters. Our own unnatural desires and our refusal to consume locally grown foods have brought us to this sorry state.”

Hat tip: Mel’s Kitchen.

In the NYT today, Nina Planck blames it on our insane pestilent feedlot system feeding cows grain and makes a good case for grass-fed cattle:

“Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? It’s not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms.

“In 2003, The Journal of Dairy Science noted that up to 80 percent of dairy cattle carry O157. (Fortunately, food safety measures prevent contaminated fecal matter from getting into most of our food most of the time.) Happily, the journal also provided a remedy based on a simple experiment. When cows were switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold…

“…But taxpayers are financing a policy that only treats the symptom, not the disease, and at great expense. There remains only one long-term remedy, and it’s still the simplest one: stop feeding grain to cattle.”

I’d been trying to think of a post about this, but I couldn’t've said any of it better.

Every now and then, I go with my co-workers to K&W Cafeteria. I look longingly at the chicken and dumplings before I move on down to get my vegetable plate and dessert. I can be pretty darn sure that the chicken they buy is from factory farms. I don’t think that it would do any good to ask.

So I took a cue from Jeff and Joyce’s chicken pie at Low Mileage Food, and decided to make my own chicken and dumplings, so there.

I bought a whole cut-up chicken from Back Woods Family Farm. I had to pay an extra 50 cents for it to be cut up, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it and I hate cutting up chicken. It was worth 50 cents for someone else to do it. But it turns out that I could have used a whole chicken, because I cooked it in the crock pot just like Jeff and Joyce did, and they’re right, it falls apart. Then you can use it for all kinds of recipes.

Last year, my mother gave me her first cookbook. Printed in 1943, it is entitled “The American Woman’s Cookbook” and contains a lot of basic information and tips for “the clever hostess,” along with my mother’s handwritten recipe for “Shrimp Wiggle” (::shudder::) on the back of a bridge score card printed in New Haven, Connecticut.

This was during the short period that she stayed in Connecticut with Daddy while he was in Army Air Force electronics training school at Yale, just before he shipped out for the Pacific. Coming from a depression-era farm in deep South Carolina where they produced all their own food and cooked on a wood stove, she probably needed a cookbook. She was 20 years old, with two years of secretarial school behind her, about to go back to the sticks to live with my father’s stepmother and father in Marietta, N.C. and await his return from the Philippines. This was where my stepgrandmother made her wring a chicken’s neck, and she cried and cried. I guess her mother must have taken care of it at home in S.C., or maybe she had hoped that that kind of work was all behind her.

Anyway, it seemed like the perfect source for a dumpling recipe, and indeed it was. It had several. Down where I’m from, this dish is called chicken and pastry.

Chicken and Dumplings
One 2-3 lb. whole or cut-up pasture-raised local chicken
4 medium carrots, sliced
1 leek, sliced (or an onion)
1 cup water
4 cups chicken stock
1 tsp salt
Black pepper

Put sliced carrots and leek at the bottom of the crock pot. Put chicken pieces on top, and pour water over. Cook on high for a couple of hours and then turn down to low for a few hours. Season to taste.

During the last 15 minutes of cooking the chicken, make the dumplings:

2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. butter, cut up
2/3 cup milk

Mix together dry ingredients and cut them with the butter with a pastry blender, two knives, or a food processor until it’s a little crumbly. Add milk and mix into a soft dough. Roll it out on a floured surface to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut into strips or squares.

Strain the chicken, saving the liquid, and pick out the bones, skin, and gristle. Put these bones in your freezer trimmings bag for future stock.

Put the chicken meat, carrots, and leeks into a pot and add the saved broth and four more cups of chicken stock.

Bring up to a boil and drop the dumplings in. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Sources

I didn’t make it to “A Taste of Floyd” yesterday. I was really looking forward to going since I enjoyed it so much last year, but I was still on the tired side of getting over my cold, and didn’t feel up to the long drive.

I did go to the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market, of course, where students from the Greensboro Montessori School were staffing the Slow Food booth. They prepared a delicious cooked salsa that had potatoes, butternut squash, and all sorts of bits from their edible schoolyard and the market. People wanted the recipe but there really wasn’t one!

While I was there, I ran into some old friends that I haven’t seen for years - my friend/boss from my bookstore days and his wife. In the days when there were still independent bookstores around here, the bookstore people were a little bit like restaurant people - we were a little community dedicated to low-wage jobs that we loved.

A short conversation with this guy that I will always remember:

Me: “I’ve been going through a real klutzy phase lately.”

Him: “Let me know when it is over so that I can tell the difference.”

I used to work stock on the floor beneath the tables and bang my head a lot. Maybe that was the beginning of my memory problems now.

Sandy and I ran errands and I really love it that we do this together. For a long, long time we worked opposite schedules and hardly saw each other some weeks. Now we almost see each other too much but I like it much better than the other way around. He recently got a promotion to Project Manager and now has his very own office for the first time ever. The company he is with is growing by leaps and bounds so (crossing fingers) it seems that we are finally in a solid place as far as secure jobs. Last week, they gave him a check for $500 to help pay his hospital bills. We were both very touched - what a difference from the other companies and organizations he has worked for! It makes me want to go to our former employer and stick my tongue out at the president (not that he’d remember either of us, since he is totally self-absorbed), but then I always want to do that. (Honesty time: the daydream actually involves a certain digit.)

This may not seem like a big deal, but I finally replaced my ancient used coffee maker with a programmable one that has an automatic shut-off. I didn’t get anything fancy, but now I can load it the night before and set the delay, and not worry about whether I turned it off after I leave for work. If you saw me try to leave the house in the morning, you would understand why I say that I am borderline obsessive compulsive. Maybe now I’ll get to work on time. This was a very good purchase that will make my mornings simpler and less stressful.

I also bought another bale of wheat straw yesterday, so I’ll spend part of the day covering the rest of the grass in the back yard. No more mowing except for the little patch of front yard we have left! We got rid of the gas mower last year, and now I can take care of what weed-choked “lawn” we have with a reel mower or the weed eater, depending on how bad we’ve let it get. We’re also going to try to seal the leak around the exhaust vent on the roof today, before the next deluge.

I’m feeling better about the trip to Italy. It’s less than a month away. All the reminiscing about 9/11 didn’t help. I have a prescription for Xanax now and I intend to use it for the ride over and the ride back. In case you haven’t guessed, I was terrified of flying BEFORE 9/11. No rational arguments about the comparative safety of air travel to car travel, etc., please. It’s not a rational issue. Statistics do not help. Big cities make me nervous in general, too. You can take a girl out of the country, but…

At least the books I am reading now for the class are much lighter and concentrate on individuals, farming, and food, rather than making sweeping negative generalizations. One recommendation that a student made was “A Thousand Days in Venice” followed by “A Thousand Days in Tuscany,” both of which are romantic and have themes of living simply and in the moment. They may have to wait until after the class.

For my class project, I’m going to write about and learn to make my own pasta, finally! Charlie says that he’ll ask the cooks in the kitchen at Spannocchia to let me observe them make pasta, and maybe include that in one of the cooking lessons at the farm. So one of my next purchases will be a hand-cranked pasta machine. I’d welcome recommendations.

Last night we went to the fair, which was a big waste of time and money. Neither of us wanted to be there once we got there! It was free admission but they charged $10 for parking, setting it up so that it was nearly impossible to back out once you saw the price. Sandy gave the attendant a twenty, then spaced out and drove off without his change when she handed him his ticket with no change. I’m afraid of the rides and Sandy didn’t want to ride one by himself. We both ate corn dogs (yes, I ate a corn dog - I had to do something fair-like) and watched a stampede over to one side of the fairground that we still don’t comprehend, but all the security guards disappeared and we found ourselves walking back through a creepy, deserted parking lot.

So we went to Cafe Europa for a couple of drinks on the patio. It was a beautiful night and we sat next to a mesmerizing fountain. I relaxed fully for the first time in ages and nearly nodded off. We sat there in silence for the most part, occasionally chatting, totally content. I said to Sandy, “This is what we need to remember to do in Florence. Not dash from museum to museum constantly, but sit at a table and relax and watch the people go by.” That’s what I want to do.

There’s a crop that I’ve been growing for the past two and a half years that I haven’t mentioned on this blog. You don’t have to have any gardening expertise to grow it, but a good set of genes and a certain amount of unattachment to physical things helps. This weekend, it finally became ripe for harvesting.

Assisting in the harvest was Jayme Baumann and Anna of Leon’s Beauty School. The crop was donated to Locks of Love, which “provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children under age 18 suffering from long-term medical hair loss.” You must have at least 10 inches of hair to donate, and Anna said that it takes three 10-inch ponytails to make a wig.

My ponytail was 11 inches, and as you can see, I still kept lots of seeds for the next crop.