Three Beautiful Things 05/13/17: Saturday with David, Minding the Grandchildren, Mom Enjoys the Flowers

1.  David slept in until nearly nine o'clock. He enjoyed oatmeal with brown sugar for breakfast and then he and the Deke went to the library, picked up a few things at the store, and returned to our apartment home. They had bought a part of a very sweet watermelon and David plunged into a bowl of watermelon cubes and was unreserved in telling us how much he loves watermelon. He stayed with us until mid-afternoon and was easy to have around, thanks in large part to his well-developed ability to keep himself busy all on his own. He told us that some time he'd like to spend two nights, not just one.

2. Hiram and Molly and Hiram's brother and girlfriend had tickets to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra perform at the Swarthmore in Bethesda tonight, so the Deke and I watched Olivia, David, and Ana -- which didn't require a lot of us. Yes, David and Olivia resisted -- weakly, I might add -- the idea of going to bed when they wanted, instead, to play Zelda on their video game console, but the Deke was calm and firm in her approach to prying them away from the console and sending them to bed. It was an easy evening -- in fact, the Deke and I each took over a couch and slept quite a bit until the concert goers returned.

3.  Christy and Carol's reports from Kellogg comforted me. Mom seems to be feeling better. If the Wednesday trip to Post Falls tired her out quite a bit, she seems to have recovered well and she's looking forward to a Mother's Day dinner over at Christy's.  Carol ordered Mom a bouquet of Mother's Day flowers from the Deke and me that would work well in her room at Kindred and Mom really enjoys them. In fact, Carol took a picture of Mom, looking pretty good, I think, with the bouquet:

Three Beautiful Things 05/12/17: Mom Update, Ana and the Dulcimer, Fried Chicken for David

1. My impression is that on Thursday on into Friday morning, Mom was pretty worn out from her doctor's visit to Post Falls and slept a lot and her temperature was elevated some. She was still tired Friday evening, but Christy and Carol report that she seems physically a bit stronger and not feverish. Christy and Carol wheeled her out of her room and they sat and visited in a sitting area for about a half an hour.  She will go to Christy's house for Mother's Day dinner. She requested ribs. Mom will be making several trips out of the facility this coming week when she sees her Primary Care Provider, her cardiologist, and visits a foot doctor in Cd'A for help with her toenails.

2.  Molly picked up the Deke and brought Ana and David over to our apartment home in the late afternoon. David stayed for a sleepover. While Ana was here, she and the Deke sang some tunes together and then the Deke let Ana strum on a dulcimer and soon Ana was singing and strumming in rhythm. It was kind of outrageous.

3. Knowing David would be eating dinner with us, I tried to remember back to when I was five years old and what I enjoyed eating and recalled what I've seen David enjoy.

Of course.

Fried chicken. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Corn.

I floured our last four chicken thighs and cooked them in hot oil in the cast iron skillet, making the outside, top and bottom, crisp. Then I turned the heat down and slow cooked the thighs until done. I also made the mashed potatoes and heated up a bag of frozen corn. With some instruction from the Deke, I made chicken gravy and it turned out smooth and flavorful, not bad for my first real try at making gravy. In the past, I've always, well, chickened out and turned the making of the gravy over to the Deke -- or, in Kellogg, to Mom. But not tonight! I put on my big boy apron and made the gravy and next time I have the chance, I'll make it again.

It turned out that David isn't crazy about potatoes just yet, but he loved the chicken and corn and an hour or so after dinner, I popped popcorn and the three of us had a fun popcorn party.

Three Beautiful Things 05/11/17: Minding Ana and David, Baked Tilapia Curry, John Sayles Tickets

I don't have any news or any update about Mom today.

1. This morning Molly texted me a request to come over to Chez Diaz to sit with Ana and be there when David got off the school bus close to noon. Molly had an appointment and Hiram was teaching a lesson and they needed to fill a 45-60 minute gap when neither of them could be home. I arrived around 11:30 and Ana was deep into apple slices and goldfish crackers and Dora was on the television. Ana was calm and only got a little bit excited when David arrived, but settled right down and sat on the couch with me to read a couple of books. At school, David made clay models on a circle divided into quarters of the life cycle of a butterfly and explained to me how the butterfly went from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. He had made clay figures of each stage.

2. Back home, I relaxed with an acrostic puzzle. Eventually I finely chopped a shallot and cut thin slices of red pepper. I cooked them in canola oil until tender and then added a heaping teaspoon of green curry paste and heated it for a short while. I added a can of coconut milk, a tablespoon of lime juice, and a teaspoon each of brown sugar and fish sauce. Later, after I picked up the Deke from school and we relaxed for a while, I laid salt and peppered tilapia pieces in a Pyrex baking pan, poured the curry sauce over them, and baked the fish until done. Earlier, I had made jasmine rice. When I removed the fish from the oven, I let it rest for about five minutes or so and topped it with chopped cilantro leaves. The recipe is here.

I now think of tilapia as the tofu of fish. It's light, doesn't have a lot of taste of its own, but works really well as a centerpiece in curry dishes, Mediterranean ones, fishcakes, the Brazilian fish stew I have made, and with other strongly flavored recipes.  It's been fun to try out recipes using talapia.

3. Matewan, a coal labor war movie, came out in 1987 and to commemorate its 30th anniversary, the American Film Institute in Silver Spring is showing it on May 16th and featuring director John Sayles in a question and answer session. For many years, starting in 1980, John Sayles directed a string of movies I loved -- The Return of the Secaucus 7, Lianna, Baby It's You, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, Lone Star, and others. This evening, I bought the Deke and me tickets to go to the screening of Matewan. I hope the question and answer session is fun -- even though I often don't enjoy such sessions -- BUT, I went to a screening of Atlantic City back in August, 2014 that was followed by a most enjoyable question and answer session featuring Burt Lancaster's daughter, Joanna. So, maybe the John Sayles one will be good, too.

Three Beautiful Things 05/10/17: Mom's Unstable, Working Out is a Relief, Tilapia -- Mediterranean Style

1. Christy and Everett drove Mom to see a cardiologist in Post Falls. Mom's condition is unstable. As is common with people with congestive heart failure, her heart rate and blood pressure are unstable. Her physical balance is not stable. Her weight fluctuates. It goes down when she takes diuretics, and the excess fluids get flushed, but then she loses too much weight, and must go off the diuretic, and the fluid builds up again. The doctor provided target weights that Mom should not go below and above.  Mom will continue her rehab program.

It was a tough day for Christy. Mom was in pain during the drive down and back. Mom can be cranky. Mom is very fortunate that Christy and Everett are free to take her to the doctor and that Christy is so attentive and takes such good notes while the doctor talks with Mom.  It's all taxing.

2. I returned to the aquatic center today and worked out in the pool for an hour, stretching, jogging in place with water weights, doing other exercises, and spending twenty minutes doing an old football agility drill and then running laps in the pool. Physically, the workout felt really good and, mentally, it helped lift some of the anxiety I'm feeling about various uncertainties -- Mom, the Deke resigning her job, when to go to Kellogg, and other things.

3. I chopped up kalamata olives, halved cherry tomatoes, and measured out a third of a cup of capers. I roasted these in a glass baking pan and then pushed them aside and laid down pieces of tilapia. I covered the fish with the tomato mixture, poured a blend of lemon juice and olive oil over it all, and returned it all to the oven, along with some leftover jasmine rice, until the fish was done cooking. When I took fish out, I covered it and the tomato mixture with basil and feta cheese. It was an excellent Mediterranean style dinner -- and, fortunately, we had some tabouli salad in one container and cucumber lemon yogurt salad in another and each went deliciously with the fish dish. I pretty much followed this recipe in preparing the fish.

Three Beautiful Things 05/09/17: Mom's Busy Day, Tilapia Delay, Old Bay Bloody Mary

1.  When I talked to Mom today on the phone, she'd had quite a day. She had an MRI done in the morning and then, back at Kindred Care, she had physical therapy sessions. (I don't differentiate between occupational and physical -- and Mom didn't make it clear to me if she'd had two sessions or three.) She sounded stronger to me today than yesterday and not as hoarse. I could tell she was tired. Her speech was slow and I think she was trying to come up with things to tell me about. She told me, and Christy and Carol have also said the same, that she is gradually getting stronger, thanks to the rehab she is going through.

2. As I've said before, I'm dealing with my anxiety during the day by working in the kitchen. I found a recipe for tilapia that I wanted to prepare late this afternoon, but the Deke wanted to grade papers at Old Line over a couple of beers and when we returned home, we decided to eat the leftover curry from last night. I'll fix the tilapia on Wednesday.

3. At Old Line, Kristin, our bartender, told me a little bit about Natty Boh (National Bohemian) beer and the Boh-tini. It's a glass of Natty Boh rimmed with Old Bay Seasoning. Then Kristin told me that when she drinks a Bloody Mary, she always rims the glass with Old Bay Seasoning.  This piqued my curiosity, so when I finished my half pint of Union/Heavy Seas Collaboration Old Ale, I ordered a Bloody Mary the way Kristin likes it. It was really good. I stopped after drinking one.

Later, during an evening of playing America's Test Kitchen in our apartment home, I made The Deke some egg salad for a sandwich for her Wednesday lunch, and judiciously seasoned it with Old Bay Seasoning.

I think it works.

Three Beautiful Things 05/08/17: Mom Sounds Tired, Aerobic Therapy, Cooking Helps A Lot

1. When I talked to Mom on the phone today, she sounded tired and hoarse. Losing water weight is helping her physical strength, Christy and Carol both report.  I am glad she had lunch with Penny Benson and that Teresa Baillie was there, too, at lunch, visiting. Mom's confusion about things persists. I heard some of her confusion on the phone. Christy and Carol wrote me about more things she's confused about. On May 9th she will have an MRI and has an appointment about her heart disease in Post Falls on May 10th.

2.  Floppin' around in the pool today at my water aerobics class, adding twenty minutes of workout to what we did in class, and lying in the aquatic center's hot tub for about twenty minutes helped settle my nerves and soothe my anxiety.  In times of difficulty, my experience has been that it's often physical activity or exercise that is the first to go by the wayside. I know when I'm in Kellogg, helping out with Mom, I don't get out much for walks, let alone some floppin' around in a pool.  Floppin' around and running laps in the pool after class got me out of my head for a while, at least, and that is always good.

3.  More than eating, cooking, working in the kitchen, is a good way for me to get some respite from the sometimes paralyzing flurry of thoughts and complicated feelings I have right now. I returned to green curry today served over jasmine rice because I still had eggplant, zucchini, and green beans in the fridge and I wanted to make good use of one of the blocks of tofu I still had.  I went to MOM's and picked up a red pepper and a bunch of green onions. I thought the green curry I made last week was pretty good and tonight's might have been even better tasting. I do know this: in many ways, the chopping of vegetables and the crackle they make when they hit the hot sesame oil in the cast iron skillet and the fragrance of the curry paste and the combination of fish sauce and sugar all combined to bring me pleasure and temporarily removed me from the uncertainty I feel, as well as my longing that things here in Greenbelt were simpler.

Three Beautiful Things 05/07/17: Mom's Sunday, Comfort Soup, Music Store and Breweries

1. I talked to Mom this morning. Carol comes to her room in the morning and has re-established the routines she and Mom had been doing at home:  weigh Mom, take her blood pressure, check her oxygen levels, see about her heart rate. Mom's weight looked good. She's definitely expelled excess fluid caused by edema. Her blood pressure (118/74)was the best I can remember for a long time and her heart rate is at a much slower rate than it was last month. Her oxygen levels are very good. From where I sit, it looks like Mom's time at Kindred is helping her. She is back to being able to get out of bed on her own. This is especially important when she's taking the diuretic. I have no measure available to know if Mom is keeping herself hydrated. I know she finds it perplexing that she takes a pill that makes her have to do the hard work of visiting the bathroom more frequently and that, at the same time, shoe needs to be drinking plenty of fluids and staying hydrated.

In her update for today, Carol wrote that in the hour or so before the sun set on Sunday, she and Mom spent some time outside in the sun at Kindred.

2. There is a lot of uncertainty in the Deke's and my life right now regarding just what we are going to do next, once the Deke leaves her job, and with Mom's situation. After a week of medical tests and keeping up on the news about Mom and starting to work out the future with the Deke (everything is still on the table), I had a strong desire for comfort food around lunch time.

I peeled and cut up about six potatoes and boiled the pieces until they were tender. I also chopped up onion, carrot, and celery and sauteed them in a stick of butter. After these vegetables started to tenderize, I poured enough chicken stock over them just to cover them. let the vegetables get more tender, and then poured in the cooked potatoes. I mixed in a quarter cup of flour, stirred it up, and then added three cups of milk. I heated it all up and the Deke and I had comforting bowls of potato soup for lunch.

3.  Just before 3 o'clock, the Deke and I piled into the Sube and headed to Takoma Park, suburb about 20-25 minutes away, for a visit to The House of Musical Traditions, a music store filled with accordions, drums, guitars, mandolins, dulcimers, strings, picks, song books, posters advertising shows from the past and events to come -- in other words, for the Deke, this place is heaven. The Deke is getting ready for the July 22nd Babes with Axes concert and needed some picks and strings and stuff. Just five minutes away from this store sits 3 Star Brewing --- a brewery I'd visited once, but the Deke and I hadn't been to together.  I sampled three beers in 4 oz glasses and the Deke enjoyed an Imperial Pecan Brown Ale and then, as we are inclined to do, we drove fifteen minutes east to DC Brau and made our regular Sunday appearance for some Wings of Armageddon and some yakkin' with Angela and Mike who were running the tasting room.

Mike has a friend who lives in Glide, OR, and finding this out brought back a flurry of pleasant images of the North Umpqua River, of visiting Clearwater Falls, Watson Falls, and others, of the wild rhodies on the Watson Falls trail, and of the colliding rivers at Glide. It was fun taking a drive in my memory back on Highway 138, one of my favorite stretches of road in the USA.

Three Beautiful Things 05/06/17: Mom Update, Egg Salad, Hanging Out with Molly

1. I tried to call Mom but she didn't pick up. I texted Christy and Carol about this and, later in the day, Christy called me from Mom's bedside and so I talked with Mom. She sounded tired. She told me she enjoyed the Cinco de Mayo lunch they had on Friday. She told me she's doing her best to get better. She sounded tired. Later in the day, Christy and Carol took Mom on a tour of the facility and she saw Penny Benson and Ray Faraca, two longtime friends, and she saw our longtime family friend and my high school classmate and great friend, Carol Fulton Jacobs. Carol was there visiting her father. Another classmate, Pam Bloom Sample, is a nurse at Kindred and Mom was her second grade teacher over fifty-five years ago. Mom recognized Pam and was happy to see another friendly and familiar face.

2. I had fun making an egg salad based on the recipe I used the other night to make tilapia fish cakes. This was the Deke's idea. The Deke strung her guitar and started playing different passages as she begins to get herself in shape to perform with The Babes with Axes on July 22nd.

3. Molly came over mid-afternoon to help us do some reorganizing in our apartment home and when she finished stage 1, we decided to go to Old Line to have some food and some beer and yak about stuff. It was a stellar party together with conversations ranging between stuff going on in the present and talking about some of the good times and some of the bewildering times in our shared past.  The Deke and Molly took a self-portrait at Old Line:

Three Beautiful Things 05/05/17: Mom Update, Mahogany Chicken Thighs, Electric Ana

1. The best news regarding Mom's second day at Kindred Care is that, thanks to Christy's phone call and the quick work of Heather, Mom's cardiologist's nurse in Coeur d'Alene, the order for Mom's diuretic came right through and Mom is taking the diuretic again. Mom had been taken off the diuretic at the hospital when she was so dehydrated earlier in the week, but without it, her problems with edema accelerate and being back on the diuretic should help her flush excess fluid out of her system.  It's tricky. She needs to expel the fluid from the edema and stay hydrated, too.

2. Last weekend, the Deke bought me in issue of Cook's Illustrated entitled"All-Time Best Asian Recipes". Today I got to plunge into one of the recipes: Mahogany Chicken Thighs. I'd say it's a teriyaki-ish dish -- I mean, maybe it's straight up teriyaki -- I just don't have the expertise to make that call. What I do know is that I loved this recipe. I love buying big packs of chicken thighs at Costco and I had a bunch on hand.

The list of ingredients for this recipe intrigued me. The first thing I did was combine water, soy sauce, sherry, sugar, molasses, and distilled white vinegar in our 12 inch cast iron skillet, and stirred the solution to dissolve the sugar.  I then placed the chicken pieces in the skillet and tucked smashed pieces of garlic and ginger between the pieces and let it simmer for five minutes before putting the skillet in the oven for 30 minutes at 300 degrees, took the skillet out, turned the chicken pieces over, and returned it to the oven for another 25 minutes or so. I removed the skillet from the oven, plated the chicken, defatted the cooking liquid, and with the addition of water and cornstarch, made a sauce to go over the rice I served with the chicken. If you'd like to read the recipe for quantities and a few other details, just go here.

3. I packed up dinner, picked up the Deke, and we steamed headlong in the Sube to the Diazes for dinner together. I experienced the snow-capped summit of my life cooking food when BOTH Olivia and David LIKED the mahogany chicken thighs. We not only enjoyed dinner together, but we spent much of the evening being entertained by Ana's seemingly endless knowledge as she answered questions posed to her about animals and family members and sang her ever increasing repertoire of songs. She performed some of them as sing-alongs with the Deke. She is a live wire, full of energy, curiosity, and a love for having fun.

Three Beautiful Things 05/04/17: Mom at Kindred, Thank You to the Pros, Everything's on the Table

1. Christy took Mom over to the nursing home and helped get her admitted and into her room. Christy reports that the staff were good to work with. Mom knows some people who are residing at Kindred. I hope she will get out of her room and visit with other residents. I know she's been chatty with the nurses and I know she found out that her speech therapist comes from right here in Greenbelt, MD where his dad worked for NASA at the Goddard Center.  I'm hope she has a good Friday as she gets settled in a bit more.

2. It took Maria at the Johns Hopkins clinic in Fulton about two seconds to check my TB skin test and tell me that I don't have tuberculosis. Even though our meeting was brief, Maria made a very positive impression on me and, later in the day, when she called me to say that neither of the fax numbers worked -- I gave her these numbers so she could send the test results to Baltimore -- I was doubly impressed with Maria's conscientiousness and her determination to help make sure that the result got reported and the process of keeping me listed keeps moving apace. I have had a very good week with kind and solicitous medical professionals and it's actually made having to get these tests done a pleasure.

3. That table that has everything on it -- the one where the Deke and I lay out possibilities for our future -- you know the one I'm talking about, right? Well, it's got some radical possibilities on it, placed on the table at Old Line tonight where we went late this afternoon so the Deke could wind down from another difficult day at work and we could talk about our future, with special attention on the recent developments in Kellogg and Mom's serious and complicated health problems. We keep what's on the table to ourselves, but we do tell friends and family what decision we've made when we make one.  I can't tell just yet if we are close to a decision or how many more possibilities we might still pile on the table.

Three Beautiful Things 05/03/17: Mom to Rehab, My Cardiology Appointment, Hung Phat and Green Curry

1. Christy called me this afternoon while she and Carol and Mom and the Loving Care person were discussing Mom's immediate future and the medical attention and care she needs. I agreed with my sisters that the best approach is for Mom to be admitted to Kindred Nursing Home and Rehabilitation across the street for what we hope is a short stay focused on rehabilitation, on building her physical strength through physical therapy. I talked to Mom on the phone this evening about this decision and, at the very least, she put up a brave front with me and is on board with this move. For a variety of reasons, the home care option can't work at this point.

2. This morning I braved the stacked traffic and delays on the Beltway because of a crash and road work and paid a visit to cardiologist Dr. Herman Segal in downtown Silver Spring.  After his nurse administered an EKG, Dr. Segal and I had an excellent talk about my medical history and he examined me and listened to my heart and lungs. All indications are that my heart is in good shape. The EKG uncovered no problems. I will return to the Silver Spring office on May 15th for a stress echo test and it looks like that will be the last thing I need to do to stay on the transplant list. I got the results of both my chest x-ray and kidney ultrasound today and neither recommended any further testing.

I also heard from the Nurse Coordinator assigned to my case and she will present my case to remain listed to the committee on Friday. The only number that is either not better or the same as when I was listed two years ago? I've gained about eight pounds. Not one of the medical professional expressed concern about this, but I'd like to get shed some pounds.

3.  I left Dr. Segal's office and headed over to Whole Foods, just for the heck of it. I went to the sandwich bar and, after eating half of my sandwich and packing up the other half, I did some shopping. It was a little bit like being back at Market of Choice in Eugene again and I enjoyed that, but nothing about Whole Foods made me wish I lived nearer to one. In fact, I far prefer the Co-op and MOM's for my day to day grocery shopping.

We were out of coconut milk and green curry paste and I wanted to buy some other things related to my attempts at Asian cooking, so I drove north to Wheaton and had a great time shopping at Hung Phat, my favorite Asian market -- maybe my favorite store of any kind.  When I returned to our apartment home, I got to work stir frying vegetables, roasting peanuts, and making a green curry sauce. Later, I boiled some wide rice noodles and I'm very happy to report that the ratio of one teaspoon of paste to one can of coconut milk and the addition of a tablespoon each of fish sauce and sugar seems to result in a curry sauce of moderate heat and great taste. I've been working for a long time to get this ratio right for me and the Deke and I might have finally nailed it.

Three Beautiful Things 05/02/17: Talked to Mom, My Medical Day, Chanticleer at the Kennedy Center

1. I talked to Mom on the phone today.  She sounded overwhelmed by all that she's experienced of late -- the falling, the hospital visit, and the uncertainty of how the care for her will take shape. I know from the updates Christy and Carol wrote through the day that a Loving Care professional will visit Mom on Wednesday to evaluate what Mom needs and what services are available to her. When the Loving Care person visits Mom, both Christy and Carol will be there to help out with the sometimes delicate task of helping out when Mom's memory is fuzzy and helping to make sure the gravity of Mom's situation gets clearly and accurately communicated.

2. It was a smooth medical day for me. It started with a drive to Fulton for a quick TB skin test and then I barreled down to Silver Spring for a chest x-ray and a kidney ultrasound. In both places, I got in promptly, worked with efficient and agreeable medical pros, and, by early afternoon, I was back to our apartment home.

3. Until tonight, the Deke and I had never been to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, perched on the banks of the Potomac River near Foggy Bottom. Tonight that changed. The Deke had purchased us tickets to see the male a capella group, Chanticleer. Their concert was stunning. They sang songs focused on the idea of love with texts that extended back as far as Rumi, took us through the Renaissance, brought the love of a mother for her son lost at war alive through singing poetry of Walt Whitman, explored a contemporary Finnish composer, and brought us into the 20th century with Gershwin, Noel Coward, and Freddy Mercury's "Somebody to Love".  I've never plunged so deeply into the beauty and variety of choral music. The Deke and I left the Eisenhower Theater deeply moved and fully enriched by this performance.

Three Beautiful Things 04/01/17: Mom's Back Home, Pool Floppin' Again, Tilapia Cakes

1. Christy, Carol, and Paul assisted Mom as she was discharged from the hospital on Monday around 7 p.m. Mom can no longer be in her house alone, so Christy and Carol worked out a schedule for Mom's care until professionals also come in from Loving Care to be with her.  Mom will have help trying to build strength in her muscles. She also needs to do all she can to stay hydrated, or, should I say, keep from getting so dehydrated again.

2. This morning, after many weeks of absence, I lifted my spirits and exercised my body by going to water aerobics. Especially after too long of an absence, the floppin' around felt really good.

3. I've had some tilapia filets in the freezer for a while and tonight I baked them and then flaked the fish meat into a mixture of egg, Old Bay seasoning, mayonnaise, mustard, red onion, lemon juice, and lemon zest, mixed it all up, formed about six falling apart fish cakes, covered them with broken up saltine crackers and fried them in hot canola oil. We ate these tilapia cakes with white basmati rice. The Deke and I were blown away by how much we loved this dinner. Here's the recipe I was guided by, but didn't follow strictly. Maybe I'll make the salad another time.

Three Beautiful Things 04/30/17: Mom is in the Hospital, Meditations Upon Resurrection, Fun at DC Brau

1. Mom had a difficult weekend from beginning to end and, after she took a fall in the evening, the EMTs transported her to the hospital where she will be under observation. For how long? I don't know. She didn't break any bones and she is not suffering from cranial bleeding. Mom has had a rough go of it over the last two and a half weeks with a variety of problems that my sisters and Mom's doctors have been monitoring. Christy wrote to me that during Mom's stay in ER while waiting for a hospital room, Mom was not in pain and, in fact, started suggesting cleaning chores and talked about someone filling the hummingbird feeders.

2. I started the day by returning to St. Andrew's Episcopal Church for the 10:30 service and meditated throughout the service on Eastertide. In the Episcopal Church, Easter is a season, celebrated for the fifty days between Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday. That means that the scripture readings, the hymns, and the sermons (potentially) continue to focus on the resurrection and its aftermath. My meditations during church focused less on THE resurrection and more on the universal existence of life springing from death all around us, in the world of nature, in the awakenings we experience, and in our healing. New life isn't the whole truth, but this aspect of the truth, whether experienced in tulips emerging in spring, the remission of cancer, renewed vigor for life, or recovery from loss, heartens and animates us.

3. Late in the afternoon, the Deke and I made our regular trip down to DC Brau and enjoyed some On the Wings of Armageddon, the music from the seventies Stu and Angela played on the house sound system, and a lot of fun yakkin' with each other, the servers, and a guy who came in and told the Deke he grew up in suburban Chicago, not far from where the Deke went to high school.

Three Beautiful Things 04/29/17: My Post on *The Glass Menagerie*, Clean Oven, Ana at the Bistro

1.  The Deke and Molly went out for lunch and I settled back into writing a blog post about my experience seeing The Glass Menagerie on April 19th at the Belasco Theater in NYC. Seeing the play and writing this post transported me back over thirty-five years to some of my favorite and happiest days of graduate school at the Univ. of Oregon and teaching at Whitworth, while also transporting me back to some of my darkest days as I suffered the confusion and heartbreak of divorce.  All of that and more made seeing The Glass Menagerie a deeply moving and satisfying experience as you can read, here.

2.  I cleaned the oven. I wrapped up the wet dish towel I used to remove the Easy-Off in the newspapers I used to cover the kitchen floor and took them up to the rubbish room in our apartment building.

3. The Deke called me to say she and Molly and Ana were going to Old Line and so I met them and we had a fun dinner. It's not easy for Ana at just shy of two years old to sit in a booth at a bistro, but she was very good and enjoyed watching Curious George on Molly's smartphone while eating a little cheese pizza. She also liked entertaining us with her physical vigor, her ever expanding vocabulary, and the increasing sophistication of her syntax. In time, Ana reached her limit of tolerance for being in an adult joint, so Molly and Ana went home and the Deke and I missed them as we made our way to the bar and returned to some discussion of what our lives might look like this summer.

Attending *The Glass Menagerie* by Tennessee Williams, Belasco Theater, NYC, April 19, 2017

When the play ended, tears streamed down my face.

What moved me?

I carried many memories and past experiences with me when I arrived at the Belasco Theater on April 19. As I watched the play, I was experiencing much more than what was transpiring on stage as Sally Field, Joe Mantello, Madison Ferris, and Finn Wittrock expertly and elegantly animated this tender, sad, nostalgic, maddening, fragile, illusory play.

I have been living with this play for over forty years. I first saw it on television. That 1973 made-for-television production featuring Katharine Hepburn, Sam Waterston, Joanna Miles, and Michael Moriarty became a touchstone for me. I can't remember if I read the play first or saw this production first, but I know I first read it in the spring of 1976, my senior year of college, when Whitworth professor Laura Bloxham agreed to let me be her teaching assistant in Introduction to Literature. Reading the play was like reading a long prose poem. Not only was the script rhythmic, musical, metaphorical, and heightened, but so were Tennessee Williams' extended stage directions and production notes, which not only tell how he wants the play to look and develop, but provide a lyrical interpretation of his play.

For the first time, around forty years ago, I realized that a play could be a physical manifestation of a character's consciousness, or, in the case of The Glass Menagerie, a physical dramatization of a character's memory, Tom's memory to be precise. The lighting, music, and progression of the play, its exaggerations, its sympathies, the sounds of the street, the songs playing from the dance hall, even Laura's glass menagerie itself all trigger Tom's memories as he tells his story of his family and I realized I was seeing not just a record of his memories, but I was watching the way memory works.

Back in 1976, I realized for the first time that a play -- or a novel or a movie -- wasn't necessarily about strict verisimilitude or about making a documentary style realistic picture of reality -- as if that were possible. I began to understand the force of a story told from a specific point of view, the power of seeing a story and its characters filtered through the consciousness (or memory) of a single character -- or characters if the point of view shifts.

While this discovery about point of view was, to a degree, an intellectual experience and a great help in my limited academic success, the deep power was emotional, even spiritual. As I was first viewing and reading The Glass Menagerie, I experienced the liberation that results from realizing that I could leave my own experience and perspective upon things and enter into another's. In my day to day life outside of movies and plays and fiction, I wasn't (and still am not) as successful at seeing things through others' perspective as I think I am when I read stories or watch dramas, but, at the very least, I know that how I see and experience things has commonality with others, but significant differences exist, too, because, like Tom Wingfield, our memories and the emotional substance of our experience bends and colors and shapes how we see things.

In the aftermath of my first divorce back in 1982, a divorce initiated by my first wife, it shocked me to learn that my wife was experiencing our marriage so much differently than I was. My longing for permanence and security and my deep desire to see myself as a great husband and to be able to tell friends and family that I was in a good marriage was so strong that I was oblivious to my wife's deep discontent and the many ways I significantly contributed to it.

The dissolution of our marriage, I know now, was accelerating in the summer of 1981, at the same time that I was about to write a four hour exam to demonstrate to those in charge of my graduate education my proficiency in the field of 20th century American drama. My studies of American drama plunged me deep into the heart of these playwrights' persistent exploration of the power of illusion, maybe I should say delusion, in American life, particularly in the American family. I began to realize that these playwrights were equating illusion/delusion with the American love of dreams, the American Dream, in particular, and were exploring the divide between the actuality of these characters' lives and these different characters' dreams, illusions, false self-image, and made-up stories they told themselves and others about their past, their current situations, and what they dreamed for their future.

I can report that as these plays rattled me.  I'd like to report that they called my own inclinations to delude myself into account, that I changed, that I learned so much about the corrosive and erosive power of illusions that I snapped out of mine. But, I didn't. These illusions are powerful. Even when recognized, they are difficult to get rid of and they continued (and continue), against my will, to shape my perceptions of the world around me and define my sense of who I was, am, and what I could and can do in my life.

Combined with my immersion into the plays of William Shakespeare, my twenty-eight year old, freshly divorced mind was jam-packed with ideas and questions regarding the interaction of illusions and actuality when I arrived at Whitworth College to teach in the English Department for two years on consecutive full-time temporary contracts from 1982-84.

The family in America was also preoccupying me, largely because I was frustrated with the simplistic pronouncements inspired by the election of Ronald Reagan about family values and the sanctity of the American family.

I wanted to see if some students and I could dig into the actualities of the American family life. I proposed to the English Department a course called "The Family in American Drama", to be given during the January term when a whole course was concentrated into the month of January. Students only took one course in January and faculty only taught one course.

I wanted "The Family in American Drama" to be intense. It was. Through plays written by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Eugene O'Neill and through a wide range of movies exploring particular families in America, we dove into studying these plays and movies and dove deep into our own family lives and experiences.

I showed students a grainy copy of the Hepburn version of The Glass Menagerie. Many were deeply moved by it. In the 1983 Jan term class, George Benson played the Gentleman Caller and Maia Blom played Laura as they acted out a part of the play's final scene for the class -- including the Gentleman Caller's "stumblejohn" kiss of Laura.

To conclude the course, I assigned students to write a letter home. I didn't read these letters. The students turned them into me sealed in an addressed envelope. I put postage stamps on them and mailed them out. Reports about the impact of these letters began to come back to me. One father drove over three hours to Spokane upon reading his daughter's letter to take her out and talk things over. Students told me about phone calls they received from home and letters written back to them. I don't remember a single negative report, but rather I remember stories of productive truth-telling and stories of the beginnings of reconciliation.

When tears ran down my face at the end of seeing The Glass Menagerie, featuring Sally Field, at the Belasco Theater in NYC on April 19th, 2017, I was moved by the production I had just seen but also by all the experiences I'd had with this play and American plays written in the first seventy years of the 20th century.

I marvel when I read play and movie reviews or when I talk with friends about movies and plays that professional critics and friends alike can write or talk about a movie or a play with such clearly defined standards of what makes a movie or play work and that almost never do their comments draw upon the experiences they bring to the work as they watch it and how that shapes their experience with the play or movie.

Anymore, I can't say that I know what makes a movie or a play good. I am almost always unable to give a good answer if someone asks me if I liked a movie or play.

I don't tend to evaluate or rate movies or plays; I experience them and the best I can do when asked about one that I've seen is to say what I experienced.  It's why I would make a lousy movie or theater critic. If I were to write a review of the Belasco Theater's  The Glass Menagerie, I'd have to say that while I watched it I experienced my history watching Sally Field on television and in the movies; I experienced those days in Laura Bloxham's Intro to Lit class when I first read the play and when I first saw the made-for-television version; I experienced the beauty of Tennessee Williams poetry and not only heard the lines spoken by the actors on stage at the Belasco, but I could hear Joanne Woodward, John Malkovich, Michael Moriarty, Katharine Hepburn, Karen Allen, as well as my former students George Benson and Maia Blom in that stuffy classroom on the main floor of Westminster Hall.

Most of all, I experienced my awakenings. Memories rushed back to me of long walks in Eugene and Spokane, trying to sort out the illusions that governed me from what might be actual and felt the pain I experienced when my illusions took over and I experienced any number of failures in relationships, friendships, and my graduate studies.

All of this moved me at the Belasco Theater while I was invited into the Wingfield family apartment and into Tom's memories of family life there. The production absorbed my attention. For those two hours -- unbroken, I'm happy to say, by an intermission --, the Wingfield apartment and what transpired there was the only physical reality I knew.

And, it triggered a lot of memories and thoughts and emotions. This personal experience with the play was every bit as important -- maybe more important -- to what I experienced in the theater as what happened on stage.

I loved this experience, but it doesn't form a very solid basis for a critique or a recommendation.

I had a very personal and autobiographical experience watching The Glass Menagerie on April 19th at the Belasco Theater. I'd like to be able to write insightful and detailed analytical comments about the production values and the acting and the directing. I can say every bit of it worked for me, and I don't doubt that what I experienced watching it was enhanced by the beauty of the show.

Three Beautiful Things 04/28/17: Thinking and Writing, Beers with the Franklins Regulars, Noshing Away

1. I spent a couple of hours thinking and writing about my history with The Glass Menagerie, working to account for the way the production the Deke and I saw on April 19th moved me so strongly. I think this blog post is going to take a while to complete and I don't know if it will ever be coherent, but I'm sure enjoying thinking back on the over forty years the play has been inside me.

2. A bunch of people from College Park, Hyattsville, Greenbelt, Berwyn Heights (I think) and elsewhere around this part of Maryland meet every Friday afternoon at Franklins Restaurant, Brewery, and General Store in Hyattsville. The Deke and I got to talking to three of the Franklins Regulars on Feb. 28th at Old Line and Jo and Jim and Sara invited us to their Friday late afternoon table. After several weeks of hosting visitors and of travel to Yorktown, Kellogg (me), and Nyack/New York City, when we couldn't join in, today the Deke and I had a couple of beers -- I really enjoyed my two half pints of Ridiculous, a sour red ale -- and a ton of lively conversation with the Franklins Regulars.

3.  Back at our apartment home, the Deke and I didn't want a full meal, so we noshed away on ciabatta bread, Shropshire blue cheese, kalamata olives, dry Italian salami, and Carr's table water crackers. It was a perfect cap to fun late afternoon and helped the Deke further relax after a demanding week of work.

Three Beautiful Things 04/27/17: Phone Calls, Making Plans, Apartment Home Concert

1.  All right. I called the insurance company to find out what to say about insurance authorization when I called the radiology and cardiology offices to make appointments for the tests I need done to stay on the kidney transplant list. I wrote out a script for my phone calls to the offices. I needed a paper version of a teleprompter and I think I succeeded.

2. The Deke had another rough day at school and wanted to go to Old Line for a couple glasses of beer and we had a very good talk about the immediate future, our future living situation, and we are beginning to do what needs to be done to solidify our summer travel plans.

3.  Back home, we tore into the baguette I bought this morning and ate it with aged cheddar and Shropshire blue cheese. I was in the mood to listen to some great songwriting and singing so, with the help of YouTube, I played us a concert of Guy Clark, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, The Highwaymen, Bonnie Raitt and John Prine, Waylon Jennings, Shooter Jennings, and an ensemble of Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell, Jerry Jeff Walker, Steve Earle, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, and Eric Taylor joining Nanci Griffith on the David Letterman show to sing "Desperados Waiting for a Train."

Three Beautiful Things 04/26/17: Transplant List Business, Dog Delay, Tuna Casserole Dinner

1. I secured the orders/referrals I need for x-ray, ultrasound, and cardiology tests and made an appointment for my TB skin test. Next up: check in with the insurance people and then make radiology and cardiology appointments.

2. As she got out of the car to go to work, the Deke asked me if I would contact Molly and ask her if we could bring dinner over to their place and pick up Maggie and Charly at that time. Molly agreed and it turns out the delay was a superb idea because the dogs might have gone ballistic with all the noise outside the door of our apartment home as workers blasted out the old linoleum in preparation to install new flooring.

3. I decided I wanted a casserole for dinner. I went back to a recipe I first made back in February: tuna casserole without canned soup. Because it's a mild recipe -- both the Deke and Hiram jazzed theirs up with Frank's RedHot --, I thought Olivia, David, and Ana might go for it.

They didn't! Ha!

In the last several months, I've only succeeded once in cooking food they would eat when I took over fried chicken. Oh, well. I didn't have my hopes up at all and any disappointment I might have felt was overshadowed by how much Molly loved the casserole.  By the way, the recipe, found here, calls for a topping of crackers, preferably in the style of Ritz crackers, but I used the overbaked and dry cornbread I fixed Tuesday night for the topping and it worked perfectly.

Making this recipe also gave me a legit reason to go to Target and buy two new Pyrex baking pans.

Three Beautiful Things 04/25/17: Stocking Up, Back to *Moosewood*, Sondheim and then Van Gogh

1. When I left to join the Deke in New York a week ago, the cupboard was pretty empty; and, with having been gone all day yesterday for my transplant evaluation in Baltimore, this morning I needed to get the kitchen back in order. I started to think about meals and I went to the store to stock up on groceries.

2. This afternoon, I went online and found the Brazilian Black Bean Soup recipe from Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook.  I started cooking out of this cookbook just over thirty years ago in the ten years or so before the Deke and I got together. This soup recipe was one I returned to time and time again. I've lost or I gave away my original copy of Moosewood which disappoints me primarily because I had annotated so many recipes, including the Brazilian Black Bean Soup. I made the soup today without my old notes and I overbaked some cornbread to accompany it. It was a comforting and nostalgic meal. The soup recipe is here and a variation of Mollie Katzen's recipe is here.

3. The deep pleasure of having seen Sunday in the Park with George endures and this evening I went to YouTube and found videos of different songs from the original 1984 Broadway production featuring Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin, given in 1986 on PBS's American Playhouse. I listened to the song "Sunday" over and over, surrendering myself to the emotional grip it has on me. I listened to the Broadway/PBS version, here, the version performed at the 1984 Tonys award show, here, and a concert version from the 2010 BBC Proms, here.  (If you listen to the version from the 1984 Tonys, it starts out a little glitchy, but hang on -- the glitchiness goes away.)

I enjoy the art history podcast The Lonely Palette a lot, here. I've mentioned it before. I had hoped the show's host Tamar Avishai had done an episode on "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte", but I think her podcasts are focused on pictures hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Seurat's painting hangs at the Art Institute in Chicago. BUT, it was no small consolation that Tamar Avishhai had produced a recent episode exploring Vincent Van Gogh's painting "Postman Joseph Roulin" and enjoyed listening to it, learning more about late 19th century French painting, and more about Van Gogh. You, too, can listen to this episode, right here.

Three Beautiful Things 04/24/17: Drive to Baltimore, Transplant Evaluation Day, Debriefing at Old Line

1. I sprang out of bed at 5 a.m. this morning to clean up, get dressed, and drive to the University of Maryland Transplantation Center for my once every two years day of evaluation so I can stay on the kidney transplant list. By leaving an hour before I actually needed to, I drove up in moderate traffic, easily found a parking spot in the hospital parking garage, and had time for a bagel and a cup of coffee at Au Bon Pain.

2. About seven of us were at the center for evaluation and through the day, after we watched a kidney transplant video together, we got called in, one by one, for a conference with a surgeon, social worker, cardiologist, nephrologist, financial/billing/insurance person, and a phlebotomist for blood work.  I spent much of the day waiting for my next conference and read almost the entire issue of the most recent New Yorker. At the end of the day, I had a final conference with the nurse coordinator and in the next few weeks I will get a TB skin test, chest X-ray, echo/stress test, and a kidney ultra-sound. Then the committee will meet and decide if I stay on the list. No one foresaw any problems.

3. I drove back to Greenbelt, picked up the Deke at school. It was the Deke's first day back after spring break and, since I was away all day, I hadn't been to the grocery store to stock the pantry after our visit to New York, so we went to Old Line and enjoyed a light dinner and told each other about our day. April has gone by in a most enjoyable blur of travel to North Idaho and New York and now I look forward to settling back into some days in our kitchen and getting back into the swimming pool and on some walking trails.

Three Beautiful Things 04/23/17: Family Service, Jack's Basketball Practice, LuvPlates at DC Brau

1. This morning Jack, Adrienne, the Deke, and I sauntered down the hill -- Jack and Adrienne live on the hill's crest -- to Grace Episcopal Church for the 9:00 family service. The rector, Owen Thompson, has fashioned a condensed Eucharist out of the traditional one and it is direct, to the point, and beautiful. The congregation gathered around the altar for the blessing of elements and then filed toward the back of the church, down the middle aisle, where Father Owen and those helping him administered the Communion. If this pared down liturgy and its more common language is meant to help the youth of the congregation experience the outline of the liturgy and its fundamental rhythms. this service accomplishes this beautifully.

2. After church, Jack, Adrienne, the Deke, and I raced to a local middle school gym where we watched Jack go through basketball drills and then participate in a short scrimmage. Jack is currently obsessed with basketball and it was fun watching him respond to instruction from the coaches about dribbling, shooting, passing, playing defense, and pouring shots through the iron.

3. Early in the afternoon, the Deke and I left Nyack and as we roared down the turnpike, we decided we'd breeze right by Greenbelt and drive straight to DC Brau. We arrived and immediately fell into conversation with Chef Jay who spoke to us from inside his food truck, LuvPlates. We found a place to sit and I immediately dashed back outside and ordered us three containers, one each of mac and cheese, Mama's greens, and chicken and sausage gumbo.  The food was divine and we told Chef Jay how much we enjoyed it and he told us more about his background as a chef and shared his dream of one day turning his food truck into a storefront restaurant. I will be watching to see if his dream comes true.

Three Beautiful Things 04/22/17: First Drive to NYC in the Sube, *Sunday in the Park with George*, Burgers

1. Instead of taking the train, the Deke and I decided to drive into NYC to see Sunday in the Park with George at the Hudson Theater. I had never driven to NYC or in NYC before and the prospect made me nervous. All went well until we arrived on W. 43rd to park the Sube in a parking garage where Adrienne had reserved us a parking place. Something was going on inside that garage that caused a huge delay and we sat on W 43rd for forty-five minutes before finally turning our car over to an employee who parked it. When I turned off of 11th Ave. to enter W. 43rd, I didn't realize the line of cars waiting to get into the parking garage was not moving and I obstructed traffic in the right lane of W 43rd. When, finally, cars in the parking garage lane could move forward a bit, I got out of the way. I'd been blocking a guy in an SUV who honked one last time, rolled down his window, and roared at me that I should get the f**k back where I came from.  I was thinking at that moment that Kellogg, Idaho sounded like a much simpler place to be!

2. With the car parked, the Deke and I hoofed it down 43rd and then 44th, experienced the mob of people, garish lights, and amplified noise of Times Square, and stopped in at a grocery-deli and split a tuna sandwich before going across the street and getting settled into our seats in the front row of the balcony.

The production of Sunday in the Park with George moved me deeply. Even though it's been around since 1983 and even though I had heard general comments about it over the years, I went into the theater not knowing the way the story would be told and I didn't know the music at all.

I had no idea it would be such a thrilling and moving exploration of the creation and power of art. We went to this production because the Deke has been having her third graders learn about painting through the art of George Seurat. Am I ever happy for the happy coincidence between the Deke's curriculum, the dates of her spring break, and the fact that the relatively short run of this production was still going.

3. Our drive back to Nyack was much less dramatic and, back at Adrienne's apartment, Alex grilled hamburgers served with sweet corn on the cob and a leafy salad.

Three Beautiful Things 04/21/17: Relaxing, Defiant Brewing (and Smokehouse), Dinner at Hearth & Tap

1. The Deke and I decided not to go to a sheep farm in New Paltz, NY and so we relaxed for much of the day at Adrienne's apartment.

2. By about 2:30, we decided to give Defiant Brewing Company, here, in Pearl River, NY a try and were we ever happy we did. Since we arrived early in the day, few other people were there and Jen, our beer and food guide, lavished us with most welcomed attention, pouring us samples of beer, telling us about their food smoking operation, and giving us some tips about places to eat in New York City. We ordered a charcuterie and cheese plate. The three meats were smoked on site, as were these divine, crunchy, and peppered thin cornbread pieces -- we'd never heard of smoked cornbread before. The three cheeses were superb and so were the balsamic pickles. The Deke and I enjoyed the beers we drank and, if we lived here, we would be coming to this place regularly to try out more of their menu and to enjoy their beers.

3. We only ate a snack of cheese and meat slices because we had a dinner date with Adrienne and Alex at 5:30 at Hearth & Tap, a terrific restaurant, here, just over the New Jersey border in Montvale.  We shared and enjoyed a portabella and arugula flatbread to start. I was sipping on a Dark 'n' Stormy. Soon my dinner arrived: roasted lemon chicken on a bed of polenta with lightly grilled carrots and asparagus on the side. It was a substantial and delicious dinner.

Three Beautiful Things 04/20/17: Mary at Fraunces Tavern, Scott and the Lower East Side, Nightcap with the Deke

1. Back on the train today -- the Deke buzzed me over to Tarrytown and I glided along the Hudson River to Grand Central and hopped on the subway to Bowling Green. I'm not very familiar with Lower Manhattan and, to me, it's a tangle of streets and I struggle to even get a sense of northsoutheastwest. I sat down, got out my trusty electronic tablet, went to Maps, and figured out how to stroll the short distance to Fraunces Tavern, New York City's oldest standing structure.  If you'd like to see or read more about this place and how it's connected to George Washington and the American Revolution, among other things, you can go here and here.

I was at Fraunces Tavern to meet with Mary McGrail for lunch. Mary arrived and we dove into some wide-ranging conversation about plays and tennis and readings and the Shakespeare Showcase and her work with the Community Service Society of New York, here.  She came to the tavern after attending a rally at the Federal Plaza to help in the fight against budget cuts to HUD.

2. As I finished my second glass of beer -- wow! -- get this name: it's brewed in the Bronx at Gun Hill Brewing Company, here, and it's a 2IPA called E. Pluribus Lupulin 4: Citrea -- I ordered it as "that Gun Hill beer you've got" -- and as I finished a ham sandwich on ciabatta bread that featured a cheese I'd never heard of and don't remember the name of -- it was kind of sweet and really delicious, yes, as I finished all of that, in walked Scott Shirk.

Scott jumped very smoothly into Mary's and my conversation, but Mary had to return to work uptown and Scott and I had plans to hit a dive bar in the Lower East Side. I think we all wish Mary could have played hookey and joined in, but, alas, that couldn't happen.

Scott and I waltzed over to the Broad Street station and lept onto either a J or a Z train to Essex Street and in a hop, skip, and a jump we were at the Parkside Lounge on E. Houston St. Immediately, I was elated to see that the Parkside had Bell's Two-Hearted Ale on tap.

Scott and I were the only patrons in the Parkside Lounge. Two televisions were playing two different movies, one with Harrison Ford that we didn't identify and the other a black and white classic movie we couldn't place.

Right away, Scott and I launched into scintillating conversation about LeVon Helm, The Band, Tom Petty, the Highwaymen, and other music and musicians before we got going on New Wave Australian movies from nearly forty years ago. Not long ago he and Cate had watched Picnic at Hanging Rock and I wished he could find The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and then I nearly fell off my stool with the special passion I feel for Breaker Morant and I rambled on too long about how Scott must watch it as soon as possible.

Time flew. Damn. We had to wrap it up.

I wanted to make it back to Nanuet, NY to meet the Deke at our favorite NY taproom, Growler and Gill, so Scott and I staggered back to the subway (at 2nd Street?) and he headed to Brooklyn and I took the F train to Herald Square and hoofed it down 34th to Penn Station where I found the New Jersey Transit ticket machines and successfully purchased a ticket to Nanuet, took the train to Secaucus, and transferred onto the Pascock Valley Line, got off the train at Nanuet, and had a nice short ride on Uber to the Growler and Gill with Hamed.

3.  The Deke and I wound down and capped off our day at Growler and Gill. I enjoyed a shorty of Wolf Among Weeds 2IPA from L. A.'s Golden Road Brewing, but, even more, I enjoyed our charcuterie and cheese plate. The Growler and Gill was quiet, we were helped by the friendliest server imaginable, and it was relaxing and fun to shoot the breeze for a while before returning to Adrienne's for the night.

Three Beautiful Things 04/19/17: Train to Grand Central, Seeing *The Glass Menagerie*, Waiting for Sally Field

1. This morning the Deke and I piled into the Sube and roared across the Hudson River on the Tappen Zee Bridge and made our way to the Tarrytown Metro-North station and leaped on a commuter train and rumbled into Grand Central Terminal, the first time we have been to New York City together.

2. We split a tri-tip sandwich in the Grand Central food concourse, went upstairs and gawked at the gorgeous cheeses, cuts of meat, fresh seafood, produce, flowers, baked goods, and other delights at the Central Market, and then, after a quick stop at Banana Republic, strode up 44th to the Belasco Theater where we watched Sally Field in the role of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie.

My experience watching this production was personal, in fact, autobiographical, and I'm very grateful that the Deke, like me, does not want to leap up and dash to the exits when we finish watching something (or when we go to church). I had to sit for a while and gather myself, regain my equilibrium, and transition out of the Wingfield apartment and its world of illusions, memories, glass figurines, nostalgic music, and a gentleman caller, back into the world of Manhattan.  I plan to write a separate blog entry about what I experienced watching this play later. One thing, though: my experience was autobiographical because of the nearly 45 years I've lived with this play -- and with Tennesee Williams, not because it recalled events from the story of my life.

3. I have never waited outside a theater after a show for the actors to emerge. This afternoon, however, a small knot of people were doing just this and the Deke figured out what was going on and suggested we hang around for a little while. Most of the people wanted to see American Horror Story's Finn Wittrock (he played Jim O'Connor) or were friends of Madison Ferris (Laura Wingfield), so by the time Sally Field came out, the small crowd had nearly disappeared and I stepped right up to the little barrier that we stood behind.

Theater security people announced before she emerged, that Sally Field would not be posing with others for self-portraits.

Sally Field autographed my playbill right after the Deke snapped this picture of her:

Three Beautiful Things 04/18/17: Preparing to Leave, Getting Updates on Mom, Driving to Nyack

1. I got packed, the apartment vacuumed, the kitchen cleaned up, and dogs rounded up in preparation to drive to Nyack, NY today. Shortly before 1:00, I dropped Maggie and Charly off with Molly and enjoyed having some time to chat before I hit the road.

2.  Three times on my drive to Nyack, I stopped at rest areas to read updates from my sisters about how Mom's day was going and to thank them and to add brief thoughts or ask questions. I am very happy and relieved that Christy and Carol will both go with Mom on Wednesday morning to see Mom's primary care giver at 7:30 a.m. to talk about their concerns regarding Mom's difficulties, especially over the last five days or so.

3. I loved my drive to Nyack -- I've just got a thing about enjoying the drive through Baltimore, making my to the New Jersey Turnpike, and driving it.  Today, for the first time, I stayed on I-95 in New Jersey -- instead of taking the Garden State Parkway. I wanted to see the view of Manhattan off to the east and I wanted to have my first experience driving on the Pallisades Parkway.  I loved it all.  I arrived safe and sound at Adrienne's, enjoyed a Dogfish Head 60 IPA and ate a couple of superb shredded chicken tacos. Alex joined us and we all sat around and gabbed while Jack entertained himself with toys and then got ready for bed. I love being in Nyack.

Three Beautiful Things 04/17/17: Mom's Easter and Today's Lunch, Old Line Relaxation, Casseroles on *The Chew*

1. I called Mom this morning and she told me how much she enjoyed Easter Day with Carol and Paul. I knew from communicating with Carol that Mom was off kilter over the weekend, but I could tell from talking to Mom that the Easter dinner meant the world to her -- she loved the ham Carol prepared -- as did the tour she made of her yard in her wheelchair, with Paul's help. She was also excited that two of her longtime friends, Flo and Dorothy, were going to come to her house and bring lunch on Monday.  Mom is always at her best when friends or family are with her or when she can leave the house for an outing -- like when we went to Marguerite Gallaher's funeral, when we went to the Easter Cantata, and, on Sunday, when she toured her yard.

2.  After running a couple of late afternoon errands, I went to Old Line to relax a bit. I decided to see if a couple of Green Hat gins might help settle my nerves and it was a good decision. I enjoyed a hamburger and a dinner salad and tried out and enjoyed a small snifter of Firestone Walker's new Double IPA, Leo Vs Ursus Fortem. (I have no idea what that name means!)

3. I don't often have trouble getting to sleep, but tonight was an exception and I helped myself settle down, first, by doing an online acrostic puzzle and then watching an episode of The Chew that focused on casseroles. It turns out that watching Mario Batali make a chili rellenos casserole Michael Symon make a Brussel sprout/noodle casserole stimulated me more than relaxed me, but, finally, I suppressed the urge to make a midnight run to Safeway to buy ingredients and bake a midnight casserole and eventually fell asleep.

Three Beautiful Things 04/16/17: Easter Service, New Beers and a Surprise, Dinner with Betsy and Martin

1. I attended the Easter service at St. John's in Bethesda where Betsy Tesi is Associate Rector. The service stirred me, especially the Easter music. My hectic Sundays of late, with travel and visitors, have kept me out of church, and I loved being at home again in the liturgy.

2. After church and after checking in on Maggie and Charly, I drove down to DC Brau and enjoyed drinking samplers of three of their latest collaborations, Green Card Pale Ale (Firestone Walker), Conflicts of Interest Imperial Pilsner (Melvin), and Yonder Cities, a Farmhouse IPA (Union). In addition, and I never dreamed this would happen, DC Brau had a year old keg of one of my very favorite collaborations from a year ago, The Wise and the Lovely Imperial Milk Stout (Cigar City). I thought that beer was dead but it was resurrected and was the perfect Easter treat.

3. From DC Brau, I drove over to Ft. Totten, having accepted Betsy and Martin Tesi's invitation for Easter dinner. Marin fixed gorgeous, really thick rib eye steaks and Betsy fixed tender asparagus. We had mashed potatoes and Betsy fixed strawberry shortcake for dessert. We had splendid conversation. Our dinner capped off an unexpectedly superb Easter Sunday.

Three Beautiful Things 04/15/17: The Deke Hops on Amtrak, Recovery Day, Potato Soup and Dumpling School

1. The Deke and I spent one full day together upon my arrival back to Greenbelt. Around 11:30 this morning, I dropped her off at the New Carrollton Amtrak station so she could travel to Nyack, NY to see Adrienne and Jack. I'll join them on Tuesday.

2. For the most part, today was a recovery day of resting after travel and a late-ish night at the Diaz's last night. After arriving back at our apartment home from the train station, I only went out one more time for Maggie's dog food and some groceries.

3. After making potato soup at Mom's the other night, I decided to give it another go with a few variations. I used up a little bit of half and half and used whole milk, not evaporated milk. I wanted my soup to have a deeper flavor and I was pleased with my idea to season it with cumin. I tend to like spinach in almost anything. I noticed we had a clump of frozen spinach in the freezer so I tossed that in. So, I started by cooking chopped onions and celery in butter until they were tender. Then I added chopped carrots, potatoes, cumin, and some flour, covered them with water, brought them to a boil, added the frozen spinach, turned down the heat, and when the carrots and potatoes were tender I poured in half and half and whole milk. I salted and peppered the soup at various intervals and ended up with a dinner I enjoyed.

Later, in preparation for a possible visit to Dumpling Galaxy in Flushing, Queens this coming week, I watched an episode of Eat the World with Emeril Lagasse on amazon.  In it, Lagasse and Mario Batali travel to Shanghai to sample dumplings at three different places and then one of the establishments lets them use their kitchen and they make dumplings and serve them to the staff. I very much enjoyed learning more about the art of making dumplings and the technique of eating them.

Three Beautiful Things 04/14/17: Greedy for Sleep, Everything is Back on the Table, Meeting Eduardo and Adriana

1. After flying across the USA, I arrived home greedy for sleep and didn't emerge from the sack this morning until 10 o'clock. A half an hour later, I called Mom to let her know I had arrived home safe and sound.

2. While I was in Kellogg, the Deke decided to resign her position as a teacher at the French Immersion school and probably not pursue another full time job. This puts us on familiar ground: we don't know what's next and everything is on the table. Tonight, at Old Line, we started piling ideas about our future on the table (well, the bar) and started to imagine just what might be next in in our life together.

3.  After eating some mussels and calamari, the Deke and I jetted over to the Diaz house where Hiram's brother, Eduardo, and his wife, Adriana, are spending the weekend. I hadn't met Eduardo and Adriana before and it was fun to get acquainted -- and, later, to exercise the freedom I always have at the Diaz house to sack out for a while.

Three Beautiful Things 04/13/17: Goodbye to Mom, Flying with Podcasts, Back in Our Apartment Home

1. Christy and Everett honked in front of Mom's house at exactly the right time, before 11:30, to pick me up to go to the airport. Mom's friend, Flo, called just as Christy pulled up, so Mom and I waved good-bye to each other. Simultaneously, I love my life in Maryland and, at the same time, I feel a strong pull to be back in Kellogg with Mom and to do things with Christy and Carol and to see my friends.  I accept -- that is, I don't fight with the fact -- that I live a life divided between two places and two ways of life, but seeing Mom slowly become more frail and knowing I probably won't see my sisters until late spring or summer made walking out the door difficult.

2. My day of flying on Southwest was easy. As I did when flying out to Spokane, I flew over the USA listening to podcasts. I learned more about an annual day of corned beef sandwiches sold by the Jewish community of the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville, MS on the podcast Gravy, here; I listened to Ed Levine interview Helen You, the owner of and dumpling creator at Dumpling Galaxy in Flushing, Queens on Special Sauce, here; Radiolab, in collaboration with the Tampa Bay Times, is looking deep into police shootings in the USA and I got started listening to it, here and here; Burnt Toast presented a fun story on a 1950s kitchen appliance, the Roto-Broil 400, here; The Big Listen posted a segment of its episode coming up this weekend and it featured the show's two favorite middle-aged Jewish ladies, Ronna Glickman and Bev Ginsburg, characters played with little reverence by improv comedians Jessica Chaffin and Jamie Denbo -- you can hear the entire episode, here; I went to the podcast Death, Sex, and Money where host Anna Sale interviewed Rashema Melson, the woman known as "the homeless valedictorian", about why she left Georgetown University, here; this interview led me another Anna Sale's interview, replayed on an episode of Snap Judgment, with "Emma", a sex worker, who talked about how and why she got into this line of work and how it affects her day to day. To conclude this episode, Anna Sale described a conversation she'd had with "Emma" recently that updated her story (spoiler: she quit giving sensual massages for money).  By the way, I skipped the first two stories of this episode of Snap Judgment and found my way to the third story, featuring "Emma", here.

Have I mentioned that I love the way podcasts help me fly over the USA and make the trip seem brief?

3.  I took a cab from the airport to our apartment home. The Deke had texted me that she was still up, so I was happy to walk in the door, embrace, and have a good talk about my week in Kellogg and the Deke's week in Greenbelt. It was good to see Maggie and Charly, too.

Three Beautiful Things 04/12/17: Lunch at Daft Badger, Potato Soup for Mom, *Chopped* Chef Judges Compete

1. Late this morning, I scaled the 4th of July Pass and coasted into Coeur d'Alene. I dropped by Byrdman's house and we plopped down at a table at Daft Badger Brewing and enjoyed some of the finest beer anywhere along with great sandwiches. Darrell Dlouhy, Daft Badger's proprietor was working. Byrdman and I both go way way back with Darrell and enjoyed shooting the breeze.

2. Mom asked me to cook potato soup with carrots, celery, and onion and I found a recipe, here, that I thought was pretty similar to the potato soup Mom made for us over the years.  Christy, Carol, and Paul joined Mom and me for a bowl and everyone seemed to think it was pretty good.

3.  Once again, after Mom got settled into bed for the night, I strolled over to Christy and Everett's to watch two very impressive episodes of Chopped featuring chef judges of the show squaring off against each other, demonstrating their phenomenal, sometimes balletic, skills.

Three Beautiful Things 04/11/17: Mom's Sleepy Day, Everything Dinner, *Chopped* and *The Chew*

1. Mom slept much of the day. In fact, Mom rarely goes back to bed, but this afternoon she returned to her bedroom and slept on her bed for a while. Today was the only day since I arrived that she didn't eat lunch. Heather, the cardiology nurse, called back and reported that the doctor is concerned about Mom's fast heart rate and would like to administer a medicine to help slow it down, but, before doing so, he needs Mom to have some blood work done to make sure her kidney function is good enough to take this pill. Mom and I will head down to have the blood work done on April 12th.

2. I decided to cook and warm up all kinds of food for dinner in order to make good use of odds and ends around the house -- I fried the last two potatoes, cooked the last of the asparagus, warmed up the leftover macaroni and cheese, fixed a green salad, and anchored dinner around pork chops and a pork steak with a choice of applesauce or cranberries.

3.  It's fun going over to Christy and Everett's to watch Chopped and tonight we watched another installation of Chopped: Star Power. It was a fun episode. The four contestants were actors, very gracious actors I might add, and each one was creative and really good in the kitchen. Earlier in the day, I watched the last half hour of The Chew. The show focused on pasta dishes and I must be sure to post Michael Symon's "Midnight Pasta" recipe, a very flexible dish he used to cook with stuff he had around his flat late at night/early in the morning after a day-night of 9 dollar an hour line cook work and few cocktails with his fellow workers. I loved that as he presented this recipe, Michael Symon took several minutes to discuss the virtues of anchovies and the different kinds of anchovies we might find at the store. The recipe is here.

Three Beautiful Things 03/10/17: Mom Update, Macaroni and Cheese, Dinner with Scott and Ed

1.  Christy called Mom's cardiologist's office to report on how Mom was doing a week after going on oxygen all through the day and night. The office returned the call later in the afternoon. I took the call and had a very pleasant conversation with Heather who expressed concern for Mom's high heart rate, explained the way Mom's reduced heart function causes edema, and expressed support for Mom napping as often as she wants to. She will pass the notes of our conversation on to the doctor and we'll see if he makes any adjustments in Mom's medicine that might help slow down her heart, but not lower her blood pressure which is already on the low side.

2.  Because I wanted to be home when the nurse called, I didn't go to the store this afternoon, but I was able to make a macaroni and cheese dish out of onion, ground pork sausage, macaroni, sharp cheddar cheese, milk, and flour.  I don't remember ever making macaroni and cheese before and it made me happy that Mom and Carol both thought this simple dish worked pretty well.

3.  Scott drove over to the Silver Valley from Spokane, picked up Ed, and they came to Mom's house and talked with her for a while before the three of us went to Best Shots for a bite to eat and to shoot the breeze. We had fun joking around with and hearing stories from our server, Baylee, about when she was a student of Scott's son in middle school.  I capped off the night with a visit to Christy and Everett's for a slug of Knob Creek Kentucky Bourbon and some superb conversation.

Three Beautiful Things 04/09/17: Mom Gets Good Sleep, Wheeling to the Church, Easter Cantata Takes Me Back

1. Mom slept in until about 7:45. She ate her breakfast about forty minutes later and then slept in her chair for the rest of the morning. Once she woke up and some mental fog lifted, her mind was sharp and she had no problems getting ready for the day's major event and she continued to be right on top of things on into the late afternoon and evening.

2. Mom got dressed up in one of her Sunday best outfits and consented to my idea that I push her in her wheelchair across the street and into the church parking lot and building without her having to do the much more difficult task of climbing into and out of her car. This worked great. Inside, I situated Mom right where she wanted to be toward the back of the church behind the pews. We arrived about twenty-five minutes before the Easter Cantata started. Before and after the concert, many of Mom's friends stopped by to tell her how good she looked and to chat about any number of things.

3. The many people from up and down the Silver Valley who sang in the Easter Cantata performed beautifully and Christy, Mom, and I were very proud of sister/daughter Carol's performance as a soloist. Listening to the Easter Cantata (directed by fellow 1972-74 North Idaho College choir member and lifelong friend, Joy Persoon) transported me back to a Sunday at least fifty years ago when a combined choir of Silver Valley churches and a small instrumental ensemble performed Handel's Messiah in the same church. Our Boy Scout troop, Troop 300, directed parking for the event and then we got to come in and listen to the performance. To this day, whenever I hear the Messiah or when I have sung it at both community sing-a-longs and as a choir member at North Idaho College, I remember that day when I first heard it performed and what stands out most clearly is the beauty of hearing a harpsichord for the first time -- that day, when I was about 12 years old, the harpsichord mesmerized me -- and never stopped.

Three Beautiful Things 04/08/17: Mom's Pretty Good Day, Sibs at Best Shots, Inland Lounge Session

1. I thought Mom had a pretty good day today. It made me wonder if yesterday's outing was restorative. She nodded off less frequently and was more alert. She's had a card table up in the living room for quite a while and, today, she finished working with the papers on it and I got to take it down, giving the room much more space. I seared and roasted four or five chicken breasts and later made a chicken soup and, at about four o'clock, I boiled a ton of egg noodles and so we had chicken noodle stew/soup for dinner with a baguette and salad.

2. Carol, Christy, and I went to Best Shots this afternoon and told each other what we think about Mom's condition at present.  We did our best to get a sense of what the summer looks like for each of us. Even though summer is almost here, Carol and I are both unsure about just how things will pan out in June and July. We had a really good time. Christy had just finished her shift at work and had some good stories to tell about her work and the people she talked with who patronize the library. The library is a life saver for any number of Kellogg people, youth and adults, and Christy is making a vital contribution to the library's mission.

3. After dinner, I joined Byrdman at the plank at the Inland Lounge and we were the beneficiaries of proprietor Bob Casady's fine barmanship and great company. The former owner of Eddie Joe's, another distinguished Kellogg watering hole, local raconteur, Eddie Miller (Lite) was seated at the bar and Byrdman, Eddie, and I got into some first-rate conversation and Eddie told some great stories. Soon, Eddie's ninety-something year old pop sashayed in, as did one of the kids from the neighborhood, Patrick Kenyon. It was a great evening, but as the time crept toward nine o'clock, I drove back to Mom's, figuring she'd be just about ready to go to bed. I was right and I helped her get situated, bringing a full day of cooking, drinks with my sisters, dinner, and a fun session at the Inland Lounge to an end.

Three Beautiful Things 04/07/17: Preparation for Mom's Outing, Mom Perks Up, My Past Rushes to the Present

1.  Mom and I were up at 6 a.m. No more of this lazing around in bed until 7:30! We had a big day planned with Marguerite Gallaher's funeral coming up at 5 p.m. Mom knew she couldn't come into the church through the front door, primarily because of the steps leading from the foyer into the sanctuary, but she and my sisters told me about a wheelchair ramp in the back of the church. Shortly after noon, I drove over to the American Lutheran Church and checked out the ramp, mainly to assess whether I thought Mom would want to push her walker up it or ride in her wheelchair. The last time Mom went to a funeral at this church, the back door at the top of the ramp was locked. After I scouted the ramp, I drove up to the funeral home to talk to the director to make sure the door would be open and to find out what Mom would be facing once inside that back door. Our conversation helped me a lot and I came home with a report that eased some of Mom's anxiety about getting in the church.

2. Mom had another day of falling asleep frequently, but as the time drew near for the funeral, she perked right up and dressed up really nice. We decided it would be best for Mom to use her wheelchair. When we arrived at the church, about forty minutes before the service, several members of the Grandmothers Club were panting their way up the ramp, making me glad Mom was in her wheelchair. When the women ahead of us got to the back door that goes into the fellowship hall, guess what? -- it was locked. But, one of the grandmothers rapped sharply on the door and one of the caterers opened it and cleared the way for me to wheel Mom through the hall and into the sanctuary. I don't know if Mom was relieved that with my help she got down the steps at home, into her wheelchair, into the car, out of the car, back into the wheelchair, up the ramp, through the door, and into the sanctuary, but I sure was.

3. In 1959-60, when I was in morning kindergarten and Mom was teaching at the Silver King school and Dad was working at the Zinc Plant and Christy was four years old, Marguerite was our babysitter each of my parents' workday. Today, nearly sixty years later, those days flashed before my eyes as Pastor Bartel read memories Marguerite's grandchildren and great grandchildren had written, and they were startlingly similar to things I remembered, yes, nearly sixty years ago: Marguerite's love for her parakeet, her enjoyment of cards and other games, her love of knitting, crocheting, and other handiwork, how she took us to parades, the great food she prepared for us, and her love of television -- ha! I chuckled during the service thinking how it seemed to me that I Love Lucy was always on when we were at Marguerite's.

After the funeral, at the dinner, I visited with people who were my boyhood elders, many whom I hadn't seen in decades. Marguerite's youngest daughter, Sandy, married the son, Dan, of our other babysitter when we lived on East Portland in uptown Kellogg, Mary Pavelich. I delighted in talking with Sandy and Dan.  I hadn't seen them since I was in grade school. Maybe I'll see them again at the All-Class reunion in August. I got to chat with Mary Pierce, re-introduce myself to Sano Haldi, talk with Joanne Schonewald, shake hands with Carolyn MacPhee, say hi to Donna White, and visit with Millie Savage.

Millie is nearly 100 years old and she startled me, in fact, staggered me, when she told me she always thought I was the most handsome boy in our Sunnyside neighborhood and always thought I should have been an actor -- because of my "good looks".  I got to tell her that I have done some acting and that tickled her.

I wheeled Mom out of the fellowship hall and helped her back into the car. Once home, Mom struggled going up the steps to get in the house, but, with my assistance, she made it and we settled into a relaxed evening, much of it with Christy.

Three Beautiful Things 04/06/17: Mom Update, Gnocchi and Shrimp Debut, *Chopped:Star Power*

1.  Mom has been sleeping more than usual lately. Again, this morning, she slept until about 7:30 this morning and during the day she nodded off frequently in her chair.  Mom has had short periods of fogginess, slow to respond to questions sometimes, and her memory hasn't been as sharp as usual. Mom is far from incapacitated. We worked together to get her Avista bill straightened out. It is. She is eating well. We are making plans to go to Marguerite Gallaher's funeral at 5:00 on Friday afternoon and the Easter Cantata on Sunday.

2. When I was last in Kellogg during November and December, our friend Rosie dropped by and she and Mom talked a bit about gnocchis. At the time, I looked at some gnocchi recipes and told Mom that I thought I could make gnocchis. This morning, as I started to trot off to the grocery store, Mom told me she wanted fish for dinner. I did some reading around and found a gnocchi and shrimp recipe and decided I would go all the way with preparing and cooking things I'd never done before. I bought raw shrimp. For the first time ever, I shelled and deveined shrimp, successfully(!). I think I kneaded the gnocchi dough too much and I'm not sure I got the ratio of flour and potatoes quite right. I might bake, rather than boil, the potatoes next time. I also want to figure out which variety of potato works best.  I'm hoping my next gnocchis will be lighter, and after doing some post-dinner reading, I learned some ideas about how I might make them lighter and better. The dinner I prepared was a skillet dinner -- boiled and browned gnochhi, shrimp, broccoli, shallots, chicken broth, lemon juice, and Parmesan cheese.

3.  I capped off the day with a visit to Christy and Everett's to watch an episode of Chopped: Star Power and had fun watching Dorothy Hamill and three other athletes compete in the kitchen. I won't give away who won the day, but I'll say it was an entertaining half an hour of cookery t.v.

Three Beautiful Things 04/05/17: Morning with Mom, The Essentials, Dinner and a Couple Drinks with Ed

1. Normally, Carol comes over in the morning to help Mom get situated for the day, but she was in Boise today for work, so I sprang into action at 7:30 this morning, more refreshed after about 5 1/2 hours of sleep than I thought I'd be, and prepared Mom some breakfast, tidied up her bedroom, got some things straight with Mom's pills, helped Mom put on her compression socks, washed and dried a load of laundry, and did whatever other small thing Mom requested.

2. Later, I ventured out to Walmart to buy some T-shirts -- even though I enjoyed packing a day early, I didn't put everything in the suitcase, and I know just how my oversight happened. I also bought some items for Mom. And guess who else was shopping at Walmart? Christy! Ha! We talked for a while, saw longtime family friend, Bev Danielson, and I finished shopping and headed to Yoke's to get the essential creature comforts I want: coffee, whole milk, and a six pack of Sierra Nevada Torpedo (by the way, Yoke's beer curator does a first-rate job. Many superb beers are always available).  Then, I thought, why don't I check out the liquor store? See if there's a bottle of rye I might like to have around -- and there was! It's an Idaho whiskey, something I've never tried. I purchased a bottle of Seven Devils Rye Whiskey from Koenig Distillery of Caldwell, Idaho.  Read more about them right here.

3. I told Christy and Carol that I would cook every dinner while I'm here.  I found a pound of ground beef in the freezer and wanted to use up some of Mom's potatoes. I found a recipe for potatoes au gratin with ground beef and I had a lot fun making it and it turned out really good, as did the fresh asparagus I skillet fried and the salad we ate. Christy and Everett came over for dinner and it was a great evening -- a great evening which I capped off with Ed over at Best Shots where I had a glass of Fresh Squeezed IPA and a shot of brandy on ice and, once again, enjoyed sitting in the room that was once the Kopper Keg and has been transformed so fully that it's hardly recognizable as the beer bust venue of my youth.

Three Beautiful Things 04/04/17: Flying with Podcasts, Free Drinks!, Back in Kellogg

1. It was a long day of travel and, as I always do when I fly across the country, I listened to a series of podcasts and doing so made both flights, Baltimore to Denver and Denver to Spokane feel short. I got got caught up on episodes of The Big Listen, enjoyed three episodes of Special Sauce, learned about the origins of chili powder on an episode of Gravy,  deeply appreciated a great episode on the early 20th century mine wars in West Virginia on Inside Appalachia, and went back to Burnt Toast and listened again to Calvin Trillin read his famous essay, "Spaghetti Carbonara Day", his wry and witty argument to start a new tradition by replacing the Thanksgiving turkey with spaghetti carbonara.  I learned about a podcast today that I plan to listen to a more. It's, of all things, an art history podcast, The Lonely Palette.

2. I redeemed my free drink coupon on the flight to Denver with ginger bourbon and liked it so much that I redeemed my Denver to Spokane coupon by ordering the same drink, but the flight attendant forgot the ginger ale, so I enjoyed a bourbon and bourbon over ice. That worked.

3.  The flight to Spokane was delayed a bit and we arrived about twenty minutes late and then our baggage was slow coming out. Christy patiently waited for me and we had a great drive to Kellogg and I arrived at Mom's about 1:30 a.m. PST, kind of wound up, but eventually I calmed down and fell into a deep sleep.

Three Beautful Things 04/03/17: Oil Change, Business Select, Packed

1. I probably could have waited until my return from Kellogg next week to get the oil changed in the Sube, but I decided to get it done a couple hundred miles early today. If the mechanics saw any problems that needed their attention, I wanted to have them taken care of before leaving for Kellogg Tuesday afternoon. There were none.

2.  Because I bought my airline ticket to Spokane so late -- Sunday evening, in fact -- the only tickets left on Southwest were Business Select. Today, when I checked in, I forgot I was flying Business Select so I had the fun experience of learning that I will be the second person to board the flight in Baltimore and the first in Denver -- you know, after the people who have early seating privileges. I've never had this experience. At least I know I'll sit on the aisle! I also get a complimentary adult beverage and that's such a unique experience that I've been contemplating for hours what I will order.  On the return flight from Spokane, I return to reality and have less expensive ticket.

3.  I won't be leaving our apartment home until in the afternoon on Tuesday, but I enjoy packing early for a trip and I'll double check my bag and satchel as Tuesday rolls along, but I'm pretty much ready to walk out the door.

Three Beautiful Things 04/02/17: Taxes, Beer, Popcorn and Trip Out West

1.  I am always relieved just to have our taxes done, whatever the verdict. This year, we had overpaid a bit, so we will get a refund, but, for me, the best news is that our tax preparer and I had an easy time getting the forms filled out and submitted.

2. The Deke and I love going to DC Brau on Sunday afternoons and I packed up some cheese and crackers and we buzzed down to the northeast edge of our nation's capital and enjoyed some On the Wings of Armageddon and had a good time shooting the breeze with Mike and Leah.  It was a good session.

3. Back home, we decided it was a good night for popcorn and several times the Deke asked me what I did this time to make the popcorn taste so good. I couldn't really say, but I was very happy that it turned out so well.

While eating popcorn, I also bought a round trip flight to Spokane and back so I can spend some time with Mom and my sisters in Kellogg.  I will arrive on Tuesday the 4th and fly back to Baltimore on Thursday the 13th.  It's a short trip, but comes at a good time.

Three Beautiful Things 04/01/17: Carol's Call About Mom, Zags Win, Splendid Leftovers

1.  It was an eventful day in Kellogg. I had a good conversation with Carol about it all. Earlier, Mom fell in the living room. She didn't fall hard. She used the emergency button she wears around her neck to call for help. Christy got the emergency call at work and called Everett who came over from next door and helped Mom get back up. The local emergency personnel arrived and checked her vitals and talked with her.  Carol and Paul also got the emergency call and came over to be with Mom. My sisters have concerns about how Mom is responding to a recent change in medication. They also want to double check with her doctor in Kellogg as to whether she should be on oxygen during the day as well as at night. On Monday, they'll be able to call and check these things out with Mom's doctors. I am starting to plan a trip to Kellogg in the near future, either soon this month or early in May.  Right now, my plans are uncertain.

2. The Deke and I went up to Old Line and had a couple of beers and talked about things. While there, the Deke's friend Martha strolled in with a friend and, for a while, the Deke joined them at their table and I watched a bit of the first half of the Gonzaga basketball game. Once home again, I kept a close eye on the score via espn.com. I started getting nervous when I saw that the Zags surrendered a fourteen point lead in the second half.  But, the Zags fought off South Carolina's comeback and iced the game with late free throws and will be playing North Carolina for the NCAA men's basketball championship Monday night. I was asleep before the Oregon/North Carolina game was finished, but before the night was over I got up to drink some water and checked the score. I had sorely hoped for a Zags/Ducks final, a game where I would be very happy with either team winning, but, alas, the Ducks lost a heartbreaker.

3. The Deke ingeniously combined the potatoes I had fried for breakfast this morning with leftover vegetables from dinner last night and poured the leftover curry sauce on top of them and then mixed in our leftover rice and we had an easy and splendid dinner when we got home from Old Line. It was so simple and, for whatever reason, I never would have thought to do it.

Three Beautiful Things 03/31/17: Maggie the Trooper, The Ongoing Curry Project, My Life Wrote to Me Today

1.  First thing this morning, I zipped Maggie down to the vet for her six month comprehensive exam. The check-in desk was crowded and Maggie gets very nervous and barky around other dogs. Luckily, there is plenty of room, so I backed Maggie away and she stayed quiet and as relaxed as she can be. I picked her up again around 4 o'clock and the vet had no problems to report. On the summary, I would have written something very clinical like "Maggie is a trooper".

2. For the first time in a week, I cooked dinner in our apartment home. Today I resumed my ongoing effort to get the balance between Thai curry paste and coconut milk right so that we feel the heat, but aren't overwhelmed by it. To my surprise, I discovered I only had one can of coconut cream left in the cupboard so I very carefully measured out just a half tablespoon of paste, figuring we could increase the heat, but with only one can of coconut cream, we would not be able to decrease it. The half tablespoon with some fish sauce and brown sugar worked perfectly. I fixed crispy tofu cubes, chopped onion, red pepper, and eggplant and we ate red curry over basmati rice. It was fun to cook again and we enjoyed our dinner in.

3.  Today emails and messages and Facebook comments and even a picture of Whitworth's baseball team from around 1975 came flying into my life. It was a remarkable day. I had contact with friends from many different points of my life -- from boyhood and adolescent days in Kellogg, my student days at Whitworth, my teaching days at Whitworth, and my many years living in Eugene. In the best way possible, much of my life flashed before my eyes today -- oh, a few regrets were in the mix -- but not a single one of those regrets involved any of these longtime friends, only love and respect and happiness.