The following refers to this apple pie recipe and this crust recipe.

For those of you also faced with the not-a-cook’s dilemma come a ‘cooking’s the key’ holiday, an empathetic tale.

Ingredients: Apples, sugar, water, flour, salt, and a petroleum product (more on that later)
Product: Apple Pie
Magical Thinking: “How hard can this be?”

Sidebar #1: Pandora Enya Radio strongly recommended for non-cooks in the throes of kitchen woes. Why? Because at your most challenging food-fail moment you will find yourself mentally leaping effortlessly through a primordial forest, fashionably unclad to reveal washboard abs. Quick check: theme from Last of the Mohicans. Later, tearing up over your rock-hard brown sugar situation, you’ll be audio-buoyed onto flaming Orodruin, crying heroically: “I can’t carry it for you….but I can carry you!” YES! You CAN VANQUISH MT APPLE PIE DOOM!!

Early morning revelation #1: Heck. Went shopping, but ingredients list did not include ‘rolling pin.’ Perhaps because author assumed….NEVER ASSUME. Anyway….if household contains rolling pin, it is in portion of household occupied by household’s actual cook, currently blissfully asleep because in doling out assignments I gave him ‘salad.’ Why? Because I thought I would prove ….? Right.

‘Pivoting,’ as we say in business, quickly, I seize upon last night’s recycling and wash labels off empty white wine bottle. Voila: glass rolling pin! Awesome! I then put it in fridge. I do this because it appears that all ingredients, at one point or another, are supposed to start out ‘ice cold.’ Possibly this has to do with the chemistry of cooking, but more probably it’s about us all feeling very haute about combining six things and turning out Quintessential America in cross-cross crust.

Sidebar #2: When I slightingly referred, in delineating a shopping list, to Crisco as ‘a petroleum product,’ was there any truth in this? Label revels soy and palm oils (fully and partially hydrogenated), and a variety of antioxidants, only one of which (citric acid) sounds vaguely edible. And what is this TBHQ, commonly known of course as tertiary butylhydroquinone? Wikipedia doesn’t reveal its origin but BINGO on eHow: a petroleum product! Which, FYI, the FDA considers edible if it comprises up to .02% of a products’ oil. For those wondering how much tertiary butylhydroquinone is in the cup of an all-oil product in your Quintessential American pie: this would be a good moment at which to state that I Am An English Major And Do Not Do Math.

(Also FYI, although toxicity studies do indicate a tendency for cancerous precursors in TBHQ-overdosed lab animals, UNLIKE other antioxidant additives, TBHQ does not induce lung lesions in said sad rats. As you will indubitably be pleased to hear.)

Moving on.

Revelation #2: Even if the water you are sparingly adding to your carefully combined Flour-and-petrolum-product base (aiming for the Quintessential Flaky Crust to which we all aspire at some point in our short lives), IS ice cold, and you’re quite careful about doling it out by the teaspoons as directed, it is possible to discover that the white-wine-bottle-flattened crust (rolled between waxed paper, because in the vague distant past you do remember Mom teaching you that trick, and after all what’s one more petroleum product in the mix): won’t actually LEAVE the wax paper for the pie pan. Two things: first, this is why we do two-crust pie. You have one more chance. Second: having succeeded (sort of) on Try Two, cut your crust-encrusted wax paper into thin strips and start building that cross-cut. Fear not. Physics enters into this somewhere, but basically it’s easier to extract a single strip of sticky failed crust from its wax base than from the whole danged thing. But what happened to flaky, you are asking? Come now: flaky went out the window a LONG time ago. We’re just working on our Minimally (very) Viable Product at this point.

I did think, possibly, that Mom’s apple pie smelled a little better while baking, but clearly I’ve just been reading too much about petroleum products. ANYway, as we all know: Looks Count. When this is laid on the buffet table we can only hope everyone dutifully admires it before turning to consume a non-oilfield option from an actual known cook.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, with laughter and love.

Every day, after leaving my bright, cute, young, everything-in-front-of-them daughters at school, I drive away down the hill with all the other parents, and I think about the call. If I got one. That one that says: ‘shooting.’ And how fast I would drive, where I would park, how I would avoid law inforcement’s cordon (set up to avoid risk, but I would not be avoiding risk), how I would get in the school, where I would look: everywhere, no matter what, for my daughters. Every day, I swear to you, I think this. And then I think …. how life would be if I were the one. Whose kid didn’t make it. Tonight, in abject empathy, in deepest horror, for the 20 sets of parents who are facing that unthinkable thing …. and in survivor-guilt, for myself and all the rest of us who aren’t? We need to be understanding how we are responsible for it not happening again. To someone. Who might be us. Let’s find a solution, fellow parents. Before the unthinkable is ours, not ‘theirs.’ [[tears]]

So: after a month to recover: do you, too, think we need American Election Culture Change? 

Here’s my “strawperson” ready for darts.

Divide the election into two simultaneous parts:

1. The Circus.  This is sort of like what goes on now (gamesmanship, advertising, rallies, debates, blogs, devastation of differently-minded families), with one difference: no candidates are allowed to be involved.  Not present, not debating, not approving messages, not on stage, not paid and not fiscally supported.
2. The Substance.  This is a highly regulated, entirely and solely federally-funded process whereby candidates are administratively reviewed, given the opportunity to demonstrate their approach, viewed online and in person, and elected.  It is divided into four (or so) portions.  The first is a minimal requirement for recognition and approval as a mature and serious candidate (e.g. personally-collected signatures from 10 people in all 50 states – or something not impossible but difficult enough to dissuade the casual).  The second is a lengthy, publically and nonpartisan-academically-reviewed statement of principle and vision, based on the scope for a President.  The last is a verbal defense of said statement.  The latter would occur NOT in a ‘debate’ format (the President of the US, as far as I know, is never called upon to publically debate a rival in the course of his/her job; why would we want to make judgments on such a performance?), but rather a simultaneous opportunity for multiple questions to be answered by the candidates (of which, we can assume, there would be far more than two), in a simulcast which would never have them speaking to each other, but only to questioners.  In fact, it would be better if they couldn’t hear each other (thus being unaware if – horrors – what they said actually coincided with another).  The final step is, of course, election.  This occurs over a period of one month, like advance voting does now.  No bunting.  No signs. No fuss.  And the first day of the subsequent month: a noontime announcement, on the basis of instantaneous electronic summation of results.

My friends’ darts at this construct so far: they suspect the methodology violates the First Amendment in multiple ways, that it subverts the significant economic boost from electioneering (all that bunting, tickets, and Air Force One fuel), and frankly a lot of them like the gaming aspect of the current version (My Team! Your Team!  WhoooWhoooWhooo!).  I don’t.  And at least, from a personal perspective, thinking this through sustained me during those red/blue wars at the tail end of quadrennial daily life in a swing State.  It also got me through the Day After  (Victory/Abasement/Analysis Day…..almost worse than Election Bowl Day).

What about you?

Engagingmy80s asks Lovingmy50s: “If you had the job of redesigning human beings, what would you put into your new design?”

Fabulous question, particular stated without parameters.  How to proceed?  Am I redesigning humans for the here-and-now (on Earth, 2012, all geopolitical systems as-is)?  Or for some farflung future, post-Earth apocalypse, when the human race inhabits 2,176 space vessels seeking a habitable relocation?

Malgre the fascinating conundrum of a mechanical redesign for alien conditions, I’ll consider a deeper level reconstruct.

‘The problem with people’ is often put down to easy differentials.  White/black. Young/Old. Differences in gender, culture, politics, socioeconomic status. Things that ‘divide’ us.

We need to compete; genetically constructed to that end, through many components of our corpus.  An easy one to label is the hormone testosterone, which in both genders drives us to outdo the rest. 

Young humans learn from their earliest days all about patience, empathy, teamwork, deference: the appearance of collaboration that they will use all their lives (unless they are extremely rich, lucky, and/or completely sociopathic) to ‘get ahead.’

We need a redesign that permits the fascinating and endless variety of individual differences, while requiring symbiosis for life itself.  We need a redesign that doesn’t handle crazed solo lunatics with semiautomatic weaponry by building systems to express our helpless outrage, but actually makes everyone’s life itself dependent on interdependence. 

Coffee drinkers get grumpy without their periodic fix; supposed the lack of human touch engendered the same reaction?  We must eat to live; suppose we also needed to exchange an interpersonal pleasantry in order to avoid irritability, faintness, and eventual death?

Initial element of my redesign: Replace testosterone with ‘togetherone.’

EngagingMy80s to LovingMy50s: “The vital necessities are air, water and food.  What are the next three?”

Lovingmy50s to Engagingmy80s: I’d balk at the premise, but find the answer easy (and an apt one for this Father’s Day): it’s true the corpus can’t make it without air, food and water, but the soul can’t do without what I’d call the “concurrent,” not the “next,”  three either:  giving, getting, and a sated ego.

I have a friend who’s heavily pregnant, here in the impending mid-summer (she’s due the day my youngest was born, so I know very well how heavy the heat weighs on taut skin; rivulets tickling constantly on aching back and itchy extremities).  She loves it.  Everyone around her loves it too: this most visible evidence of the ‘giving essential.’  We all need to give of ourselves: of our physical being, our material wealth, our time, effort and adoration.  People who do not give are deemed lacking in the human essential; people who give inordinately are sainted.

Sainted though giving may be, saints are also sufferers, and it’s equally widely recognized that giving without receipt wastes one to the core.  The less-than-saints among us require equal measure of the giving and the getting.  In my own distinctly unsaintly life, there have been long stretches when the weight of what seemed like unequal outflow for inflow etched lines at the downward sides of my mouth that mirrored my internal unmet emotional chasm.  For me in the current moment, an overflow of gifts both material and immaterial only lets me increase my own outflow without a sense of burden.

It is, however, possible to give and to get in abundance, yet to remain miserable.  Having just weathered ‘awards season’ here during graduation days at our university-centric community, and gearing up currently for similar ceremonies with our community theater, I’m reminded of the power of ego.  People will go to amazing, amazing lengths for a pat on the back.  “Awesome!” says my eldest idly when I suggest something that doesn’t displease her, and that’s all I need to sit out the next blistering storm of other-directed teen angst.

So: to breathe air, to drink water, to eat food, to love, to love back, and to feel recognition of our own worth.  The vital sextuplet.

Feeling blessed, today on the day of the celebration of paternity, that you’ve afforded me – and given me – the basis for all this:

“You’re Awesome, Dad!”

(and you can lean on that, when my next midlife-angst vent comes along.  These midlifers: so overwrought! )

Your loving daughter.

Lovingmy50s to Engagingmy80s: Geological science has the interesting task of studying the effect of cataclysms: meteor collisions, massive quakes, the sudden crumbling of an immense ice-dam.  Exciting stuff.  On the human-life scale, we experience incremental change but we also get those ‘OMG WOW’ moments where entire perspectives suddenly shift.  The cataclysmic gamechanger can be awful, like an unexpected death, or as minor and constructive as a sudden intellectual ‘aha’ during a quiet moment of thought.  Tell me about one (or more!) of yours.

Engagingmy80s to Lovingmy50s:

I started up a company to save the world by solar energy, but many years of concentrated effort had shown me, beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, that the world did not care to be saved by me and my solar energy-  “Not economic”! ………….. read more

Engagingmy80s to Lovingmy50s:  Kids grow up real fast.  So what is your plan for yourself when they leave home?

Perhaps tellingly, I initially mis-read the question to be: “…when YOU leave home?”  I ‘left home’ (your home) at 18, for College And The Wide World (swearing, of course, never to return; “BTDT,” I said – leaving it all behind).  But of course I very delightedly pranced my way back (all full of the World, and happy – for a while – to leave it behind) in order to raise my own two kids exactly where I’d been raised.  It all felt very right.  So far (right on the imitative trajectory), Ms. 14 tells me frequently these days about how far SHE is going to go when HER moment arrives.

Anyway, when I leave home for the second time (health and finances willing), it will be with my beloved partner, heading for known places (shared soul-memories of the former solo), and new places too.  We have a while to settle on the exact itinerary, since it’s still seven years (assuming all goes right) before Ms. Now-11’s HS graduation.  And of course finances will be tight with two college tuitions to consider. But we love having fun doing good, so that’ll be part of whatever happens.

photo from: http://www.photographyblogger.net/16-adventurous-open-road-pictures/ 

In any case: travel is on the agenda.  And (lots and lots of) writing.  As long as my mind doesn’t go (and/or as long as the bits that are rusty find soothing oil through instant digital answers to forgotten info) – the happy thing about my chosen passion is that tales age well.  And sometimes they only ripen into full flavor with time.

Don’t you think?

Engagingmy80s to Lovingmy50s:  What advice to your kids about preparing for their adult life, which will be ever so different from mine and yours?

I’ll start by acknowledging that although it might be a bit (or more than) of a cop-out to mention: according to all the experts, I may already be done preparing them.  With Ms. 14 and Ms. 11 seguing this spring, respectively, from their first year of high school and last year of elementary school, even though I am still focusing on them, ferrying them, feeding them, and correcting them when they err: they’ve probably pretty much imbued all the basis for Who They Are and How They Will Proceed, even now.

So what did I try to do?

There are a couple of basics that underscore my half-century’s-worth of experience, and I hope they ‘got it’ when they were amenable to the getting:

• Develop a flexible worldview.  By ‘flexible,’ I mean – don’t bend with the circumstances, but learn from them.  And don’t assume the same rules apply to every circumstance.  Treat everyone as you would be treated, and be simultaneously wary of being taken advantage of.  But always (always, always): be careful.  Full of care.  For yourself and others.
• Employ your natural good fortunate and skills to your advantage and to others’ advantage.  You were born into relative privilege and comfort, but the person sitting opposite you, looking just like you, might very well not have been – and that will color everything about how you interact.  It will also color what you can and should do in the world, to make it that better place that your Poppy always believed was perennially possible (and was his personal obligation).

Overall, though, my advice to my kids was and is: Consider power.  Consider it a lot.  Who has it.  Who doesn’t.  Why.  What it means.  How it is used.  In the home, in the office, in  the city, in the nation, in the world.  Think about it all the time.

Closing Anecdote: Ms. 11, coming skip-footed and light-hearted from her final day of her (good-fortune-privileged) take-out TAG class, told me they’d all written essays on power and read them to each other during a walk to the College Green.  She added that the nearby mower drowned out their words, and she herself made a paper fortune-teller out of her essay while not listening.  I paused to appreciate the symbolism of a fortune-teller created on the back of words of power.  Then, more prosaically wondering at the worth of the lesson, I said:  “So what do you think about power, honey?”  She tilted her head: “Hmmm.”  I added, half sardonically: “Do you think absolute power corrupts absolutely?”  She took a very long time to answer, during which I almost, but not quite, told her what I thought (I did, though, after she answered). 

After this lengthy and considered reflection, she said: “No.”

Ambiguous perhaps, but I’d like to think it’s a good sign.

Lovingmy50s to Engagingmy80s: Can we begin with the end?  When we were all in the hospital a few Fridays ago, you drawing difficult breath in the bed and us family-and-friends types alternately Googling the latest weird condition the docs claimed to have found and whiling away the wee hours as best we could, I think we all had that heavy sense of:  “Is This It?”  Which was sort of the impetus for this dialogue.  So my first question is: how does Death look, from where you stand now?

Engagingmy80s to Lovingmy50s:

“Well, frankly, I don’t spend much time looking at it. 

And I like the attitude of that famous philosopher, Woody Allen:

“ Do I believe in life after death?  No, I believe in death after life- makes more sense that way.”

I have died a few times already……” 

    (click to read the rest)

‘It was one of those things,’ I explained to friends, ‘that either becomes a tragedy or an intense hassle.’ Only you never know which, en route through the moment, so you try your damnedest to let the hassle part wash over you. Just in case.

The worst didn’t happen this time, and at one point I confess I did succumb.  9:35 on a Saturday, 2 scant hours’ sleep after a night in the ER with the pneumonia-and-possible-other-awfulness-afflicted elderly parent; ferrying the youngest to her Irish Dance performance.  Discovery on arrival: she has left the poodle socks, which I painstakingly (and with pride at the forththought despite the circumstances) set out at 4 am before sleeping). Temper flares.  She evinces some minor remorse.  Teen and I dash off to retrieve missing item before performance (“OMG POODLE socks,” says the sister.  For once, I am completely in line with the perennially sardonic teen-tone).  All ends well (timely-retrieved socks pictured, with fellows). 

Here in the week after, all has also come out ok on the pneumonia front.  Dad is back at home, breathing better, up and about, sharing annecdotes with my partner over an unexpectedly casual dinner (my mother’s table, strewn with take-out Chinese cartons – a “once-in-a-lifetime photo op,” says the teen – although I neglected to take it, in relief at the relieved and casual atmosphere).

Everyone else is also breathing better, although our breaths are bated with the bitter foretaste of days to come.  Dad may last a long time yet, and of course one lives (when one is reminded to remember to live) with the knowledge that tragedy can strike anyone at any time.  It is not necessarily my father’s departure which will send us into that anticipated spiral.  But we have all again realized, in the full flood of forgotten socks and all the rest of the silliness of the everyday, that our most transcendent truths are temporary, on an individual basis.  It is nice to have poodle sock retrieval to occupy oneself.  It is nice to waste resources on a less-than-incredibly-healthy-and-homecooked dinner.  It is nice to have a weekend without either tragedy or hassle on the near horizon.  To be, temporarily, short-sightedly, obliviously, all-too-humanly …. happy.