My cousin – the younger one by nine months – sent me an email about an article a member of her family found in the Wall Street Journal. It was written by a young woman who grew up in the town where my father was born and where he is buried. It is the town where he told of the “oldtimers” telling stories of their Indian-fighting days in the Old West to young boys – my dad being one of them.

It had a bandstand; people gathered on Saturday night; when my father was overseas in WWII, neighbors witnessed my grandmother’s regular walk up to the bank to deposit the allotment he had designated the government send her. She never spent a cent and my dad bought his first car with the money.

I slept when I visited in a bed with a portrait of my great-grandfather in his Union Blue watching over me. My father’s family has been in southern and central Indiana for a long, long time.

I have a postcard from 1950 of Kingman’s main street. I guess I’ll find it and scan it and post it.

And I always wanted to live somewhere exciting and sophisticated; but here I am – Cracker Barrel White Trash in the eyes of the city I always wanted to live in. And it’s okay.

Der Bingle and I were talking this morning about Bill Murray, which led to a mention of Dan Ackroyd and some hesitation and then the rather embarrassing, but in unison, question: Is he dead? No, he is not and he is four year younger than we are, which makes me pause.

However, forget all that because it doesn’t relate to the post title, although I suppose, Is he dead? is not all that delicately phrased. Still, what made us think about the recent brouhaha over men making inappropriate remarks, was the recurring skit between Ackroyd and Jane Curtain, portraying news people in a Cross Fire format.

Who can forget “Jane, you ignorant slut.” It became a catchphrase. But, sorry, Dan, I guess now it’s curtains for you.

Just before daylight, out the front door. I see no elf prints; perhaps I should go look under the windows.

I surf the internet in the morning, looking at the news first to see if anything happened that the media feels does not have a Trump twist to it, and then just peeking in nooks and crannies on various sites.This morning one link led me to BuzzFeed, which highlighted a segment on “special” gift-giving.

And that is how I found The Fat Toad Farm and the mention of the special caramel sauces. I immediately sent Der Bingle and LZP a text about it and received back a reply from Der Bingle, asking if we got a family discount. You know, the Fat Toad part, not the caramel mention.

I said that they wanted a picture and would probably put it on their label. Now, I feel Der Bingle is shying away from following up on that, but my money is on LZP who I think can come up with a real winner. After all, he and Der Bingle are both smarter than I am, but when it comes to wicked good cleverness, he truly leaves me in the dust. (Der Bingle is pretty good at that too, but I’d say LZP is a bit more devil may care about it.

So, I am waiting to see if there are any photos showing up . . . Actually, I might just look in the archives and photoshop out the two good-looking sons/nephews of LZP and Der Bingle respectively. That would leave me with uh, Old Kook One and Two?

Oh, there is a codicil I have to had to what may turn out to be my final post and testament: Somewhere along the line, I switched FAT in my mind with OLD and got Old Toad Farm. It was with that in mind that I wrote this post. BUT WHEN I LOOKED CLOSELY, I realized I had a problem: scrub the post or correct it and run for my life? I’m heading for my bolt hole now.

Oh, dear, while checking on a blog to see if there was a new post that would lend itself to whimsical joshing – perhaps a few tongue and cheek verbal tennis ball lobs between another comment leaver and me, I was stopped in my tracks by one of the sections of the frequently changing banner.

YES. THAT. UP THERE. I believe I have seen it before, but apparently simply scanned it because I came away with the snooty cat image as being exasperating to the lovable and loyal with eyes-that-would-melt-your-heart dog image.

Now, that I have let my eyes actually take the whole thing in, I am in a state of reflection; no, no, that’s wrong. I am upset. Do I have the same characteristics as a cat? (And I am skimming over any reference to catty remarks here)

How can I be in a category with cats? All those funny posters and comics that highlight how cats are more like staff than friends. And that book: 101 Things to Do With a Dead Cat. When we lived in Chicago, I bought it and casually mentioned it to a neighbor who was thrilled because her husband had been looking all over for it. He couldn’t find a copy because I assume so many people had swarmed bookstores to buy this tome by a kindred spirit.

It is so much to take in at one time. Shocking, actually. At Christmas time too!!

I am going to be more accurate – I am a sous to the nth degree chef, actually to infinity degree, and possible negative infinity. In other words, in finding my way around the kitchen, my mother, who was an exemplary cook, indicated where the doors in and out of the room were.

So, when holiday time rolled around and Mother pulled out all the stops on recipes, I was recruited to do the “things anyone who could read could do”. That is sort of like learning to swim by reading a book about it, but let’s just that go. Basically, I did the scut work and when more complicated steps were involved, she would talk me through it. It could get fairly nerve racking for the both of us.

I think I would almost prefer to defuse a bomb that deal with the tension of adding just the right amount of ingredients at just the right temperature and time. I would rather watch grass grow that stare at a supremely elegant jello-based salad that required things to be added at the proper stages of the jello setting up. No, that’s wrong; watching grass grow would be boring. Working for Mother was to feel like an med student working with the top surgeon at Johns Hopkins.

However, now I miss the fancy dishes and sometimes exotic ingredients and the extra steps she took – such as we had to rice the potatoes before we mashed them and the butter and milk added had to be heated first. The potatoes, of course, were the last thing to be prepared so they would be just right. Oh, the performance anxiety.

I again commented to Der Bingle what I have mentioned for fifty years that why go to all this trouble when people were going to EAT it. Do people eat artistic masterpieces or world-changing inventions. Hey, lets go grab a Michelangelo and make short work of it? They do not. Or how about smashing light bulbs for the fun of it? No.

Der Bingle replied I was supposed to get pleasure from watching the happy faces of people scarfing down the multi-layered crushed pretzel crust, cream cheese, jello holding suspended fruit, whipped cream and artistically placed strawberries. I can’t quite see it like that.

So, and era has ended and with no granddaughters who take after their great-grandmother, I have a very large number of cookbooks and stacks of recipes cut from magazines and newspapers. What to do with them? Set them out for grabs?
I wish I knew some young women who like to cook and would cherish the cookbooks of Sarah Shimp Grismore.

And a fraction of the jello molds.

I have been listening to an audio recording of the YouTube video mentioned below – over and over and over again. When I was alone here, I actually hooked it up to a SPEAKER and put the volume up. While puttering around I let my mind wander from vignette to vignette, all inspired by the lyrics. Ah, so many stories I made up in my head.

Sometimes I stop to think if I were to convey the stories to someone else, they would be overwhelmed by the combination of characters and backstories . . . and they would look at me incredulously.

Ah, Der Bingle is on ichat, so so long oolong.

I can’t stop listening to this:

I have always said Thanksgiving as if it were the name of an event, a proper noun. I knew, of course, what the two words that made up the one word meant, but I always just said it with the idea (thanks to FDR) that it was the fourth Thursday in November.

A few years back, I was reading an entry in a blog by a young woman who was from rural Texas. She wrote that people here in the Midwest looked at her strangely when she said Thanksgiving, because she didn’t run it all together but pronounced it as the action the word described: THANKS GIVING. I’ve always remembered that.

We take so much for granted, especially in this country where we pretty much have it everyday. In fact, we hurry it along, so we can get on to the shopping for the next month’s giving which seems to have taken over even the slightest nod to mangers and a star and wise men.