Listmakers Anonymous, here I come!

I live by lists. Can’t help it. Must have one – at least one – every day. Even if all it says on a given day is:

Pet the cat
Check Facebook

Of course, most of my daily lists include reminders to be here or there at a certain time, to make a payment for something or other, to do this or that task as secretary of the local Bahá'í Assembly, to call my daughter about a question related to the children’s theatre company we are starting or about a family matter, to return items to the library, to remind my husband about … (there’s always something), to stop at one or more stores for supplies referenced on a separate shopping list, the one that has a permanent home on the refrigerator. Etc., etc., etc. And here’s the puzzlement.

I love these pesky sounding lists. I really do. And I especially love crossing tasks off as they are completed. My favorite lists are the ones that are unreadable by the end of the day because all the items have been obliterated by heavy lines.

Aaaaaah, what a wonderful feeling of accomplishment!

Or is it actually a symptom of questionable mental health? Is obsessive listmaking a practical tool or a “cunning, baffling and powerful” addiction? (Any of you who have been regular participants in just about any kind of 12-step meeting will recognize that phrase.)

I know what you’re thinking. Come on, Helen, quit exaggerating. And stop trivializing addictions. Listmaking is just good organizational practice. What’s the big deal?

OK, maybe you’re right. After all, I do get a lot done with the help of these long tedious lists, providing I don’t forget where I put them. And there’s my job, which basically requires me to be a Mother Hen listmaker. In order to coordinate both admissions for prospective graduate students in an education department and also the various steps and phases and paperwork necessary for students to properly record and complete all their requirements and eventually graduate, I spend a lot of time organizing, collating, transmitting and filing pieces of paper. Often the job also involves offering a sympathetic ear and an encouraging nudge, whichever is appropriate, to help students keep on track toward their Ph.D.

In other words, a Mother Hen listmaker. And most days, that feels like a perfect fit.

Still, there are indications that maybe I take this listmaking propensity a tad too far. Like the time, many years ago, when we were in the process of buying a house for the first time. I found that moving into a newly purchased house was more complicated than any other moving I had previously done, and seemed to involve more lists. One morning, a few days before the closing, we went out for breakfast and I brought along clean paper and a pen and all my notes and spread them out on the table to try to get them organized. My husband watched me for a few minutes (in wonder or in horror, I don’t know which), and than asked, incredulity dripping from every word, “Are you making a list of your lists?”

I was. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that’s exactly what I was doing.

Now here’s the reason this topic is on my mind today. Because my love of lists, or whatever it is that makes lists such an essential part of my life, also makes it very hard to enjoy 11 unscheduled days off work. 11 days off, no traveling planned. Just 11 days at home.

That’s what’s happening right now. Our office, basically the whole university, closed at end of day on December 23 and won’t re-open until the morning of January 4. Today is day 5. It’s a Monday morning. Most Monday mornings I have finished writing my blog – with its self-imposed, publicly announced weekly publishing deadline -- the day before, or sometimes even the day before that. This week, despite having had almost nothing pressing to do for days 1 through 4 of this break, here I am on day 5. Monday morning. Just getting started.

Why? Because for an addicted listmaker, sustained freedom from lists is not a pretty sight.

All during December, which is the major crunch time in my job, I dreamed about this break. As I slogged through 113 applications to our doctoral program -- most of them arriving right at deadline time and thus creating an avalanche of paperwork to process -- as I answered phone calls and emails and arranged and labeled files and scanned or saved documents into online folders, hopefully getting all of them into the correct places, and tried to get everything cataloged and communicated and coordinated before December 23 so our faculty could access the information and begin reviewing applicants online while the office is closed ….

Gads, that was a long sentence!

Anyway, you get the idea. I was very busy. And the thought of a beautiful 11-day break with no trips planned, no major events happening, lots of time to lie on the sofa reading books and watching movies, seemed like heaven on earth.

Sure, there were things to be done during that time. The incipient children’s theatre company urgently needed attention, a small home renovation project is in process, many hours of ice time would be available for skating practice, a couple of Bahá'í meetings were scheduled, there would be ordinary household tasks to manage and grandkids to play with, and of course, two blog deadlines. But ordinarily all of that and more must be accomplished around a full-time work schedule. Without having to go to work, the rest would be a snap. Right?

Maybe.

I left my office last Wednesday feeling pretty pleased with myself. Everything was done and I was able to walk out the door with a peaceful mind. After work I went to the library and stocked up on books and movies. And of course, made a list of everything that I needed to do, at some point or other, during the break. Not a schedule, mind you. Just a list. Just a whenever-I-could-fit-it-in-around-sofa-time list.

After a bit of shopping early in the day on Thursday when stores were still open and some food preparation for the duration, I spent virtually the rest of that day and all of the next doing … absolutely … nothing.

Or at least, what feels like nothing to me.

I didn’t write anything. I didn’t organize anything. I didn’t read anything except novels and email. I didn’t cross anything off on a list. And it felt pretty good, for a while. Until about mid-day Friday, when a strange lassitude set in. By then I’d had plenty of rest and could easily have, if not dived, at least tiptoed into a couple of the tasks that would have to be addressed at some point during the break. And I’d had enough rest to start feeling a bit bored. And I could have put on real clothes and gone out for some recreational grandparenting. AND all of these options sounded very appealing to my thoroughly relaxed brain.

But did I do any of that?

Nope.

I just burrowed deeper into the sofa. It seemed my body had forgotten how to move.

Maybe I was having listmaker withdrawal symptoms. You know, crashing. At any rate, when Saturday morning came and the world around me came back to life, so did I. Hooray, there were places to go, things to do, people to see (what song lyrics am I channeling here???), and I was energized once again as I charged out the door, tightly clutching a list for that day, ready to conquer the universe by crossing off items, one by one.

Now it's today. And just a few minutes ago, after writing most of the above text, I walked into the kitchen, unashamedly picked up my current list, rummaged in the drawer for a yellow highlighter, and swiped it across every item that needs to be done today. And didn’t think a thing about it until after I came back to my computer and re-read what I’d written up to this point.

So here’s the deal: if any of you can relate to this, and are willing to admit it, I propose we start a new 12-step group, Listmakers Anonymous. I’ve been involved in starting other recovery groups so I know just what to do. First, we make a list …

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My Christmas Tree

One morning when I was six years old I woke up and saw a Christmas tree standing at the foot of my bed. Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.

My tree.

Mom had said no every time I asked, no, I could not have a Christmas tree. We were Jewish, we didn’t celebrate Christmas, except for the stocking she would hang in the living room and fill with nuts and chocolate and oranges for me to find on December 25. Like a lot of Jewish parents, she let a little bit of Christmas into our lives. Stocking, yes. A tree, never.

But a tree was what I wanted, and here it was, an unexpected gift. My tree.

Then I really woke up. No tree. It was only a dream, an especially vivid, amazingly tangible dream.

After that year I decided to accept the fact that I would never have a Christmas tree. As the only Jewish student in my grade school, I liked answering other kids’ questions about Hanukkah. Being different, unique, had its compensations. I could live quite well without Christmas, thank you.

When I was 17 years old and just graduated from high school, I spent a couple hours with a fellow graduate learning about the Bahá'í Faith. Here at last was an explanation for the station of Christ that made sense to me, that seemed logical and likely to be true. This and other aspects of the new religion attracted me, beckoned further study, and several months later, to my parents’ horror, I signed a little card and officially identified myself as a Bahá'í.

Seven years later I married a fellow Bahá'í whose family was Catholic. They had great fun watching me participate in Christmas for the first time. I enjoyed it, too, but after a few years found it was no longer fun. There’s a kind of “have to” frenzy surrounding Christmas that seems normal to people who grow up with it but looked crazy to me watching it from the outside, and felt even crazier after a few years on the inside. I loved my husband’s family but just couldn’t love Christmas. We stopped participating, and since we didn’t celebrate Christmas in our own home, I was done with the whole thing.

I never forgot the tree in my dream, however, the tree I wanted as a child but could not have. The picture of it in my mind remained clear and vibrant. Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.

I told my husband about the dream. He said he wished he could see my tree, it sounded so special.

My mother and I had a difficult relationship. She wanted so much to be the perfect mother, because she had never had one of her own, at least not one she could remember. My grandmother had been killed in a robbery when Mom was less than a year old. She was raised by a loving father whom she adored, but she also suffered from the stern influence of her mother’s sister and her much older brothers’ abusive attempts at co-parenting. She was sure her life would have been wonderful if her mother had lived. Without a real mother, or the up-and-down experience of an actual mother-daughter relationship, she envisioned a perfect mother. When she became one herself, she wanted to be perfect, too.

But in order to be a perfect mother one must have a perfect child, a child that proves ones perfection to the world. I didn’t fill that bill. Mine was a strong-willed-ever-questioning-always-fighting-for-independence personality that she described in mostly negative adjectives – stubborn, mean, selfish, cold. I could never be the perfect child who would allow her to be the perfect mother.

She died on December 19, 1990. My sister called a couple days before to tell us Mom had slipped into the expected coma so that we could get to St. Louis before the end. I imagined myself sitting with my mother at her bedside to pray and maybe, finally, find a bond with her. Instead I stood in the doorway to her bedroom and watched as her body struggled to breathe. A coma was a much more active and strenuous event than I had anticipated. Her soul was struggling to let go and move on. It felt wrong to intrude on such a private experience. Or maybe I was just afraid, even then, of being unable to meet my mother’s needs, of being the wrong kind of daughter.

After the funeral, my husband and I stopped by his mother’s place to stay overnight before continuing our drive home. She had been widowed a couple years earlier and had moved into an apartment. The family’s Christmas had migrated to her daughter’s farm house a few miles outside of town, and the tree in that house had become the family tree, decorated with their traditional supply of much handled Santa Clauses and homemade baubles.

There was also a Christmas tree in my mother-in-law’s apartment. She told us that she hadn’t really wanted one, but her daughter had insisted and installed it there. When we arrived I was very tired and hardly noticed it sitting in the picture window in her living room. We visited a bit, then went to bed. The apartment had a guest bedroom, but I told my husband that I wanted to sleep alone in the living room, since it was likely that I would wake up often, probably cry again, maybe pull out my notebook and write to continue processing my mother’s death.

For a couple of hours I slept on the couch, my face pressed against its back, wearily oblivious to the rest of the room. Then I woke up and turned over to face the picture window and looked for the first time at the tree that was standing there.

Not a big tree, not a little tree, a medium-sized tree, very green, very full. Its only decorations were shiny colored balls – red and yellow, blue and green – and silver tinsel draping it from top to bottom. It stood bright and beautiful against a backdrop of complete darkness.

I recognized it immediately. It was my tree. The tree of my dream. The tree I had wanted so much as a child. 39 years later, I was seeing it again. But now it was real.

And I knew that my mother had found the perfect time to give it to me.

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Blow out the candles

I wasn’t paying much attention to my birthday last week and then my daughter sent me a greeting on Facebook and blew my cover. Facebook is amazing. A wonderful cascade of birthday wishes came pouring in from friends who saw her post, and my previously heedless brain started churning.

See, it’s like this: before the Facebook surprise I wasn’t paying much attention to my birthday. Partly because this is an especially busy time at work and that’s taking up a big chunk of my attention, but mostly because I didn’t want to think about my new age.

64.

64 years old? Me? Naaah! Can’t believe it. Don’t feel it. Must be a mistake.

Because it’s going the wrong direction. I’m getting younger, not older.

Lest you think I’m also getting slightly unhinged, let me quickly acknowledge that there are just too many proofs that despite my subjective opinion, it’s indubitably obvious that I really am 64. I can remember having a black dial telephone and a party line, and not knowing what a pizza was, or a television, or a self-service elevator, and learning to type on a manual typewriter before electric ones (let alone computers) had even been invented, and hearing about Kennedy’s assassination while walking to class during my college freshman year … etc. etc. etc.

And of course it’s pretty normal to look in the mirror and see a senior citizen face and wonder who in the heck that old lady is. “Can’t be me, I still don’t feel grown up.” Probably most of us have experienced that kind of dissonance. Whereas I’m talking about something much more specific and particular to my life at this moment.

You know those assessments people get that tell them their physical age and whether it’s different from their chronological age? Sometimes the results say they have the body of a person 15 years older or 20 years younger. I haven’t had such an assessment, but definitely feel like I’m getting physically younger. I even said that in a conversation a couple months ago, a slip-of-the-tongue kind of remark: “I was older then” referring to a time a few years ago.

The guy I was talking with didn’t think I was cracking up, though, because he’d heard similar sentiments from other friends. Friends who, like me, had adopted a plant-based diet.

If you’re really passionate about chicken or steak or cheese and think vegans are actually intergalactic aliens in disguise, you should probably stop reading this blog right now. Because while I’m not about to tell you what to do, I am going to talk about what I did and why and what’s happened because of it. Take it or leave it. This is my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Recently my daughter published an excellent blog describing the journey she and her family have taken along the nutrition highway, a journey that paved my own way despite my initial resistance to joining them whenever urged. Buy organic? No way, too expensive. Eat hummous? Yech, forget it. Cook meals that require a lot of chopping instead of just opening a box? Who has time for that? The only thing I agreed about was avoiding sugar, because my diabetes demanded that concession. But I certainly wasn’t willing to also forgo artificial sweeteners.

Like a lot of people, I thought I was doing a pretty good job by eating a little bit less of this or tad more of that. The golden mean vs. radical extremism. So why was I gaining weight, topping 200 pounds, despite getting a fair amount of exercise at the gym and biking to work for at least half of each year? And why were most of my blood glucose numbers registering over 100 points higher than the top margin of the safe zone? And why was I feeling so bad so often?

OK, that last question isn’t fair, since the answer wasn’t diet, at least directly, although I’m sure it was a major contributing factor. The answer, as I finally learned almost three years ago, was that I had a gallbladder filled with cancer as well as the more usual gallstones.

The cancer was discovered during routine surgery to remove the offending gallbladder, and it surprised the you-know-what out of my doctor. I’ve since learned that there are less than 10,000 cases of gallbladder cancer in the U.S. every year, compared to close to 200,000 cases of breast cancer. But cancer is cancer, an oddball variety notwithstanding, so for the next six months I lived in oncology world, where the typical fun activities are major surgery, chemo, radiation, and spending most of your life lying on the sofa.

Since my October 12th blog already talked about how this cancer experience led to a major lifestyle change which resulted in a big weight loss, I’m going to skip forward, or rather back, to today’s subject: getting younger while getting older. Because I’m pretty sure that if I took one of those age assessments now, it would tell me that my physical age is closer to 44 than 64.

At least, that’s how I feel.

And the reason for this wonderful and unexpected development has to be my new plant-based diet, because that’s the only thing I changed. As previously noted, I already was getting at least some deliberate exercise. I hadn’t had a cigarette since 1984. And I couldn’t stop drinking alcohol since I’d never started. So I have to give credit where credit is due.

I’ve also learned a few things along the way. I’ve learned that I’d rather pay for organic chemical-free food now than for serious illness and general yucky health later, which I no longer assume is a natural and unavoidable component of aging. I’ve learned that sticking to a plant-based diet has caused unexpected changes in my food preferences; that I like stuff, hummous included, which I used to find unappealing or worse. I’ve learned that natural sweeteners like agave nectar or sucanat not only sweeten but are even beneficial.

I also found that a plant-based diet tends to include very few refined foods, which is a good way to avoid many carcinogens, while at the same time it fills ones body with mostly unrefined foods that require a lot more calories to digest.

So here I am at 64, with more energy and strength and general well being, not to mention a better figure, than I had when I really was 44. Hence my neurotic desire to deny the whole thing and –

Wait a minute. I could do that. Heck, Jack Benny did it. He stopped at 39. Never got a day older. So maybe I could just sort of sneak back to 44 when nobody’s looking and settle there for the duration, however long, or short, that may be.

Except for the indisputable fact that people who really are 44 would not have been born when Jack Benny was a TV star. Might not even know who he was.

Curses. Foiled again!

-30-

Pome for a day

OK, boys and girls, I’m going to have to cheat a bit tonight. My creative juices were all used up trying to correctly decipher the installation instructions for a new DVD/VCR combo. And the amazing part is that I did! Decipher, that is. Correctly even. A true miracle, believe me.

Getting a new piece of equipment to install and learn how to operate was the last thing that I wanted – well, maybe not THE last thing, but pretty close. It was necessary, though, because our old VCR has quit recording, and since I can’t live without seeing “So You Think You Can Dance” and won’t be home this Tuesday night to watch it in real time, I was forced – really, that’s the correct verb when obsession is involved – to spend way too many hours this weekend researching and questioning and shopping around to figure out what to do.

My first rather naïve idea was to just buy another VCR, but it appears that the VCR has gone the way of the dinosaur. My exploration finally led me to two choices: a one-time expenditure for an on-sale DVD/VCR combo or an added monthly cable fee for DVR service. Since my husband never wants to record anything and “Dance” is the only show I absolutely must see (and really about the only one I ever purposely sit down to watch), the idea of a new monthly expense wasn’t appealing.

Until I brought the new machine home and looked at the instructions, that is. And was immediately absolutely sure that I’d never be able to follow them. Since that’s what I thought, it almost became true. Knowing with absolute certainty that I was hopelessly out of my league, I called a friend for help. He couldn’t come over but expressed faith that I could figure it out by myself. Somehow that helped me feel a tad more confident, just enough to think maybe he was right and to begin again and believe it would work. Which is probably why it did.

So it seems appropriate to share something I wrote many years ago that expresses a large part of what I had learned from a twelve-step recovery process (which I’ll talk about some other time). I wrote it as a presentation piece when my daughter and I were co-hosting a writer’s open mic (another topic for a future blog). It’s called “I think” and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed performing it. Read it out loud. It almost sounds like a real “pome" that way!

I think, therefore I feel,
Because what I think is what feels real,
Even if it ain’t.

Saint or sinner,
Loser or winner,
Sad and blue or in the pink,
It all depends on what I think.

I think, therefore I feel.
I change my thought, and just like magic
I stop feeling tragic.
Just like that.
In no time, flat.

Sometimes a thought is buried deep,
A thought I keep
Guarded and hidden,
Till it pops up unbidden,
Like a garden weed.

But if I plant a new seed,
A new thought,
Nourish it, prune it, keep it safe from draught,
In time it will bear fruit,
New feelings that replace the old
And let me finally feel kind or calm or strong or bold
Or whatever I could never feel before.

It’s like walking through a door,
From darkness into light,
From bondage into flight.

I think therefore I feel.
And since what I feel follows what I think,
When my thinking changes, in a blink,
So does what I feel.
Such a wonderful deal.

-30-

If it's all the same to you ...

If the flowers of a garden were all of one color, the effect would be monotonous to the eye; but if the colors are variegated, it is most pleasing and wonderful. The difference in adornment of color and capacity of reflection among the flowers gives the garden its beauty and charm. Therefore, although we are of different individualities, different in ideas and of various fragrances, let us strive like flowers of the same divine garden to live together in harmony.

That quotation comes from one of the many speeches given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during his 1911-12 travels in the United States. He was talking about unity in diversity, a central teaching of the Bahá'í Faith. I like his analogy. It’s easy to picture a garden where all the flowers are, say, red and picture another garden where the flowers are red and purple and blue and yellow and white and orange, and to know that most of us would rather look at the second garden.

Or would we?

The idea for this week’s blog came from two sources: a novel I finished last week, and Thanksgiving. The novel is A Walk Through Fire, William Cobb’s fictional portrayal of the backstory to the ragged beginnings of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement that challenged legal racism and eventually led to the election of a dark skinned president with an African name, an event that was beyond unimaginable in 1960.

I was intrigued by the reasoning of the book’s White characters who believe that anything, even murder, is totally justified when necessary to “protect our way of life.” It’s easy to see these characters’ thinking as evil or stupid but the way they see it is simply self-defense against the threat of change. Throughout the novel many of Cobb’s characters, both Black and White, argue about or warn against or in some other way reject the developing move toward legal equality out of fear that it will take away what they already have and give them something different that they either know or fear they will not like.

Without trying to oversimplify an extremely complex subject, at the moment I’m interested in only one question: why are people so attracted to sameness? Why do we so often want to do things the same way as they’ve been done before? Why do so many of us on this small planet find such security in sameness that we completely reject others who are unlike us? Why does this fear of difference or love of sameness or whatever it is afflict humankind throughout history in every part of the world?

OK, I guess those were four questions if you want to get technical about it. And they are certainly not new or unique questions, they just happen to be what was on my mind this week.

So where does Thanksgiving come in? Right here.

“Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof would be a good theme song for the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s part of our calendar, because so much homage is paid to preserving old patterns of celebration, returning to former times, and keeping everything the same, as if sameness were the key to harmony and love and faith. I don’t believe it is. Neither is constant change, of course, that would be chaos, but an appreciation for the value of change needs to balance the prevailing wisdom that a good holiday is a traditional holiday. Change, after all, is the pre-eminent condition of life.

This phenomenal world will not remain in an unchanging condition even for a short while. Second after second it undergoes change and transformation. Every foundation will finally become collapsed; every glory and splendor will at last vanish and disappear, but the Kingdom of God is eternal and the heavenly sovereignty and majesty will stand firm, everlasting. Hence in the estimation of a wise man the mat in the Kingdom of God is preferable to the throne of the government of the world.

That thought also came from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. And again at the risk of sounding simplistic, I see this principle operating even in something as mundane as a Thanksgiving dinner. In this case, it was the dinner I enjoyed at my daughter’s home. About the only tradition that we honored was the fact that we came together to eat food.

It was a potluck meal that included two kinds of chili, Korean rice noodles with vegetables, homemade Chinese dumplings, corn muffins, fruit, rice, veggies, and an experimental mushroom-pineapple concoction. No sweet potatoes. No cranberries. No stuffing. No mashed potatoes or gravy. No Cool Whip-Jello mold. And turkey (ground, not carved) only made an appearance in one of the chili recipes. The group included family and friends, young and old, American and Asian, people who were already well acquainted and others who first met that day, a truck driver, a one-man-band performer, a composer, College of Education doctoral students, a home schooling mom. We played Uno, learned about African drumming, discussed educational issues, spent an inordinate amount of time and brain power deciphering a complicated logic puzzle, and sometimes laughed till we cried “uncle.”

Nobody watched a football game on TV. The only pumpkins in the house were painted ones, compliments of my grandsons. We plopped the food on the kitchen table in no particular order and sat down to eat on any chair or piece of floor we could find. Sameness, 0. Unity in diversity, definitely a 10. Maybe even a little piece of the Kingdom of God.

Really, an altogether lovely afternoon that --

Wait a minute. Did I say there was no stuffing? No? Stuffing? NO STUFFING???? Now that’s going too far. There are some things that should never change!

-30-

Pizza tales

The other day at work a student from Egypt told me that ordering a pizza for a home meal is not a common experience in his country, which started me thinking about pizza and how ingrained it is in our national life style, and that got me thinking about my personal history with it. Kind of a circular history, since I’ve pretty much ended up back where I started.

And where is that? Since you asked, I’ll tell you.

Some of my younger readers (do I have any of those?) might be surprised to know that even someone (ahem) as young as me can remember a time before pizza became our unofficial national food. According to the Ultimate Authority (also known as Wikopedia), pizza started to become a common American food in the mid 1950’s. Not in Springfield, Illinois, though. It must have been around 1954 that my Aunt Dora and her daughter came to visit from St. Louis, Missouri, and were absolutely scandalized to learn that not only did our town not have any place from which to order this pseudo-Italian delicacy, but that my mother had no idea what a pizza was. No, wait, I must be remembering this wrong. Not about my mother, about the pizza availability situation. We had to have at least one pizzeria in town by then, maybe a tiny shop on a dark corner in an otherwise empty part of town where we had never ventured, because somehow Aunt Dora found it and brought pizza into our home for the first time. Our reaction? Yech! We did not like it, not at all.

I felt like the main character in Green Eggs and Ham, even though that book hadn’t yet been published. “I do not like this pizza pie, I do not like it, that’s no lie. I don’t like pizza hot or cold. I don’t like pizza new or old. I do not like it with a pop. I do not like it so please stop. I do not like it, Auntie dear. You can have the rest. Here!”

Eventually my mother decided that since most of the country was becoming pizza crazed, maybe the stuff couldn’t be all bad. She wasn’t about to spend money ordering it ready made, though. Instead she would go to the grocery store and buy do-it-yourself pizza. The ingredients for the dough were in a box, and maybe the tomato sauce, but apparently not the cheese because she used to make it with American cheese. Somehow that didn’t enhance pizza’s taste value for me. “I don’t like pizza from a box, I’d rather have a bagel and lox. I don’t like pizza with this cheese, so you can take my portion, please!”

A few years later, my father hooked up with a man named Bernie who was a chef from Chicago and together they opened a small pizza restaurant in Springfield. They called it Bernie and Betty’s, which I guess they figured would sound somewhat more euphonious than Dave and Molly’s, if not more Italian. Bernie’s pizza is what finally won me over. His pies were topped with giant pieces of green pepper and onion and mushroom, and some kind of really yummy seasoning. The sauce was delicious. The cheese was great. The crust was just right. I loved the stuff! So much that for many years I didn’t like anyone else’s pizza. I’d eat it, of course – Pizza Hut or Shakey’s or whatever if that’s all I could get – but always with wistful remembrance of Bernie’s creations.

I wasn’t alone in my admiration. More than once – meaning at least twice – I overheard strangers discussing the pizza options in Springfield and raving about Bernie and Betty’s. Bernie died long ago but when my dad sold the restaurant he also sold the recipe, so Bernie’s pizza has lived on after him in all its unique glory. (The restaurant is still there, with the same name, much larger now and with a full menu of pasta dishes and such.)

It’s all my dad’s and Bernie’s fault, therefore, that I became a typical American pizza addict, always happy for an excuse to order and, no longer living in Springfield, willing to call or visit just about any restaurant. Except one. Which shall remain nameless. My daughter and I ordered from that place one night when we were living in the Chicago area. I don’t know why I went along with calling them since I already knew I didn’t like their product. And when it came, I took maybe two bites and quit. Me, quit eating? That’s unheard of. Except now you’ve all heard of it, but it’s probably the only time that ever happened. But heck, the stuff tasted like cardboard covered with tomato sauce. It’s a good thing for this particular chain that my opinion was the minority one, because amazingly (to me) it’s still in business,

Now we get to the day in 1999 when I became a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. This was in Galesburg, Illinois where I was finding it very difficult to get a job that provided a livable wage, and having become used to living on tips as a waitress, was willing to try doing the same as a driver. I worked there for 16 months, until I moved to Urbana after the Fast Food Hell accident you read about last week. And that experience was probably the beginning of the end of my love affair with pizza. First because it was way too available. Every time the cooks made a mistake, such as putting the wrong topping on a pizza someone had ordered, they would place the mistake on a table in the delivery area and we were all welcome to it. And the cooks made enough mistakes – inadvertently or (maybe?) on purpose – to provide a continuous selection of pies for employee munching. In that environment I quickly stopped thinking of pizza as a special fun food.

Plus I was dazed and amazed and appalled to learn how much America depends on pizza. Many households would order pizza as their family meal three or four times a week. Ordinary people, as far as I could tell. Where did they get that kind of money? And when were they getting any real nutrition? And why didn’t they tip better?

OK, just kidding about that last one. Actually tipping was pretty good. Some of the drivers would grouse loud and long whenever they got “stiffed,” but I sided with the ones who preferred to take it all in stride. After all, I had basically lived on tips for five years as a waitress, and had learned to accept the bad with the good and be happy as long as it all evened out. Also in that job tips were pretty much everything because waitress minimum hourly wage was legally several dollars below regular minimum wage. As a driver, on the other hand, I got less in tips but earned standard minimum wage as well as gas allowance. And of course all the pizza I could eat. Can’t forget that.

Delivering anything in Galesburg is quite a challenge because whoever laid out the town and assigned street numbers to the houses must not have known how to count. In most towns, at least ones where I’ve lived, the houses are numbered pretty logically. If the first one is 1401, the next one is 1403, then comes 1405, and so on. In Galesburg, it’s more likely to go like this. 1411, 1419, 1427, 1429, 1441, and then on the next corner, 1444. I’m not kidding. Just try finding 1444, where they are expecting hot pizza in a reasonable amount of time, when you can’t use basic math to calculate which house it will be and can’t see the house numbers because they are too small or too dark or hidden behind tree branches, or all three.

Another test of skill for Galesburg delivery drivers are the trains. Galesburg started out as a railroad town and must have more train tracks per capita than any city in the U.S. In order to get your deliveries made in a timely fashion, you had to calculate how to avoid streets crossed by train tracks and instead choose streets that ran under tracked viaducts. But sometimes there were just no good option. One day I literally was unable to get to my customer. Every way I tried to go was blocked by a million-mile long train that either wasn’t moving or was moving very slowly. I was triangulated by three different tracks. Me and a rapidly cooling pizza, destined for a hungry and unhappy and soon to be unhappier diner when he or she bit into a cold pizza.

Then there are the dogs. Dogs are an occupational hazard for delivery people, at least for delivery people like yours truly who doesn’t much like dogs and basically is scared of them. There was a family who lived out in the country, one of the families who ordered about every other day. The first time I drove into their yard (yard, no driveway) my car was immediately surrounded by four or five large and loudly barking canines. No way was I getting out of that car. Since I didn’t have a cell phone at the time, I just sat there and waited for someone in the house to notice all the barking and come out to check. The mom finally did, and of course she said, it’s OK, come on out, the dogs won’t hurt you, they’re very friendly. Yeah. Sure. I wasn’t buying it. If she wanted her pizza order she’d have to come to me. And she did, but not gladly. I delivered there a couple more times but never left my car, and clearly that woman didn’t like me much.

The vindication for my attitude towards dogs came one night about 11:00 p.m. when I knocked on a door and was greeted by some truly fierce barking and growling accompanied by intense scrabbling of sharp-sounding claws against wood. I expected to hear the usual (and totally unreliable) “it’s OK, the dog won’t hurt you, he’s very friendly,” but instead a voice on the other side of the door nervously instructed me to walk across the porch and wait at a different door. “The dog really wants to hurt you,” the owner said when he came out to get his order. And it definitely sounded like if I had stayed much longer at the first door, that animal would have forced his way through it and eaten me, with the pizza for dessert.

I was still shaking and quaking about my close call with canine drivercide when I returned to the restaurant and learned that the cooks had made one of their mistakes and I had delivered a different pizza than the customer wanted. Which meant I had to go back to that house and deliver the correct order and give that dog another chance to devour me. And the worst part? These second trips to correct cooks’ mistakes never meant second tips for the driver, while at the same time they kept her/him from delivering to a potentially tipping customer. Killer canines and no tips. What a job!

After I left Galesburg (remember the Fast Food Hell accident from last week’s blog?), my slow evolution toward eventually becoming mostly vegan began. Vegans are vegetarians who don’t eat any animal products, including dairy, so now I haven’t had even a taste of pizza for over two years and have basically come back full circle to my nine-year-old opinion. If someone here sold a good, healthy vegan pizza, with a palatable vegan cheese substitute, I’d probably love it. But so far I haven’t found a vegan cheese that doesn’t taste like wallpaper paste.

Hmmm, maybe I should suggest to that chain which shall remain nameless that they make a vegan alternative. Wallpaper paste on cardboard. Who knows, I might like it. Stranger things have happened.

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Cranksgiving and other bits of tid

Thoughts rumbling through my brain tonight …

Cranksgiving
It’s a great way to combine recreational biking with service and charity. We had our second local Cranksgiving ride yesterday, on a lovely, unseasonably warm and happily dry day. The idea is to pick one store in each of four zones which together pretty well cover the whole city (or twin cities, in our case), then buy at least one of the designated items at each store: tuna or soup in Zone 1, for example, or canned corn or sweet potatoes in Zone 4. Riders could choose to buy as little or as much as they could stuff in their backpacks and baskets and, in some cases, bike trailers. At least half the fun is hooking up with other riders and plotting the best routes and strategy. Our group numbered 7, including one couple on a tandem bike and one guy on a recumbent three-wheeler, and our plan of attack was designed to get us from place to place with the least amount of cycling in traffic and to make our last stop the store closest to the finish point. We didn’t bike a huge amount of miles, less than 20 probably, but while most people think central Illinois is flat, cyclists know that there are lots of uphill, or at least upslope, places, and pushing your bike up and against a hefty wind at the same time that you are hauling several extra pounds of canned goods can be mighty challenging. So next Cranksgiving I hope to remember to buy just a couple things at each of the first three stores and save the bulk of purchases for the store that’s only a few blocks from Cranksgiving central. It’s asking a lot, though, for me to remember something for a whole year, especially since yesterday I couldn’t even remember (with instructions in hand) which items had to be purchased in which zones! No matter. Zone accuracy notwithstanding, it all contributed to the pile of items waiting to be transported to the food bank.

Been there, done that
Maybe one reason I like participating in Cranksgiving is that there have been a couple times in past years – long past, thankfully – when I needed food bank assistance. In both cases the Salvation Army was my personal salvation. Hooray for the Army!

Cleanliness is next to miraculous!
My financial situation is fortunately much better these days, which is why I’ve recently started doing something I’ve wanted to do for many years but never thought would be possible – paying someone else to clean my house. Not the whole house, and not every day, actually just two hours a week. But what she gets done and done well in two hours beats anything I could manage in a whole day, even if I were so inclined. The first two or three times she came, she took care of big projects that had been neglected to the point of disgust, like cleaning and organizing the utility area, degreasing the walls around the stove and attacking the growing cultures inside the refrigerator. Now we’re into basic maintenance, and let me tell you, it is an absolute joy to leave a sticky kitchen floor in the morning and come home to a sparkling clean one at the end of the work day. My miracle worker is a graduate student and won’t be around for a month or so during winter break. I’m considering moving to a motel for the duration!

Good reads about basic assumptions
The underlying question in the whole health care reform debate, according to author T. R. Reid, is whether or not we believe that every American deserves equal access to medical care when needed. That’s the question he raises in The Healing of America, a comprehensive and (I think) objective comparison of other countries’ health care systems with ours. He doesn’t endorse any one system and points out that there are lots of ways to achieve the same goal if we ever manage to agree on that goal.

On a different front, another assumption that has been basic to the development of our culture has been, to put it bluntly, Blacks don’t belong here. When historian James Loewen started the research for Sundown Towns he expected to find only a few hundred places that had told African-Americans and sometimes others (Jews, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants) to get out of town before sundown, or else. Instead he found thousands of cities and towns and suburbs all over the country that had such laws, and in many cases still have them, either outright legislated or accepted unofficially by their citizens – places where even President Obama would not be welcome to spend the night if he popped in on his own without a Secret Service entourage. Check it out, it’s quite an eye-opener.

Fear of success
Scary moment: hitting the submit button to send my master’s program application on its way to the admissions reviewers. Surprising moment: realizing the scary part was not fear of rejection but omigoshwhatiftheyacceptmeandIactuallyhavetodoit!

Half-formed thoughts tripping lightly through my brain which might one day grow up to become complete blogs …
Why does almost every student and faculty member and applicant who stops by my desk or calls on the phone start by saying they have “a quick question”? What is a quick question? What is a not-quick question? Is one better than the other? Does a quick question mean a question that only requires a quick answer? “Yep?” “Nope?” “Maybe?” “Ask me again next week?” I have no idea why “quick question” is such a popular phrase. Maybe you do. In that case, do you mind if I ask you a quick question …

I also wonder about another interesting bit of human behavior, a kind of herd instinct involved in going through doors. If there is a choice of three side-by-side doors, as in the main library on the campus where I work, and 10 people are all heading toward them, wouldn’t you think they would fan out and use all three doors? I mean really, wouldn’t that make sense? Instead what I see repeatedly is nine people following one person through one door while completely ignoring the other two. Why? OK, so this isn’t exactly an earth-shaking problem, but I’d still like to know the answer. If you are aware of someone who might know, please tell me so I can ask them a quick question.

And what do people mean when they say “have a good” day or night? What constitutes “good” in this instance? And if you’re running into the grocery store at 10:00 p.m. to pick up one onion, isn’t it a little late for the cashier to wish you a good evening? Then there are the people who say “Have a good one.” A good -- what? OK, I know everyone means well or at least that there is nothing sinister about this or the other above mentioned behavior quirks. But you know, I just can’t help wondering.

In case you are wondering why you are still reading this disjointed blog, let me just end it here and say good night. Have a good week!

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