“SING, OR GET OUT!”

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Sadie was a single woman, and she had been single for a lot longer than she had been not-single. There was a husband way back in her youth, and three other men who came close to landing her in their marriage bed—nevertheless, Sadie had remained single. She had lived alone for the biggest part of her 85 years, and it suited her. Whether contentment with it came naturally or as an adaptation to her circumstances, Sadie didn’t know, and what’s more, she didn’t stew over it. A fretful mind had been a troublesome quality of her youth that she had got the better of with time.

          It came to pass that Sadie could no longer live alone, however. She could move in with her son or her daughter. In both cases, she would have a room of her own and the rest of the time would live in the midst of their noisy lives. Sadie opted instead to take a quiet and private one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility for seniors such as herself. It was just the right fit for the independent-minded and self-sufficient Sadie.  

Adjustment to her new surroundings came easily and quickly to Sadie. Course-correcting was another skill she had mastered over the years. One of her favorite mottos was that by not allowing endings to occur, we don’t allow beginnings to form. She looked for opportunities within the structure of her new home to fill her time and to make friends. Toward that end, she joined a group that advertised itself as the Mid-Ohio Senior Chorus that met twice weekly in the recreation room of the facility. The chorus’s current agenda was to rehearse a selection of Christmas Carols as part of a holiday program for the entertainment of the residents and their guests. The show was scheduled to take place on the eve of Christmas Eve that year.

At her first meeting, Sadie slid into the only empty chair at a long table nestled among a total of three long tables in the rec room. Elder women of various descriptions occupied every other chair of two of the tables. The third table was crowded with elder men, two of whom Sadie knew to be single like herself. The other six men were married to six of the women in the group. A few minutes later, a quavering female voice broke into a trilling rendition of ‘Joy to the World’ and immediately was joined by a unison of female voices. The men took no notice of the singing that was underway around them, and they continued in their talking and joking among themselves, a noisy state of affairs that drowned-out the female voices. At the completion of the song, Sadie bent to the ear of the woman seated to the left of her and asked if the men were there to sing in the chorus. The woman replied that she didn’t know for sure.

Sadie’s hackles began to rise like an angry junk yard dog’s. She pulled to her feet at the precise moment the first words in a wobbly female voice took flight in the next song on the itinerary. The voice stopped. Along with Sadie’s independence had come a penchant toward opening her mouth and speaking her mind. “Gentlemen!” Sadie piped up. “Are you here to join in the singing or not?! And if not, then I suggest that you either decide to sing or get out!”

A deathly hush descended on the room. All eyes clamped on Sadie’s ramrod figure. Presently the women began to twitter meekly among themselves and the men’s necks swelled and their faces reddened in disdain for the mouthy woman who had the audacity to denigrate their dominion over that and any and all other proceedings. But soon, the atmosphere began to change. Sadie’s friend Sylvia rose to her feet and said, “Yes, Gentlemen! If you aren’t going to sing, then get out!” Chairs scraped loudly and some toppled over as all the women in the room found their feet. “Sing, or get out!” rang through the space as female voice after female voice joined in the mantra.

Stunned red faces blanched white and Adam’s apples in deflated male necks bounced up and down like loose ping pong balls. Two of the men wrestled to their feet in ready to vacate the room. Neighboring burly hands reached out and pushed them back down in their chairs. Tension coiled to near snapping. The anxious moments ticked by, and then at the furthest end of the men’s table, a melodic baritone gave forth: “Silent night, holy night, star so high, shining bright….”

All twenty-four members of the Mid-Ohio Senior Chorus struggled to their feet and the room filled then with the wondrous harmony of female and male voices come together in a common cause.

Enjoy! And Happy Holidays.©

***

The above story is a fleshed-out reenactment of a dream I had last night. -Linda Lee Greene

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase on Amazon.

#ChristmasCarols, #Christmas, #JoyToTheWorld, #SilentNight, #SeniorHousing, #ChoralMusic, #MidOhio, #LindaLeeGreene, #AuthorArtist

POPPAW’S ROCKING CHAIR

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

That Christmas Weekend of 1952, there was a radio somewhere in the farmhouse of my maternal grandparents, tucked away, gathering dust. It hadn’t been turned on much since World War II when the family was anxious about the fate of their eldest soldier-son in battle with the Germans. By 1952, television had taken the place of radio in most homes, but such a “newfangled machine” hadn’t yet found its place in the farmhouse. The local newspaper held on as my grandparent’s major source of information, and by way of it, they knew that Harry S. Truman would hand over the keys to the White House to Dwight D. Eisenhower the following month; that Elizabeth II had succeeded her deceased father to Great Britain’s Royal Crown; and that war was on yet again, but in a faraway place known as Korea. That Christmas Weekend while my parents and my little brother and I were at the farm, the bulky and black rotary-dial telephone that sat on the stand by the front door of our own house eighty-five miles north of the farmhouse, could ring off the hook for all we knew. No answering machine or voice mail would alert us to missed calls upon our return home. Such conveniences were as yet to come into existence. Like the television, the telephone was another “newfangled machine” that Poppaw scoffed at and Mommaw wanted but wouldn’t get until several years later.

          Christmas was like any other day on the farm: the cows still needed rounded up and fed and milked; the hogs still needed slopped; the chickens still needed fed and their eggs gathered; and the outdoors dogs and cats still needed attended to, as well. That morning Poppaw was agitated over a fox that was menacing the chickens. His .22 in his broad and brawny farmer’s hands, he had slogged across the nearby soupy fields in hunt of the fox, but the wily creature had outsmarted Poppaw again.

          Discarding his muddy boots at the back door and propping his rifle in a corner of the entryway, Poppaw traipsed in his stocking feet to the coffee pot on the kitchen counter. He poured a cup of the steaming brew, lightened it with the heavy cream skimmed from the milk of his best milk cow, loaded it with sugar, and chugged it. And then he trudged to his rocking chair in the front room and draped his coat on its back. Poppaw always kept his coat within arm’s reach and his footwear at the back door, because there was no telling what awful things could happen out on the farm. One of the horses could lose its footing on an icy bank of the creek and plunge in to freezing ice-capped water way over its head—especially Old Roger. “That horse ain’t got the sense he was born with no more. He’s jist gitting too old and simple,” Poppaw often complained. Or that crafty fox could get into more devilment. He could sneak back in the henhouse and send the chickens scurrying and flopping and squawking into the farmhouse yard and up on the porch just as soon as Poppaw was out of the way.

Poppaw’s rocking chair was perpetually pulled up as close as possible to the chugging wood-burning stove. The farmhouse was abuzz with the voices of Poppaw and Mommaw’s several visiting adult children and their spouses and their children. I was in hog-heaven because being with my grandparents, my uncles and aunts and cousins was my favorite thing. I was champing at the bit to get Christmas morning underway. In my hands, as always, was my mother’s camera with which I would memorialize my family’s Christmas in black and white images. After what seemed an eternity to my fidgety cousins and me, Poppaw lowered his Abe Lincoln frame to his creaky rocking chair. It was our signal to begin our Christmas celebration.

My mother had stewed over what to get Poppaw for Christmas as she had done every Christmas of my nine years of life at that point. And as usual, she settled on two flannel shirts, two pairs of wool socks, and a couple packs of Mail Pouch chewing tobacco. Just about everyone else had decided on flannel shirts, wool socks and chewing tobacco for Poppaw too, and by the end of the hour, Poppaw had enough of them for an army. I snapped the photo of Poppaw opening the first of our gifts to him, and now I share it with you. Happy Holidays to you and yours. May it be as happy as ours was on that Christmas of 1952.

Oh, and Poppaw! I hope yours is a rocking good 125^th birthday up there in Heaven today.©

                                                                        

***

Several years ago, I wrote a novel about Poppaw and Mommaw, their kids, and extended family titled GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. The novel is a blend of fiction and nonfiction and includes transcriptions of actual letters the members of the family wrote to one another over the years and provide a poignant glimpse into the lives of a particular strata of American people during the twentieth century. Among the catalog of my books, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is my favorite. The act of writing it brought me home again after decades of rootlessness and alienation from my authentic self. It is a novel written from my heart more than any before then or afterwards. If you feel inspired to read the book, it is available for purchase at  http://goo.gl/imUwKO.

                                                                         

#Christmas, #1952, #HarrySTruman, #DwightDEisenhower, #QueenElizabethII, #WorldWarII, #Americana, #FamilySaga, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene, #Author/Artist

 

IN DAD'S SHOES

 

 From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

Dad was in the garage,

Working on a car.

One of his,

Or one of his brothers’,

Or one of my mother’s brothers’.

It didn’t matter

‘Cause Dad liked working on cars.

Dad removed his greasy shoes and grimy socks before coming in the kitchen,

And as always before and again that time,

I noticed his feet –

So much like mine,

And I took the photo of his shoes to remind me,

And hoped I would be more like him in other ways with time.

 

©Linda Lee Greene, 2007

 

My father’s given name was Leland Edward Greene, but he preferred the shorter Lee Edward Greene. The briefer version won out and was his name for the entirety of his 89 years of life. I am named for Dad. The distinction is mine among the four offspring of my parents due to the order of my birth: I am the firstborn and because of that accident of chronology, by tradition the name was given to me. As time passed, however, it seemed meant to be, because among my three siblings and me, I resemble my father in appearance most closely. The jury is still out on whether or not I take after him in other, more crucial ways.

          For the past several years, I have been asked to write the eulogies of some departed members of my family. The assignments began with the passing of my father on March 29, 2014. In tribute to him on this day that would have been his 98^th birthday. I am including herein the opening paragraph of the eulogy I wrote for him:

 

“Lee Edward Greene, 89, beloved son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and cherished friend was one of the last of the Greatest Generation, a loving and dedicated family man who was a joyful and steadfast breadwinner. He was a man good with his hands whether the task was to fix a leaky faucet, to make a car purr, or to build a house. But essentially he was a simple man – he held no public office, never attained fame nor amassed a fortune, but within the small circle that comprised his life, he was the center that always held, the rock upon whom everyone depended, the flint against which everyone struck on his/her passage to adulthood. We aren’t likely to see his kind again any time soon…”©

***

                                                                       

If you are moved to read more about my father, the people and the circumstances that made of him the man he was, you can read about it in GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. It is my first novel that blends fiction and nonfiction. The official genre is listed as historical fiction. Among an author’s catalogue of her/his work, there is always a favorite, the one written from the heart more than any before or afterwards. GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is mine. My father’s coming of age story mirrors mine in that writing this novel put me on the path to my true home again after decades of rootlessness and of alienation from my authentic self. You can find the novel at http://goo.gl/imUwKO.

 

IF ONLY IT HAD RAINED…

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

Today, Wednesday, November 22, 2023, is a day fit only for the intrepid here in Central Ohio. Blustery and gray and hung over from yesterday’s rain—the day mirrors my mood. “If only it had been such a day in Dallas sixty years ago!” the nagging voice whirls like dirvishes unchecked in my brain. “If only it had rained or at least threatened to rain and President John F. Kennedy had been in a closed car rather than the open one…his beautiful head would have been shielded from Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer bullet.”

          In my long life I have lived through my wedding day; the birth of my son; the birth of my daughter; my divorce; the death of both of my parents and of my brother and of my sister; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr and of Bobby Kennedy; the Vietnam War; 9/11; Covid 19, January 6^th; and more surgeries than I can count on both hands; but no hours loom as starkly in my memory as those that opened at mid-day of Friday, November 22, 1963, the day my fellow Americans and I were struck dumb by the news that John F. Kennedy, our president, had been assassinated.   

          Basking in the unseasonably bright and warm day in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, my co-worker and I strolled leisurely from our lunch at a nearby café to our workplace in the credit department located on an upper floor of the towering Uni-Card building. We approached the crowd of our loitering co-workers on the broad sidewalk fronting the building and joined in the pitter-patter and joking so typical of New Yorkers at their leisure. The lively drumbeat of chatter stopped abruptly when a man rushed out of the broad entrance of the building, his hand clutching a long white ribbon of tickertape that trailed in his wake, and his voice shouting, “THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT! THE PRESIDENT WAS SHOT!” In the blink of an eye, a second man ran from the building. It was his duty to tell us that the president was dead, that the city was shutting down as was the case across the country, and that we were dismissed and advised to get to our homes as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

The one detail missing from my memory is the means by which I made it to the one-bedroom apartment in Flushing, Queens, New York, in which my bridegroom and I had taken up residence only three months before. Perched on the floor of our living room, our noses only inches from our small black and white television, my husband and I watched nearly motionless, other than bathroom and kitchen breaks, the unfolding drama of the several days comprising JFK’s assassination: the tragic motorcade, the chaotic manhunt, Oswald’s frenzied apprehension, and then, the man in the scruffy fedora crashing through the mad crowd, raising his gun-wielding hand and shooting Oswald dead…right there on the TV screen…right before our stunned eyes. And then there was Jackie’s blood-stained pink suit, the new president’s swearing in, the flag-draped coffin, the funeral procession with the riderless horse, the little son stepping forward and saluting his fallen father.

          To my mind, that condensed national event was unmatched in modern history—until now…until this now when Americans are more mixed up and at odds in mind and heart than at any other time since the country’s Civil War. As we gather at our Thanksgiving tables tomorrow, let us clasp one another’s hands and send out fervent entreaties for healing of the wounded USA.©

                                                                        

#11/22/1963, #ForestHillsNY, #JohnFKennedy, #JFK, #POTUS, #Assassination, #LeeHarveyOswald, #BloodStainedPinkSuit, #JackieKennedyOnassis, #VietNamWar, #9/11, #Covid-19, #January6th, #CivilWar, #LindaLeeGreene, #AuthorArtist

 

 

WHAT A CHARACTER

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Life has hit me with some new low blows lately, and I expect them to continue to menace until I get beyond them—and then on to another round. That’s the way the day to day unfolds here in this particular confluence of protoplasm known as Linda Lee Greene. During times like these, I turn to certain practices that help me through. I meditate; I read inspirational material; I write; I storytell to my immediate loved-ones through a long texting thread; I paw through old photographs and relive the moments they bring to mind, an exercise in which I lose my present self in the past for a while and that rewards me with momentary amnesia of my current stresses.

          I took on the mantle as my birth family’s official photographer at the tender age of six, my mother’s little Brownie camera wound with black and white film incessantly in my grubby hands. I had the natural eye and ear for a good photograph. It was the precursor of my inborn talents as an artist and a writing storyteller that blossomed pretty much concurrently with my penchant for the camera. Such is the story behind my featured photo of my sister Sherri.

You will notice that the date of the photo is Oct. 1956. To be precise, I took the photo on the day of that month and in that year that was the occasion of Sherri’s third birthday. I had turned thirteen two months before. The location was the backyard of our home at 507 W. Second Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, an old multi-storied Victorian that I think of and dream about as home to this day, even though I haven’t lived there for sixty-five years.

That backyard was an ideal setting for great photographs. It was lush with green grass, flowering bushes, and leafy trees—an ancient cherry tree whose many and strong branches provided years of fun summer afternoons of climbing was a favorite of the neighborhood kids. An arbor of sweet green grapes draped the walkway that began at the foot of the back porch and led to the garage and doglegged to a gate that opened onto the alley. Tucked in one side of the arbor was a bench, a two-seater that was both private and romantic among the copious grapevines. I posed Sherri on the bench and snapped a picture. Next I dragged an old chair from the porch to the yard, lifted Sherri up to it, and instructed her to stand straight and smile.

Sherri had her own ideas about how our photoshoot should be conducted. She didn’t like posing upright on the chair and gave me her famous “look of disapproval”, her arms bent and fists coiling in ready to fight. I got the shot just in time and memorialized it in my photo of her on her third birthday. Sherri hasn’t changed one whit since then. She still has her own ideas about things and isn’t shy about having them known. She might be my favorite person in the world while at the same time remaining my competitor. My little secret is that it doesn’t matter to me which of us wins. All that matters to me is that Sherri is my sister, and I count my lucky stars for it every single day.

My wish is that you and yours have a lovely Thanksgiving. I know I will, in large part because my sister Sherri will be with me at our table this year, and God willing, for many years to come.©

#Sisters, #Thanksgiving, #VictorianHouses, #ColumbusOhio, #LindaLeeGreene, #AuthorArtist

AHEAD BY A NOSE

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Way back when I was a kid of Columbus, Ohio’s inner-city, narrow ribbons of patchwork concrete ran between the old, asbestos-clad Victorian houses and row upon row of brick townhouses, dwellings comprising neighborhoods much like those found throughout Colonial American cities. In one of the townhouses lived my friend Janey and her mother, Helen. Helen was the only single, working mother on our block, a status that rendered her a curiosity among the stay-at-home-mothers. There was never any mention of the whereabouts or even of the existence of Janey’s father. At some point, one of the local busybodies decreed that he must have been a casualty of World War II, for after all, most of the neighborhood kids were born while the fathers fought in that conflict. The explanation took hold and held, but we never really knew the true story behind the mystery of Janey’s missing father.

Actual fatherlessness was an almost unknown factor among our circle of family and friends in those days. Whether birth fathers or surrogates, fathers were at minimum often obscure figures in the background of our daily lives. In my and my sibling’s case, our dad worked nights and while he was at work, we slept, and while he slept, we were at school. He was nearly a specter-like presence among us on weekends, for most Saturdays and Sundays he was preoccupied with repairing his car, replacing a busted faucet or other chore required to keep a family and its household whole and functioning. But our dad, like the dads of other kids we knew, was there—somewhere—when the chips were down. Janey was the exception.

Janey was the exception in other ways, as well. She was the only kid I knew who sassed her mother. That kind of thing just didn’t happen in my tiny 1950s world. I stood in shocked horror of Janey’s aggression toward her mother, a kind of hostility I didn’t feel toward my mother, and if such a thing ever popped into my head, I ejected it for fear of hurting my mother’s feelings and/or losing her love. That Janey took such risks with her mother was astonishing to me. I didn’t like Janey’s behavior, but at the same time, I felt a kind of unwelcome admiration of her pluck. Guts like hers could take a person places, and that fact gave her a pass in my mind. It set her up as the wild-child of our play group and a fascinating character I was content to embrace despite her bad behavior.  

At bottom, the thorn that pricked the clashes between Janey and Helen was that Janey sucked her thumb. Janey and I were both six years old and in the first grade of the same school as well as neighbors when we met. She sucked her thumb then and still sucked her thumb when at the age of fifteen we said our last “goodbye” on the day my family moved out of the neighborhood. Throughout the years I knew them, Helen had coated Janey’s thumb with iodine and other bitter substances, had wrapped her thumb in tape or her whole hand in gauze, all to no avail. Janey persisted in her baby-mode despite the fact that her mouth and teeth were altered by the practice, and the thumb she sucked was stunted. It never developed to a size larger than a toddler’s. Other than the pint-sized thumb, the most notable mark of the thumb sucking ritual was on her nose. As Janey sucked her thumb, she hooked the index finger of the same hand across her nose, and the constant pressure from that finger carved an inwardly curving ridge in the bridge of her nose. Her ski-jump nose made Richard Nixon’s look half-baked. I can’t help but wonder if Tricky Dick sucked his thumb on the sly.

I am not here to disparage Janey. I have infinite sympathy for her, for surely her thumb was the pacifier she used to cope with the challenges that came with the absence of a competent father-figure somewhere in the catacombs of her days, and exaggerated by the enormous stresses of an overworked, single mother. Helen’s anxiety over Janey’s thumb sucking addiction was understandable for there was no getting around the huge impediment her thumb sucking presented to her future success and happiness. But even so, I just bet there is room for optimism about Janey’s chances in life, for you never know where an oddly-shaped nose might point you. Look at Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand. Janey’s strong and nervy, ramrod-straight backbone set against the flimsy bent of her nose tells me that while she might have remained a strange character in the eyes of many, she was also wily enough to stay ahead of the game—if only by a nose.©*

 

*The above is a work of fiction based on a composite of actual events as they exist in its author’s fuzzy memory bank.

 

***

           Linda Lee Greene’s award-winning novel

 

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT

 

“5 Stars…A woman’s search for the truth behind her husband’s infidelity unearths dark secrets and monstrous circumstances, chilling exposures that in the end illuminate her path to a new and better life…told from varying viewpoints in varying states of existence and so becomes quite unique and utterly fascinating."

 

Purchase Link: goo.gl/i3UkAV

 

#VictorianHouses, #Townhouses, #ColonialAmercanDwellings, #WorldWarII, #FathersDay, #ThumbSucking, #FathersAndDaughters, #MothersAndDaughters, #SingleWorkingMothers, #RichardNIxon, #LindaLeeGreene, #CradleOfTheSerpent

THE TIME I GOT ONE OVER ON WHITEY FORD

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

Nobody can ever say of me that I am a “globetrotter,” although I would like to be a habitual gadabout. In my younger days, before health issues took over and ever since then have dictated my whereabouts, I did a little international traveling. My last trip across the pond was an employer-sponsored, long-weekend in England. Take my advice and never go to England on a three-day pass, because the time will zoom by and you’ll be left with little more than a blur in your memory bank. Nowadays, unless I travel by way of a story in a book or an article in a magazine or trek along with Rick Steves on public television, it isn’t likely that I will ever again get to Europe or any place beyond the borders of the USA. “Maybe in my next life?!” I lament in my weaker moments—when my enthusiasm for my Elizabeth-Barrett-Browning-existence flags.

            In the meantime, you can bet that I keep a “Travel Bucket List” for my reincarnated life. Deep down I know the whole idea of a newly-embodied self is a bunch of hooey, but didn’t Dorothy make it to Oz on the wings of a tornado and Alice to Wonderland down a dark and creepy rabbit hole? A similar kind of out-of-body episode might be my only pathway to the trip of my dreams—to a week at a cooking school in Tuscany and another week hanging out at the Bay of Naples—at least two to three weeks to take in the history, art, and culture of Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan, and then onto several days of hiking the Cinque Terre, chasing romance at the feet of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, and on and on? I figure I, or whomever I will be in that re-embodied entity, will have to carve out about three months for such an itinerary.

            “Dreams are made to sleep on,” someone must have said at one time or another, and the specific night around which this story centers, I crawled into bed and in no time my eyeballs rolled up into my head and my eyelids closed down on my fondest dream. In an instant I was transported to Northern Italy, at a raucous celebration comprised of thousands of townspeople dressed up in garb that must have dated back to the 12^th or 13^th centuries—men in knee-length or long tunics, some sporting chain mail and full-fledged suits of armor, the women in long tunics or gowns and linen veils draping their heads. I was soon to experience that the pointed-toed shoes that both sexes wore were lethal weapons. A man standing next to me explained that the festival was called the “Carnival of Ivrea,” known as the “Battle of the Oranges” to English speakers and the biggest food fight in Italy and surrounding countries.  

            My new friend went on to say, “The three-day festival is a re-enactment of either a 12^th or a 13^th century event—nobody seems to know for sure—in which a marquis or duke or person of a similar ilk, exercised his right of privilege and forced himself on a miller’s daughter on the eve of her wedding. The whole affair backfired on the tyrant when the young maiden got her hands on what had to have been a really sharp knife or some other chopping utensil and cut off his head. The legend holds that the townspeople then stormed the palace where the maiden was held captive and burned it to the ground. It signaled the end of such oppressive acts on the part of the ruling class and is thought of as a revolutionary turn for the common people.

“The re-enactment comprises thousands of townspeople divided into nine combat teams of aranceri on foot that throw the oranges. The oranges represent old weapons and stones, and as you can see, they are thrown at aranceri in carts that represent the tyrant’s ranks.”

While I couldn’t imagine landing a position on one of the teams, it seemed to me that an alert and a nimble bystander could swipe at least one loose orange and get in a lick. “You wouldn’t think so many oranges could be had here in the cool shadow of the Italian Alps,” I said to the stranger.

“Crateloads of them are shipped in from Sicily. It’s the leftovers from southern Italy’s winter crop. By the way, my name’s Whitey Ford,” and he held out a big and beefy hand. Mine was lost in the curl of its elongated fingers and cavernous palm.

“Whitey Ford?! Not the Whitey Ford, the greatest pitcher in the history of the New York Yankees?” I gasped.

“One and the same,” Whitey replied as he released my hand.

At that very second, an orange sailed through the air, levelled precisely at Whitey’s head. He stepped to the right, reached up that iconic left arm, and just as the orange was about to drop into his palm, I thrust my right hand up and grabbed it—I owned that orange! I had actually gotten one over on the legendary Whitey Ford. As fast as lightning, I pitched it like Whitey landing a strikeout across home plate. A missile nosed in on its target, my orange connected and splattered in an orange slurry on a draped head onboard one of the tyrant’s carts.

And wouldn’t you know it, I woke the next morning to a juicy navel orange at rest on the nightstand next to my bed. Had I carried it to my bedroom the night before intending to eat it, but then forgot it in my urgent need for sleep? Was it like the time I absentmindedly brushed my teeth with antibiotic cream, or when I said my former lover’s name instead of my husband’s at the exchange of our wedding vows? Or had the fairies really visited me while I slept and gifted me with the most perfect specimen of an orange? Such are the delightfully curious possibilities of a dreamer’s life.

Rather than peeling it and eating it in the same old way, I figured this special orange demanded special treatment. I padded to the kitchen, laid it on a cutting board and sliced the orange in half with a serrated knife. I then ran the knife around the inside perimeter of each half to separate the pulp from the peel and then each section from the membrane, like I always do to halves of a grapefruit. Next I dribbled 4 to 5 drops of vanilla extract and 1 teaspoon of honey onto each half and then topped them with a generous sprinkle of cinnamon. I arranged the orange halves onto a cookie sheet sheathed in aluminum foil and placed them below the broiler of the oven for 3 – 5 minutes. Piping hot out of the oven, I had a hard time deciding on whether to top them with whipped cream, ice cream, or fruit. Fruit it was, and I topped the orange halves with a couple cubes of canned peaches.

            I could only eat half of my magical orange. I put the other half in a storage container and placed it in the fridge. It was my breakfast the following morning, reheated in the microwave at 30 second intervals until it was just right.©

 

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#Italy, #RickSteves, #TravelBites, #PBS, #ItalianAlps, #CarnivalOfIvrea, #BattleOfTheOranges, #WhiteyFord, #Baseball, #NewYorkYankees, #OvenBakedOranges, #GardenOfTheSpiritsOfThePots, #LindaLeeGreene

 

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Multi-award-winning artist and author Linda Lee Greene’s GARDEN OF THE SPIRITS OF THE POTS: A Spiritual Odyssey, is a novella in which ex-pat American Nicholas Plato relocates to Sydney, Australia to escape the mental torture of devastating losses back home. Strange encounters in Australia’s outback with an Indigenous potter reveal to Nicholas unexpected blessings and a new way of living. The novella is available in eBook and/or paperback. Just click the following link and it will take you straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase the book.

https://www.amazon.com/GARDEN-SPIRITS-POTS-SPIRITUAL-ODYSSEY-ebook/dp/B09JM7YL6F/   

IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

 

“Resurrection” as illustrated in Christianity’s Easter and “indictment,” as attached to America’s former president are top of mind just now. Surely I am not the only one to take note of the irony. Religion and politics don’t have a lock on such goings-on. While usually narrower in their reach and impact, such stories abound across all sectors of humankind:

 

IT’S ALL IN THE NAME

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

We lived in the tight, inner-city streets and on our spacious porches as much as inside our homes when I was a scruffy kid. A mishmash of early, twentieth-century Victorians, freestanding doubles, multi-family townhouses and apartment buildings—brick or asbestos-shingled masses packed together like sardines in a tin can—our homes were separated only by slim spans of pockmarked, concrete sidewalks and face-to-face across narrow streets paved in bricks. The streets were edged with skimpy strips of weedy greenspaces and broad walkways. Graffiti was an ever-present feature of the streets and walkways, chalk-doodled and scrawled as they were with our hopscotch grids and hide-and-seek bases and baseball diamonds. We could depend as well on hearts and flowers in chalked messages of love blooming in the clay and concrete, the hard surfaces that were the avenues of our transportation and commerce and recreation.

            Oddities, injustices, cruelties, as well as charity and compassion abounded at every point of the compass—the kind of fodder about which writers dream. There was the brewery, the brick and river-stones behemoth around which our dwellings were clustered and that provided employment for so many of the locals, a place that belched poisonous, sinus-scorching and tear-wringing fumes in the air every afternoon. And who couldn’t guess that on the other side of the street, positioned in a straight line with the entrance of the brewery was the most heavily trafficked beer joint within several blocks? Of course, one of the city’s oldest and most revered Catholic Churches right around the corner from the watering hole is worthy of a mention, for it was, among other notable reasons, a house of worship famous for its standing-room-only confessional.

Two streets south of us was the cloistered district tagged by bigoted outsiders as “Fly Town.” It was the DO NOT ENTER place that was the stomping grounds of the black people in our midst. On many Sunday mornings, I sneaked across that invisible boundary of segregation and stood outside their small church and listened to the glorious music that soared through the walls of the building—spirituals and gospels, “Amen” music as it is commonly known—music that sent chills of wonder down my spine. Oh, how I wanted to go inside and join them. While I was drawn to that kind of spiritual abandon, it also scared me, and I didn’t dare cross that barrier.

Feral cats and stray dogs roamed the area at will. The standout in my memory was an imposing, black Chow Chow, a bear-like beast that was in constant battle with other dogs and cats and that terrified every human being it encountered. Across the alley just west of our house lived Freddy, a kid of my same age and a Ted Bundy in the making. Freddy’s pastime of choice was to catch a feral cat of the day, swing it around by its tail and then bash its shrieking head against a telephone pole. The terrorized cats usually survived Freddy’s assaults while I and the other kids in witness were traumatized forevermore by his violence. Freddy and the Chow Chow would have made good bedfellows.

            The house directly across the street from us, clad in shamrock-green shingles and like most of the freestanding houses of the area, featured a spacious front porch. It was the residence of Catherine, a World War II widow and stay-at-home mother of my friend Molly. Molly was the only person of that name whom I have ever known. There was the Unsinkable Molly Brown who survived the sinking of the Titanic and Molly the cloned sheep that had its 15 minutes of fame in 1997. Molly, my friend, also had the distinction of being a genetic double of her mother. They were both petite, blue-eyed blonds. Their physical features weren’t remarkable in a neighborhood of a preponderance of little and pale females. The odd thing about them was that during the nine years I knew them, Molly had a parade of new fathers and with each new father, she had a new last name. Catherine’s free-hand with Molly had its limits, however. It turned to out and out suppression in other ways. For instance, Catherine denied Molly’s every plea to cross the street, or to play in it or on the sidewalks with the rest of us kids. Molly’s porch was her private and only playground. I see so clearly in my mind’s eye that lonely, little girl standing at the edge of the porch watching us play, her bottom lip quivering and her tears dripping from her trembling chin.

I lost contact with Molly when my family and I moved out of the neighborhood. Both Molly and I were fifteen at the time. Six years later, in a peculiar mix of serendipities, I ran into Molly among the New Year’s Eve throng gathered at Times Square in New York City. What were the odds of happening upon a person I used to know from two states away and all those years before? I recognized her instantly, as she did me. “Mollyyyyy,” my mind flipped through the long list of her various last names for the appropriate one. I would have expected Molly’s face to have been ruined by the emotional wounds that surely were the legacy of her swinging-door fathers and conflicted mother, but it was nothing of the sort. Molly’s face was fresh and as sparkling as the crystal ball that a few minutes later dropped into the New Year.

 

She recognized my bewilderment and said through a kindly smile, “It’s just Molly now. All those last names sent me into therapy for a long time. I came away from it simply as Molly.”

 

“That’s cool!” I declared, and I wrapped her in a big hug. I pulled away and added, “Cher and Madonna have done quite well for themselves that way.”

 

“Exactly!” Molly affirmed. We laughed and there was no need for further discussion on the matter.

The incident brought Freddy to mind. Did he ever make it to an analyst’s couch or a church’s pew? Did he have nightmares about the cats he tortured? I had to be content with knowing that at least Molly had made it to the light. And what about Catherine? At the time, I still held to the opinion that she was bat-&hit-crazy. Years later, my assessment of her grew more flexible—when I became one of those desperate mothers trapped in a frantic search of a substitute father for my children.©  

   

#Easter, #Indictment, #Resurrection, #VictorianHouses, #Townhouses, #ApartmentBuildings, #TedBundy, #FeralCats, #StrayDogs, #ChowChows, #MothersAndDaughters, #GardenOfTheSpiritsOfThePots, #LindaLeeGreene

 

***

 

Multi-award-winning artist and author Linda Lee Greene’s GARDEN OF THE SPIRITS OF THE POTS: A Spiritual Odyssey, is a novella in which ex-pat American Nicholas Plato relocates to Sydney, Australia to escape the mental torture of devastating losses back home. Strange encounters in Australia’s outback with an Indigenous potter reveal to Nicholas unexpected blessings and a new way of living. The novella is available in eBook and/or paperback. Just click the following link and it will take you straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase the book.

https://www.amazon.com/GARDEN-SPIRITS-POTS-SPIRITUAL-ODYSSEY-ebook/dp/B09JM7YL6F/  

 

WHIP UP A MEAL FROM NEXT TO NOTHING!

 

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

Christopher Kimball of the MILK STREET TELEVISION cooking show, recently asked his friend Alex Aïnouz, a Parisienne, to tell the audience about the recipes a typical French home cook prepares for his/her family during any given week. Aïnouz replied, “We cook what is available; we don’t cook recipes.” Come to think of it, our ancestral mavens of the cook stove, and hearth, and fire-pit have been cooking that way since fire was discovered. Well-stocked pantries and freezers are contrivances of the modern world.

The conversation between Kimball and his French friend took me back to memories of my dear mother. While Mom was a darn good baker of pies, cobblers, biscuits and bread, she wasn’t as skillful a cook, otherwise. She fried her meats to near leather and creamed just about everything: creamed peas, creamed corn, even creamed canned tomatoes, a method of preparing vegetables that never pleased my taste buds. “Al dente” was not only a term Mom never heard, but the concept would have been completely foreign to her, for she boiled her vegetables until they were as soft as mush. In another way, though, she was masterful in the kitchen. I can’t tell you how many times I witnessed her pulling together a meal on a dime from a seemingly empty fridge and pantry, because, as was common back in those friendlier old days, someone unexpected stopped by at right about meal time.

Mom began life as a farm girl during the early decades of the twentieth century. Her experience in the kitchen was typical of budding cooks in most farm kitchens back then. There was the benefit of her mother’s enormous garden, which was replete with vegetables and various kinds of berries, its harvest canned and stored in the cellar at season’s end; there were chickens in their dozens in the yard, on the porch, in the barnyard, and gathered among the apple and peach trees in the orchard. Every morning, the hen house was a veritable egg-banquet in the offing, and out in the smokehouse, sides of brined pork and beef suspended from poles, the products of the farm’s stock of pigs and cows. Never ever was there a sparse larder. All that was required to pull together a meal when company came around was to gather up some eggs, wring a chicken’s neck, break open a canned jar of corn, cook up a “mess” of green beans afloat au jus in hunks of ham or thick slices of bacon, and throw some wood in the oven of the cook stove and bake a loaf or two of bread, a blackberry cobbler, and a peach pie.

 My mother was nineteen when she and my father married, and as soon as they could pull it off, they high-tailed it to the big city and never again entertained the prospect of farm-life. Thereafter, for the most part, the local grocery store was the equivalent of my grandmother’s garden and smokehouse. Nevertheless, no matter how long it had been since Mom’s last trek to the grocery store, she could whip up a meal from thin air. Macaroni and cheese with sliced ham sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup were her staples; or gravy and biscuits and fried potatoes; or bean soup and cornbread, or my enduring favorite: fried bologna sandwiches and sliced tomatoes on the side. Of course, people in my corner of the world call them “Fried Bologney Sandwiches.” Mom followed the traditional recipe of fried bologna, American cheese and mayo slapped between slices of white bread, but I like to tinker with traditional recipes. Be advised that my version of a fried boloney sandwich is hearty and filling. I can only eat half of one. It’s a good sandwich to split with a friend, or to save the second half for tomorrow.©

 

 

LINDA’S FRIED “BOLOGNEY” SANDWICH

INGREDIENTS

• 2 slices of your favorite bread
• 2 slices of bologna
• A few tablespoons of a butter and olive oil blend such as Olivio or Countryside Creamery Butter with Olive Oil and Sea Salt  
• 1 slice of sharp cheddar cheese
• A dollop of ketchup
• 2 eggs

DIRECTIONS

                                                            

1.        Put 1 tablespoon of the butter/olive oil blend in a frying pan (preferably an iron skillet) and heat to medium high.

2.       Cut short slits in the bologna around their entire perimeter. This prevents the bologna from cupping while frying.

3.       Place the bologna in the skillet.

4.      Brown both sides of the bologna. When done, scoop them onto a plate with a spatula.

5.       Quickly crack the eggs into a bowl and whip them as if you were preparing them for scrambling.

6.      Lower the flame under the skillet to low. Add another tablespoon of the butter/olive oil blend to the skillet.

7.       Dip both sides of the bread into the whipped eggs and place them in the skillet. Cook both sides to a French Toast golden brown.

8.      While the second side of the bread slices is browning, place the two slices of fried bologna on top of one slice of the bread.

9.      Add the cheese to the top of the bologna.

10.    Drop a dollop of ketchup on the top of the cheese.

11.     Place the second browned slice of bread on top to form a sandwich. Flip the sandwich with a spatula and cook until the bread is slightly charred and the cheese is melted. The charred consistency adds a satisfying crunch to the sandwich.©

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Multi-award-winning author Linda Lee Greene’s GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, which is a novel that blends historical fiction and an intimate study of her ancestors, receives rave reviews:

5 stars Wonderfully Written!

“This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. [It] reached out and touched my heart, mind and soul. [It] provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”

GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is available in eBook and/or paperback. Just click the following link/URL and it will take you straight to the page on Amazon on which you can purchase it.

Purchase link: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

#ChristopherKimball, #MilkStreetTelevision, #CookingShows, #Recipes, #FarmLife, #FriedBolognaSandwich, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene