Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Losing a Grandbaby

May 18, 2015 was a new day for a new baby girl that I only got to love for four months.  Grandbaby number five.  Being retired from the military, I now had more time to play with the children. Especially when they're little babies.  I like little babies.

September 22, 2015 was the last day on Earth for that new baby girl.  A monster got to her and took her away from us.  Monsters can be surreal, especially when they stand back and watch as I attempt to push air into the tiny lungs; wanting her chest to rise and fall with natural breaths.  But it doesn't. Not even with the chest compressions her grandfather was applying to accomodate the breaths.   

Then paramedics take over and attempt to supply air to her lungs, and continue as they take her little body on the stretcher to the ambulance to take her to the baby emergency room.      

In the children's hospital, her mother holds her lifeless body, as momma rocks and cries.  And rocks and cries.  The monster was there and he had a panic attack, so he got to go to the other emergency room.  His father went with him.  

Momma had to talk to people, so I held my new baby girl and rocked and cried.  And rocked and cried.  

Two days later, the monster confessed to the police that he had killed his daughter.  Blunt force trauma around the head and a broken arm.  

He sits in jail; alive.  

I hate him.  

Monday, December 19, 2016

Crappy days . . .

Crappy days for me is when I sleep so late that the most productive times of day are gone.  I detest sleeping.  It's a waste of time that I could be doing better things.  I wish there was a capsule to take, like in the Jetsons, where the pill kept you up as long as you wanted and you got the body rest that's needed to function effectively and efficiently.  I hate days like this and then I will do nothing in particular the rest of the day because it's so pissy to not have time to do what was wanted to be done.  So you just say screw it.

Monday, December 5, 2016

I Am Both Of My Parents - Ponderings . . .

I PONDER LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE.  I mean, I have plenty of time to and I enjoy pondering; especially when I get to come to some conclusion about whatever.  In fact, I have a Conclusion journal where I write those down, what I've learned.

I think I have turned into a form of my mother.  I know that sounds strange coming from me because you and I have talked about those things; even when she was still alive.  All my life she'd tell me, "You're just like your father."   It didn't matter what I did, good or bad; I was just like my father.  Now, I am the grandma who's always feeding everybody when they come over. My mother did the same thing with us kids and our families; have everybody over for dinner or lunch.  Or we'd just go there and hey, let's cook up some rice and kimchi, with dried cuttlefish as an appetizer.  Okay!  We were always eating at my parents' house. Mom was always feeding us.  Heck, she even knew our favorite foods because she'd fix them just for us, personally, on our birthdays.  Like, I loved Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  One whole box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was ONLY for me.  Mom would fix two pots of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and everybody else had to share only one pot full.  The other was mine. 

Hey, didn't you go with me to my mother's house one day for lunch?  For as long as I can remember, she was always cooking food for somebody.  When we lived on Posts, she always cooked during the holidays for soldiers that didn't get to go home.  They'd either come eat at our house or she took a full menu of holiday feats just for them, usually MPs, and then later the 164 SFS.  Anyway, for a few years now, along with my chirren an 'em, we've got people that have nobody to share Thanksgiving, so they come here.  And we will eat, thank you, Jesus.  ^_^ 

I never learned how to cook.  I never had to.  All my life, everybody fed me.  Really.  I think people felt sorry for me because they all fed me very well into my adulthood due to no cooking of my own.  I didn't even know how to make sweet tea, living in the South for as long as I have.  I can't say that I hadn't tried to learn cooking at a young age; I did.  I even took Home Ec for four years; I majored in it.  I used to be a member of the FHA.  Go figure, huh?  We were taught cooking and given recipes after the teacher and we made meals.  We were taught how to run a home effectively and efficiently.  I learned everything in Home Ec except how to cook anything that tasted any good, or come out right, or come out at all.  In high school, I never learned to cook or bake anything.  Nothing.  I got an F for that part of the class, but that was okay because everybody fed me.  Besides, I passed the rest of Home Ec with flying colors so my grades made up for that F.  I think my Home Ec teachers hated me.

2009 was the year I started learning to cook anything other than white bean dip or Rotel dip.  As the years passed and nobody ever got sick, and more and more people liked what I was preparing because it was "tasty" (I like that adjective for foods - tasty), the more my own palette crave tasty foods.  The meaning of the saying, "You are what you eat" hasn't been the same as it was pre-2009.  Maybe because I don't have to pass a PT test, so to speak, anymore, I am more aware of tasty foods and not as much on super healthful foods as I did pre-09.  Don't get me wrong - I make every attempt to eat things in moderation, and I usually do.  But I make one heck of a 14-bean soup with ham and ham Goya (seasoning), with a pork bone that still has plenty of meat left on it.  (I think there are currently two ham bones in the freezer for later.)  I think I've come to the conclusion that I really love pork.

One of tomorrow's meats is a big ole' Springfield ham that Rick is cooking on the grill.  Lana is roasting the turkey.  I love ham steaks.  I love pork chops browned in butter.  I love bacon.  I love bacon.  I love sausage.  I love sausage gravy and biscuits.  Tennessee Pride puts out a very tasty sausage gravy in those boiling-pouches.  Just add more cooked sausage and herbs and voila'.  I tried to make pork chop gravy twice.  The second time it was pretty good, and I ate a lot of it.  I'm going to come back a pig.  Snort, snort!

So here I am, 61 years old, a Lali and a Pee Wee, I cook well, the kids' friends who have come to dinner have told Steven that they wish they had a grandma that cooked like this; that they heard stories of grandmas who liked to cook.  I laugh.  I am not a big fan of cooking.  I am a huge fan of eating tasty foods.  Tasty.

Pre-2009 was a whole other life.  I had careers.  Being domesticated was not in the cards for me.  Especially when it came to cooking; I didn't have to.  Remember?  My life, pre-2009, was nothing like my mother's life at all.  Never had been.  I didn't cook if I didn't have to, which was actually a good thing because what I had learned to fix in that time was hardly ever tasty.  But I had work to do out there, learn everything, be all that I could be, because nothing was just a job - it was an adventure!  And I knew I'd never go hungry, as my father knew this during the Great Depression.  He was too scrappy to go hungry much less his younger siblings be hungry.  During his Army days, he was friends with the soldiers from the mess halls.  My father was an excellent scrounger, especially when it came to food.  Like meat.  I am an omnivore.  I came to dislike meat during a part of my young life, but that's another story.

I think I've come to the conclusion that I got to get the best of both worlds with what I've learned from my father and my mother.  My first 54-years of life was used to doing things I was taught by my father; which in a way carried into my career life and helped me be all that I could be with that adventure.  I've only had seven years to learn to be domestic.  I'm not too good at most of it but I can cook.  I can cook tasty foods, that is.


Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Mid-Century Style


FURNITURE DESIGNS from the 1950s/60s are now called Mid-Century designs.  I heard this on an episode of "Let's Make A Deal".   I was born in 1955, which makes me a Mid-Century design.  I like that term, Mid-Century design.

I was lucky to have been born in 1955.  That year and more to follow would be a fast-moving collage of life being made and mastered.  If you think about it, the world as we know it, inhabited with people, is actually not that old.  Technology has progressed and renewed swiftly and continues to do so.  Positive proof of progress is the Hearing Aid.  I saw my first Hearing Aid in 1961 when we visited my grandparents for the first time in Memphis when I was six.  My grandfather wore around his neck and on his chest (over his shirt) a black box, bigger than your cell phone, that was a receiver with a tube that led to his ear.  When he spoke on the telephone, the ear-piece of the telephone was turned downward and over the black box.  The telephone was held upside down and the mouth-piece, the transmitter, was on top by his mouth.  Here it is, 2016, and Hearing Aids are so small now; or you can even get them in bright colors.

The Dental Experience has come a long way since the Mid-Century.  The Dentist Office with chair, the porcelain sink with water constantly swishing down the drain ("rinse and spit"), the giant, blinding, overhead light, the Dremmel tools on the silver tray in front of you, novacaine from big needles if it was available, the large films stuck in your mouth to take X-rays.  The sounds of the whirring as the Dremmel tool whined and screeched in your mouth.  Here it is, 2016, the Dental Experience has come a long way, baby.  Small needles for novocaine, small overhead light, Dremmel tools are out of sight for the most part, they offer Nitrous Oxide, and music plays.  I like nitrous to get the Dental Experience pleasant and relaxing.



     

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