A decade of devotion

Joel and Stephanie

June 30, 2001

One inch into this thousand-mile journey

Your step beside makes softer the hard road;

One minute into this time of greedy song

I am convinced no other theme will do, but you.

That all things converge where your face begins,

And nothing ends until your eyes say it ends;

That if two lips could yearn more for another

Two lips, I know it could not be mine, because

My mouth craves the pressure of your own, in

Glaring day, dusky twilight and deep night;

Wrong, right, and every uncertainty between

There is no fret of doubt. Only recognition.

One moment into eternity's cache of sure living

My hand in yours, let fears and years fall away.

 

Long live the lagniappe

Sorry I can't do the iconic circumflex over the o, but I just need to say that I do so love it when Lancome Paris is "in gift."

Such a gallic way of saying "If you buy something we'll give you something for free."

Circumflex or no, I know that under normal circumstances, it's nearly impossible to beat the house.

But somehow -- maybe it's the fact that, back in the late '80s, they gave me a baguette (the bread kind, not the diamond kind) for buying a mascara, and I am significantly impressed by food -- when Lancome is in gift they truly make me feel as though I'm getting something for nothing.

This from a woman who just paid twenty-five fifty for a pirate eyeliner (Le Stylo contour yeux longue tenue)!

But it's very good pirate eyeliner. Waterproof in accordance with any self-respecting pirate prerequisite. Tres magnifique Lancome!

Of course the purchase of the eyeliner wasn't enough to get me the freebie, so I had to get a concealer (Maquicomplet anticernes a couvrance totale) too.

Another twenty-nine fifty.

Don't judge!

I needed both things -- rather desperately if you want to know the truth -- because I'd just as soon poke my eye out as be seen in public without eyeliner on it and concealer beneath it.

So I played along.

Besides, I will still be using that eyeliner and that concealer when we're, oh, roughly two hundred days closer to throwing Obama out of office.

They may not last "forever" but primo beauty products get you closer to happy-days-are-here-again time than, say, drugstore cosmetics are likely to do.

As a nice bonus they make you look better on the way.

And for my trouble?

I got me a haul of a cuuuuuute little French blue and yellow Riviera Collection tote bag, three face creams, a tiny bottle of serum, and a two-ounce cleanser. Creme Radiance no less!

That my friends happens to be the Cadillac of facial cleansers.

Shut my mouth! It really really WAS a good deal.

And even if you don't wear makeup and never go within hollering distance of the Lancome counter, did you even know the word lagniappe before today?

Didja? Be honest or no baguette for you. Not that there's any left.

Oh and in other news, clearly Claudine (no doubt a Francophile like me, but still) suffers from a latent King Kong complex.

C'est la vie.

Sugar in the mornin'

It is a well-known and more-than-adequately documented fact that I have a sweet tooth roughly the size of, like, that part of Alaska where we're not allowed to drill.

I always wake up hungry and it's a battle choosing breakfast food. Because I always want something sweet although sweets are not always available in my house.

Always always always.

So as I'm making coffee this morning I think: Cinnamon Toast.

No, not the disgusting cereal. The actual food.

How I love it.

You take some good multi-grain bread, very rich and textured. You spread it with a thin scrim of real butter, then lightly sprinkle on the cin-sug mixture. Bake on the toaster oven rack without the tray.

I have this sprinkler jar that used to be a candle. I couldn't wait to use up the candle so I'd have this cunning sprinkler jar. Yes, I know you can buy sprinkler jars without candles in them but I thought this was clever.

Just looking at the aforementioned cin-sug mingled in there makes me thrill.

Now I will say that growing up, we never made cinnamon toast this way.

What we did was, we turned on the oven broiler. I seriously doubt we owned a toaster but it didn't matter because that was no good for cinnamon toast anyway.

We got out a cookie sheet and put our bread on it. Not multi-grain; this was in the '60s but well before the granola generation healthified bread for the masses.

In other words: White bread, y'all.

We slathered our bread with margarine (never did we have real butter), then took a spoon and dipped it into the sugar bowl.

Next we loaded our bread with ridges of sugar, the more the better.

Then we got our cinnamon, which came in a little tin oblong of a box with a plastic top equipped with open circles and a crescent for either shaking or spooning.

Making sure that spooning-crescent thing was firmly closed, then purposefully poising the box directly over our butter sugar bread, we hit its bottom until obscene amounts of cinnamon dotted the landscape in the form of brownish-red clumps.

Some people thought it was all in the wrist. As in, a gentle side-to-side shaking motion over the sugar. Whatever. I was too impatient for such niceties.

In my opinion if you did it right, the cookie sheet sported a white-and-reddish-brown outline of what would ultimately be your toast. Sort of like crime-scene paint sprayed on the sidewalk.

We popped the whole thing under the broiler and it immediately started smelling ridiculously good.

When the sugar was bubbling and the cinnamon had gone dark-brown and gooey, and the edges of the bread all golden from that happy marriage with the margarine, we grabbed a potholder and retrieved our masterpiece.

Oh how it was to lift your slice of cinnamon toast, still soft on the bottom so that your fingers made big craters in it, but all crusty on the top with what we now know was the caramelization process.

You consumed it lustily, quickly, trying so hard not to burn your tongue, washing everything down with cold milk.

Rustic. Elemental. Almost primitive in its unbridled lusciousness.

Forget the cin-sug mixture in the ersatz candle jar! Forget the toaster oven!

I think I'll make my breakfast the right way tomorrow.

Lean mean Claudine

So the other day Erica came home to spend a week with us.

She's helping her dad with a special project during the day.

In the evenings she swims with us and watches movies with us and goes to the grocery store with us (for necessities such as lime sherbet and sugar wafers) and in general keeps her aged parrots a very excellent kind of company.

I am sad to report she is leaving tomorrow for the Peach State where she resides.

However, in a few days we're all going up to Ohio to visit with my recently-widowed mother-in-law, so we'll have much more together-time before school starts.

(Erica teaches fifth grade at Peoples Baptist Academy in McDonough, Georgia.)

Anyway it wasn't long after the Boo arrived that I noticed this wee stuffed ... thing on my kitchen table.

It bore the almost-unBEARable cuteness associated with Boyds Bears, which I have been known to sort of collect because if there is one thing I have a great deal of difficulty resisting, it is a bear in a hat.

But this little furry thing flopped over on my table -- sporting a tag identifying "her" simply as Claudine -- didn't look like any bear I'd ever seen.

First of all, there is her prehensile tail.

Now, far be it from me to comment on anyone's caboose, but if you've ever known a bear to have a tail as long as its arm, I would like to know where you saw it.

And what you were smoking.

Then there are her whiskers, which can only be described as unsettlingly longish.

Leading me to believe Claudine is a cat. A cat-bear? Or maybe just one of those creatures included in the and Friends part of Boyds Bears.

Turns out Claudine was on my table because she was a gift. For me.

Which is strange because if there is one thing I most decidedly am not, it is a cat person.

I speak dog. All dogs all the time is my motto -- well, one of them -- and I have the lazy Chihuahua to prove it.

Eventually it came to light that Erica sort of won Claudine -- no, not in a poker game but in, of all places, Sunday School.

I would elaborate but what would be the point? All you need to know is that we Baptists are big on giveaways.

For some reason the Boo thought Claudine would fare better in my orbit than in her own.

So that's why, when I held Claudine up to Erica and said "What's this?" Erica replied (with a sly grin) "That's for you."

Huh-kay.

And we were living peaceably until today when Claudine, out of the infinite atmosphere, began getting into all sorts of mischief.

First I caught her in the rooster bowl with the open (and half-eaten) package of sugar wafers.

Too bad I haven't got a sardine for Claudine, I thought. In other words, more appropriate Claudine cuisine.

I scowled at Claudine but she did not react. Next time I entered the kitchen she'd appropriated a jar of honey as her own personal ursine-feline perch.

I knew I was in trouble when that time, she refused to make eye contact.

But I had work to do so I left Claudine to her own devices. How much damage could she do? I reasoned.

Perhaps my laissez-faire attitude was ill-advised because practically before I could turn around, she was in -- as in, she had become part and parcel of -- our (sacrosanct) Lindt stash.

Next she snuggled innocently with some unsuspecting and entirely boring zucchini* (one vegetable that ever seems to know when it's being used).

The little darling.

Clearly a hopeless recidivist, back in with the chocolate, Claudine was later caught preparing to embrace a bottle of Parisian pink lemonade.

That time I took pains to upbraid her. "Do you want to spend the rest of your born days occupying a shoebox stuck in the back of my topmost closet shelf?" I said.

Claudine high-tailed it out of the Le Creuset (though not away from the French lemonade) and made herself smaller. I chose to read her actions as an inclination to acquiesce with the law and order we keep around here. Somewhere.

Oh yeah I'm a sucker. But in my own defense, I've had zero experience with cats.

Later still, I noticed Claudine was no longer consorting with the sugar wafers, chocolate, honey, and lemonade. Apparently she'd lost interest in the zucchini. She wasn't even on the counter anymore.

I assumed she'd retreated somewhere to think about what she'd done and consider the dark dimensions of the aforesaid shoebox, a/k/a her forwarding address.

Oh no! She'd managed to get her bad self over onto the baker's rack, where she was holding two sugar wafers hostage.

Fine thing.

Of course I took them from her! The wafers were safer with me and besides, it was either that or call a SWAT (Sugar Wafer Accountability Taskforce) team.

I didn't have time for that amount of nonsense.

Where did she turn up next, you ask?

See for yourself.

This cat is jaded, I concluded. A hardened criminal and no mistake.

Good as my word, I went to rummage for the solitary and sole-less domicile I'd promised Claudine.

Upon my return I looked for her in the popcorn bowl.

It was empty.

My eyes swiveled back to the counter.

Ah.

Claudine's a pirate.

Might've known.

That explains a lot.

She'll be sleeping in my bed tonight.

*Squash. Whatever.

I see cloud people

I look at this picture and I see faces.

Two, to be exact.

A large contemplative face and a smaller, laughing, upturned face!

Faces within faces, as it were.

I do not recognize the faces and no, I'm not off either my rocker or my meds.

Actually a rocker sounds nice but I don't need meds, thanks ever so.

I am, however, hungry for validation.

Do you see them?

Please tell me you see them.