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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you've been paying attention you already know that at our house, we're huge fans of the classical crossover or pop-opera (say it with me: "POPERA!") genre.

Think Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban, Il Divo, The Canadian Tenors ... to name the most notable.

And then there are these three Italian kids.

Turns out I've blogged about them before!

Collectively -- now -- they are known as Il Volo. That means The Flight in Italian. And I do believe that, musically at least, they are destined to soar.

They were put together by some savvy impresario or other in 2009, when all three performed in an Italian music competition.

A few weeks ago they debuted their eponymous first album. Here is my two-word review: Molto bella!

Very beautiful.

Pictured left to right are Gianluca Ginoble, age sixteen; Piero Barone, who will turn eighteen this coming Friday; and Ignazio Boschetto, age sixteen.

I know it's a fourteen-plus-minute YouTube. I don't expect you to sit and stare at their picture for that long.

But do yourself a favor and, when you get up to do something else, let this three-song video play.

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What's that you say? More, please? OK.

Fantastico!

You may thank me in spaghetti.

and the glory of children are their fathers.

~Proverbs 17:6~

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Audrey and Andrew (children two and four of four) surprised TG by showing up at our house in Columbia unannounced (by me) and unexpected (by him) at about ten thirty on Friday night.

They both live in Knoxville. Making the four-hour trip after a long work week was a sacrifice.

But it was one they gladly made, for they love their father. They enjoyed spending Saturday with him and attending church with us this morning. I wish they hadn't had to leave right after lunch.

Erica will be home tonight, to spend a few days with her parrots. Stephanie saw her dad just last week.

TG is s a classically-trained, salt-of-the-earth kind of father. Throughout all the years of rearing our four kids, and in his relationship with them now as adults, I've never once known him to phone it in.

From the day Stephanie was born, as a dad TG has been present but not only present; he's been interested. But he's not only been interested; he's been involved. And not only has he been involved; he has actively worked on behalf of his children throughout their lives, often in ways distinctly unsung.

As every parent knows, the true labor of love undertaken for the sake of our children is rarely seen -- and sometimes not even guessed at -- by those it benefits most.

Like all of us, TG has a few faults. He functions at various times and with equal proclivity as the Sultan of Stubbornness and the Earl of Exasperation.

Despite these and other assorted peccadilloes displayed by their paternal parental unit, I believe I'm safe in saying our four children know the treasure they have in their dad.

As it should be.

For his Father's Day they pooled their resources to buy him an upgraded Weber grill ... bigger and nicer than the one he already had. He's already used it to cook out for us. Burgers!

We had an extra burger-loving guest this weekend: Rambo the Camp Dog.

More on that later.

Happy Father's Day!

Interred at Rose Hill Cemetery, York, South Carolina.

Rest in peace.

And I promise I'll tell you.

Eventually.

Still seeking clearance from higher-ups. Please be patient. Your virtue will be rewarded.

But that does not preclude my telling you funny and/or interesting stories about my relatively short visit.

For example.

On the morning of the last day I and my traveling companions spent in New York, we left our hotel -- Marriott Brooklyn Bridge, remember? -- at about nine o'clock.

We were going to Manhattan for the day. First stop Grand Central Station, where we were to have breakfast. There are all sorts of neat places to have breakfast at GCS but I highly recommend Junior's.

Anyway our escape route took us across the street, through a small park named Columbus, then underground to the subway.

The sidewalk in front of the MBB is a trifle bustly at all times of day, but especially in the morning.

I can't remember if I told you this or not but as our little group walked hither and yon in The Big Apple, I was always dead last.

No, I do not dawdle and I will thank you not to snicker.

It's just that, while of completely normal height and relatively nimble for my age, I'm not exactly long-legged.

And I like to walk! I even like to walk quickly, and often do, for excercise.

But I dislike trotting through the mean streets while all prettied up. I'd rather stroll, with frequent stops, plus dreamy stares for effect.

Think Holly Golightly minus the tiara and yard-long cigarette holder. Or any cigarette holder, or any cigarette.

Minus the cruller too, come to think.

But on the day in question I was unquestionably clad in black!

So as I sashayed out the door of the MBB and turned left, following my group, bringing up the rear as it were, I heard a whir.

Turned out there was a lady coming up behind me quite rapidly compared to my pace, dragging a medium-sized suitcase on wheels.

Hence the whir.

Which whir very suddenly stopped as the lady stopped -- also very suddenly -- about a second and a half after she passed me on the left.

For some reason I looked down at her feet when she stopped. I think it was because she herself was looking down at her feet.

And why was she looking down at her feet? Because there, on the sidewalk, lay her skirt in a puddle around said pedal extremities.

Yes! You read that correctly. The poor lady had lost her skirt mid-stride on the sidewalk in front of the Marriott Brooklyn Bridge.

Now, you'll be happy to know the lady was wearing a trench coat all buttoned and belted against the matutinal cool. Her unfortunate and very public wardrobe malfunction did not leave her standing there in the altogether.

But there was still the problem of her skirt being on the ground at her feet in the middle of a New York City borough.

Instinctively I got between her and the street. I could shield at least one side of her from view!

She very good-naturedly reached for her fallen waistband and began pulling and tugging to get her lower-half garment back in place.

Relatively.

I wanted to be an encouragement since I do believe that is my calling and my ministry.

At any rate it beats working.

You must've lost a lot of weight recently, girl, I observed in a conspiratorial tone punctuated by my trademark deafening grin.

The lady got the biggest kick out of that! She threw her head back and laughed uproariously, flashing all of her teeth to the sky over Brooklyn.

Oh girl, I must've lost some weight! She cheerfully agreed.

Now you need to keep a few safety pins on hand if you plan to wear your bigger clothes, I suggested.

She repeat-concurred, grabbing my arm while we laughed and carried on together right on the sidewalk. She promised she had some pins and would make good use of them.

Well I sure hope they're in that suitcase, I said, resulting in a whole new fit of giggles.

Before we parted I felt moved to tell her, misery-loves-company fashion, about the time not so long ago when I was shopping at Dollar General. I was wearing a knee-length skirt and it was a bit tight.

I hear those snickers and I will not warn you again. You've done the same and you know you have!

But anyway, as I shopped at DG that day I was constantly under the impression that I had to tug on my skirt.

My mama used to slap my hands when I was little for tugging on my clothes, but she wasn't there so I tugged and pulled.

When I got to the cash register and was paying my money, I felt something funny around my knees. I looked down and saw most of my black half-slip hanging out from under my skirt, its lacy hem nearly brushing the tops of my shoes.

Clinging around my knees was the elastic of the slip's waistband.

When I told a friend about this incident later, she told me she would've walked right out of that slip like it wasn't even hers.

But that solution never occurred to me. For one thing I'm not rich and I can't be so cavalier about leaving my lingerie in the floors of retail establishments.

I reached down and took off my slip and balled it up and shoved it into my purse.

Then I left and I stayed away from that DG for a good month or so.

Anyway, a short while later on the day the lady's skirt fell, at the Grand Central Junior's I enjoyed a full repast of eggs with hashbrowns and sausage and wheat toast slathered with butter and marmalade, washed down with coffee plus cream with two refills.

Is it any wonder my clothes are tight?

Before leaving I stared dreamily at thirty-five-dollar cheesecakes in the Junior's bakery case.

And of course I took lots of pictures which you by now know because you've been looking at them as you've read this post.

I leave you with a sage observation you've no doubt heard before, i.e.: Nothing's real until it's personal.

Why do I point that out? Because right after I got home I began noticing this commercial wherein the poor well-intentioned flash-mobster is not on AT&T's 4G network and therefore is not aware that the urban happening has been moved to 12:30 ...

... and it dawned on me:

That's GRAND CENTRAL STATION! I WAS THERE AND I TOOK PICTURES OF THAT CLOCK AND THE STAIRCASE AND THOSE LIGHTS AND THE FLAG AND ... AND EVERYTHING!

It looks exactly like that.

Relatively. 

Truth be known, iconic Grand Central Station is possessed of a grandeur I hope you someday have an opportunity to see with your own eyes, if you haven't already.

But please keep your clothes on! Or at the very least, be armed with safety pins and the 4G network.