Old So What

  In 1869, a French chemist named Hippolyte Mège-Mouries created a new “butter,” made from beef fat.   It was supposed to have a longer shelf life than real butter, and be an overall hardier product. So, in 1895, the butter industry, or whatever it was called, banned yellow margarine. This meant that you could only buy white margarine. Segue to the early 1950s… Now, I’ve seen white margarine. It’s not appetizing, but that’s the point. So, you had to mix the yellow coloring with the white margarine glop. They came in a plastic bag, but in two different compartments in the bag that you had to squish together.   I loved to do this.   It was a fun job when you’re five! (I, myself, prefer the taste of butter.)

  In the 1980s, exhibitions of Titanic material started to tour. (I think they are still touring today in some form.) My husband and I were Titanic junkies at the time. It was an emotional experience going to one of these productions. We went to Memphis, Tennessee; Boston, Massachusetts; and Atlantic City, New Jersey to view the sacred artifacts from the Titanic. And they did feel sacred. All the objects owned, valued or used by so many people who died needlessly in such a tragic way. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about you should come up for air from under that rock.) The Boston exhibit was the most exciting because the “Big Piece” had just been raised on August 10, 1998, from the grips of the ocean. My husband memorialized the event of our touching the large piece of the starboard hull on September 26, 1998, with a kind of a plaque for our stairway wall. It wasn’t just a keyhole that you stuck you finger in, as so many Titanic exhibitions give you for just a tou...

  Dark   chocolate that is at least 70% cocoa. Blueberries Pumpkin seeds and Tumeric Curcumin

  before there was a known cure for the disease, mothers on summer nights would tell their children not to go collecting fireflies. “They might give you Polio, they’d say.” I know, because I had one such mother.

  Your family usually starting with the eldest members begin to disappear. One by one they leave.   At first, because you’re young, you don’t notice all that much, but eventually it all catches up with you, until you are forced to notice. This usually happens around the time you realize that you are now getting old. You lose a spouse or a parent, in other words a significantly essential person. Where’d they go? Unfortunately, we know…so start now having a few extra caring people around you.   You can never have enough of those. Having a loving pet is good, too.   And don’t forget to provide a caretaker for that pet for when you, yourself, disappear.

  It was not lost on me that I chose to start to write in earnest after my relatives, who were writers, were either in mental decline or dead. I obviously didn’t want any comparisons to turn up. There was one person about whom the following story revolved. About whom my entire world revolved at the time. It was my mother, of course. This particular story began on the morning of The Interview, an ordinary enough occasion for young girls in the 1950s who wished to enter Polite Society. As defined by people who considered themselves to be socially superior, thus allowing them to set standards of behavior for everyone else. I was 14 at the time, just slightly pretty, and exhibiting a beginning glimpse of attractiveness to come. We were late as usual. (I’m certain that when she was dying, my mother told God, “WAIT, I’m not ready yet!”) I never actually called her Mother, but rather, “Mommie” until like a slap across the face, she told me that I was too old to be calling...

  Cole Porter was a composer and lyricist, and genius! He wrote this in 1935 during a pacific cruise aboard a Cunard ship traveling from Indonesia to Fiji. (Jerry Gray is also listed as a composer on this song.) To do this song justice you must, of course, listen to the melody. A sample of the lyrics to The Beguine: When they begin the beguine It brings back the sound of Music so tender. It brings back a night of tropical splendor. It brings back a memory ever green. I’m with you once more under the stars, And down by the shore an Orchestra’s playing And even the palms seem to be swaying When they begin the beguine…   …Oh yes, let them begin the beguine, make them play Till the stars that were there before return above you, Till you whisper to me once more, Darling, I love you! And we suddenly know What heaven we’re in When they begin the beguine   …Even the palms seem to be swaying!