The Magic of Four O’clock

By Anita Garner

Four o’clock is golden.  I can hear four o’clock coming, wearing a bell around its neck.

I feel four o’clock in my bones.

It’s the turning point in the day. Time to exhale. Get up. Think about what’s next. Could be coffee. Could be something intoxicating. Only a rude person would suggest four o’clock is too early for that. It might be a walk around the block or aimless wandering into another room.

Four o’clock’s intent changes with the seasons. In winter, the light is leaving and there’s the pleasant prospect of an early evening by firelight. In summer, if I choose to follow the light, there’s plenty of time left to see where it leads.

Professional schedules these days are often malleable. We may still be accountable to somebody, but how we do it varies.  It’s our own business how we set our internal clocks.   Four o’clock insists I pay attention.  Time to tap into fresh resources and keep going, or wrap it up for the day.

I’m guessing everybody has a magic hour, declared or not, a time when everything shifts.  Four o’clock is mine.  What’s yours?

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Bacon is the gift that keeps on giving.

bacon

In decades past, we carried Grandma’s gravy and barbeque sauce home on the plane. I still take food home after family visits, but it’s easier now because I drive between San Francisco and Los Angeles with a cooler in my trunk.

Holiday mornings always include Mimosas and bacon – in a quiche or with eggs, or snatched from the platter before it’s cooled. This year, my daughter and granddaughter surprised me with a batch of biscuits made with bacon grease. Best biscuits ever.

We Southern-born cooks put bacon grease in just about everything except dessert. We add it to breads. We sauce our vegetables with it. Gravy? Not possible without a roux that begins with bacon grease. Sometimes it’s bacon grease and butter creamed together, but the bacon grease is crucial.

bacon grease

My people kept bacon grease in a tin can near the stove. I keep mine in a jar in the fridge, and that’s the only part of the equation that’s changed. Bacon grease is the prize ingredient. We buy bacon just to render it, so we can own the drippings. As our holiday visit was ending, I remembered that the bacon grease jar in my fridge at home was almost empty, and made a note to stop at the market to buy several pounds of whatever bacon was on sale.

bacon grease 2

While packing to come home, I heard whispering and giggling from the other room and then my granddaughter appeared with a big grin, both hands hidden behind her back. She held out a gift “from Mom and me” – a small, round container with a red bow on the lid, filled with bacon grease. The last gift of the season is, so far, top of the list of Best Gifts Ever.

Container 2

New Year. Revised definition of happiness.

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Remember when we were very young and thought “happy” was our birthright? As the years went on, we’d do a lot of things just to get some of that. Today I think “content” or “peaceful some of the time” will suffice. I don’t think of these as compromises, but rather as more likely-sustainable states of mind.

newsletter-2

They’re arriving. Cards and envelopes with newsletters and photos and stories of work and travel and details about what life brought and even some telling about what life took away during this year that’s ending soon.

I especially like the ones I receive from people with whom I don’t ex-change emails all year. Nor even phone calls. People who don’t use Facebook. This is often our one communication and it’s become increasingly im-portant. I don’t want to lose track of people even (especially) when we’re not really in touch (much.)

Stories are what I love. I even enjoy newsletters with stories about people I don’t know. And pictures – the more, the merrier.

One surprise newsletter is written by the husband of my first roommate. I had the honor of being part of their wedding ceremony, back when we were barely out of our teens. Seeing their year told in words chosen by him reveals a side of him I hadn’t known before.

An envelope I wait for each year comes from a couple whose children I used to babysit. Now they’re great grandparents and in close touch with every member of their growing family. They share details about college classes and hopes and dreams and plans and romances of each of their multiple grandchildren, and I’m happy to make the acquaintance, in this way, of people I may never see.

Last season there was less mail and I worried about some who always wrote, then stopped. This year, they’ve begun arriving again and there are more of them. Maybe this tradition matters even more during a time when so many people have had to cut back on so many other things.

Keep them coming. Your newsletters will always receive a welcome here.

The End Of Youth?

The End Of Youth surprised me one morning. It didn’t sneak up on me gradually, the way friends have related their own revelatory experiences with mirrors. For me, it came all of a sudden and I was hugely, comically surprised at the face in the mirror. It was as if the wrong person had jumped out of a cake in a sitcom. What? Who is that?

I’d ignored previous clues. Now they all piled on together. The checkout counter. Any given cash register where senior discounts were figured.

In the past, I’d ask for the discount and the person in charge made a fuss of saying, “No, you can’t be.” Some were sincere, others not, but I was fine with their reaction and fine with pulling out I.D. to prove I deserved the discount.

You can guess what’s coming. One day, everything changed. As I presented my merchandise, the cashier asked “And are you a member of our Senior Club?” That was the first time nobody said, “You can’t be,” and from that day forward, it happened more frequently.

It’s not a specific age. It happens to some of us  decades too soon, because an observer isn’t really observant or doesn’t know what aging looks like, or isn’t paying attention. It also happens the other way around for some of us, years later than we really deserve, and we are offered a grace period, while we pretend not to notice the changes in the mirror.

But it will arrive. It will come in some way at some time to you, personally, and that will be the beginning of many other things, some of them very good. It can be the beginning of figuring out the next stage, of deciding our own worth based not just on a set of physical markers.

This isn’t to say that I have the answers yet, but only to remind you, as a friend, that day is coming, the day you fully accept you are no longer young and that it’s okay.

Fruitcakes – the gifts that keep on giving.

I like the ones that look and feel like bricks.

I like the ones in a circle with giant chunks of candied fruit protruding.

I don’t trust the cake-y ones. A chunk of fruitcake should offer some resistance when you pick it up. A stomach should know it’s been fed fruitcake. What’s the point if it just looks and tastes like cake?

I tried to make fruitcake at home a couple of times. Mine didn’t have the heft and the mysterious bits of things that surface from the ones you can order.

A friend makes a credible plum pudding with hard sauce. It bakes in a small, circular pan and after everyone else is done with it, sometimes she freezes the leftovers for me. The good thing about this is that, old or new, a hefty holiday treat looks and tastes the same after weeks.

Somehow words make this sound unappetizing. But my mouth waters and I am signing off now, headed to the kitchen to brew some strong coffee that is almost worthy of my once-a-year fruitcake festival. Sadly, I had to buy one at the market, because I haven’t yet ordered the best one available.

I have a favorite source for fruitcake. It’s Collin Street Bakery in Texas. This is not a paid announcement. It’s a sincere wish that I’d already ordered one from them so that while I’m writing this on a December Sunday afternoon, I could have a slice.

My mother introduced me to them by passing along to me all the fruitcakes her Southern friends ever sent her. Several were from Collin Street Bakery and I was immediately addicted. I love these people for making their almost-too-heavy-to-lift, DeLuxe Fruitcake. Look them up online, and be sure you ask for the DeLuxe. Big D. Big L.

The annual October dilemma

The question is not who will win the World Series. It’s not who will win the election. It’s Halloween. All the Halloween candy is on sale, and if I buy it in advance, I will eat it in advance. Meanwhile the giant Tupperware bowl that holds the treats on the bench by the door, sits empty and forlorn. And coupons which will save me ALMOST HALF* the cost of my candy purchases, are set to expire before Halloween.

What to do, what to do, what to do….

* Note: The upper case letters may be a cry for help.

Sometimes there’s a need to be very, very specific.

She’s 7, and in the Me-centric world of a person who’s only inhabited space on this earth for a few years, she believes that everything she perceives is exactly what everyone else perceives. This is one of the purest definitions of the innocence of childhood; touching while it’s present and sad when it’s lost to reality.

She’s having a sick day at home on the living room couch. She maybe has a fever, and definitely the tummy is iffy. She wants the sheet on, then off, then on but with her feet out.

I’m a visiting, volunteer brow-soother. I change the cool cloth on her forehead, and since her mom is at work, she feels the need to explain to me exactly how this will go. Her comments are phrased in the form of questions, but she delivers them in a weary, oh-brother-here-we-go-again tone.

“You know how when you feel sick sometimes it starts in your head? But sometimes it starts in your tummy? Then you can feel it coming up from here?”

She pats her tummy.

“And then you start to cry? And then you throw up.”

The “you start to cry” part gets me.

She watches intently, to make sure I haven’t missed a step. She wants to know that her particular brand of sick is the one understood by anyone in charge, and since I’m not her mom, she’s careful to be specific, assuring herself I’ll do everything right.

“And then, will you please call mom at work and ask her if I can have some Canada Dry?’

This, she evidently believes, is a magic potion that makes the tummy stop what it’s doing. No sense reminding her that she’s keeping nothing down at the moment, so I assure her I’ll call her mom at work soon.

She flips over onto her side, curling up, turning her back to SpongeBob on T.V., clutching her tummy, struggling with the inevitability of the sequence she’s just described.

We dash to the bathroom and minutes later, with the washcloth refreshed on her forehead, I sit in a chair near her, paging through magazines, hoping she’ll get some rest. She asks,

“Did you know you can make a really cool tent with your feet? I’ll show you. You put your feet up like this.”

She’s got one foot in the air, propping up the sheet, but then the leg comes down again and she says,

“I’ll show you how later.”

Tummy calmed, within minutes she’s asleep. I’ll stay in this chair for a while, because when she wakes up, I’m sure there’ll be more specific instructions to come.