Weather-watching obsession – does this make me an ol’ coot?

Watching the weather is a favorite hobby of mine.  I don’t generally get my weather reports from television, but I might as well be one of those people we see in comedies, who fixate on the Weather Channel and sit there for hours, soaking up data about places they’ve never been, never intend to go, and if they did go there, they wouldn’t know anyone. Those people are portrayed as coots. (One definition of  a coot:   simple-minded.)  A weather fanatic will say to no one in particular,  “I knew it.  I knew that system was gonna come in early.”  

Except for not watching the Weather Channel (tornadoes and hurricanes are exceptions that demand TV coverage) I may be one of those people.

I check the Weather Channel’s website several times a day for places where friends and relatives live.  Every trip for me begins with www.weather.com where I can fill in the name of any city and see what’s predicted for the next ten days. 

It might be an inherited trait, since my country born-and-bred father had a set of weather instruments on the back porch and glanced at them  several times a day, always remarking out loud on what he saw there.  He often disputed what the dials told him, and he was always right.  He could feel changes in his bones. 

Something about working out in the fields as a boy and his own deep respect for nature had permanently tuned him in to the time for sowing and the time for reaping. His instincts often did not agree with the calendar. He’d wake up and announce that he was going out to our vegetable garden. “I better go pull up the radishes and the collards before the sun hits ’em again.”   And this while rain was still falling.   He knew when a big change was coming.

I don’t have the knack he did for predicting imminent change, but I’m always hopeful about it. Our problems may stick around, but at least we can count on the weather to change.  When my diagnosis is boredom,  just watching the weather offers promise. 

One reason I love  my part of Northern California (and envy New Englanders)  is that the weather plays tricks on the forecasters.  Mother and Father Nature send along surprises  for us several times a month.  We’ll get rain when the sky was clear a minute ago.  Big winds arrive high up in the treetops, when the lower limbs don’t even know it yet.   Fog rolls in and out, but not always on the schedule we expect.  I’m disappointed when the fog fails to appear.  Like the redwood trees in the back yard, I rely on absorbing fog through my pores.  

I like being surprised by the weather.  Keeping the family’s weather-watching tradition alive  (my brother does this too) the first thing I do when the day arrives is go see what the weather is like outside, and I do it again before sleeping.  It seems I’ve been making my own notations out loud to no one in particular, without realizing it.   (Another definition of “coot” might be “predictable.”)

I haven’t been a grandmother all that long and sometimes I forget a small person is nearby. They’re always listening, aren’t they?  One recent morning while I was visiting at her house, I opened the drapes and stood there for a minute with my coffee cup.  From the little girl who’d snuck up behind me I heard, 

“Hammy, you forgot to say ‘It’s a beautiful day.'”

Generations of weather-watchers later, we’ve added one more.

Ó Anita Garner

Children at funerals

What is the advantage in taking young children to funerals?  In my humble opinion, their presence exposes them to indelible images that may later prove even harder to deal with.

I was raised in the Deep South during the 1950’s and our culture of dealing with death and the departed included the family’s insistence on an open casket if at all possible.  Coffin lids were closed only in cases of extreme disfigurement.  After the service at the home of family members or in the church social hall where casseroles were consumed, much was made over how the deceased appeared in death.  “Didn’t she look good?  And words meant to be a comfort – “They did such a good job with his hair, didn’t they?  Looked just like he did last week.”

Funerals were loud affairs with sobbing and moans mixed in among the amens and exhortations from the preacher.  Demonstrations of grief were many and varied.  Eulogists offered proclamations about the virtues of the departed while singers invariably waved handkerchiefs around – using them to mop sweat during humid summer events  or to dab tears away when the singer knew the departed, and sometimes a handkerchief was merely one more dramatic device.

Good music at our funerals was a matter of pride and if a home congregation didn’t boast singers of the right caliber, a call went out to find someone who could offer the best interpretation of the songs the family chose.  A funeral was quite a show and I guess our people considered them a healthy way to get it all out, because folks would respond to a wail with, “That’s right!  Let it go, sister!”

Children attended these services.  I was a child myself when my preacher-father required me to sing at funerals.  Very soon (I started singing at funerals at the age of 9) I learned to avert my eyes because gazing on a coffin, even when I’d never met the departed, was disconcerting.

But all of this is to say that I wouldn’t voluntarily open up a discussion with a young child based on the theme, “He’s gone and he’s never coming back.”  Those discussions will come soon enough and will likely last a lifetime.

Ó Anita Garner

Food Network

I sat down to watch a cake decorating show on Food Network, but it turned into a show about engineering. Could the bakers/designers duplicate (in cake) a favorite car?   On the next show, they built a replica of a DJ’s sound board.

I like the cooking process so much I’ll watch, enthralled, while someone makes a sandwich, but I don’t want to watch cooks building structures out of food.

Food Network was a comforting, homey background for me, one I could leave on in a room while I did other things. When a recipe caught my eye, I’d  stop and watch.  I record every show I don’t want to miss and notice there are fewer now from Food Network.  (However, I have in the process discovered Cooking Channel.)

Some of the Food Network’s changes are interesting, but shows that involve bizarre  foods or non-foods lose me immediately.

The last time I sat down with a cup of coffee to visit with Food Network in real time, there were competitions going on most of the day. I’m not a fan of shows where cooks work against the clock, get critiqued and then eliminated.  The shows where  Food Network chooses their own “new stars?”  I’d rather be left out of those decisions.  Cooking as a sport doesn’t grab me, but I may be in the minority here.

Food preparation is giving way to food-as-adventure.  I like shows where recipes are named and then prepared and then tasted and the host is personable, where a love of food and the cooking of same are stressed.

Dear Food Network, here’s what I like best:  Cooking.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Half full or half empty?

Either “The sky is falling” or “Every cloud has a silver lining.”

Both points of view are evenly represented among my nearest and dearest.  Most days I fall into the silver lining category, which means of course I’m destined to spend much of my time with people who are always dodging chunks of the sky.

I like grey skies.  I live in Northern California in a fog belt and I am (perversely, some say) not a fan of summer.  I count the days until the season changes to autumn, which brings the chance of showers. 

My only grandchild lives in sunny Southern California, so I spend a lot of time there.  A few weeks ago, the four-year-old and I stepped outside her house and walked right into an unexpected June rain shower.   She stopped and turned her face up, and as  her new sundress got good and soaked she said,

“I love the rain.  Free water coming down.”

That’s my girl. 

Ó Anita Garner 2009

The Truth About Gift-Giving

When people say “Don’t get me anything,” it’s best to pay no attention.  They’ll  say “I have everything I need,” but that doesn’t rule out wish fulfillment.  And it helps if we’re mind readers about what they’d really like, if only they’d say so.

I’m going to a birthday party for a man who’s 85 years old today.  Getting a gift for him takes more than a little  thought.  After we’ve lived a certain number of years, most of us feel we own enough things.  In fact, we’ve started giving things away. 

It’s much easier to shop for younger people.  They really do need things and then they want so many things, there’s a world of gadgets they feel they can’t live without.

My birthday friend says “Don’t get me anything.  I don’t need a thing.”  But I think when someone says that, he’d still like to be surprised with a little something.  So I’m paying no attention  and giving him a gift anyway.  Sounds simple enough – but it’s not, because he really does have everything he wants and duplicates of everything he needs.

Over these past few birthdays I’ve about used up every creative notion about gifts for him.  Someone suggested “a gift of time” and last year I spent an afternoon with him over coffee and sweets I baked myself.  But this year’s a big number with a big party and I don’t want to arrive empty-handed.

I finally settled on the one thing that he uses every day – music.  He plays music at the top volume of his Bose extra-special CD player that his daughter insisted he buy.  So I got him a CD.   Oh – and one of those cushioned “kitchen slice” rugs to put in front of the stove.  He didn’t say he needs one, but I think he does. 

Thanks to his grandson,  who got him a DVD player and installed it, I’ve got a head start on gift ideas for Christmas.  

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Too big for the block?

Here’s what I see on a morning walk:   Cars parked on the street bumper to bumper, with barely an inch between them.  Vehicles with their wheels up on the sidewalk where baby strollers and wheelchairs and assisted-walkers fear to roll.

Vehicles clog the small village where I live, parked along every winding lane, every mountain road, many of them parked askew so that this morning as I walk carefully among them, a driver approaches, weaving through the space that’s left, becoming a skilled participant in the getting-to-work marathon.  As more walkers and runners and kids with backpacks  join in on their way to school, it becomes a dodgem game.

How did one small town get so full of shiny metal? 

Well, here’s a cottage that’s been expanded with its garage “repurposed” and its driveway fenced off.  Four vehicles park out front.  Here’s new construction – a giant house going up where a cottage once lived.  It’s being built fence to fence with no yard, no garage and no driveway.  More vehicles join the lineup. 

As I wander, I wonder something else.  If this house is too big for the block, is it also too big for the times?  

I do remember how it got like this.  I participated.  The thinking was, I’ve worked hard and my home (and sometimes what I drive) are part of my very identity.  If I can pay for it, I’m entitled to it.

It’s going to take a whole lot of re-thinking to change that part of our American dream.  We’ll need to figure out a new personal definition of success, ways to find gratification in making better choices.  And we’re just now beginning to ask the tough questions:  Is this home/car necessary?  Is it right for the preservation of the larger community? 

The biggest personal hurdle is getting past what is our right and moving on to our responsibility.  The toughest question is,  just because we can, should we?

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Will power is so overrated.

When  I need to change something, I don’t go looking for some (as yet undiscovered)  storehouse of will power. That’s just wheel-spinning, time-wasting.  Most days I can’t even spell will power.  Instead, I ask myself, how badly do you want this?  I  have  to want to want to before I begin.

After years of trying to harness will power, I find I don’t stick to positive change just because  I should.   Pitiful – considering there’s so much room here for improvement.

I think about change and think about it, talk about it and talk about it, and still I know that until there is desire, no amount of will power will help.  I only accomplish change when the deep-down want creeps in and sticks around for a while.

I once quit smoking for a boyfriend.  That didn’t last.  Went to the gym to impress someone there with my firm body. Hah.  My toned muscles lasted about a minute after he left the class.  (Obviously this behavior was when I was very young and impressionable.) 

Then one day, years later, I really wanted to be a non-smoker, so I stopped.  It was harder without a cheering section, but I wanted to be a person who didn’t buy cigarettes, didn’t carry them around, didn’t bum them from other people.  And that worked.  I’m nicotine-free about twenty years and counting.

Now to the body image thing.  I am looking in the mirror and seeing a whole bunch of stuff that needs changing.  I’ve made changes before, but when the urge left, so did the positive results. This time I want change to last.  So I ask myself, are you really ready?  Do you really want to?  Some days, I don’t even want to want to. But I can feel it in the air – that day is getting closer – the day when I will do it. 

With a history of  both extremely NON-successful habit changes and a few major successful changes (quitting smoking) I know I won’t even try until there is a stirring of desire.  It’s desire and not will power that precedes action in my case. 

So here are my three steps.  Boy how I wish I could claim something more logical, more mature, more focused.  Nope.  That would be the definition of will power.  Instead, here’s what works for me.

Step One:  I have to want to want to.

Step Two:  Then I move to actually wanting  to.

Step Three:  Begin!

Or not.  The or not factor is always the variable.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Confessions of a magazine & catalog addict

I’m a third generation magazine and catalog addict.  My grandmother loved them.  My mother loved them.  And a fourth generation is now well represented by my daughter.

When I was a child, even before I could read, Mother saved all her magazines and catalogs for me.  I was fascinated by how she treated them like treasures.  Not one was thrown away until it had been read and read and re-read.

I thumbed through her McCall’s, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Time, Newsweek, Life and Look.  She had a separate shelf for the big fat catalogs of the time, including Sears and Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney and Alden wishbooks.  Those we kept forever, even after new ones arrived.  The magazines were eventually passed along to other families.

In later years she added subscriptions to Consumer Reports and lots of trade publications. As I grew away from her home and no longer shared all of her tastes in printed matter, still my reverence for those publications never diminished. Today I buy some magazines at the newsstand, subscribe to others, and am the recipient of still more from friends who pass theirs along. I enjoy them all. 

Some people complain about catalogs but I’ve never considered a mailbox full of catalogs an annoyance.  I welcome the ones that arrive unsolicited and then sign up for others, and pass them along too.  Next to my big blue reading chair right now there’s an eclectic stack.  One by one they’ll go into a box in the trunk of my car to make the trip to my daughter’s house.  She shares them with people she works with and they go round and round from there and end up who knows where.

I like the thought of this widening circle of readers.  When these publications fray and fall apart, as they eventually must, then all of us will have participated in a form of social interaction that some say is primitive, but I find satisfying. 

Sure I can order online without ever seeing a catalog in print, but the items seem different and somehow more appealing when I hold the pictures of the products in my hand and turn the pages back and forth.

As for ideas in newspapers and magazines, maybe it’s an illusion but it seems to me that I even think about things differently when I’m holding onto them in print. 

All this talk about newspapers dying  and magazines getting thinner and catalogs available only online has me worried.  I hope there’s a way to keep them coming.  They’re lifelong friends and I’d miss them awfully if they went away.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Waiting is too hard.

Jack wanted that bag of cookies. 

His mom said,

“Jack, I told you, we need to eat our breakfast first.”

 He wailed and I mean it was loud, using the full extent of his lung power,

“Noooooo I don’t wanna wait.  It’s too hard!”

 In that small cafe, it doesn’t take much wailing to fill the room.

Jack appeared to be four or five years old.  His mother looked at the few of us gathered in the cafe early one morning last week and shrugged apologetically. 

I stood at the counter, placing my coffee order.  A young man waiting near me said, 

“Poor little guy.”

I nodded and added,

“I agree with Jack. Waiting is too hard.”

The mother heard us and said,

“I shouldn’t have bought the cookies ’til we finished our eggs.” 

But at this little cafe/bakery, decked out to resemble a French bistro, when you place your order, you pay for everything at once, so Jack knew that cellophane bag of treats was waiting.  Who could blame him for focusing on the treat?  Focusing on the treat is about as universal an emotion as I can think of. 

All of a sudden it got quiet in there.  Jack had stopped yelling long enough to say to his mom, 

“I am serious!”

The man and I, waiting for our orders at the counter, both broke into laughter at that, which probably didn’t help. 

Jack’s mom looked at us and smiled and over his now-renewed protests, she  said,

“He’s having a bad day.”

The man said to me,

“I can relate.”

I  walked past Jack, carrying my coffee and newspaper, and patted him on the head. 

He hollered some more and then gave it up and ate his scrambled eggs and toast. 

As Jack and his mom left, he asked her,

“Can I have a hug?”

She picked him up, and with his long growing-boy legs dangling, she carried him out, as he clutched that bag of meringues tightly.  He gave me a smile as they left.

I’ve been thinking about Jack and his bad day ever since.   I envy him.  It would be nice if once in a while wailing out loud in public was considered acceptable behavior for adults.  But since it’s not, at least we still have cookies.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Sometimes a small rebellion is enough.

You know that feeling you get when someone cancels a plan and all of a sudden you have this unexpected clump of free time?  It’s exciting.  It’s a gift.  You were looking forward to the thing, but once it’s cancelled through no fault of yours,  you’re now looking forward  to not going.

It’s  a slippery slope from there to canceling something you planned for no reason except you don’t feel like it anymore.  At first it felt like a not-nice thing to do, but I have my rules:  

1) I consider whether anyone else will be hurt by my actions.

2) I never cancel at the last minute “just because.”  

3) I only say I’m sick if I’m sick.  

I’m too afraid of bad Karma to mess with that one.      

The first few times I used the “just because” clause, I felt a tiny guilt pang, but that was replaced quickly by a giddy feeling. Most of the time it’s like playing hooky with no consequences.  When it  feels like somebody else is running my life (no one else is – I have only myself to blame for my schedule) all it takes to restore balance is to cancel one thing that’s coming up.   

Still there’s that nagging feeling that a person ought to stick with what she committed to.

Which brings me to Netflix.  One day I returned a Netflix rental  WITHOUT WATCHING IT and when I tore off that skinny sticky strip on the return envelope, plopped the unwatched DVD  inside and closed it up, I felt a surge of whatever that feel-good hormone is.  It was  a small extravagance, but a huge emotional victory.

Here’s the shoot-myself-in-the-foot part:   More than once I’ve returned a selection, only to re-order the same title again later.  Evidently even my small rebellions have a price. 

Ó Anita Garner 2009