Woodlea

Here's to nostalgia..Today, en route to my mom's cardiologist appointment, we stopped for lunch at a little cafe in Bel Air. We've been there many times before, but this time, I took a seat looking out toward the rest of the shopping center, and saw...Woodlea Bakery. Now, if you grew up in Gardenville --or anywhere near Belair Road--in Baltimore, or went to St. Anthony of Padua School, you'd know the Woodlea Bakery. That was where you went after church on Sunday to buy a bag of doughnuts, or rolls to have with breakfast, or a cheesecake..or just about any baked goods that your mom didn't make. Forget this business of buying birthday cakes at the supermarket. Back then, it came from Woodlea's.

Beyond that, I went to school with one of the Hergenroeders--the family who owned the bakery. Almost everybody could say that because there were lots of Hergenroeders, and they lived in an apartment above the bakery. This was all rather exotic for me, as almost everyone I knew lived in a house with a yard and a sidewalk; certainly not above a shop.

But back to the important stuff. Seeing the sign, I asked my mom (who is not very dependable for information nowadays) if that was the same as the Woodlea Bakery I knew . When she claimed ignorance, I said I would just stop there after lunch if there was time and ask. Which I did, although it was unnecessary. When I stepped through the door and looked at the glass cases inside, I knew.

There were the doughnuts, the cakes, the lemon bars, the cookies...all the things I remembered and hadn't seen in forty years. I lapsed back into bakery nirvana, which generally means that I buy more than anyone could possibly eat while fresh. Cheesecake unlike the current two-inch-thick commercial versions with fruit toppings.. Woodlea's take has always had a bread-like crust, a layer of filling, and comes sprinkled with cinnamon. Doughnuts, marshmallow doughnuts. They were always my favorite--almost pure sugar. Honey-dips--now known as plain glazed doughnuts. Fat in its larval form. Bread and rolls and cakes of all sorts, looking just as they did when I could barely see into the glass cases.

I exercised great self-control. The visual was enough, really. I did get a bag of doughnuts for old times' sake, however. Two of the half-dozen were marshmallow.

Decisions, Decisions

I make a lot of decisions--of varying degrees of importance. It requires a certain amount of energy to decide how to order my day, to line up my agenda, to keep track of where I'm supposed to be and when. I have to decide every day what's for dinner and how long it will take to prepare, and whether I have all the ingredients necessary to do so. Not momentous fare, I'll grant you, but coupled with the bigger life decisions we all make every day, every week, every year, it's enough. And that's my problem: decisions.

What good is a blog if you can't use it to exercise your pet peeves? Right. I went shopping today for staples--you know? Those things that are far cheaper at a big box store than at your local supermarket; things you don't buy that often, but have to have on hand: paper towels, toilet paper, soap, laundry detergent...that sort of stuff. Perhaps you see my gripe coming...

I am tired of spending 10-15 minutes in the paper goods aisle, trying to calculate the best deal in paper towels and/or toilet paper. It is impossible. I am not even a math-phobe. I actually like math, and enjoy challenging myself on mental calculations of price per ounce or cost per sheet. Weird, I know--and supermarkets have taken a lot of the fun out of it by doing the math for you and recording the unit price. However, even these unit price stickers fail utterly when it comes to toilet paper. No two packages are alike, and therefore, you can't compare them. Ultra-soft, Ultra-Strong, Huge rolls, Mega rolls, Single rolls, Double rolls, Triple rolls: 8 rolls equivalent to 16 rolls, 5 rolls equivalent to 15 rolls. Or so they say. Then when you factor in the fact that at least one of the packages is on sale, and the unit price stickers are applied randomly to shelves with no regard for what is actually ON the shelf--you have a recipe for total mathematical meltdown, right there in the Target aisle. It isn't pretty.

Paper towels are no better. Single strength, double-strength, select-a-size, single rolls, double rolls, quilted vs. non-quilted, printed vs. white, recycled vs. regular. And then, the various brands vs. the generic models. There is no hope of figuring out the best buy in this case.

I'd like to say that these are the only situations that baffle me, but I am overwhelmed by choices in the supermarket as often as in the Target aisle. It's not even the esoteric items that bother me: it's the everyday stuff. Bread. Milk. Orange juice. Canned tomatoes. WATER!!! All in infinite variety. Literally. I have seriously considered mapping out the dairy case: Fat-free, skim, reduced fat, low fat, whole, soy...and that's before you even think about the size of the container. Orange juice? It should just be orange juice, but no. We have to decide the level of pulp we want and what additives we want--calcium, perhaps? extra vitamin D? Bread comes in wheat, honey wheat, white, white whole wheat, not to mention the rye and pumpernickle options. And what ever happened to canned tomatoes? Now we have whole, diced, diced with onion, petite diced, Mexican style, Italian style, packed in juice, large, small, Roma, with chiles or without. Even water, for heaven's sake, comes with or without flavors, vitamins, or carbonation, with a pop-up or screw-down top, and from a variety of springs, mountain streams or filters.

I am all in favor of open markets and competition. I know it's good for business to build better mousetraps and to seek out and cater to new markets. But when carried to this extreme, product proliferation is driving me back to the time when I bought solely by brand name, and usually the brand name that I saw in my mother's pantry. Vermont Maid syrup, McCormick's teabags, Minute Maid orange juice, Quaker Oats. Distrustful of the myriad of products, I retreat toward the tried-and-true basic versions of the familiar. There's a reason I only buy Pepperidge Farm white sandwich bread. It's one less conscious decision I have to make.

Winter Doldrums

Can I blame the weather for the fact that I've not posted anything since....well, since longer ago than I can remember quickly? There comes a time in the year when everything is old and tired and boring--including me. January seems to be that time for me: the post-Christmas letdown, the re-packing of all the stuff that comes out for the holidays, the search for the everyday stuff that I had to put away...After a while, you get the feeling no one would notice anyway if you left a few things out all year. (Come to think of it, the Nativity set that I was keeping out till after Epiphany is still on the shelf for Lent. Yikes!)

Anyway, three weeks in San Diego cured at least a portion of my January ennui--or at least pushed it farther back in my mind. It's now March, which is only a hop, skip and a jump till spring.

Malaise

You can tell it's winter. My brain has gone into post-holiday hibernation, and I find it hard to dredge up enthusiasm for writing about anything this week. The weather is frigid, our hot water heater (for the third time this fall/winter season) is on the fritz, snow seems to be perpetually in the forecast, if not on the ground, and I am tired of every recipe in my files, and am patently unwilling to move along in the organizational plan I once had for: (name one or include all) the house, my writing, losing weight, beginning an exercise program...even, god help me, for reading a book or two.

Nothing is right. Everything requires too much effort. No one is doing their job (at least in my book), and I am suffering fools on a day-to-day basis--and NOT gladly, I might add. I am bored--and boring, incapable of creative thought or action. I feel like my refrigerator--full of dribs and drabs of wilted old vegetables and unappetizing plastic tubs of leftovers. I feel like my garden--frost-bitten and languishing under gray clouds and dead trees. I am television without sweeps week, a schedule of perpetual reruns. I am my computer without Wi-Fi, disconnected and drifting. I am Einstein without an idea, a musician without a melody, a Broadway play without an audience, an endless visit with my mother.

I am always one tick off the mark, one ingredient short in every recipe, one errand unaccomplished, one forgotten item at the grocery store. I've written too few notes, failed to meet deadlines, forgot to call, neglected to vacuum, started too late or left too early. I am perpetually disappointed by everyone and everything, and am crabby and cranky and put-upon. I am annoyed by everything and pleased by far too little. I should smile more.

And yet. The days are getting infinitesimally longer. I have good friends who have (apparently) been overlooking my abysmal moods. We are planning a long visit to sunny San Diego. And if I put on my Pollyanna hat, I can see that I have more pros than cons in my life. January will soon be gone. As will February. March will give way to April, and spring may yet reappear. I. Can't. Wait.

Birthdays

Today is my birthday. Today I am celebrating my existence on this planet, and the fact that I have managed to hang on for 62 years. If statistics don't lie, I should be entitled to another 16 or more years, if I take care of myself.

Compare that to our animal friends and I'm doing pretty good.

• I have already outlived the average donkey (and the scary crocodile) by 15 years.
• I am over 4 times the age that could be expected by the most optimistic chicken.
• The Queen bee, waited on hand and foot, only lasts 5 years at best, and her poor worker bees are doomed to a year, max.
• The pigeons that decorate my car survive only a third as long as I have (they have that coming)
• The ox (which I can be stubborn as) isn't so stubborn after all in the living department. Twenty years.
• The guinea pigs, dogs and cats and horses I've cleaned up after over the years (how's that for a prepositional construction, folks?) can't keep up with me. I will outlive them all--this a reminder to Jake, who woke me up this morning at 5 AM: I will prevail.
• And, to the squirrels that dig up my carefully planted daffodil bulbs: DIE! I can wait you out.

Of course, the box turtle has me beat: 123 years, which makes me wonder why we endanger life and limb and risk disastrous pileups to save them as they creep across the road in front of our cars. Squirrels we slaughter with abandon, apparently, but not those decrepit turtles.

All this aside, I am grateful beyond measure for every year I've had, or can expect to have. I am grateful for the family and friends who make these 62 years seem like the lifespan of a gnat. I am the luckiest person I know, thanks to all of you.

Oh, Lord, it's coming!

Christmas, that is. I really love Christmas. It's the getting ready that drives me round the bend. I'm not a great gift-buyer, so that cloud of anxiety starts hovering around this time. I also start thinking about Christmas cards and when I should start sending them. I remember a cousin of my mother's--Arminda, her name was-- who dutifully mailed out her Christmas greetings before Thanksgiving. I suspect she was either not quite right, or else, phenomenally organized (which implies the former state anyway.) In any case, I haven't bought mine yet--but I am sending out change of address cards, if only to spare the inhabitants of our old house the pile of Christmas cards that might go astray. They are on their own as far as catalogs go..and they will see a lot of them, I'm sure.

For some reason, I am also the editor of our church's Advent devotional booklet--allowing me the privilege of badgering people for contributions (literary, not monetary) and fiddling around with cover design (I frittered away the greater part of today on that), not to mention writing a self-assigned poem for the book. Done today! At least the first draft. And not a moment too soon, as I need to xerox the cover, print the assorted pages, collate and assemble--all before November 21. Gack.

To look forward to: cookies, figuring out how to decorate this new house, deciding whether or not to do a party of some sort, getting a tree (and maybe a second one for the front window)..the Christmas Readings at church (a delight that I never took advantage of until about three years ago!), the Scottish Walk, which I love...and so many more 'joys of the season'...

Anyway...attached is this year's poem in rough form which may or may not change, depending on the time available for further tinkering:

Perspectives

There’s a baby in our house this Christmas

and that makes all the difference--

A child’s eyes, unjaded by the past,

eyes that see a simpler world,

devoid of disappointment

and grim visions of the future.

Put a baby in our hearts this Christmas.

Give us babies’ eyes

to see as we ought to see—

through the Christmas-colored lenses

of belief and hope and love

that only the child in us can wear.

Make us children again this Christmas.

Tell us a story-- the simplest of stories:

that God keeps His promises,

through all the ages;

and, just to remind us,

He sends us a baby:

a baby at Christmas-time—

our new beginning.

--Mary McElveen--

Christmas 2010

Requiems

Autumn has not been kind this year. For two weeks running, we will have attended memorial services for friends stricken by cancer, and heard of and visited friends in hospitals and rehab centers. Is there an imaginary line somewhere-- like the International Date Line-- that marks the border between reasonable good health and steady decline? If so, give me the coordinates so I can steer my boat around it.

All of a sudden, all those admonitions to eat right and exercise and monitor my health sound less like ignorable nagging, and more like sensible precautions. My casual presumption that I will always be able to continue my current laissez-faire attitude toward what I do and how I do it is now subject to attack. Gone are the days of last-minute anything--everything takes longer, requires more effort, and leaves me more tired than it should. And then, there are those losses that remind me every day that life does not go on forever; that, impossible as it seems right now, I have a finite stretch of time and am definitely on the downhill side of the mountain.

I certainly plan on a few more decades, but suddenly, I am realizing that that's nowhere near a guarantee. So. It's time to submit my poems, to write that novel, to finish all those projects that languish upstairs, and maybe, just maybe, say a few 'thank yous' along the way.