Wake up and smell the bacon

I believe ice cream has magical properties—and when scooped into a pretty glass dish in big round spoonfuls and topped with homemade caramel sauce and savoured ever so slowly—moves me to write.

Despite the fact that my core temperature has plummeted from eating more than my share of vanilla—and that I can’t feel the tips of my fingers on the keyboard due to the frozen dairy phenomenon—I do believe I am inspired.

Of course, as Murphy’s Law would have it, my old cat “Millie” in calculating a jump into my lap while I sat at my desk, missed, and landed on the keyboard, and with one flick of a paw erased all the work I had done in the past half hour for this column.

I was just about to write about bacon, because as I now understand it—as of Monday, October 26, 2015, at approximately 7 a.m. as the world sat down to breakfast (or breakfast for supper)—we found out bacon is bad for us. Really? Who knew?

When was bacon ever good for us? Hot dog wieners and lunchmeat made the news today, too. Not good for us. Seriously?

We all know what hot dogs are made of. If you do not, look it up. And before October 26th, who out there believed bacon was good for you after what was left in the frying pan congealed into a solid off-white paste?

But bacon tastes good. So does ice cream. The occasional hot dog isn’t so bad either, especially when cooked on a stick over a bonfire. Not much compares actually.

Before October 26^th if I “Googled” bacon I’m pretty sure it would have garnered something other than “bacon cancer” as the first hit, but we’ll never know that now. Bacon’s reputation has been slaughtered.

Pig farmers are royally aflame (my alternate clean description for “ticked off”) at the news that pigs, “the other white meat,” are suddenly and abruptly associated with cancer. 

Beef farmers, are red in the face too, over claims of “hot dog” “lunchmeat” and “cancer” all being used in the same sentence.

I love bacon. I don’t eat it often but when I do, I choose the best I can afford and I enjoy it. Hot dogs sometimes make my list too, and I would still rather eat bacon than smoke one cigarette.

I have two daughters who smoke and have for years. I wish they’d quit. 

They will roll their eyes when they read this because they are well acquainted with my stance on cigarette smoking. 

I want them to live to be healthy little old ladies in rocking chairs watching their great grandchildren play. Chances are good they won’t get the chance if they don’t make good choices with their bad habits. Sorry girls.  

  

I wish for the sake of all our children—who inhale far more nicotine into those lovely fresh young lungs than they will ever eat in bacon and hot dogs—that the health organization would flood the media with enough of THAT travesty in one day’s fell swoop to crash the tobacco industry to the ground for good.

End of story.

Life is a pot of soup

I was sitting at the kitchen table tonight, one hand holding up my head while the other made circles with a spoon in my homemade turkey vegetable soup.

I make a mean turkey vegetable soup. It’s a powerful medicinal bastion that can kill a virus just by its aroma. In fact I believe my turkey vegetable soup is the one and only cure for the common cold.

I sat there stirring the bright colored vegetables and big chunks of turkey meat in a golden-hued broth, steam rising to meet my nose. I watched everything in the bowl take on a speed of its own after I lifted out my spoon.

I was feeling sorry for myself—a self-depreciating talent I am a pro at when I want to be. I was convinced that on the cusp of my 55^th birthday I hadn’t accomplished anything worth celebrating, except for the fact that I was very good at running the two-week marathon from paycheck to pay check. 

Just call me “Stretch Armstrong-Caldwell.”

And I kept stirring that turkey vegetable soup.

“Muffin,” the kitten, who sat like a statue at my feet waiting for a piece of turkey to drop off my spoon, maintained the patience of “Job,”  as motionless as a cat statue in ancient Egypt. She knows it is worth the wait.

Another house companion was outside doing what a grown cat does best—catching unsuspecting birds and mice.

Earlier this evening while working in the barn I followed a trail of  down and feathers to find a robin who won’t be making the fall migration this year, poor fellow. And over there under the “My Barn My Rules” sign is another has-been winged thing, a sparrow. The survival of the fittest hunts here. His name is “Louie.”

I keep stirring my turkey vegetable soup, and my thinking—a revolving door I often lose myself in—takes me places as I try to find good feelings about being 55 and at this juncture in my adventurous life.

The band ‘Five for Fighting’ is singing “100 years” in the background. I flat stare the soup, the kitten, and the falling leaves outside the kitchen window.

It’s difficult not to compare myself to people around me who have the things I don’t have that I wish I did—yet most of those things, my late grandmother would have me know in her spirit whisper, fall darkly under #10 on the big list. Not good.

Then the turkey vegetable soup that I have been staring into for 30 minutes begins to talk to me. Funny enough, I listen to its story.  

“Once upon a time, there was a turkey carcass, some broth, a few spices, a carrot, two onions, some fresh peas, and a scoop or two of elbow macaroni sitting around the table, pointing fingers at themselves for all the things they thought they couldn’t do.

The soup pot said, “Jump in,” and so they did, and something amazing happened. Together they became an amazing soup.

Herein was my lesson.

There is more success in my life and in me than I give myself credit for.

I am a powerful pot of soup.

(One thousand bucks in my bank account would be nice though.)

Now, where did I put that?

20 pieces of underwear, all my socks—each divorced from its mate, multiple pairs of pantyhose of tortuous sizes, and all the trinket junk that covered the bottom of my panties drawer were flung around my bedroom such that a tornado couldn’t have left a bigger mess than I did in about 10 seconds.

I was searching the last bastion of hope for a piece of stainless steel hardware that I needed for the transport of my sailboat mast in the “down” position when trailering ‘Scout” home for the winter months.

I thought I was so smart when I removed the cradle from the bow pulpit last spring and carried the heavy lunker to the trunk of my car, sure to know where I’d store it at home over the summer.

I’d looked everywhere for the missing piece. I must have gone through 30 boxes in the garage, 10 in the shed, and another dozen in the barn hayloft, before searching the basement, porch, kitchen, and finally, my underwear drawer.

The mast hardware is just one in a long list of things I have misplaced over the years. I come from organized stock and I loath to think that I have a list of misplaced things that is longer than my family tree.

The bag of winter clothes is on that list, along with my electric blanket, and the four ft high Christmas tree that I put away two years ago in the basement.

I’ve misplaced my carving tools, guitar music, all the spare light bulbs, 4 D-cell batteries I bought last week for the one flashlight that needs them, and 200 ft of LED lights that I use every year on the tree line of my driveway.

(But I know where the “Doritos Cool Ranch” potato chips are--and the dip—my bag of chocolates and a bottle of red wine.)

A recent update to my laptop required a restart and password verification before I could reap the “El Capitan” benefits. I’d written the secret letters on a piece of paper and put it away a year ago, in case I forgot what it was. And now where it was.

Flat stare.

Misplaced awareness—been there, done that one too. I was engrossed in a television program with my daughter while my grandson sat at our feet, presumably absorbed in the show the grownups were watching. Not so.

There he was quietly sitting with us jamming pieces of Kleenex up his nose until he packed his nostrils so tight that when he sneezed it snowed gobs of white tissue everywhere.

I have revisited the same locations umpteen times in the last week still searching for the mast cradle, hoping I overlooked the shiny hunk of metal and bolts the last time around. 

On the positive side—because there always is one—I found an old lantern I was looking for, and a twenty dollar bill stuffed inside an old running shoe—but not before moving a hair ball—or what I thought was a hairball—out of the way and realizing as I used my bare hand, that it was the thrown up remains of a mouse that my cat had gifted to my shoe.

Misplaced the shoe too. Not sure where it landed when I threw it but I’m not going looking for it.