Requiem for a Blackberry

Of course I bought an iPhone. I have been waiting forever, from the time the rumors began to swirl about an Apple/Verizon partnership. For years I have carried both an iPod and a cell phone which is not exactly apocalyptic, but also not exactly convenient. There is only one dedicated spot for a rectangular electronic gizmo in my purse, in my car, and in my pocket. I tried Pandora on the phone instead of an iPod, but it’s not possible to get the precise play list required by certain moods using Pandora. I can get a decent Bad Day soundtrack on Pandora if I make a station based on The Smiths + The Magnetic Fields, but it’s not as perfectly tear-jerking as my own, private label collection. An iPhone, in addition to being preternaturally beautiful, lets me carry one device with my music, my calendar, and my favorite apps. As an added benefit I am able to use it to make and receive phone calls.

Monday morning, death came to the pink Blackberry Curve. Although our relationship had been strained for some time, I get ridiculously attached to objects that I use frequently, and I considered appropriate and sensitive farewells. My pink Razr, the first phone I loved, was given away when I upgraded. I was still half in love with its sleekness, and the ease with which it slid into the tightest spaces. The orange enV which I loved with all my heart died a terrible, watery death. It was my constant companion during my stint as Media Liaison for a Congressional campaign, its ring tone was Ethel Merman belting ” Anything I Can Do, You Can Do Better” and, along with dress-up clothes, heels and a laptop bag, it made me feel like I was a character on  “West Wing.” It should have had a proper burial, that phone, but instead of floating out on the Ganges beneath a blazing pile of flowers, it fell into the (clean) toilet and drowned. It breathed its last in a bowl of rice near a heat vent, and was replaced by the pink Blackberry.

The Blackberry was efficient, and cute, and I loved the aesthetics of the keyboard and the fact that it fit perfectly in my palm. It did not, however, work with my iTunes library. The screen was very small for my aging eyes, and I could never see a website the way it was meant to look. Reading comments on an Open Salon post required me to roll the ball endlessly to get to the bottom of the page, as many as 200 times for a popular piece. When I became eligible for an upgrade I waited, willing the rumors to be true, visiting the Verizon store to meet the Android phones and feeling attraction, admiration, but no coup de foudre. I had already felt that the first time I saw an iPhone, and there was no other phone for me.

So I pre-ordered an iPhone, not at 3:00AM, but pretty darned close. It arrived Monday in its Appliciously pristine white box, solid and with just the right kind of heft, ready to make my life complete. We are all synced, the two of us, although it would be nice if Comcast e-mail could actually be made to cooperate. My selected play lists are there, my calendar, my recipe file, my contacts, my Kindle, and everything else I would need to live on a desert island that had electricity. If I learned to fish. I love to touch it, to push the button and watch the icons jump into place like the June Taylor dancers. I am totally, totally in love.

The pink Blackberry, still in good shape except for some wear around the ball, has been consigned to the junk drawer in the kitchen. Tuesday morning its alarm went off at 7:00AM, a forlorn bell sounding from beneath a half-empty seed packet, an extension cord, and a partly melted birthday candle. By yesterday it was silent, its battery drained. I have no one to give it to, at the moment, and I can’t bear the idea of putting it in an envelope and sending it away for cash. It will stay in the drawer, maybe come out to live briefly as Backup Phone when my son goes somewhere where his Droid X might be at risk, or get donated to an organization providing phones to domestic violence victims. It might also remain in the drawer for years, being shoved aside in a frantic search for the last AA battery or a roll of masking tape. That seems like a bad end for a trusted companion, pushed aside like a first wife and left to die in a drawer beneath the microwave.

It’s just a thing, and not an heirloom brooch, a wedding ring or a dried lotus from Thailand. There are no cedar chests for old phones, no beribboned scrapbooks, no stark modern shadow boxes…they are just metal and plastic and memories. Goodnight, sweet phone. My iPhone is vibrating.

 

Abe, You Missed The Mark

“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

Abraham Lincoln

While my admiration of Lincoln as a President and a human being is abundant and sincere, I have hated this quote since the first time I read it. It often appears in the midst of some brightly-colored cartoon confection of illustration involving flowers, children on swings, and fat, puffy clouds. I dislike being motivated, cajoled, bucked up or otherwise manipulated into feeling something other than what I organically feel, and the notion that I could just snap my fingers and Be Happy makes me downright hostile.

There are, undoubtedly, folks out there who have the discipline to change their mood by “making their mind up.” I imagine some gigantic mental bed, and these able practitioners stripping the bed of the sad, tortured, dirty mental linen and replacing it with sheets fresh from the clothesline and redolent of spring air and sunshine. I envy them that, as I envy those who have the capacity to “zone out,” not so much making a concerted effort as developing an ability not to look at the bad stuff.

I not only look at it, I catalogue it after examining it with a magnifying glass, or maybe an electron microscope. I find myself digging in the way one’s tongue finds its way again and again into the fresh hole left by a lost tooth, then making myself stop, then digging again. I pick, I write long, illuminated manuscripts in my head about every possible facet of wrongness, and I get kind of lost in it until a switch is thrown by some unseen hand and it’s over. I cannot “change my mind,” and I can’t look the other way;  I’m riding every mixed metaphorical wave until it crashes to the shore.

Back to Mr. Lincoln. As you may know, his wife Mary Todd was considered “mentally unstable,” and towards the end of her life the combination of mental illness and grief caused her to attempt suicide and, eventually, to be institutionalized in a psychiatric facility. I often wonder, seriously, because I wonder about things like this, whether Abe really believed that Mary could just try harder and “get happy.” When he uttered his famous words of bonhomminous buck-uppery, what did she think about them? Was he blowing smoke (as politicians have been known to do), or maybe taking a frustrated, public jab at a wife who was kind of a pain in the ass? Was he, himself, one of those people who has the capacity to change his mental linen, or was he simply able to distract himself with other things until the pain passed? Maybe the statement was made early in their marriage, before he fully realized the extent of her problems.

And what did Mary Todd think, bedeviled, intense and moody, unable to change her mental state by sheer force of will? I think of her suffering, smothering in her own despair, without so much as an iPod full of Happy Mixes, MTV reality shows or a Hershey bar and a stack of fashion magazines to help her through the worst times. She probably didn’t even have the luxury of confiding in friends.

I will probably always think Lincoln was a great president; that Civil War business was tough, and within the parameters of his time, he acquitted himself honorably. I grew up looking at a portrait of him every night during dinner, and I always thought he looked sad; maybe that’s why I have so much trouble with that ridiculous quote and the notion of him giving in to some Pollyanna folksiness that has irked me for forty years. In the Slough of Despond, where I wallow from time to time as did Mary Todd and countless others, there is not much room for shiny platitudes. We are, I think, wired differently, and it just takes as long as it takes. I can’t fault Abe for trying, but he was wrong. Dead wrong.

Pasties, And No I don’t Mean That Kind

Although I grew up in Michigan, I was not one of those people who went Up North at every opportunity; I spent my summers in Maine or in Europe, and never crossed the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula until I was 30. I knew about pasties, though, the hearty meat-filled pockets that are the State Flower of Michigan. Rudy, a friend of my mother’s who grew up in a logging camp in the Upper Peninsula, made them annually with his sister, using the family recipe. At their best theyu are a collation of tender beef, potatoes, rutabagas, and onions wrapped in a pastry crust – not unlike empanadas, or the pierogen my grandmother and mother made from leftover brisket. It is likely that pasties originated in Cornwall, and were made so that miners had a portable lunch to carry into the mines; they are now found in England, and in parts of Minnesota as well as Up North Michigan.

Rudy’s version was sublime, but the closer one gets to the Upper Peninsula, the more likely it is that one will be served a pasty that seems to have been made by a cook who chewed up the contents, spit them into a circle of dough, and baked them. The meat is tough, the crust is tough, and it is hard to imagine any self-respecting Cornish immigrant carrying such a thing willingly to work. There is also an ongoing and vigorous controversy about condiments; apparently it is customary to serve them with gravy in parts of England, but no self-respecting Yooper (a person from the “U.P.”) would use anything but catsup. Gravy, I am given to understand, indicates that one’s pasties are dry and require the unctuous camouflage of a blanket of slime.

At their best, pasties are worth their considerable weight in gold. Theyare carried down from Up North in waxed paper and in bags from reputable pasty purveyors and doled out to the fortunate recipients. They are made in local kitchens as a form of love made visible in a half-moon shape. When I discovered that a colleague, a real Yooper Person from Escanaba had a treasured family pasty recipe and was willing to share it and his time, I boldly went where no sane cook would go – from never having made a pasty in my life to producing more than 60 of them in one day for my weekly Wednesday Night Live dinner service. Even Mrs. M., a veteran Pasteur (Pasterina?) had never made more than 25, and that was the night a local restaurant burned and she and the other Fire Belles produced pasties to feed the firefighters.

There were goofs along the way; accustomed to making regular pie crust for fruit pies, I didn’t at first understand that it was necessary to violate all known rules for “flaky” crust by cutting way back on shortening and adding more water. A traditional piecrust would never withstand the handling necessary to make a pasty, and would fall apart if anyone attempted to eat one out of hand, as folks often do. I was skeptical about the safety and ick-factor of cooking raw meat inside the pastry crust, and about the notion that it was important to use really fatty meat so that the fat would enrich and effectively “shorten” the crust, but the meat cooked beautifully, and the crust straddled the line between durable and tender. I also cut my thumb open peeling and dicing what seemed like 500 potatoes, and required rescue in the form of a bandager and my husband who came in to help me make up the time I had lost to blood and gauze, but that probably won’t happen to you.

I am forever indebted to Mrs. M., my colleague’s mother, for sharing her recipe, right down to the “good coffee mug of potatoes,” and for her wise counsel by cell phone when we were a little unsure about time and temperature. The pasties were magnificent, the crowd was thrilled, and nary a speck of gravy was needed. This is the basic recipe we used, which allows variations. Mrs. M. adds carrots, which gave the pasties a slight hit of sweetness. She doesn’t use rutabagas, which are traditional, but her son does, and I did, and I thought they were wonderful. If you don’t like them, can’t find them, or can’t deal with peeling and cutting them (which, honestly, is a bitch) you may omit them and bump up the quantity of other filling ingredients. DO buy the fatties ground beef you can find; it is counterintuitive in these days of healthy cooking, but pasties are not health food, they are filling, hearty sustenance from places where people work hard, the sun doesn’t shine for days, and the world is made infinitely better by knowing that in some pocket or bag there is a half moon of pastry rolled and filled with love.

 

Pasties

 

Serves 3 lumberjacks, 6 regular people, or any combination thereof

Prep Time: 2.0 hours

Cooking Time: 1 Hour and 15 minutes

 

 

For the Dough:

1. 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
2. 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3. 1 cup shortening
4. 1 cup cold water

 

For the Filling:

 

1. 1 pound Ground Chuck, or the fattiest ground beef you can find (ask your butcher)
2. 2 large baking potatoes, peeled and diced
3. 1/4 large rutabaga, peeled, diced and finely diced
4. 1 large or 2 small onions, diced
5. 1 carrot, grated
6. Salt and Pepper to taste (I like lots of pepper)

 

Directions:

1. Make dough by mixing flour, shortening and salt with fingers until the mixture resembles coarse sand. Add water until the dough will easily hold together in a ball and is not crumbly. It should not crumble. Wrap the ball of dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
2. Preheat oven to 425
3. While the oven heats, mix meat, potatoes, rutabagas, onions, and carrots in a bowl, preferably with your (clean) hands. Add salt and pepper, cover mixture and refrigerate so that the flavors can mix. According to Mrs. M., this step is essential.
4. Divide dough into three parts. One at a time, roll the sections into circles about ¼ inch thick on a lightly floured surface.
5. Imagine the circle cit in half, and place a third of the filling mixture into the center of one half, leaving at least half an inch of dough around the filling.
6. Pull the “empty” half of the dough over the filling to make a half moon, pinch the edges to seal them, and slash the top to allow steam to escape. I like to make cute designs, but it isn’t necessary.
7. When all three pasties are made (and they will be LARGE), place on parchment paper on a baking sheet and bake at 425 for 15 minutes.
8. Reduce temperature to 350 and bake for an hour. You can test for doneness by poking a fork into one of your ventilation holes; if the rutabagas and potatoes yield easily to the tines, you’re ready to eat.
9. Serve whole or in halves, with catsup available.

 

These are great with coleslaw, and also with beer. Drinking wine with pasties is against the law in Michigan.

 

Ann Nichols, Repository of Useless Information

This morning I was trying to explain to my husband how difficult I found it to get over the giant ice ridge plowed into the end of our driveway. “It’s like driving over a railroad tie” I explained. “No, a track.” Then my brain did that thing that it does. “Like if the tie was a bow-tie, like Sherman’s soldiers made on their march to the sea.” He looked at me uncertainly, accustomed to living with The Repository of Useless Knowledge, but always vigilant for signs that I have crossed over into full-blown psychosis.

I remember everything, and as a voracious reader for 48 years I have picked up a catalogue of factoids that often give me the air of a moderately idiotic savant. I know all about Eddie Fischer, Liz Taylor and Debbie Reynolds, the uses of the Coca leave in Peru, Japanese Zeroes, Hadrian’s Wall, Broadway song lyrics, ballet scores and the deaths of everyone from Aristotle to Brittany Murphy. I watch Jeopardy and our local high school Quiz Bowl telecasts with tense avidity, calling out the answers I know, mumbling to myself after I get one wrong, and tuning out all living persons in my immediate orbit.

I grew up in a family of know-it-alls; a father with three degrees from Harvard, a mother who was a Quiz Kid, and a brother who competed in the same Quiz Bowl league that I watch to this day. Things moved fast, and it was essential to know stuff or be left in the dust. In that crowd, my family of origin, I am the weakest link, the one who knows more about celebrities and pop music than about Euclidean Geometry or Aeschylus. I am the flake.

It has been suggested many times that I should try out for Jeopardy, and while that massages my ego, there are several reasons that I will never follow through. First and foremost, I know that I would never be assertive enough to “ring in” quickly. I would think I knew the answer, doubt that I knew the answer, worry about whether I knew the answer, and decide that I reallydid know the answer around the time that Todd, a Computer Programmer from Des Moines answered the question and watched his score increase by $1,000.00.  I am also utterly incapable of doing that math thing they do that involves figuring out how to wager enough that if someone else bet all their money and got it right, I would still win by a dollar. I just don’t get it.

Which brings me to the last thing standing between me and recognition of my status as Greatest Living Repository of Useless Knowledge. As some kind of cosmic counterbalance to the things I do know, there are areas in which I am as blank as a five-year-old raised in a cave on an island in the Pacific. I know nothing about sports, except that there are some. I know nothing about geography, cannot identify the states on a map, and do not know the capital of anything. I am, as I have mentioned, innumerate, and also have a hole where my knowledge of science should be. I can identify a Shakespearian tragedy at twenty paces based on the name of a minor character, but I don’t know an Au from a Fe.

So it’s not happening, the Jeopardy thing; I’ll just sit on my couch like Rain Man, calling out answers and ignoring ringing phones and burning soup as my family indulges me with Community Mental Health on the speed dial. It’s all for me, this vast body of useless data, but in the most secret reaches of my mind I cherish the possibility that I will some day be in a situation in which I will save the day, the country or the planet because I can name the only venomous snakes living in North America. Until then, ask me anything…almost.

Snow for God’s Sakes

The forecast in these parts is for a blizzard commencing some time tonight. The number of inches varies, but suffice it to say that if this weather pattern (which makes it sound much prettier than it actually is) continues, we will be buried by this time tomorrow under about a foot of snow.

The nearest grocery store is out of bread, events are being pre-cancelled, and I have only this morning received an e-mail from Sears reminding me that this might be a wise time to invest in a snow blower. I do not need a snow blower because I live on an urban lot and have the services of a 14-year-old boy who owes me big time. I am not even remotely panicked, although I worry about people who live in homeless camps, have been unable to pay their heating bills, or require medical intervention like dialysis. I feel terrible for stranded travelers, and families in which the children get most of their calories from free breakfast and lunch programs at school. I worry a lot about what they eat when school is cancelled because of snow.

Mainly, I am baffled by this hype. I live in Michigan, a state whose slogan is “Water, Winter Wonderland.” This is the “Winter” part. Life here from October to some time in March is basically a form of the Winter X Games in which we are not sponsored, and my hair is never as pretty as Shaun White’s. We have down coats, warm boots with serious tread, Carmex and tissue in every pocket, and both “dress” and “work” gloves. We own shovels, bags of Ice Melt, and carry bags of kitty litter and spare blankets in the back of our cars. We know from tire chains, and bet our lives on knowing how to steer into a skid at an icy intersection. Collectively, we shake our heads at the out-of-state students who race past us on un-salted roads, throwing up an obfuscating wake of white stuff onto our windshields, or drive around in un-scraped cars peeking through a tiny, eye-level hole in the opaque ice blanketing their SUVs.  We are skiing, sledding, ice-fishing, curling, skating people, a race of red-faced carb loaders who complain bitterly about winter from the moment it begins, but who secretly love the challenges and the supernatural sight of fresh snow glittering under the street lights during the last dog walk of the night.

This is life here, in the winter, and has been for all of my considerable life. It always seems odd to me that storms that have occurred annually since “Detroit” was pronounced correctly become big news stories for days. There is, for example, real news coming out of Egypt at the moment, but no one would know that if they watched our local stations. We are told every ten minutes about the impending blizzard as if we lived in Maui and our Wednesday morning surfing might be cancelled. Last week we were barraged with news of a “cold snap” which meant that instead of a high of 30, we might only see 10. If we lived on the Beltway, or in Tennessee, dropping temperatures and snow would be news. We do not, it is not, and no grave-faced suit with a weather map is going to inspire me to make a frenzied run to buy bread and milk. The roads will be cleared in a matter of hours, they always are, and if not we will eat everything in the house and then experiment with various condiments mixed with bowls of snow. It will be an adventure.

If I may climb onto my icy soapbox, let me pose this question: what if the energy we throw into Snowpocalypse Hysteria was diverted into making winter storms easier for those who are truly at risk? What if we could buy some nourishing, ready-to-eat food for families with hungry children, donate blankets and warm clothes to a shelter, or make an on-the-spot-while-we’re-thinking-about-blizzards donation to a shelter serving the homeless population, or a charity helping folks to pay their oil and gas bills? Very close to our well-prepared households there are families of refugees from tropical climates who need warm clothes, boots, coats, hats, and probably a starter supply of Carmex and tissue. They are now part of this community, and we all have to be prepared.

It’s going to be winter here every year, and we will always have snow days, cancellations, and hazardously low temperatures. It’s time to pull on our down coats and hats with ear flaps, slather on a layer of Bag Balm and use our hearty Michigan constitutions to make sure that what is really a minor and expected inconvenience is not a real “snowpocalypse” for someone else. That would be news.