Politics

It's hard to avoid these days, politics, that is.  It was suggested in the media, and the media is always right, right?, to avoid the political conversations at the Thanksgiving family gathering.  We did, for the most part, avoid that conversation but it did creep in a bit.  Fortunately it was quite civil, perhaps because it was rather one-sided.  In fact, it was suggested that in a world of division and some hostility that our house was a safe zone.  One could say what they wanted without arguing and fighting.

You may have guessed that the conversation was not in support of our president-elect.  If you guessed that corrected you can probably also presume that we receive emails with similar leanings, as we did this morning.  Now it would be wonderful to fight everything that our president-elect has suggested as a part of his plans for governing our country.  This may be where we're making mistakes, regardless of who you voted for or what your perference for governing this country may be.  It's what the Congress has done for the past eight years, block everything that the president proposes, and that didn't get the country anywhere except frustration and our current political atmosphere.

Let's assume that everything we propose is not perfect and that everything the other side proposes is totally wrong, because in the real world that's probably true.  So when someone suggests that we should block everything the president-elect proposes, perhaps we should step back a step and see what it is that we are blocking and consider a compromise.  Perhaps all of us should consider what is best for our nation as a society and work with each other in that direction.

I would also think that we could work together trying to understand each other and continue in our small ways at home to care for and support each other and in particular those in greatest need and those feeling marginalized.

One might hope that the words politics and polite would have some common grounds, such as politics is a process of being polite in community decision making.  That's not true.  Politics has a Greek origin meaning "affairs of the state," while polite has Latin roots for being "refined, organized."  Perhaps by common use we can make politics polite.

Bread, Pies and Cookies

Days don't get much better than ones like today; we're preparing food, lots of it, with some variety, for dear ones both friends and family, young and not-as-young.  The day is special as we go beyond the routine making tasty foods that are more seasonal and special.  The day started long before today with planning, making lists, gathering supplies and doing preliminary tasks.  Last evening I baked the traditional and sought after Gramma cookies.  While Gail is a grandmother and the cookies could be named after her, if she actually did the baking, or they could be named after my mother who was a grandmother and did bake these cookies later in life, but actually the name was coined when I was a youngster and my grandmother Marie [Saxowsky] baked them.  She probably did them more than just at Christmas but I remember them particularly at Christmas.  This batch turned out really well; some of the best I've ever done, lightly brown on the bottom as well as the top, plump and soft but didn't sag from being under-baked.

So today started by running hot water over the metal mixer bowl so it would be warm when I put water, yeast and honey in it to proof.  Then sift the powdered sugar and cocoa together for frosting the cookies.  Actually Gramma cookies are pepper nuts or as they were called in German, Pfeffernuss.  As I was putting some ingredients back into the cupboards I wondered what ingredients my grandmother had to work with back in her day, especially when she was young.  Thinking first about chocolate chip cookies, when were chocolate chips first available.  The answer is that the first chocolate chip (Toll House cookies named after the Toll House Inn where they were first made) cookies were made with chopped up Nestle's chocolate bars in the mid 1930's.  The "chip" was made starting in 1941.

The ingredients in Gramma cookies were all available throughout her life; flour, lard, coffee, eggs, spices, sugar, molasses, honey, cocoa, powdered sugar, vanilla.  She probably made chocolate chip cookies after the word about their goodness got around.

Gramma made her frosting thin enough to dip the entire cookie in the frosting, dip them out with her hand and place them on wax paper.  I vary a bit from that in that my frosting is a bit thicker, I dip only the top into the frosting and spoon off the excess before putting them on wax paper, or newspapers.

By now the yeast is proofed and we mix up the batter in a nice mixer, knead it on a wooden chopping block and place in a bowl with a towel over the top to rise.  That aside, we combine shortening (lard would have been used decades ago) and flour, blending them until they are uniformly combined.  I use the wire wisp attachment on the mixer.  Then I switch to the regular blade and slowly add the water, letting it mix only a short time until the water is integrated throughout the mixture.  Then it's squeezed together into a uniform ball before I cut it in half and roll it out as a pie crust.  Gail makes the pumpkin mix from pumpkins from the garden that we cleaned and cooked last evening.  Soon the pies are in the oven and setting up.

Back to the bread dough which has doubled, it's kneaded and separated into a small ball to be rolled out, spread with butter, cut into small pieces and rolled up into crescent rolls.  The last ball became cinnamon rolls.  Yummy.

It's time to move on.  The cookies are frosted and the frosting is setting up.  The pies are out of the oven and cooling.  The bread rolls are on the cooling rack waiting to serve their purpose tomorrow along with the turkey, all the trimmings and the side dishes.  Okay, maybe tomorrow with be a better day than today.  Two great days in rows is quite grand.

A Time for Healing

Last week we were among the leaders in a project of housing and feeding families who temporarily are without homes.  During the course of the seven days about 90 different persons from more than a dozen churches plus community members and university students participated in this project.  No one asked about or talked about religion or governance leadership.  We just joined together in a common cause.

On the last day of that same week we worked with another two dozen volunteers including doctors and nurses to serve the uninsured and underinsured with loving medical care.  We don't ask if documented or citizens; we don't care if they need an interpreter or speak English; we don't look at their skin color.

This is where the unity and love of people come together.  It's not only a county or a nation, it's humanity.

During the last months this nation has displayed division.  Like has been said before, "A house divided cannot stand."  So we must let the national leaders do what national leaders do and locally join with others to help each and every one of us.

OPB airs a feature yesterday that I heard bits and pieces of in the background of my day that showed small groups discussing international issues.  They were asked to speak something negative about their country and then as a group turn that negative into a positive.  That's our focus today, to turn our loss into a positive step forward.

Hug your family, take the hand of a neighbor and walk with a friend to make this a better place for ALL.

God

After reading a blog about "the lake of fire" I feel compelled to write my version.

"If your son or daughter asks for some bread, do you give them a stone? If you do good things, doesn't God do even better things."  "Don't even the dogs lick up the crumbles that the children drop to the floor?"  God is good, God is better than good.  God is the best, beyond our imagination.

Do you really think that after all the years that Mother Theresa helped the children, the poor and the hungry in India that God would send them to the "lake of fire" just because they grew up not knowing Jesus?  There are millions in the world who believe that the understanding of God came through Moses, or Muhammed, or Buddha, or the Great Spirit.  What makes Christians more correct then them?  What if they are correct?  I believe God loves us all more than we can imagine and will do everything God can to keep us from pain and suffering, and God is all powerful.  God hates evil but not people.

Since we're on the topic which we don't understand let me throw in a simple thought about heaven.  How do I envision heaven?  It's hardly a place and there are no bodies that need food and doctors.  As God is "I am," we are "we are."  Heaven will be spiritual interactions among all of us, after all without our bodies we are but spirits and we don't know the parameters of spirits, they just "are."

Now off to do the work of today's callings.

Boredom

It's never to late to learn something new, or to approach something from another point of view.

I often thought I would would like to be bored, just once.  It seems like there is always something waiting for me, something that I could do, something that I should do.  If only there was a time when everything was done and there was nothing more to do.  Time when I couldn't find anything to do.  Time when I was truly bored.

It's never happened, and never will.  Well, maybe when I can't do anything anymore.  Or I lose my mind.  It's my nature, it's built into me, to find something to do.  Even now that I no longer work for an income or am employed, I have a long list of things that I would like to do either for the next day or the next year.  I have accepted this as who I am, and it's just fine.

Today, however, I heard scientist on the radio talk about mindfulness and spoke also of boredom.  He discussed boredom or being bored in a very different way, a way to which I can truly relate.  He said that when he was doing a routine task, after a while he would become bored before finishing the task, such as mowing the lawn.  As he mowed the lawn his mind would wander to other times he could be doing and would rather be doing; he referred to this as being bored with mowing, with the task at hand.

If that's boredom, especially if it's the part where the mind wanders to another task, I am almost always bored.  I would have referred to this feeling as being distracted from the task at hand.  Now I have a new word for that distraction; I have a new definition for boredom or being bored.  And I am even bored now, or at least distracted to move on.  In fact, I have done several other tasks while writing this.

Cleaning the Garden

It started the serious type rain apparently while we were traveling in North Dakota early mid October, probably about the eighth or ninth.  Upon arriving home I reset the rain gauge by dumping five inches.  During the following week I read and dumped two and a half and thence and a half inches.  The lawns are looking it and the little weeds are covering everything including the driveway.

So it's time to do the tasks that come with fall and the rainy season.  The plan is to transplant more of the saplings under the Red California fir down in the field.  I mow the area in preparation and between showers dug some holes.  The transplanting is still waiting for another break in the rain long enough to do the task.

We did prune the grapes back seriously.  During the prying we discovered that both arbor trellises need repair.  It's that old wood rots when wet syndrome.  Add that to the autumn to-do list.

Also we remove all the plants from the garden except the beets.  The tomato plants had a few small green fruits which had no hope of ripening.  The deer got the best of them.  One pepper plant had about five peppers varying in size from small to full grown, all green sweet peppers.  We pulled the weeds and turned the soil.  Now it's waiting for newspapers and leaves to cover the garden to prevent the winter rains from packing the soil hard.

The two potato plants that came from Rich's funeral service had nothing beneath them.  Really, nothing.

The rain continues, lighter now, but enough to enjoy me to find things to do inside and there's plenty of that.  The temperatures are cool and with the dampness, working in the shop requires an extra jacket and cap.  And so I'm off.

Homecoming at U of Jamestown

There's this belief that if one travels and gets away from home and its necessary routine, one would have time and be inspired to write.  For me the inspiration is marginal and the time is, well, it's not there.  I will try to sneak in a few words this morning between taking granddaughters to school and preparing a two-hour drive to our niece's farm.

It's been 50 years since I and nearly 100 others graduated from Jamestown College.  It's also Homecoming Weekend, so by tradition, common sense, logic and "just because," it's time to have a reunion of these graduates.  The college, now a university, supports such an idea but doesn't have the resources to organize or promote it.  A few emails were exchanged among classmates and a few more were sent from the university.  The results were the return of seven graduates from North Dakota (3), Florida (1), Minnesota (1) and Oregon (2).  Some of us were friends in college, some were mere classmates with little to no interaction.  Five spouses also joined the party.

Over a period of several gatherings, mostly at the first meal, we recognized each other by our name tags and reintroduced ourselves.  Interestingly enough it wasn't only a handshake or "hoodie-doodie," it almost always evolved into a hug, both as we first met and again as we parted on the last day.  Perhaps it was an emotional embrace of sympathy for the aches and pains of being 72 years old (there's no hiding one's age when everyone is the same age, more or less) or celebration that we made it this far.  We had no major conversations about health or aches and pains but we all looked rather good and moved rather fluidly.  Thank God for that.

We exchanged a few stories, usually with the one beside us, took a group picture and exchanged some addresses, Facebook names and phone numbers.  It wasn't until we returned home or had a chance to access a computer that we would discover on Facebook that our theological and political preferences were all over the board.  A great lesson this is that if we leave some of our opinions in our pockets we can have a congenial relationship with anyone.  After all, when comes right down to the wire, many believe there is only one god in the major religions, a god of love, and if we believe as stated in almost every religion and philosophy of the world that we should treat others as we would like to be treated, the world would be a better place.

Now it's time to return to our homes and continue to do what seventy-year olds do, volunteer, play golf and try to stay healthy.  And to take the next granddaughter to school.  Only ten years until our 60th reunion.