Cornpone
I start researching Hoagy Carmichael and end up cleaning house
Check in
Black and white
“Snow White” and “Black Bag” were playing recently at the St. Johns Cinema. Enjoy the regular lines and patterns of this building. This photo could have been shot in 1920, or yesterday.
Triad
I haven’t done a triad, an arrangement of three words, for a while. This one is silly.
Forge
Forget
Forgo
Forge
Forge is a mighty word. Strong and forceful. A forge is fiery, hot and noisy. A place where metal is melted and melded and bent and pounded into new shapes. The verb “forge” is the process of creating, or of movement. Something strong from something strong.
Forget
Next to powerful forge, forget seems diminished and bewildered. How did it get into this triad? Dunno. Forgot. Or maybe it had to do with an arrangement of letters. Forget is forge with a little t at the end.
Forgotten
I lost a penny yesterday As if one penny matters. You can always find another Under the sofa cushion. Forgotten things are hidden Like the lint in your pocket. Sometimes, though, you forget On purpose, an effort of will. Oops, forgot your birthday! Another one next year. I can’t find my car keys So I will take the bus.
Here’s something else forgotten: A bike rack outside the abandoned Bed Bath & Beyond store at East Portland’s Mall 205. It’s an apt metaphor for the grimness of today’s climate: social, political, even practical.
Forgo
Forgo means to put off or to abstain from. Maybe I should forgo writing about forget. Forgo is not the same as forego, which means go before in time. (The dictionary says forego is a variant of forgo. I don’t buy it.) A foregone conclusion is a prediction waiting to be made.
I predict that I might not write another triad for a while. Too many other ideas.
Beauty shot
This is more than just a pretty picture of flowers. Notice the patterns and placement, how the colors balance one another from background to forefront. Everything fits in its place and complements the whole.
Cornpone
I was thinking about Hoagy Carmichael, whom you might know from his appearance in the movie “To Have and Have Not” with Bogart and Bacall. Or maybe not. But surely you know his song, the jazz standard “Stardust.” Or maybe not. It’s so hard to know what knowledge people have in common anymore.
Used to be, everyone knew about the ides of March, “lend me your ears” and “Et tu, Brute?” from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” because we all read it in ninth grade. But do students still do that?
I’m reminded of those surveys that show the majority of Americans can’t name the three branches of government from the Constitution. Or just one of the five freedoms listed in the First Amendment. Here they are, in case you were wondering.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If only our current administration had respect for these five freedoms.
Hoagy
But this is about Hoagy Carmichael. (I’ll get to cornpone soon, too.) I wanted to know why he was called Hoagy, and I found that is because his name was Hoagland Howard Carmichael. In a biography on hoagy.com I came on this quotation from his mother, Lida, who told him:
“Music is fun, Hoagland, but it don’t buy you cornpone.”
Well, it turned out, his music—and his onstage persona of the louche piano player with a cigarette dangling from his lips—bought her little Hoagy plenty of cornpone.
What is cornpone?
Most cooks are familiar with cornbread: Cornmeal, flour, eggs, milk, shortening and leavening. There are many variations. Sometime sugar is included.
Cornpone, on the other hand, is more basic: just cornmeal, water and salt. The cake is fried or baked in oil or bacon grease. It’s usually served as a savory side dish with meats or stews. Taste of Home has a recipe.
Never had cornpone? Me neither. Maybe you have to live in the South.
Cornpone gets around
In The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s copious biography of Lyndon Johnson, the author notes that members of the Kennedy White House used to refer to Johnson, then vice-president, as “Rufus Cornpone,” or to him and his wife, Lady Bird, as “Uncle Cornpone and his little pork chop.” A lot they knew.
This may be apocryphal, but Abraham Lincoln supposedly liked cornpone. George Washington, on the other hand, preferred hoecakes, a type of cornmeal pancake leavened with yeast. Find a recipe at mountvernon.org.
A sonnet
When I wrote this poem, I let the pen wander on its own, wondering what it would write next. I was thinking while composing that it that the result would be dreadful, but with a little tweaking it came out all right.
Poems appear
When poems pull my soul outside of me My pen won’t cease, the words flow from the nib, I can’t stop words, nor can I stop to see If thoughts make sense, the images so glib. Why do I seek, my ragged breathing soft Along the paper, all my senses full? Cloaked metaphors now keep my soul aloft. The silent music's arc and fall and pull— Oh, life, you suck me dry, my heart, my breath. My worth, my yearning also you dissolve. How many poems are left before my death? No sainted harmony, just chords without resolve. These thoughts surround me far into the night I cannot shed their seeking. Words take flight!
Spring cleaning
It used to be that women cleaned the house thoroughly in the spring, chasing away the soot, grime and the stagnancy of winter. Carpets would be taken outside and beaten to dislodge dust; hardwood floors were waxed. Walls would be washed, and in some cultures, whitewashed.
Nobody does any of this anymore. Sturdy finishes for wood floors obviate the need for wax. Businesses will clean rugs for you. Dirty (but cozy!) oil heat has been replaced by electricity and gas, so less soot.
Last year, I consulted Hints from Heloise for advice about cleaning. This year, my book of choice is Unf*ck Your Habitat by Rachel Hoffman.
Hoffman’s gives advice to young ’uns (not my generation) on how to clean. It’s an uneven book that conflates straightening with cleaning, for example, and recommends using vinegar to clean surfaces I wouldn’t use it on. But she is careful to include the needs of people with disabilities in her recommendations, and she has some good advice, such as: “There are two solutions: less stuff or more storage. Less stuff is almost always the better option.” I agree. Still, I have a lot of stuff and not enough storage.
Her prose is easy and funny. Why stress over cleaning?
Newspaper advice
The March 13 edition of The Washington Post has an article about cleaning myths.
Some pointers:
Don’t use crumpled newspapers to dry windows when you wash them; use microfiber cloths.
It’s better to use the dishwasher than wash by hand. Counterintuitively, the dishwasher uses less water. I don’t own a dishwasher, so the point is moot in my house.
You can wash cast iron. It’s seasoned and can handle soap and water.
Don’t use dish detergent on to wash you car. It strips the wax off the finish.
Vinegar and soda are fun to watch foam but are not much use other than dislodging some elemental drain gunk.
Another Post story delivers a truth we already know: cleaning the oven is a nasty process and nothing works as well as Easy-Off. We’re warned off the appliance’s self-cleaning cycle, which could damage the oven. I say, if the gunk in the oven has gotten so hard it’s a beast to remove, why not just leave it? This is what I’ve always done. It helps if you make it a habit to put a sheet pan or cookie sheet under baking casseroles to catch drips.
No more big detergent containers
While on the subject of cleaning, I am a big fan of using detergent sheets for washing clothes. The little sheets are like dryer sheets. You just toss one of these in with the wash and let the machine do the rest. Robert and I were skeptical about this product at first, being used to liquid detergent from a big plastic bottle. How could an insubstantial little square deliver? Yet they do!
The sheets are made by a company called Earth Breeze, headquartered in Medford, Ore. They come in a recyclable cardboard pouch and cost $12 for 60 small loads or 30 big ones. We think these little sheets do such a terrific job. They clean just as well as Tide.
Checkout
Guest appearance
I’ve been asked to give a senior citizen’s perspective on riding transit next week at the Oregon Active Transit Summit (OATS) in Portland. As part of a panel discussion, I’ll be reciting some of my bus adventures from this Substack, Becoming. Readers know I write about bus travel a lot and that I have a unique perspective on what I see from the bus. Recently, I wrote about the Division FX2 bus and about how you can get to St. Johns via four separate bus routes. Last year, topics included car culture and a big rabbit on the 57 line along the Tualatin Valley Highway.
I’m honored to be on a panel with Carol Kachadoorian, executive director of dblTilde CORE, a nonprofit that promotes active mobility infrastructure, especially for older adults. The moderator is Jeff Mapes, a friend and colleague from The Oregonian, where he was the senior political reporter. Jeff has written a book about bicycle commuting, Pedaling Revolution.
We’ll be talking at 2:15 p.m. Thursday, April 24, at the Double Tree at Lloyd Center. Tickets for the three-day conference start at $383.11, and that’s the student rate. You could apply for a scholarship.
Scrap words
I found a scrap of paper with six words on it. I couldn’t remember when and why I wrote them down. These are the words:
Relent
Expand
Grumpy
Medley
Exodus
Inform
These words have a strange connectedness. Could I have written them as an exercise in word association? I do that sometimes, especially in my daily writing exercise when I don’t have anything immediate to say. In the exercise, they might be strung, like: “I relent, I expand, but it makes me grumpy. My medley of emotions exiles me from what could inform me.”
Simple solution
I finally figured out where these words came from. The clue is that there are six words and each word has six letters. Perhaps you got there first. These words are the solutions of the six anagrams from one Sunday Jumble puzzle in the newspaper.
Sometimes, a synchronicity is just a coincidence. Or something random.
If you’ve read this far . . .
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Becoming is, after all, the work of a human—me!
—Fran
Missed seeing you at the rally today . . . I had a very ordinary, routine start to an extraordinary day, at about 8:00AM.
I had a departure time of 10:45 AM so I didn’t spend my usual time reading emails, though I did read a fascinating account of the beginning of the Revolutionary War by Heather Cox Richardson in her daily blog, Letter from and American. And I had not yet made my sign for the 50501-protest rally at Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, though I had had an idea for the sign just before I got out of bed.
I had finished my toast and coffee, checked the weather, my bank account and scanned my emails. Then I went to Google and typed in “The earth photographed from space.” Up popped the iconic first photograph from an early moon launch, I think in 1969, with the moon in the foreground and the blue, cloud covered, earth in the black void of space—the photograph, if I’m not mistaken, that was at least part of the impetus for the very first Earth Day.
I downloaded it and printed it out on my Epson 8500.
It remained, all these years later, stunningly beautiful.
I had thought to use the back side of the cardboard carton I had used for my first sign for the April 5th rally. So, I trimmed it down with my utility knife, found a piece of 1x1 cedar and trimmed it to the same length as my previous sign, stapled the cardboard to the cedar stick, laid the trimmed photograph on the top center of the cardboard. Then I went to my MacBook Pro and typed in the text that had occurred to me while I was still in bed—"A Gift—we must care for her!” I printed out the first two words and the dash in 300pt type, trimmed and glued them. I discovered that I would have to make the other words smaller, to fit on the allotted space, so I tried 200 point and that worked. I printed out the remaining words, trimmed and glued them, then I glued everything on to the cardboard and voila!
Inline image
At about 8:40 I left our home and walked over to Holgate and Cesar Chavez to catch the #17 TriMet bus which would take us right to the Courthouse Square. At the first stop the bus made after I had gotten on, I was greeted by my neighbors, Fran, who rents Jeremy and Laura’s old house, diagonally across Liebe Street from our corner and Alan and Gertie who live diagonally across Liebe from her, two housed down from our corner. Fran’s husband Ed stayed home with a bad cold.
So, Fran and I hung out the whole time.
When we were walking down Jefferson Street toward the river, we were stopped by a young woman who had noticed my sign and wanted to interview us. I have forgotten her name already but she said she worked for the program, Here and Now, at WBUR in Boston and she was in town visiting her sister. She said she had been surprised by the rally, having been unaware that it was happening. We chatted for several minutes. One question she asked stuck with me: “What gives you hope?”, she asked. Of course, I can’t recall exactly what I said but I do remember talking about the conversations I had had with folks who felt that the 50501 group was not cooperating with other groups enough and that having a rally. so soon after April 5th was maybe too much. I told her that I was given hope by seeing how many people had come out today and that we need to grow our resistance and that we never know the effect we will have when we attend a rally, whom we may touch or whom we may inspire, that will help grow our movement, like, yourself, I said. Had I not come, we would have never been able to have this conversation.
I have no way of estimating the size of the crowd but it felt at least as big as the first rally in which we marched across the Hawthorn bridge and back and I think that one was in the thousands, at least several thousand.
So, I am encouraged and I will continue to be in the streets as long as I have breath, making connections, and speaking up and speaking out as a citizen in order to make our democracy—a government of the people, by the people and for the people—work!
Bill
I love when you write about words. I was reminded of David Whyte's Consolations books. love them. thanks. fran for a most enjoyable post.