Strawberries, margarine and oblique writing

Plus a lost hymn and crema Mexicana

Check in

There has been snow in Portland these past days. Snow enforces silence. Everything is quiet under that white comforter.

Ulm (my cedar) with snow and alpenglow. Fran Gardner photo

People speak in hushed voices. Birds hop silently on the surface, leaving tiny tracks.

The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass, 
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.      (Keats)

Silent images come to you: 

Water lapping soundlessly against uncaring stones.
Stars trembling in the night.
The great injustices of the world, unheard, beyond our knowing. 

Meditate on them. Dream them. Winter has wrapped you in its final, cold embrace. 

Hug it back.

Eat mindfully. Or don’t.

Today I’m sending you the first of many posts about food. I care about food. A lot.

Perhaps you’ve heard of mindful eating. My head agrees that eating carefully and slowly and being aware of what you eat—smelling it, tasting it, noticing the texture and how the flavors dance with one another—are worthwhile goals.

But my heart is with multitasking. I like to eat while I read or watch television or listen to an audiobook. Two things here:

1. The flavors are so intense—the sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami chasing around in my mouth—that I need to dilute the sensations, degrade them, take the edge off. Otherwise I’ll explode with enjoyment.

2. Isn’t multitasking with food what we do when we enjoy a meal with others? We’re tasting and enjoying while at the same time our attention is being snared by conversation. It’s hard to concentrate on the essence of lettuce when your dinner partner is regaling you with the misadventures of his cat.

So, I leave how you eat up to you.

Meanwhile, I’m going to talk about strawberries and margarine with a side of Mexican crema. I want to tell you all about fermenting stuff, from kombucha to kimchi, but that explanation is long and involved and will have to wait for a later post.

First, though, a hymn break

The song that disappeared

I remember quite clearly a song my class sang, it must’ve been in fifth grade. In public school, in Bloomington, Minn.*

It goes like this:

I awake to the day on a mountain high
Where the sun shines bright in a perfect sky.
The trees, like arrows, are pointing above,
My world is peaceful because of God's love.

This day is my own, I must use it with care.
So when night comes, and I say my prayers,
I’ll thank you, God, for a beautiful day.
This is my morning song.

The kids in the sixth grade broke into four-part harmony on the line “I thank you, God.” I couldn’t wait to do that.

I tried looking up the lyrics and could only find one—one!—mention on the Internet. It was a posting on a website called Name that Hymn.

Has anyone else heard, or sung, this song?

*Those were different times, when the default education was Christian. We also sang spirituals:

My Lord, what a morning,

My Lord, what a morning,

My Lord, what a morning

When the stars begin to fall.

You will hear the trumpet sound

To wake the nations underground,

Looking to my God’s right hand

When the stars begin to fall.

And, of course, Christmas carols like “Away in a Manger” and “Silent Night.”

Oblique

This is about how I write.

Oblique is not the same as abstract. Not even a cousin. Oblique is the slightly askew idea, the straw that sticks out of the basket. “Which of these things doesn’t belong” the children’s picture puzzle asks. That’s the oblique thing. The one that doesn’t play well with the others. They are all lined up, and it’s standing with its back to them.

This is the idea that escapes and carves a scar against the carefully combed hairs of your argument.

I envision the oblique idea running upward, from bottom right to upper left. Or it could be a spiral, knocking over words and their careful constructions in a widening path.

Sometimes what is oblique, what upsets the status quo, is not an idea but a character. Urkel in “Family Matters.” Any character played by Eddie Murphy, or Eddie Murray for that matter. Barney Fife. Paris Geller in “The Gilmore Girls.” Feste, Falstaff, Arial, Bottom, Malvolio and many others in Shakespeare. Because that’s what comedy, what humor is, the oblique idea out of nowhere, the incongruity that makes us laugh.

Like this (lame) joke

A duck walks into a bar. 
“You got any peanuts?” he asks the bartender.
“Nah, we don’t got no peanuts in this bar,” is the response.
So the duck leaves. The next day he comes back, and he asks: “You got any peanuts?”
“No, you, moron! No peanuts. Didn’t I just tell you?"
So the duck leaves. The next day he walks into the bar.
“You got any peanuts?”
The barman explodes. He slams his fist down on the bar. “Look, you idiot, I said we ain’t got no peanuts! Now ask me again and I’ll nail your feet to the floor.”
The duck leaves, but he’s back the next day.
“You got any nails?”
“No, we don’t have any nails in this bar.”
“Okay then,” says the duck. “You got any peanuts?”

If you have to explain a joke, then the obliqueness fails. The sad little arrow creeps back into its quiver.

Practice obliqueness

Writing is dangerous when it’s too easy. You just fire up the keyboard and the words march obediently onto the page.

But if you want people to notice, to connect with, to remember what you write, then you need to throw that oblique curveball from time to time.

It’s that one oblique idea, the wayward thought, screaming through the neat array of structure, that makes an essay work.

An example: Many years ago, I wanted to write about how, while there are plenty of words to describe unpleasant men—jerk, horse’s ass, prick, bastard, schmuck—there’s only one word for an unpleasant woman: bitch. So, that’s an idea.

But it wasn’t until Barbara Bush used that salty term, in a rare lapse in decorum, that I had an oblique idea to hang a column on. The little anecdote about her brought the rest of the idea into focus.

Running on oblique

I’ve done it in an earlier post: Internal rhyme (in “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” → A poem by W.S. Gilbert → hymns written by his later collaborator, Arthur Sullivan → “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” and a tune named “St. Kevin.” → looping back to Groucho Marx and his rendition of “Lydia.”

Oblique arrows all over the place. And don’t say you didn’t enjoy the ride.

On to food:

Strawberries in winter

Few things we eat taste as peculiar as frozen strawberries, a winter weirdity so strange that I made up a word for it.

When I was a kid, frozen strawberries came packaged in a paper block with two metal ends. You would use the dull end of a bottle opener to pry off a metal piece.

National Museum of American History, Bequest of Walter and Josephine Landor.

Walter Landor was a commercial designer who worked for Safeway, and he designed this packaging for a Safeway store brand, Bel-air.

Today, of course, frozen strawberries come in plastic bags, often resealable.

But how do they taste?

Well, weird. When they are thawed, the strawberries have a pillowy texture, and they don't taste anything like fresh strawberries.

It's often struck me that hardly anything that is strawberry flavored tastes like strawberries. Strawberry suckers, for instance. They taste like red sugar.

Oh, wait. . . . Strawberry ice cream. It tastes like strawberries, in a very good way.

Yet even strawberry jam doesn't taste particularly like strawberries unless it's a premium variety.

My daughter Maggie brought me some strawberry preserves from Brittany that taste like real strawberries. They are known as Fraise de Plougaste.

The berries in Brittany result from breeding a white strawberry from Chile with local berries; the result is red and succulent. Strawberries are native to all temperate parts of the world, so it's not unusual that there would be strawberries in Chile.

Oregon’s best berry*

Here in Oregon, we have unusually lovely local berries, which are only available for about two weeks in June. They are a variety called Hood, and as they are very soft, they don't keep well. They make a brief appearance in supermarkets with produce managers who are willing to coddle them, but they only last a day or so.

Most of the Hood strawberry crop goes to make jam in commercial facilities.

In the decades before the ‘60s or ‘70s, Portland children were recruited to pick strawberries in June. Buses would come into Eastside neighborhoods to pick up the kids and take them to the fields.

*Actually, the best Oregon berry is the Marionberry, bred in Marion County, the home of Oregon State University, where biologists crossed an olallieberry with a Chehalem blackberry in 1945. The name has nothing to do with the disgraced former mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry.

Memories of margarine

Time was, margarine was considered a healthful—and cheap—alternative to butter.

I grew up in Minnesota, which is a big dairy state. Thanks to the power of the dairy industry, consumers couldn’t buy colored margarine in the state.

Margarine came packaged as a one-pound slab of white stuff that looked like lard. A little bubble of orange color was stuck to the center. You were supposed to soften the margarine, then smoosh that color into it until the margarine was an even yellow.

Well, that was a lot of hassle, especially for kids, who would never think to set out the margarine a few hours beforehand so it could soften.

Mom to the rescue

But my mother had a solution. We lived in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis, which was about two hours from the Iowa border. She would periodically drive to Iowa and return with a case of blue Blue Bonnet margarine. Each pound was packaged in quarters, like butter sticks, and it was a nice yellow color.

Butter is never mentioned in the ads for margarine. It’s the “high-price spread.”

We bought it because it was cheap. I used it in many of the 16 variations of the sugar cookies in The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Merritt Farmer. Of course, the recipe called for butter, but what did I know?

However, in the ’80s or ’90s, the margarine industry started adding more water to the product to make it lower fat. Baked goods made with that margarine were dry and tasteless, because the water evaporated, and there wasn’t enough fat.

The thrill is gone

Now it’s been determined that margarine wasn’t good for you after all, being composed of trans fat—hydrogenated vegetable oil. Butter is now valued for healthful compounds such as lauric acid, selenium and conjugated linoleic acid.

I’m astonished to find that Blue Bonnet margarine, which started life in the mid-50s, far as I can tell, is still around. You can buy it at Walmart.com for $1.38 a pound, or on Amazon for $1.99. Still way cheaper than butter.

Another cheap alternative

This cheap substitution is worthwhile. Real crème fraîche, cultured French cream, is difficult to find and expensive when you do find it. Depending on the brand, it costs upwards of $7 for 5 or 6 ounces.

The alternative is Crema Mexicana, made by Cacique. Like crème fraîche, it’s slightly sour but not as much as sour cream. It’s made to be drizzled over Mexican dishes like enchiladas, but it’s equally good with berries or French toast.

Just don’t add it to coffee. It will curdle.

It costs $4.29 at Fred Meyer, but that’s for 15 ounces. It keeps for a few week after it’s opened.

Darigold makes a “Mexican style” sour cream, but it’s more sour cream than crème fraîche. It’s salty. Tastes great with peanut butter if you don’t mind the fat.

Check out

Farewell to the fiddle

A lot of things are changing in my life. I have acquired a power wheelchair and a van to drive it in. I’m going to sell my mobility scooter. If you are interested, let me know.

I’m moving to a new apartment, leaving Ulm, my pet tree, behind. The new place has more windows, so it’s far sunnier, but there’s no wall space to hang pieces of my many quilts in progress.

I am also going to sell my violin, which I bought about seven years ago, finally replacing the student violin my sainted mother bought for me in 1963.

I can’t play it anymore. I am developing scoliosis on my left side, and that keeps me from holding instrument properly under my chin. So so long, Irish jigs and bluegrass tunes. No more “Planxty Miss Burke,” “Blackberry Blossom” or “Ashokan Farewell.” No more wishing I could still play with an orchestra.

I have plenty of ways to nurture my creatively without the violin. I'll still miss it.

Gulp. I just accessed the Multnomah County Library site to reserve a book. There’s a closeup of a violin, showing a tailpiece and the bottom of the F-holes. It hurts to see it.

Goodbye February

How did it go with “nix on negativity?” I think I was able to forestall judgement a few times. It’s never enough for a critical person like me.

I tried. I hope you did, too.

Foreshadow March

The theme for March is “reconnect.” Pick up the strands of dropped relationships and weave them back into your life. I’m already starting to remember things I forgot years ago. . . . Like “thin places.” Those are the areas where the membrane between the real world and the spiritual is stretched taut. Many feel this tension at the seashore. I’m going to find my thin spaces in dreams and meditation.

I hope you will journey with me.

Daily practice

And, dear ones, I hope you are writing. Every day. Just a bit. Just to give your spirit a little kick into a new dimension. There is so much to discover about yourself. Just sit, pen in hand or hands on keyboard, and let the words come, unbidden.

You will be astounded by what happens next. . . .

The work we do

Here, again, are the themes for the entire year:

January: Buy nothing. Be content with what you have.
February: Nix on negativity. Not being a critic is so difficult for me that I assigned working on it to the shortest month.
March: Reconnect. Pick up the strands of dropped relationships and weave them back into life. 
April: Reset and reorganize. Not just external clutter, but disorganized thoughts and intentions, even dreams.
May: My body. Review. Renew. Restart. Movement, disability, resolution.
June: It’s not about me. A month to choose not to be offended, not to run everything past the “me” filter, to move beyond assumptions.
July:  Walk every day
August: Remember to see. I visit this concept so often, it’s worth its own month.
September: Colors and seasons.
October: Home and away.
November: The dark is rising.
December:  Celebrations.

—30—