Scout Moves

Here is my column from today's edition of Small Town Newspaper. I sent it in before leaving for Romania, so I can only trust they actually printed it. Oh, and one more thing while I'm gone—TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!! ••• June 21 is World Handshake Day, named so because Ivan Zupa of Austria wanted to do something global to commemorate the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed scores of people from fourteen countries. His hope is that if everyone would exchange an international handshake, we could create a wave more powerful than any tsunami. Of course, Zupa isn’t suggesting we literally shake hands with someone from another country on this particular day—he’s thinking a more figurative gesture might do the trick, an introspective acknowledgement and acceptance of the rest of the world to foster a sense of brotherhood or sisterhood. In his poetic style, Zupa writes, “Put your hand in the sea and shake hands with the world.” Even those of us who are land-locked can understand the symbo

My birthday is coming up—next Monday, to be exact—but I won't be around to talk about it, so let me address the subject a few days early. I'll be 48 on the 21st, summer solstice. I was born in Decatur General Hospital in Decatur, Alabama, and I am the youngest of four daughters. I've never made a big deal out of my birthday apart from shouting it to everyone I know, just in case they were to forget. I get just a few cards (one from my insurance agent), I don't get many gifts and have only been given one birthday party in my entire life. I was 10, and we had cake and ice cream in the yard. Some birthdays have been memorable, though, despite the lack of hoopla. Husband gave me my first French horn on my birthday 10 years ago. We saw James Taylor in concert one year, my sister took me to hear Andrea Watts and the Chicago Symphony another year, and we went to a Cubs game in Cleveland on another. The year I turned 21, I was a student in a Bible college and going to summer sc

As much as I love my cats, I love this dog. His name is Jonah, and he lives with his people across the street from my house. OK, his people are my friends, but the dog—oh, the dog. When Jonah is nosing around his yard, and I am standing out in mine, we can have a conversation. I yell across the street to him, and he wags his tail with great expectation. "Maybe she'll come over here and pat my head and tell me what a good boy I am," is what he's saying. They say that even when he's inside his house and he sees me through the window, he wags his tail with the same expectation. And when they say, "Hey Jonah, Scout's coming over," he wags and barks and wags and barks. They may be padding the truth there, but I don't mind. Jonah has peed on my mailbox, thrown up on my patio, chewed a hole through my sleeve in a playful tussle. I've adopted this big chocolate lab the size of a small horse as my foster dog. When he was younger, Jonah would sit at t

I was sent on another interesting assignment for Small Town Newspaper yesterday. I drove out to the middle of absolutely nowhere to tour a new winery. A couple of adventuresome people have an alpaca farm and decided to open a winery on their property. They have about 75 acres not too far from here—30 minutes, assuming you don't get stuck behind one of those people who drives about as fast as I could walk. That happens sometimes. At a fairly decent clip, I drove about 7 miles down a narrow, curvy road and then turned onto an even narrower, curvier road and drove another two miles. That's where the winery is, Out There. It's so out there that when you stand on the back deck of the place, you look out at nothing but rolling hills as far as you can see, and the alpacas stand there with their mouths full of grass and watch you as you contemplate the wide-open spaces. The only sound you hear is your own breathing mixed with a faint wind chime hanging from a distant hook. It was e

I don't have a newspaper column to post today because I took last week off while my mother was visiting. Sometimes, it can take hours to write one of those things, and it wouldn't do to have my mother sitting alone while I work in the corner and talk to myself until a column emerges. Now that she has gone back home, though, I can get to work on the next project, and here's what it is: I'M GOING TO ROMANIA! Here's how this upcoming trip came about: Months ago, Eustacia was thinking about what she would do with herself over the summer—she doesn't have a job and wouldn't be taking summer classes, so she decided to find a volunteer project. She investigated several options and chose United Planet , a non-profit organization that sends people to spots all over the world to help out with healthcare, environmental projects or teaching English. Eustacia decided she'd like to spend a month working at an orphanage in Tanzania. We've known other people her

My mother will leave for her home in Georgia this morning, so yesterday to honor the last day of her visit with us, we hosted a lunch with two of my friends, Joan and Jane—you know, a women's sort of lunch by the pool. My mother and I started early in the morning to make the peach trifle with lemon mousse; we had to make the lemon curd and let it chill for an hour, and then we had to roast the peaches and whip the cream and assemble the whole thing so it could chill for two hours at least. We also made c hilled cucumber-honeydew-mint soup : flatbreads with sea salt and thyme : and a chickpea salad with balsamic and honey vinaigrette: It was all served with large gulf shrimp (pre-BP) drizzled with olive oil. We made a pitcher of peach iced tea and a pitcher of white sangria, and we carried the whole feast outside to the patio. We sat under the big umbrella and ate and talked and talked and ate, and it was all lovely. We aren't the delicate type—no doilies, dainty dresses or stri

Wow, my mother and I have certainly been learning these last few days. I didn't want her to have to just sit around the house and watch me flit from activity to activity, so I've made a point of doing interesting things she wouldn't normally do at home in Georgia. On Saturday we went to Amish-land. This part of Ohio is home to the largest Amish settlement anywhere, I think—state, country, world, whatever. A twenty-minute drive straight west will put you smack in the middle of where they live and work, and where they smartly cater to tourists. There is an old farm nearby with tours of the house and outbuildings, so we went there to learn about the culture. The house we walked through was built in 1840, and while there wasn't a tour guide on duty, there were plaques on the walls that explained the purpose of the rooms and the furnishings and gave overviews of their culture. We read about their weddings and funerals, how they choose their bishops, and how teenagers are giv

Blogville hasn't had a good meme in a long time, but Savannah has tagged me in a new one. Here goes: 1. Do you believe in ghosts? Nope, although I remember walking through a house in which two elderly people had died. A realtor was showing us the place, and on the way down the stairs, I felt such a chill and such a sense of dread, I had to hurry for the door. It was probably self-inflicted fear. 2. Are you content with your life? I suppose. I wish I had more formal education, and I'd like to be writing more, but other than that... 3. Have you ever been close to point blank? I'm not sure what this means. Death? If that's it, then no. 4. Is philosophy necessary? It is absolutely necessary. It's the love of wisdom, as Savannah pointed out, and it drives us to live above the animals and to think deeper. 5. Do you live with books? Yes, I live with books on every table. And I live BY books as well—Husband is a publisher, and his books pay the bills. 6. Have you ever bee

I doubt I will ever deliver a commencement address, and no graduate will ever ask me for words of wisdom. But, I do have a weekly column as my platform, so here I am offering unsolicited advice. As read in today's edition of Small Town Newspaper: ••• I’ve been reminiscing lately, flipping through old high school yearbooks as I’ve thought about the recent graduates from this current and much younger generation. I don’t know if signing someone’s yearbook is as common a practice now as it was in the ‘70s, but the pages of my old books are filled with the usual clichés written in colorful ink—“you’re the best,” “always stay as sweet as you are,” “good luck in everything you do.” If one of this year’s graduates were to ask me to sign his or her yearbook, I’d skip the standard remarks, and instead I’d write this in bright red ink: Treat others the way you would like to be treated, because applying the Golden Rule to everything you do beats good luck every time. Jesus is reported in the G

I haven't had time to sit down and paint very much lately, so I was happy when Peahen posted something fun on Facebook. She agreed to make a small gift for the first five people who responded to her post who also agreed to make gifts for someone else. I signed up as quickly as I could, but do you think I could get five of my own Facebook friends to make something? Of course not, but it's OK, I decided. Not everyone is crafty. So, I altered my post and allowed five people to sign up for something made by me with no obligations to reciprocate. I cook, knit, paint, make earrings and sew purses. Well, I used to sew purses, but that was a fleeting hobby. So, I wrote down the names of my five friends who signed up and thought about what to make for them. The FB post clearly states the gift may not be something the recipient likes, but I wanted it to be nice. Painting is the thing I'm most interested in at the moment, so I bought small black mattes and painted according to their

Is there anything better than home-made lemon curd? I'm hard-pressed to think of anything, so when I found this recipe for lemon curd cheesecake, I knew it was something I had to spend half a day making. I realize the photo here isn't very appetizing—between the bad color and angle and general lack of presentation, this look more like a block of crusty grits than a delectable cheesecake, but believe me, it's wonderful. And this looks so much nicer than it did later when I dropped the thing on the floor—Splat! the whole cake slid off and landed on the kitchen tile. Don't worry, though. I salvaged it, just not for company. I confirmed something while making this cheesecake. I had suspected that it's possible for graham crackers crumbs, or even whole graham crackers, to go rancid like oil but needed a chance to test my theory. Well, when I got to the crust portion of this recipe, I discovered I was out of crumbs. I found an unopened box of graham crackers, though, and

I've had this song running through my head for a few days, the Carly Simon/James Taylor song that goes like this: De bat he rat got wings All the children know that What I need to know from the lord Is how you get de wings on the cat They say a bat's got radar And he can fly through fan But what I am afraid of is That he got another plan To fly in me face Fly in me face The other night, there were three people in my house—Husband, Eustacia, and Me—and we were each on a different floor going about our business as people do, when Husband came upstairs and calmly said, "OK, we have a bat in the basement." There is a slouchy family room on that floor with big, comfortable furniture and a large TV, and we go there to watch movies or old episodes of West Wing—yep, we're still doing that. Husband had been down there watching the news. My office is just off of that room, and when my husband saw a bat swoop in and go into my office, he shut the door, trapping the thing in

I'm way behind in talking about today's subject, but that's just because I've been preoccupied with tasks or ideas or what have you. I get busy with something and then remember the thing I wanted to talk to blogville about and think I should get to writing, but then another task comes up. Anyway, here's the deal: Almost two weeks ago, my orchestra performed its final concert of the season. It was a tag-on concert meant to raise extra money, so to bring in the middle-America, small-town Ohio crowds, we gave a country concert with a guest soloist and a guest fiddler from Nashville. We also made room on the stage for other musicians we don't normally perform with—steel guitar, banjo, mandolin, drumset, the kind of piano player who looks at a piece of paper with nothing but chords scratched on it and then manages to play a song that's free and easy. The plan worked, and we had a sell-out crowd that evening. We played numbers we don't normally play, and we sa