Scout Moves

That's Woodstock, Illinois. We didn't actually have Thanksgiving in that town, but we did go there the day after. On Thursday, the in-law side of the family gathered in Palatine, Illinois for the traditional meal, which was wonderful as always. There were somewhere between 20 and 25 people there for dinner and only two dogs. I love dogs and like having them around, but I'm not used to them, and their commotion can be startling. On Friday, we all made our way west or north or northwest (not really sure) for the town of Woodstock. One of the in-laws has bought a house there, and her daughter and son-in-law live there. The house is an adorable 100-year-old two story with delightfully creaky stairs and interesting nooks here and there. We met at the house and then walked a few blocks to have brunch. This town has several claims to fame—Orson Welles went to school there as a boy; Paul Newman lived there at some point; some scenes from Planes, Trains and Automobiles were filmed t...

I'm not prepared to report on Thanksgiving at the moment, but a sister-in-law has written a practically lyrical piece at Winged Musings . Go read it.

I just returned from another annual Thanksgiving feast with the immigrant class ( here is the post from last year with photos ). The Mexican and Guatemalan women gather in the big kitchen and whip up a feast—tamales, tostadas, fried steak (milanessa), homemade tortillas and enchiladas, which is actually a salad made with lettuce and ham and tomatoes. Juana made 60 tamales—she mixes maseca flour with water to make the filling, stuffs the flour mixtures with seasoned chicken, and wraps the whole thing with a banana leaf that has been soaking in water. She wraps each tamale in foil, and then she steams them all in a big pot. It's a staple on a Latin plate and understandably so. There was no room in the kitchen for me to even watch, so I sat out in the big room with the American students in the GED program, the ones who don't eat no Mexican food. They contributed the traditional American Thanksgiving dishes and the desserts because the Latin students aren't fond of desserts, at...

I realize Thanksgiving is actually just one special day and not an entire week, but this year it feels extended. We'll be leaving Tuesday afternoon by car, picking up Eustacia along the way, and driving to Chicago. We'll get there in time to meet No. 1 at O'Hare on Wednesday, and then we'll join the rest of the in-laws and out-laws for two full days of thankfulness and food. Most of the gang will be there, although I just learned two of the large bunch will be in Brazil instead. There will be four generations total—some vegetarians and some omnivores—eating all the traditional stuff, plus a pack of dogs afoot waiting for crumbs to hit the floor. But what I'm really looking forward to is having both of my daughters within reach. I am thankful for many things, but in the interest of being concise, here is today's newspaper column about just a few. There are only two comments at time of posting, and they are personal and nonpolitical, sort of. Let's hope it do...

Just a few minutes ago, I found myself singing "Yes, We Have No Bananas" for no good reason. It popped into my head out of the blue, as songs like this tend to do. So you can enjoy it with me, here is Ukulele Katie with her own rendition, along with the sheet music so you can sing along—are the lyrics offensive by today's standards, do you think?

Today is the birthday of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, born in Indiana in 1866. Why is that significant? It isn't, really. He was a judge and the first commissioner of organized baseball, but beyond that, his name is what caught my attention. Landis was named after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia where his father fought as a Union soldier during the Civil War. His father lost a leg in the battle and so named his son after the place. Seems an odd tribute, I think. Imagine if all the soldiers wounded in our current wars were to name their children after the places where they were wounded—we'd have an awful lot of Fallujah Smiths and Baghdad Joneses running loose in a few years. I have flown a kite on the battleground of Kennesaw Mountain. It was my niece's kite, and the poor kid had to watch while I accidentally let go of the string and let the thing take off above the trees. I like that a piece of ground that saw so much horror would become a place where people would g...

Yesterday, I was sitting here listening to my cat lick himself—it's an unpleasant sound like a heap of wet noodles being squished around a big pot—when the phone rang. Small Town Newspaper wanted me to cover a story at the high school, if you could call it a story. I suppose it is. The football team is in the playoffs, and some students have an extraordinary way of showing team spirit. They call themselves the Shirtless Men. They go to all the games regardless of weather with no shirts but with letters painted on their chests that spell out the name of the school. If they have enough boys lined up, they spell out something inspirational, like "Let's Go Small Town." The Shirtless Men are a tradition that has passed on from class to class so that there are now alumni. These boys are excited for Friday night's playoff game and wanted to tell their story, so two of us were sent to talk to them—one full-time reporter was there to talk to the main group, and I was there...

I'm old, or at least I feel old. Because I lost a lot of sleep in trying to see some falling meteors the night before last, I spent yesterday in a fog. I had previously scheduled a Swedish massage for 2:30. I don't normally order up a massage just for the heck of it, but the day spa where I have my hair cut was offering a deal, and I bought it on impulse one day. I had to use the purchase in November, and so yesterday was pretty much the only day I could do that. Between lunchtime and the massage, I decided to take a quick nap. I like power naps now and then—twenty minutes just to close my eyes and postpone functioning. I lay down on the couch and let myself slip into power-nap mode, and it was such wonderful relief from exhaustion. I had a weird dream—Husband and I were living in a big, sprawling house with huge hallways and a giant kitchen. We decided to take in a boarder, a man who paid rent and had free reign in the kitchen. One day the man started rummaging through the pan...

This morning around 3:00ish, I got up and bundled up with jeans and socks and shoes, a big coat and a scarf, and I went outside to see the Leonid meteor shower. It was cloudy to the south but clear to the north, and I hoped the sky would clear so I could see something remarkable. It didn't. I did see a brilliant streak through a break in the clouds, though, and that was enough to make me settle in on a cold, metal chair to see the show. The thing is, there was no show. In the 20 minutes I sat outside, I saw only three or four meteor streaks, and that was it. What proved more interesting were the sounds you can hear in the middle of the night in a neighborhood like mine. You can hear traffic from the highway with truck tires making different tones from car tires, and you can hear the furnace kick on. You can hear the wind rattle the empty trees and the leaves they've dropped being pushed along the pavement with that same wind. I never heard a single dog bark, but I did hear some...

Now that I'm not kicking myself for my errors in Saturday's orchestra concert, let me try this again. Our concert really was a success, I think. We did not attract a sell-out crowd, but we did fill many more seats than we seem to have been filling for the first concert of each season in the past. And the audience offered their enthusiastic applause for everything we presented to them. Maybe it was because we were a smaller group than the full orchestra, but when the winds played the band piece at the beginning, I felt as though we were each super conscious of what the others were playing around us and made great efforts to blend and make something together, not just side by side. I am always amused at our behavior during rehearsals in contrast to our behavior in concerts. We rehearse Saturday afternoons, and people are tapping their feet noticeably and counting rests out loud and swearing when they come in early or miss a note. But a few hours later during the performance, the ...

I am just now back from my orchestra's concert, the season opener that featured Holst's The Planets. I normally wouldn't write about the thing until Monday or even Tuesday, but I thought I would sort this out now while it's still fresh in my head. The chardonnay is cold, and the pesky cats aren't pawing at the mactop, so here I go: I'll start from the end and work backwards. The second half of the concert was a violin concerto by Saint-Saëns with Bohdan Subchak as the guest soloist. Bohdan plays with us normally, but tonight was his night as the star. He is a tidy penny-loafers sort of man who you can't imagine would leave the house with his shirt untucked, and he plays beautifully. He was given a standing ovation, and his response was a delightful piece he played unaccompanied. The audience was quiet for him and stood again. I was part of the audience because I didn't play the second half of the concert. There was some confusion as to who should play th...

"I grew up in Canton, Ohio." That's what the sticker says on this package of chicken thighs I bought at the local grocery store. The point is that the chicken is sort of local, and the company wants to market to people for whom buying local is an issue, but I prefer my food not talk to me in the first person no matter where it grew up. I wouldn't want a sticker on the package to say "I lived in a coop for nine months" or "I never knew my parents" or even "I had the brain the size of a pea, and my name was Rita." Simply, I do not want to hear from the actual chicken I am about to eat. But, after I got over my distaste for the label, I cooked these thighs anyway. I followed a recipe from a Food Network cookbook for North African Chicken Stew. It goes like this: (serves 4) 1 1/2 cups chicken broth 1 cup uncooked couscous 4 teaspoons kosher salt Freshly ground pepper 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 tablespoon unsalted butter 6 boneless, skinless chi...

Yesterday I found myself in the gymnasium of a small, rural elementary school that puts on an annual Veterans Day program. The entire fifth-grade class, all of 20 or so kids, sang a song with some of them as soloists who could really belt out a number, and some of them recited poetry. They led everyone in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and in singing the National Anthem. And they talked about the history of different traditions. Very interesting. They played a video of Red Skelton remembering how one of his teachers taught the kids to say the Pledge with feeling—I LOVE Red Skelton. Then they asked all of the veterans in the audience to stand at the front by the stage, and 26 men and women went forward. Each one said what war they fought in or what years they served, what branch of the military they represented and how they were related to a kid in the school. There was a great-grandfather, grandfathers, uncles, an aunt and one of the teachers who retired from the National Guard. The...

English class was full of surprises yesterday. I sat at a table with four women—two Mexicans and two Guatemalans—and we read a newspaper written for an early reading level. When we read together, each student takes a turn reading a few paragraphs, and I help with pronunciation and explanations of new words or unusual phrases. For example, in a story about the Berlin wall and how Germans are debating how to memorialize it, the phrase "brushed off" was used to describe opinions that were being dismissed. We had to talk about the meaning of that phrase for a minute. Then we read about how NASA has sent a probe to the moon to take photographs and to measure the temperature, and the probe has revealed that the south pole of the moon is the coldest spot in our solar system. Because there is a large crater there, and possibly a crater within a crater, the area never sees the sun. The article led to a discussion about the nature of the moon, and suddenly the disparity between the edu...

Last night, my orchestra had its first of three rehearsals for a concert we'll be giving Saturday evening. The season's theme is space related (as in the Cosmos, not Star Wars), so we will be playing portions of Holst's The Planets throughout the year starting with Mars, Venus and Jupiter. There are six horn parts, and we're covering them with four players. Fortunately, my rib/muscle/cartilage issue has resolved itself, and the guy next to me with the upper respiratory something and carpel tunnel surgery is doing just fine, so we're handling it. Last night, it was so nice to sit down and play the parts and do well. When you sit alone in your living room to practice, you can play with dynamics and do your best to be musical—as the principal horn player says, to play the way the composer intended—but nothing compares to being in the midst of the whole group where you can react to each other, a collective adrenalin rush that makes the quiet sections lovely with anticip...

Last week when I was thinking about an editorial for today's edition of Small Town Newspaper, I discovered that today is National Young Readers Day. It was established by the Library of Congress in order to encourage kids to read willingly and to develop a love for reading that will last their lifetime. It's a worthy goal. The thing is, in order to fund events and materials and to market the thing, they needed a corporate sponsor, and they chose Pizza Hut. I am not a fan of Pizza Hut. Ranked among the pizza chains, I think they are mediocre, and the atmosphere of their restaurants makes me sad. But my main issue is not that it was Pizza Hut that sponsors something like a reading program with the Library of Congress. I find it appalling that we would allow any junk-food companies to promote their junk to a captive audience—this reading program is in public schools, and food from Pizza Hut is a reward for kids who read. I should have written my editorial about this issue, but mos...

I am up early on a Saturday morning—have already had a cup of coffee, checked the Facebook news feed, skimmed the newspaper, ignored CNN's chatter—because the cats don't understand daylight savings time or Saturday mornings. They want food when they want food, and with Big Mike's blood sugar issues, I can't really ignore his request for breakfast. So, I will take the opportunity to tell you that I have brought Maryann back from the dead. Maryann was the title I gave to a novel I wrote a couple of years ago. When I was writing it, I posted a chapter at a time on its own blog but then put it away. Well, HERE it is in full, downloadable or readable online. One of my brothers-in-law has written a novel and put it online in pdf form, so I have followed his lead and done the same with Maryann, now called Mrs. Branch. November is National Novel Writing Month. I'm not going to write a novel in November, so I'll take the cheap way out and offer up one already written.

I didn't fall down, but someone else did, and I feel somewhat responsible. Here's what happened: I was sitting in the coffee shop section of Borders yesterday afternoon where I had camped out in an arm chair. I was working on a thing for Small Town Newspaper and was on a roll, sort of. A deaf man stopped by and signaled that I might like to buy a pen from him—he held out a ball point pen with a card attached explaining he was deaf, and the pen would cost $1. So, I handed him a dollar, and he handed me the pen. He walked over to a guy in another chair who declined, and I felt superior. I thought the deaf man might not really be deaf and was just too lazy to get a job, but that's not my responsibility. I had a spare dollar I won't miss, and now hopefully he'll put it to good use. I went back to my writing when a young woman sat down next to me, and I had a sense she was looking at me. I looked up to see her staring at me with her chin in her hand. She asked if I had a...

The two things converged yesterday—a quiet day and a piano. So, I played through some music on the stand, and when I got to Mozart's Fantasia, I thought this is something I have to record. What was I thinking? I suppose I was thinking that this music is fun to play even if you play it poorly. It varies from loud to soft and loud, and it slips into slow passages after some punky fast phrases. There are chords and runs and the satisfaction that comes from pounding on the keyboard now and then. It's got it all. Some of it is like stirring cream with a wooden spoon; some of it is like smashing something with a hammer; and some of it is like tucking in your arms and rolling down a grassy hill, screaming until you reach the bottom. When I first learned this thing in high school, my poor old teacher had a sort of rickety grand piano, and when I used the sustaining pedal too ferociously, the thing fell off. I sat there on the bench apologizing with my teacher stretched out on the floor...

To translate: I am learning Spanish. I'm not sure that's true, but I'm certainly trying. For Christmas last year, Eustacia gave me a language kit that suggests you can learn Spanish in 3 months, and I have finally started using it. The kit's CD is for hearing the proper pronunciation as you work your way through the book, but this CD doesn't include explanations. And it doesn't tell you to slow down, that the chapters designed to be completed in one week are not meant to be completed in one evening. I can't help myself, though. As I worked on the first chapter, Week 1, it seemed so simple that I whizzed right through it, and I was reminded of the Spanish I learned in high school. But I didn't stop to actually memorize the vocabulary or the sentence structure that would come in handy later. Week 2 brought even more words and grammar rules, and by Week 5—or Day 5, in my case—I am in over my head. I now have to start over and quiz myself and actually work ...

My nephew Colin has been posting old family photos on Facebook, and you never know what horrifying image may appear from day to day. He has dug up pictures from a Christmas when I was relatively thin, which just makes me feel fat. And yesterday he found this picture from my teen years. On the left is my eldest sister holding her son Kenneth who is now 30ish and the father of two. In the middle is one of my middle sisters, and on the right sits young Scout at about the age of 17. I remember being that age, but I have no recollection of this moment—I don't know where that swing might have been, whether it was in Georgia or Indiana or Alabama. My hair went through a series of changes and in those years. My mother had this idea that to be truly pretty, a girl had to have curly hair, and since my hair is naturally straight, I was therefore not naturally pretty and was given a permanent now and then as a child. When I was 15, I chose to have that terrible thing done to my hair of my own ...

It doesn't take much to declare a month the National Month of Whatever. All you have to do is make it so and put it on the Internet, and unless it's something completely ridiculous, it will take off and actually become recognized by people other than yourself. Well, November is the National Month of Inspirational Role Models, so called by a woman in Detroit who is part of some sort of community organization. The designation has since spread, and now people outside of Detroit recognize it. In preparation for an editorial about role models, I spent some time thinking about my role models, and I couldn't come up with any. I guess I don't have one. Is that wrong? When I was a kid, I'm pretty sure my sisters were my role models. They are older than I am, and they seemed so grown up to me. They were (and are) smart and funny and talented and independent. I wanted their clothes and their friends and the little bit of freedom they were granted more so than I was—heck, I was...