Scout Moves

As I sit here on this easy Sunday afternoon watching A nthony Bourdain's "No Reservations," as he learns about food in the Ozarks —he kills a squirrel, skins it on the front porch and eats it in a meat and vegetable pie—I am reminded of an event from my youth. Follow me down the Reminiscing Trail, won't you? When I was in middle school, I had a friend, Sue, who lived in the country and whose parents tended a garden. I spent the night with her a few times and had food they had grown and hunted themselves. One night, Sue's mother served me squirrel but was afraid to tell me what it was because she didn't know if I'd eat it. I ate every bit on my plate and thoroughly enjoyed it, and the family liked me for not turning my nose up at squirrel meat. What they didn't know was that my sisters had grown up eating squirrel before I came along. Living in Alabama, our family didn't have a lot of money, and my father would hunt squirrel to put meat on ...

Since before Labor Day I have been working with a committee of three to plan a fund-raising event for the orchestra, and I’ll write about that here so that a year from now, when we likely will do this all over again, I’ll be able to look back at a record of the rights and wrongs committed. This all started last summer when our general manager asked the acting event planner, Katy, to come up with some kind of dinner/dance fund-raising event. Maybe she didn’t specifically say “dance,” but that’s what I recall. Katy asked me to help, and we sat on this idea for a while. There was no time to put it together that summer, so we aimed for New Years and had a great plan for a bash. The hall we wanted to use wasn’t free, though, so we thought about Mardi Gras instead. But another money-asking non-profit hosts a big Mardi Gras event, so we aimed for a mid-winter ball instead. I don’t know why that idea didn’t fly, but then we got to summer and couldn’t put it off any longer. We looked at...

I’m reading Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn—in 1992, a cargo ship crossing the Pacific hit a storm that pitched it at angles extreme enough to send some upper-deck containers plummeting into the deep. The force of the impact was powerful enough to break open the containers, and imported goods floated out to sea. Among the merchandise were 28,800 rubber bath toys, a fourth of them little, yellow ducks. So, Hohn traveled to the four corners to track these little ducks that washed ashore. His journey is fascinating, and what he learns and then teaches is compelling. In my reading today, Hohn reminisces about his childhood and Sesame Street and discovering the song Ernie sings about bathtime "Rubber Ducky, You’re the One." And now I have to reminisce, too. The song was introduced in 1970 and spread far beyond Sesame Street. In fact, that year, it made the Top 40. Is there still a Top 40 in pop radio? I have no idea because I don’t listen to pop radio these days, but in 1970, I was...

I was vacuuming all the empty bedrooms upstairs, the ones where my daughters used to sleep (sigh), and I ran across things I could pilfer. I found a bottle of nail polish, and now my nails look nicer than they have for a long time. I found a bottle of air freshener that will come in handy where the cats are concerned, and I found a book I had heard about but had not yet read, Elie Wiesel’s Night . I decided that as soon as I finished the house cleaning, I would sit down to read the book and have it finished by Sunday evening. It’s only about 120 pages. Wiesel was 15 when his Romanian-born family was evacuated to a Nazi concentration camp, and Night is his account of those events. You’d think such a first-hand telling would take more than 120 pages, and printed with generous leading at that, but one thing that makes this book so compelling is that he takes only that number of pages, a sparse number of words, to tell his story. When describing the day-to-day survival of concentra...

This evening, I had the task of preparing dinner for Husband and I, and I wasn’t keen on the idea. It had been such a nice day that began with sleeping in, followed by a nice breakfast. The dog and I went for a walk at the park, I had a pleasant lunch, watched a little news, read a little, went to a quick meeting, went for a swim, read some more. I had a nice conversation on the phone with No. 1 who is back to juggling—she was very good at it in high school. Quick tangent: we went to Cleveland for an Indians game one evening, and as we were finding our seats and scoping out the food options, we passed a professional juggler who was doing simple tricks. Katie offered to show him a trick she had learned, and it was new to him, so she demonstrated with great skill. Some of The Keepers Well, back to dinner time. I have a large collection of cookbooks distributed on two floors of the house, “The Keepers,” I call them, because I purged the less-than-ideal books for a charity drive l...

It feels good to cinch up a belt that used to be too small and to slide it over to the third notch. That happened to me this morning, and as I said, it feels good. It’s a sign of progress. I don’t go in for quick-fix diets these days, I don’t get sucked into promises of easy weight loss—you can have your beach body in just three short weeks—you can lose ten pounds in two weeks—you’ve seen the ads. To begin with, I’ve never had a beach body, and that isn’t my goal. And I know from past experience that if you lose ten pounds in two weeks, you did it with an eating plan that isn’t sustainable, and when you get back to normal, those ten pounds will come right back and then some. Years and years ago, I tried Slim-Fast and lost weight—like ten pounds in two weeks—but you can’t keep that up, and it turned out to be a waste of time and money. Then I met a woman who had lost a lot of weight by eating nothing but a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast and lunch; out of ignorance and desperation, I...

Cherubs on a Seesaw by Wenceslas Hollar, 17th century Well, here we are, the first workday after Labor Day, and shouldn’t it feel like the death knell of summer? The squeaky breaks of school buses cut through the late alarm clocks of those of us whose kids are years out of grade school, the pool skimmer basket can hardly contain all the leaves falling from the trees, and it’s time to retire the white pants for the season. Yep, enough of that, I guess. Except it’s not quite the end of summer. In Middle Ohio, at least, it’s going to be in the mid-80s all week with humidity to match, and if the rain holds off at some point, I might go for a swim and make use of the pool before closing time. Should happen in a month or so, I fear, when that ugly green tarp will be stretched tight over my big blue water. And although I’ve started harvesting long pants and sweaters at the odd sale here and there, I’m still wearing my short pants and thin cotton shirts like it’s July or something. I f...