Itchy

(Courtesy of backtothefuture.wikia.com)

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” — Albert Einstein

The times I’ve screwed up most in my life are the times when I’ve ignored my intuition.

Intuition nudges me in different ways on different days.  Could be (and often is) something simple — which driving route to take or a particular item to buy.  Sometimes the issues are weightier, at which point intuition wades in bearing a klaxon that you’d think I’d have no trouble hearing.

What is it about ourselves that makes us ignore such blatant and visceral alarms?

Back around 1987 or ’88, my first husband and I found ourselves out of work.  The corporate position I’d held had been liquidated due to a consolidation and subsequent office move out-of-state.  As for himself, well, he was out of work more than he was in (harbinger to life with an immature dweeb).

At any rate, finding ourselves somewhat at sixes and sevens, we opted to sell most of our stuff, put the rest in storage, and take a little adventure.  The plan was to travel down to Florida to see a friend, then out to Colorado to visit my sister, and then head back-on East (via Michigan and another friend) where we would squat (briefly, one hoped) with my disapproving parents while we found new jobs.  (This, of course, was back in the day when jobs were a wee more plentiful than they are at present.)

All in all, things went well.  The car behaved.  The cat (yes, we had the cat with us because my father swore he’d have her put down if we left her with them — nice, huh?) took to traveling like a fish to water, laying along the back window while we traveled.  But somewhere — briefly — an ominous wrinkle appeared.

At this late date, I can’t tell you where we were when it happened.  We’d pulled off the highway at a large rest stop because I needed to use the bathroom.  The minute we parked, the orange warning sign in my head went off.  “Come in with me,” I said to the dweeb.

“I don’t need the bathroom,” he said.

“I don’t care,” I said.  “Just come with me.”

He wouldn’t, so I went in alone with the Star Trek “red alert” blaring in my mind.

The interior of the place was maintained and well-lit.  There were other people around, both men and women.  But there was this guy…

I can see him in my head to this day.  Tallish.  Slender.  In his 30s probably.  He glanced at me as I came in and that’s when the warning in my brain grew really hot.  I knew he was the reason I needed to be worried.  I probably should have turned right around and walked out, told hubby to drive on to the next stop or made him come back in with me.  But I talked myself out of it, told myself to stop being so silly, and went into the ladies bathroom as another woman came out.

I entered a stall, sat down to pee…and the door opened.  A pair of men’s shoes walked past my stall and went into the stall next to me.  The walls were high enough that he couldn’t look over at me (at least I don’t think he could; I didn’t dare look up to find out, couldn’t bring myself to do it).  I hurried up the peeing (as much as anyone can) and bolted, racing for the car.  When I got in and slammed the door, the dweeb’s emergency light finally went on.

“What’s the matter?”

“That guy,” I said, motioning with my eyes where the said individual had just come out of the building.  “He followed me into the bathroom.”

It would be nice to say that my former husband confronted this guy, but he didn’t.  Would it have done any good?  Who can say?  Should we have gotten his license plate number and reported him to the police?  Probably.  Could I PROVE it was him?  Nope.  All I saw was his shoes.  All I felt was the hot wire warning that went down my spine when I saw him.

That incident leaps to mind every time my intuition kicks in.  There are still days when I talk myself out of doing what it’s telling me to do (and days when I regret doing so), but mostly I try to follow that secret voice at my core.

And the dweeb?  Well, he’s one of those things intuition warned me about.  Sometimes I’m a slow learner.

Candlelight

 (courtesy passnepa.org)

What is it about the dark of night that makes it so easy to be hard on ourselves?

I write this at 2:23 am, having been up for an hour due to a combination of eye-piercing headache and my husband’s snoring.  I’ve the lights on, a fire in the hearth, and a cat asleep on the back of the couch.  (She’s yowling in her sleep, probably dreaming about the dog who visited yesterday.)  Beyond the curtained windows, the woods are dark.

I find no fear in that darkness.  I have enough within to occupy myself.

At times like this, my brain seeks out the chinks in my daily armor.  “You’re hopeless.  Useless.”  “You’ve wasted your life.”  “You’ll never amount to anything.”  “You call that writing?”

giveupgiveupgiveupgiveupgiveup

Some nights, it’s hard not to listen, difficult not to embrace those lying words as truth.

How many of us achieve the grandiose dreams we set for ourselves in childhood, high school, or college?  How often do we sell ourselves short and settle for something less than what we want or feel we deserve?  Although — admittedly — sometimes that supposed “less” turns out to be more than we imagined, a blessing in disguise, turns out to be exactly what we need as opposed to what we want.

Smart man with words, that Mick Jagger.

So what to do on those nights (or sometimes days) when the shadows loom and the voices whisper?  It’s easy to say “don’t listen.”  It’s cavalier to suggest one turn their back when, in the end, it’s us alone against the dark side of ourselves.  (And who willingly turns their back on the enemy?)  Friends are good to reach out to.  They’ll bolster a sagging ego, rally around, maybe give useable advice (but usually not).  They’ll help keep you afloat until you regain the strength to swim again on your own.

But, oh, aren’t the deep waves tempting sometimes?

The Stranger

 (courtesy of wired.com)

Well we all have a face that we hide away forever
And we take them out and show ourselves
When everyone has gone.
Some are satin, some are steel, some are silk and some are leather
They’re the faces of the stranger , but we love to try them on.

You may never understand how the stranger is inspired
But he isn’t always evil and he is not always wrong.
Though you drown in good intentions, you will never quench the fire.
You’ll give in to your desire when the stranger comes along.

                                                                                                                                   (Lyrics from Billy Joel’s “The Stranger”)

How foreign really are the phantoms we carry beneath the thin sheath of our hides?  Don’t pretend they aren’t real.  You know they are — whether or not you’re willing to acknowledge them.

We don’t give up playing pretend when we leave childhood, we just raise the stakes.  We play at being beautiful or handsome or stylish or modern or intelligent or with it or…well, take your pick.  We may, indeed, be many of those things, but chances are that sooner or later you put on a mask to be something you’re not, to fool others or to fool yourself, to try on some clothes “off the rack” (as it were) that you otherwise wouldn’t dare shrug into on a regular basis.

Sometimes we carry regrets for the roles we don’t have the nerve to embrace, the black-edged shadows of our soul that call a seductive siren’s cry into the void.  I look back on my life and realization emerges with a bit of squint-eyed, broken-mirror glare:  I wish I’d been Joan Jett.

I mean, look at her:

 (courtesy of mylespaul.com)

She’s perfect, an amazing blend of beauty, raw sexuality, and spit-in-your-eye bravado.  God, who wouldn’t want to be her?!

I was raised to be a good girl and I’ve worked very hard to maintain that facade.  In truth, I suppose it isn’t entirely a facade; certainly, I’ve some good girl in me.  (Too much, probably.  The Pollyanna training runs deep.)  But I’ve got a bit of bad girl in there, too, and it’s a damn shame I don’t let that rebel run wild a little more often.  I may be in my 50s, but there’s still a part of me that wants to wear leather, spandex, and silver studs, to bang my head, to raise a fist.  I want to look hot, cut my hair just so, wear too much makeup, and strut like Travolta.  I don’t do it (except in the privacy of my own head and my own home…), but I want to, right out there in public for the whole world to see.

Why don’t I?

Well, partly because I don’t want to embarrass myself.  And partly because once I let that genie out of the bottle, she might not want to go back.

See, she’s the Hyde to my Jekyll, the dark and wild free spirit that lurks at my core, the flame-bearer of my heart, the bit that (thanks to family and society and pressure) I turned my back on years ago.  I haven’t lost her entirely and that’s a good thing, but for a long time I pretended (and believed) that she no longer existed, that I had eradicated her.

It made me sad.

But recently I’ve discovered that she’s alive.  And she’s strong.  And she wants her time.  Oh, I don’t plan on running out and purchasing a new wardrobe, but I’m finding other ways to let her have her day, her say, her time.

And, man, it feels good.

Thar She Blows!

(Courtesy of foodbozo.com)

One of the great joys of my life was reaching an age where I no longer had to automatically go on vacation with my parents.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love to travel, I just didn’t like going anywhere with my parents.  Our trips were relegated to twice-yearly visits with distant relatives I hardly knew and, since my folks were never what you’d call ”go out and have a rousing good time” sort of people, consisted of sitting around doilied living rooms listening to other people talk.

Death to a teenager.

So when I got to be around 15, I told them I didn’t want to go.  I don’t recall my father caring one way or another, but Mom was worried about leaving me alone, fraught with terror that any number of ills would befall me while out of her protective sight.  I held firm, pleading my case, and she finally agreed — IF I allowed my niece Michelle to stay with me.  At that point, I’d have agreed to just about anything to get them in the car and gone, but I still wonder what “protection” she thought a 10-year-old would be.

At any rate, my parents departed, leaving us to our own devices.  And, my, but didn’t we feel so grown up and independent and worldly!  We played music loud, stayed up late, all those “rebel” tendencies.  (Hah!  We were the most staid rebels you’ve ever seen.  Not a cigarette or a glass of wine to be seen.  We’d never have dared and, in fact, I’m not sure the thought ever crossed our minds.)

But one night, getting ready to watch some movie on television (this was back in the Ice Age before cable or VHS or DVDs; anyone else remember “Movie of the Week?”), Michelle expressed a desire for a snack.  We rifled the kitchen cabinets, came up with an ancient box of tapioca, and decided to make pudding.  Neither of us had ever done it before, but we’d watched my mother do it and, honestly, how hard can it be if you follow the directions printed on the box?

How much to make, though?  The recipe as written seemed skimpy.  We were hungry! 

So we made the entire box.

Have you ever seen the really big mixing bowls our grandmothers once used?  They held lots (and I mean LOTS) — everything from vast quantities of rising bread dough to quarts of strawberries.  Ours looked like this:

(Courtesy of ebay.com)

It was big.

BIG.

And it was full of tapioca pudding.

We let it cool just past the tongue-scalding stage before we lugged it into the living room and sat down on either side of it in front of the television, each of us armed with a spoon.

The two of us ate the entire thing.  Down to the bare crockery.  Licked it clean.

Six cups of milk.  A cup of tapioca.  A cup of sugar.  Four eggs.

Oh, my God.

We lay on the carpet like pregnant beached whales, moaning with despair until we were finally able to get up and shamble off to bed like a pair of undead ticks, bloated beyond belief.  In the morning, we swore we would never eat tapioca again.  I’m pretty sure Michelle has kept that promise all these years.

Come to think of it, so have I.

Gone Between

Oh, Tongue, give sound to joy and sing
Of hope and promise on dragonwing.

Anne McCaffrey died on Monday, November 21, at approximately 5 pm at her home in Ireland.  As there will doubtless be many tributes and obituaries posted online and elsewhere, I don’t need to repeat the details of Ms. McCaffrey’s life  here.  What I would like to mention is her effect on me.

In 1971, I had never heard of Anne McCaffrey.  I was 15, a freshman in high school, and not even much into science fiction.  That changed the day a new friend put a copy of Dragonflight into my hands and said, “You need to read this.”  She was right.  Although I’d dabbled a bit in “sci-fi,” it was fantasy that held sway over me.  In my soul, I was Peter Pan.  I read deeply of unicorns and giants, dark fairies and witches, selkies and dwarves.  I didn’t even really like science fiction much.  I found it too dry.  But there, in the pages of Dragonflight, I found a seamless blend of worlds both scientific and fantastical.

There’s been some debate over whether the Dragonrider books are science fiction or fantasy.  To quote Wikipedia:  While the earlier novels in the series have elements also present in fantasy (low levels of technology, fire-breathing dragons, feudal societies), the prologue explains the events take place on a colony world. The first novel was originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact (1967), and that magazine did not publish fantasy. The publisher lists them as science fiction titles, and McCaffrey herself describes them as science fiction and stresses the scientific rationales behind the world she has created.

Although she wrote of many different worlds, it was the McCaffrey of Pern who first made science fiction palatable to me.  The reasons, I think, are threefold.  The world of Pern is total, complete, as solid and real as a handful of clay.  Her characters, though occasionally superlative in a James T. Kirk sort of way, are also flawed and eminently human.  And her dragons — ah, her dragons! — are not just fire-breathing fashion accessories for some scantily clad heroine or iron-thewed hero, but complete characters in their own right.

It was a short hop from Dragonflight to crafting my own Pern stories.  With a handful of writing friends, I filled notebooks on the adventures of our own characters (Mira, Elitha, K’nar) and their dragons (Brenth, Tamorth, Mirenth).  Through four years of high school and on into college we continued the tales, on the way growing as story-tellers.  Meeting other admirers of Pern added spice to the mix.  Holds and Weyrs cropped up and their members wrote their own stories, spreading and deepening the history of Pern.  Although I’ve read that Ms. McCaffrey did not altogether approve of the changes some Pern fans made to their version of her world (multi-colored dragons comes to mind), she seems to have been reasonably tolerant of our desire to play in her sandbox.

And what a wonderful sandbox it was!  What a safe and careful place in which to begin the process of honing our skills as writers, to learn the craft, to parse out the permutations of plot and character development, conflict and pacing.  And what friendships were made in the process.

Anne is gone, but she lives on in the worlds she created, the words she shared.  She taught us that it was okay to dream — and dream big! — and that we may face defeat, but it need not devour us.  The Dragonlady has gone between.  The dragons keen their sorrow.  And we are richer for having known her.

Thank you, Anne.

Harper, tell me of the road
That leads beyond this Hold,
That wends its way beyond the hill…
Does it go further on until
It ends in sunset’s gold?

(picture of Anne McCaffrey courtesy of  mccaffrey.srellim.org)

Sleepless in Connecticut

 (courtesy of obesity.ygoy.com)

I love my husband very much.

I hate his snoring even more.

When we first met, he never snored.  In fact, for the first year we were together, he never snored.  I think it was a ruse to get me to marry him, because if he’d snored then the way he snores now, the marriage would never have happened.

I’m not talking a few little grunts and snuffles and burbles.  I’m talking noise to move seismographs in the Sahara and rattle tea-cups in Japan.  There have been times when his snoring was so loud that it kept me awake THREE ROOMS AWAY!

Humor aside, this has caused some issues in our marriage.  Lack of sleep makes you contemplate all sorts of things, not the least of which being holding a pillow over your loved one’s face until he expires.  Vacations have been ruined by his snoring.  For several years, I ended up moving out of our bedroom and into one of my own because I was tired of having to get up and move onto the couch every night.  (Sure, I should have made him move, but he was impossible to wake up.  I have literally shaken him and had him not so much as crack an eyelid.)  He woke every morning dragging and headachy and irritable.  Made him loads of fun to live with.

I begged him to seek help/lose weight/exercise, all to no avail.  It was hard not to think he just didn’t care about the distress it was causing.  Actions speak louder than words and that’s how I chose to interpret his lack of interest in our difficulty.  Finally, he agreed to be tested for sleep apnea.  Hooray!

Until they declared him to have a mild case (Yeah?  You try sleeping with him!) and insurance refused to treat it.

At our own expense, he finally agreed to undergo a uvulectomy.  For the uninitiated, a uvulectomy is a surgical procedure in which all or part of the uvula is removed. The uvula is the bell-shaped organ that hangs from the top of the throat.  The pain post-surgery was the worst he ever experienced and he told me — in no uncertain (and quite angry) terms — that he would never, ever undergo something like that again.

Did it work?  For about a week.  Then we were back to the awful snoring…and back to sleeping apart.  And, frankly, it sucks swamp water to live like a roommate with your spouse of choice.

And that’s where things stayed until earlier this year when a friend of ours was diagnosed with sleep apnea and issued a CPAP machine.

 (courtesy mysleepapneasite.com)

This is a nifty gadget that forces air into the nose to keep the breathing passages open.  Friend mentioned it providing relief and on her word, husband decided to try again.

He went for a sleep study and discovered, to his amazement, that he was waking up no less than 60+ times an hour.  (Yes, you read that right — waking at least once a minute.)  No wonder he felt like death warmed over most of the time.  So they wrote a prescription for a CPAP machine of his very own.

He doesn’t like it, but he uses it.  He calls it his “deep-sea diving mask.”  It’s admittedly awkward and annoying.  It wakes him up in the night because the seal has crack, or it’s uncomfortable, but even with those disturbances, he’s getting more (and better) sleep with it than without.  He no longer wakes exhausted and with a pounding headache.

The problem?

Sometimes — like tonight — when he first comes to bed, he snores despite the machine.  That usually ends after a few minutes.  But occasionally — also tonight — he removes it in his sleep and I can’t get him to put it back on.  Then I have not only the snoring to contend with, but the sound of blowing air as well.

Which is why I’m writing this at 3 am.

If you’re up, give me a call.  We’ll talk.

 

Sign of the Season

 (Picture courtesy of marlboroughrotary.org)

I was driving to the grocery store this morning to do the requisite shopping for Thursday’s holiday meal.  We’re getting off easy this year, as we’ll be dining with friends who are taking on the brunt of things like pies and cooking the bird.  I’ve been asked to provide a vegetable dish (acorn squash baked with apples – oh my yes!) and stuffing.

The stuffing is an iffy proposition at best.  My mother made the world’s best stuffing, a dense dish heavy with bread, potatoes (yes, potatoes), onions, celery, milk, butter, and what my husband describes as a “metric butt-ton” of poultry seasoning.  It’s a wonderful thing.  Now, you’d think that one of her three daughters would have inherited the ”stuffing gene,”right?  But such is not the case.  Although at least two of us have made repeated attempts at duplicating her fabulous recipe, the result never tastes the same.  So I’ve warned our hosts that this will be definitely be an experimental dish (I’m ditching Mom’s recipe and trying something new) to which the male half the party said, “Your experiments always turn out great, so no worries.”

God bless him.

At any rate — as I was driving to the store, I got to thinking about that iconic Thanksgiving image — the resplendent Tom turkey, tail feathers fanned in display.  He’s everywhere this time of year — on cards, in windows, on signs, hung on school-room walls.  You know the one I mean:

 FAKE TURKEY (courtesy of clipartspot.com)

 REAL TURKEY (courtesy of flickr.com)

TOTAL TURKEY (courtesy of squidoo.com)

And I flashed on a memory that I’m willing to bet many of you share:  the turkey hand.  Or the hand turkey, depending upon your phraseology.  Oh, come on.  Don’t give me that look.  You know exactly what I mean:

(Courtesy of thewoodenrobot.com)

It must have been somewhere between first and third grades that I learned to make these.  (Probably first grade, knowing my lovely, wonderful teacher Mrs. Kirkpatrick.)  Take a clean sheet of paper, place your open hand on it, palm down, trace around it with a crayon, and color it in to your heart’s delight.  If your teacher was particularly brave, paint was allowed.

This jolly fellow was our harbinger to the holiday to come.  Halloween was behind us, our candy consumed, our pumpkins consigned to the trash, costumes put away for another year.  Christmas loomed in the distance, hidden behind the hump of Thanksgiving and all its trappings, the wonderful food, glorious smells, and hope of snow.  How best to help us prepare, than for our teacher to instruct us in the world’s easiest way to draw a turkey?

Do they still do it this way, I wonder?  If not, they should.  If not, YOU should.  Find a little kid and get to it!

***************************************

Another Thanksgiving memory surfaced while I was writing this:

One year, the bindery in which my dad worked closed on Thanksgiving week and gave every a “vacation.”  Because we only ever saw my mother’s family in Maine once a year, in summer, my folks decided we would go up for Thanksgiving.  While this no doubt was something of a pain in the tuchus for my parents (well, for my mother in particular, since she was the one stuck packing the suitcases at the last minute), for me it was a moment of magic.  See my grandparents and cousins when it wasn’t summer?  Rapture!

I remember we purchased a Swifts Premium Turkey Roast (I can still hum the jingle) for the centerpiece of our meal.  I’m sure the usual trappings were there (potatoes — well, it IS Maine, after all, stuffing, vegetables), though I can’t remember them now.  I do recall that Grandma made me jello in one of her copper molds.  (I’d been begging for ages and when she finally agreed, my mother said, “If she’s going to all that trouble, you’d better eat every bit!”  I did…and these molds were BIG.)

As if all this wasn’t enough to make the holiday special, it snowed.  And when I saw snowed, I mean it in big letters:  S-N-O-W-E-D!  A real old-fashioned New England nor’easter screaming across northern Maine.  Something in the afternoon, Pop called me out of the kitchen, down the short hall to past the laundry room and basement door and stood me on my tiptoes on an over-turned box to look out the window of the back door.  The snow raced sideways in powdery sheets lit by the flood light near the back steps.  And there, forging a track from beneath the steps to the garden shed, was an ermine.

 (Courtesy of naturescapes.net)

I don’t know if he was hunting like this fellow or not.  Possibly he was, or perhaps he’d found a way into the cellar and a bit of warmth.  Whatever his mission, Pop and I watched him for some time, and it was a bit of magic I’ve held onto for years.

*******************************

And one last thing, just because it made me laugh:

 (courtesy democraticunderground.com)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I Know What I Like

  (Photo courtesy of aromatech.ca)

“The most immediate and basic response we have to a scent is whether we like it or not.” – Dr. Rachel S. Herz

I am extremely sensitive to odors, yet they form some of my strongest memories — good ones as well as bad, a jumble of images, sensations, and emotions as varied as a jester’s motley.

Synthetic scents are a no-no, intolerable and headache-inducing because they are usually so strong, a massive weight where a faint hint would suffice.  We’ve all experienced it — the miasma of heavy aftershave or perfume, hair product or deodorant.  (An elderly neighbor used to saturate the hall adjoining our apartments with a cloying stink my husband referred to ‘Bile Berry.’)

For me are the scents found in nature – the light perfume of wild-growing flowers, the mineral tang of lake water, the musk of earthworms in the rain. and the loam-rich scent of horse manure.  Better still are those aromas associated with food — fresh rosemary and thyme, oregano and basil crushed between my fingers; the bouquet of cinnamon and nutmeg, allspice and ginger and clove; the indescribable allure of real vanilla.  One whiff, and I am transported…

…my grandmother’s kitchen and the air thick with the smell of baking bread, molasses cookies, and fresh doughnuts.
…holidays with my parents, the rich odor of butter cookies heavy with sugar and vanilla; fudge with a scent so massive you could practically carry it.
…a childhood classroom, each student with an orange and a pile of whole cloves, pushing the sharp, pointed end into the heavy rind, releasing the perfume of juice and oil.
…the old electric range in the house I grew up in, a back-burner set on simmer beneath an enormous kettle of spaghetti sauce, bubbling like lava.
…baked cloves of garlic, sweet and hot, spread across a slab of hot, fresh bread.

The delight that comes from pleasurable scents are many – you feel them in your mouth and stomach and nose, but more importantly, you experience them once again in your mind and heart.  In that way, we anchor to the past and send tendrils to the future.

First Steps

 (Picture courtesy of mikecasey.net)

I got thinking today about kindergarten.  I don’t remember having much in the way of expectations of my first foray into school, no recollection of anything my mother told me, no sense of excitement or dread.  Kindergarten was just something I was expected to do, so I did it.  When the school bus arrived at our stop that first morning, I climbed up that Everest of steps without a single look back at my mother (unlike my neighbor Bobby — two years my senior — who bawled like an infant and threw a spectacular temper-tantrum that embarrassed both him and his mother).

My teacher, Mrs. Davenport, wasn’t much taller than the kids she was hired to teach; a chunky, round-bodied woman with te face of a squeezed lemon and a soul of arsenic.  It was obvious right away that she didn’t like kids and had no interest in teaching us anything of importance.  Of course back then (we’re talking 1962), kindergarten ”teaching” was an over-inflated term.  Ours was a half-day made up of play time, story time, snack time, and nap time before they shoveled us back into the bus for the long trip home.  I’m not sure what Mrs. Davenport had to complain about.  Her job was more that of a babysitter than an actual teacher, but maybe that was her problem.  Maybe she resented the perceived waste of her time and talent.  At any rate, she treated us like the enemy and interacted with us as little as possible, saving her voice for reprimands, sarcasm, and little else.

Play I knew how to do, though what happened in our classroom was drab compared to the rich, imaginative romps in my back yard.  Girls were doomed to play ”house” and “kitchen” and (in extreme cases) “school,” while the boys were allowed to rumpus a bit with oversized cardboard building blocks (something I would rather have done).  Story time was coupled with snack time, occupying both our minds and our stomachs.  I have a vague remembrance of chocolate chip cookies and small glass bottles of whole milk, though I can’t remember a single story.  Nap time was a total waste.  I hadn’t taken a nap at home in years and the idea of doing so now, smack in the middle of the day when I was wide awake and there were so many things I’d rather be doing was an alien and ungainly notion.  I lay on my thin mat and stared at the ceiling, while all around me my classmates snored like sailors.  Every now and then I’d be reprimanded to close my eyes.  I would dutifully comply, then roll onto my side away from the teacher and open them again, laying in silence until the call came to wake up, put on our coats, and go home.

All in all, it was an uninspiring nine months.  On the other hand, that time was my first journey into the greater world, the first indication that there was something of import beyond the walls of my home, a thing to explore and know, the sense of an adventure as yet unrealized.  What that adventure would bring — failure as well as glory, sadness coupled with joy — were ideas as yet unrealized, vague notions behind the clouds in my eyes.  All I knew then…all I know now…is that I burned to know it all.

Mon Histoire D’Amour Avec Le Chocolat

 (photo courtesy of jujubabies.com)

As a kid, I wasn’t into chocolate.  I know; blasphemy, right?  What kid doesn’t love chocolate?  Well, this one for starters.

Chocolate was my father’s purview and he wasn’t picky in its form or nature.  Hot chocolate, syrup over chocolate ice cream (an almost nightly occurrence), a large bar (always a LARGE bar) whenever someone gifted it (usually at Christmas).  Mars Bars and Milky Ways.  M&Ms and Snickers.  With or without nuts or raisins or anything else you might add.  You name it; as long as it was chocolate (except white chocolate, which he despised), he’d eat it.

My mother was definitely not a chocolate fan.  In fact, other than peanut M&Ms and Fanny Farmer’s Turtles, I don’t think she ever ate the stuff.  Unlike my dad, she was a connoisseur of English toffee, caramels, and Planters Peanut Bars.

As for me, I possessed an enormous candy drawer for a kid with little interest in it.  Though the drawer was considered mine (except for the year that the black ants invaded, then it was definitely theirs — erg), it was really anyone’s drawer.  At any given time it contained a tumbled mixture of licorice, all flavors of Pez (and several character dispensers that would probably be worth some money nowadays), lemon drops, and the detritus of whatever holiday had most recently passed.

If it was Easter, my chocolate bunny took up residence in the freezer where Dad could break off pieces whenever the mood struck him (i.e., every time he passed the fridge).  He got the jelly beans, too, because I couldn’t stand the sugary grating against my teeth,  I was content with the foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and mottled malted milk eggs.  The horrid, flourescent yellow marshmallow chicks always ended up in the bottom of my toy box where they hardened into a frighteningly mold-free, rock-like substance which could then be used in games of pretend.

Halloween brought an enormous cache which I upended onto the living room rug and doled out to my parents.  To me came a few random candy bars and the apples and cookies (this was back when it was safe to have neighbors give out homemade goodies).  Dad laid claim to everything chocolate.  Mom took the Necco wafers and Mary Janes.  The loose and scattered handfuls of candy corn sat unmolested for weeks until, having turned into hardened, diseased-looking gigantic fingernails, they were dumped into the trash.

At Christmas, I eschewed the chocolate or peanut butter fudge, the five-pound Hershey bar, and the popcorn balls thick with molasses in favor of peppermint canes and spearmint, rooting through the glass dish of hard, jewel-like candies for my favorite flavors.

So what brought about my change of heart toward chocolate?

I have my friends Lorraine and Phil Spaziani to thank for broadening my gustatory horizons.  It was in their kitchen that I first heard the names Ghirardelli and Guittard, Lindt and Ritter and Droste, and savored the pleasure of dark chocolate as it’s meant to be.  I learned about dutch process cocoa and the exquisite joy of making homemade hot chocolate from scratch rather than relying on canned syrup or a talcum-y powder dissolved in water.  To say I’ve become a zealous convert is the understatement of the year.  My desire to explore the world of excellent chocolate — as consumer, as baker —  has no horizon.  So at this point, I’ve only one question:  Knowing his experience with chocolat, do you think I could persuade Johnny Depp to help?

 (Photo courtesy of lemurpublishing.com)

Hot Cocoa ala Lorraine Spaziani

1/4 Cup dry cocoa (do yourself a favor and purchase a really high quality cocoa)
1/4 Cup sugar
dash of salt
1/3 Cup hot water
4 Cups whole milk
3/4 teaspoon vanilla

In a saucepan, whisk together cocoa, sugar, salt, and hot water.  Bring to a boil over medium heat and cook for two minutes, stirring constantly.  Add milk and stir thoroughly.  Heat through, but DO NOT BOIL.  Add vanilla and whisk to a froth and serve in mugs with or without whipped cream and/or marshmallows.