To me, the perfect picture of summer happiness is this …
… vine-ripened tomatoes. The color, the smell, the taste and the memories of tomato summers gone by.
The above beauties went into my okra-tomato gumbo.
Come on over!
Tomato Joy
Tag: Encouragement
Five Friday Happy Bringers (7/19/13)
Here are five things I’m happy about this warm July Friday in South Georgia.
1. My newfound love of KALE–here sautéed with onions and garlic.
How else can you eat it? Anybody know?
2. Six-year-old Grandson Daniel pretending to be part of an Office Depot sales associates meeting yesterday. (He got bored when his mother and I were doing some shopping.) (And he has his grandfather’s sense of humor.) (I thought it was a lot funnier than the Office Depot folks did.)
Right after I took that picture, Daniel asked me if we could go look at speaker eggs. Huh? What? I’d never heard of such a thing.
How does a kid know about such devices?! When I asked him, he said that EVERYBODY knows about speaker eggs. I couldn’t decide if I was proud of him or wanted to spank him. A little while later, when he asked, “Abu, how old will you be when I’m twenty?” I knew I wanted to spank him.
3. Eating dinner in a balcony.
(At Sage. Historic District Savannah.)
4. Lying down in your bed at night, putting your head on your pillow, and going to sleep.
5. Savannah Clouds.
*
Look up at the clouds this weekend!
Pot Pie Smiles
One of my earliest joyful memories as a kid finds me meandering off, on warm summer mornings, to the community playground near my house in Cochran Field, near Macon, Georgia. My best friend Billy and I would play until our mothers brought us chicken pot pies and sweet tea. Sitting at the weathered, wooden picnic tables, we would gobble down our pot pies in their little aluminum containers (which we repurposed as treasure collectors).
I have always loved the creamy texture, the flaky crusts, the green peas and carrots, and the homey, Mama-ish warmth of chicken pot pies (or turkey pot pies but NOT cheesy or veggie pot pies). Of course, they were FROZEN SOLID forty-five minutes before I had all those lovey feelings as a child. And back then, I didn’t realize that our mothers were watching The Price Is Right or Queen for a Day instead of preparing fresh, homemade lunches for us boys.
So after buying organic vegetables from the local farm-to-table community market (doesn’t that make me sound health-oriented and grounded yet hip and on-target?), I decided to make a homemade chicken pot pie. HOMEMADE
First of all, do you have ANY clue how long it takes to chop carrots, celery, peppers and potatoes? Boil the corn and then scrape it off the cob? Finely cut the rosemary? Roll out the dough? (Okay, okay, all I did was roll it out of the carton, but still.)
But, oh my goodness, what fun! I may become a famous TV chef or something!
Delicious!
Swanson’s may do it faster, but not better!
Five Friday Happy Bringers (6/14/13)
I’m Hot but Happy. 98 degrees yesterday here in Savannah (heat index way over 100); 95 today. Whew. But unless I’m having heat tremors, here’s what I’m happy about today.
1. Seeing Love listed as an ingredient on a product label.
But kale? KALE?? Seriously?
2. The surprising, intricate beauty of looking up in Savannah.
3. My good buddy Riboclavin …
… without a thermometer. Okay, so maybe he doesn’t seem to be enjoying his food 100%, but still, he’s sitting in the sun, getting a vitamin D boost.
4. As some of you know, my grandkids call me “Abu” (Cuban/Hispanic shortened version of grandfather) because I thought “grandfather,” etc sounded entirely too paternally old. Well, six-year-old Daniel and three-year-old Gabriel are WILD over Skylanders. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, DO NOT try to figure it out. It’s far too complicated. But the Skylander franchise is basically taking over the world, of kids. Anyway, I recently told D and G that a brand new, exciting Skylander figure had just come available on the market, AbuForce!
The three-year old bought it for minute until the six-year-old exclaimed, “No way, Abu. You’re joking again.”
“I am not,” I lied. (Why does that trait come so easily to me?)
“Prove it, then,” smart-mouth Daniel challenged.
“Okay I will,” I responded, having no clue how to do so, or even what I meant.
“When?” he asked, a little smart-mouthier.
“Tomorrow,” I easily answered.
Sometimes, angels come your way. I told my friend Robert about my dilemma. He laughed and said he might be able to help. It seems the U.S miltary has a program called Huggs-to-Go, providing dolls for children of service men and women deployed. The figures have a place at the face for pictures of dad or mom, etc. Since Robert is retired Army and currently works at Hunter Army Airfield, he somehow managed to get me two of the dolls.
I presented the AbuForce figures to Daniel and Gabriel the next day. Both, in shock that there really was an AbuForce, melted my heart with their excitement over my little joke.
And the following day, they brought unparalleled joy to my heart when they both told me that they slept with AbuForce.
5. Beautiful paths to walk down.
Look for some joy this weekend. You’ll find it.
Sunday Afternoon Adventure at Bonaventure: A PhotoJournal
I spent an incredibly warm but wonderfully interesting couple of hours this afternoon at the historically magnificent Bonaventure Cemetery here in my beautiful Savannah. The day might have been heavy and muggy, but my time there was anything but–cooler than Leopold’s! It seems that every second Sunday the Bonaventure Historical Society offers free guided tours of the cemetery, so I showed up thirty minutes early with a big water bottle and wearing my thinnest t-shirt.
Before leaving my air conditioning, I checked out the cemetery’s website and learned that …
Though not Savannah’s oldest cemetery, Bonaventure is certainly its most famous and hauntingly beautiful. Quintessentially Southern Gothic, it has captured the imaginations of writers, poets, naturalists, photographers and filmmakers for more than 150 years. Part natural cathedral, part sculptural garden, Bonaventure transcends time.
Military generals, poet Conrad Aiken, Academy Award-winning lyricist Johnny Mercer and Georgia’s first governor Edward Telfair are among those buried at Bonaventure. The approximately 100-acre cemetery is also historically significant as a reflection of changing views on death and dying in the Victorian era. As death became more romanticized and ritualized during this period, cemeteries became lush, beautiful “cities of the dead.”
Another reason behind Bonaventure’s popularity is John Berendt’s book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which featured a cover photo of the now-famous “Bird Girl” statue, formerly located in Bonaventure. The statue has since been moved to the Telfair Museum of Art, founded through the bequest of Mary Telfair, also buried at Bonaventure.
Our tour guide, the vivacious Ms. Elizabeth Ford …
… oozed Southern hospitality and a spoke a delicious Southern dialect. (After the tour, I wanted to go home with her just to hear her talk some more. But I didn’t really know how to ask.)
Elizabeth led us around the hauntingly beautiful Gothic graveyard, along the banks of the lazy Wilmington River, regaling us with stories of the history of the place and showing us gravesites of some of the more prominent folks buried there. But what I loved most of all was the simple interplay of a deeply Southern voice leading me, slowly, on Sunday afternoon time, through such beauty.
(In the above pic, I was aiming for a cemetery facial expression. Did I get anywhere close?)
(I wish I had a ponytail like that guy to my left.)
My parents taught me to love cemeteries. As friendly places, reservoirs of wonderful memories. To this day, when I return home to visit them, we usually end up at one of several cemeteries in or around my hometown of Ball Ground, Georgia, where close relatives are buried. Granny Nix and Veto. Mama and Papa Saye. My brother Jimmy who lived only one week. Old Doc Saye, Ball Ground’s first doctor. Pulling weeds around a headstone, or straightening flower arrangements, we get caught up in “Remember when’s” and “She was a pistol!” and “I still miss him so much.” They taught me that I am standing tall today because of all of them who came before.
Bonaventure: an afternoon of warm joy.
10 Reasons I Loved My Little Trip to Visit My Folks
Early yesterday morning I drove up to my north-of-Atlanta hometown of Ball Ground for a short visit with my mom and dad.
My dad–Harold or Tub–is 89 (90 in November–come to the party!), and my mom–Geneva–turned 86 in May. I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun we have when I visit. They taught me (are still teaching me) to laugh, to enjoy life.
Here are Ten Reasons I loved my little visit.
1. The early dinner that awaited me upon my 11 am arrival. Okay, for some of you this will be a bit confusing, but in Ball Ground lunch is called dinner, and dinner is called supper. (Breakfast is called Hardees.)
My favorite meal in the whole wide world consists of 1.) my dad’s creamed yellow corn. 2.) My mom’s fried sweet potatoes. 3.) A tomato and an onion.
The corn is scraped, raw, from the cob and meticulously cooked stove top, stirring constantly to keep it from scorching. It has the taste of heaven.
These sweet potatoes look a little burnt, and they should. That gives them the carmelized flavor. Cooked in a large cast iron pan, there’s nothing better. One stick butter, one cup sugar, sliced sweet potatoes. Orange joy.
Oh. My. Goodness. Thank you, Jesus.
2. The bird clock in my parents’ bathroom.
I like it best when the batteries get old, and the hourly bird calls become eerily elongated.
3. Walking around my folks’ small house (which my dad built BY HAND 34 years ago), looking at the bushes and trees.
4. Eating supper at Cracker Barrel. During the meal a very overweight but jolly lady came over to our table and said to my mom, “Honey, can I give you a hug? You remind me so much of my little grandma.” “Why, of course!” Mama replied.
“”Our hugs come in twos,” my dad said with a laugh. And then was amply rewarded.
I thought about saying, “What about me? Three’s company.” But my mouth was full of turnip greens and chow chow.
5. My mother repeatedly getting her supper choice, “eggs in the basket,” confused with a meal she had about forty years ago at IHOP called “pigs in a blanket.”
“Now what do you call this again, Neal?”
From the Cracker Barrel menu: Eggs in the Basket–Two slices of Sourdough Bread grilled with an egg in the middle of each, cooked to order and served with smoked sausage patties, turkey sausage patties or thick-sliced bacon and your choice of Fried Apples or Hashbrown Casserole.
6. Still at Cracker Barrel, as my dad stood in line at the counter paying (he INSISTED), another lady just finishing with paying her bill, saying to my dad, “Here, sir, let me pay for part of your meal with the rest of my gift card. Happy early Father’s Day?” And my dad, a bit confused at first, trying to PAY her for the gift card, before she finally hugged him and said, “No, no, I want to do this for you for an early Father’s Day present!” (While I stood over to the side between the pulled taffy and the Brad Paisley cd, unsuccessfully holding back laughter.)
As we finally left Cracker Barrel, my mom said to my dad, “You sure are hugging a lot of women today. I gotta get you out of this place.”
7. After loading mom’s walker in the trunk, and getting us all in the car, my mom, saying, “Tub, you should have asked that lady what days she usually eats at Cracker Barrel,” sending the three of us into giggles for two red lights, when I said to them, “I wonder if she would like to adopt us as her other family,” (which really wasn’t all that funny, but still got us roaring all over again, in the way you sometimes do when laughter is in the air.) Pulling off the Ball Ground exit from I-575, my dad said, “Those hugs were a pretty good way to spend an afternoon.” Because, of course, it was only 5:00 and we had already finished supper.
8. The feeling, even at my age, of being HOME.
9. The difficult but important discussion we had on this trip about what my mother would do if my dad died first.
“I just hope to goodness I go before Tub.”
“Now Neever (his version of Geneva), we can’t control those things.”
“What I really wish is that we could just go at the same time,” my mom said with total sincerity.
“Well, that might be possible,” my dad said with a twinkle in his eye, “the way I’ve been driving lately.” And we all laughed, at something so unfunny.
10. Experiencing irony as I was leaving Ball Ground the next day, stopping by a convenience store for a Yoo Hoo and a lottery ticket. The long-time teller printing out my ticket, as she mouthed, “straight to hell,” the lyrics of a country song blaring from the radio, and then handing me my Power Ball and saying, “You have a blessed day, sir!”
A joyful, blessed trip.
Five Friday Happy Bringers (5/17/13)
Happy happy, bo-bappy. Banana fanna, fo fappy. Fe fi mo mappy. Happy! (Did I do that right? I’ve spent about 45 minutes, trying it out with every relative’s name I can think of. I keep messing up.)
Friday. Happy Here’s Five:
1. A little bundle of joy.
(Grandtwin Madison)
2. This funny ad about rum.
*
“When you hurry through life, you just get to the end faster.”
3. Corn bread. Here’s some I made to go with cabbage and sausage the other night.
4. This great quote about talking your JOY.
5. Grandtwin Matthew feeding Tyler.
May your weekend overflow with joy talk and joy walk.
Remembering Peter on this Teacher Appreciation Week
It never fails. And I’m glad it doesn’t. Whenever I see yellow gladioli, I think of Peter. I saw some today.
Peter Christopher taught creative writing in the Department of Writing and Linguistics up at Georgia Southern University (where I taught for twenty-four years). He was a colleague and a friend and the fiction person on my dissertation committee when I got my doctorate.
And Peter died far too early in 2008 of liver cancer.
After his passing, I reminisced about Peter’s impact on my life. Here’s that remembrance:
*****************
Peter, “Something Blooming, Something Found” and the Glorious Gladioli
Somehow, yin-yangishly I suppose, Peter’s smile carries both playful humor and serious authority as he says to me, “Here’s what I want you to do, Neal.”
“Take all that,” Peter points at the pages and pages of text I have been rather proudly producing for weeks before asking/begging him to be the fiction person on my dissertation committee, “and put it aside–or throw it away.”
My dissertation is going to be an examination of how fiction can be used as a type of educational research, as a way of knowing. And as part of my work, I want to write a novella which illustrates, through the characters and plot, various educational stances I have studied and enjoyed. But I’m not a fiction writer, and I don’t really know how to get there. I want Peter to sort of help quickly guide me through the process, tell me I can do it, be a cheerleader of sorts.
“Uh, well, you mean I’m not going to be able to use this?”
“Maybe. We’ll see. But for now I want you to forget everything you’ve written and have planned so far. Here’s your homework.” Again the smile–the smile that is beginning to get on my nerves just a little. “For two weeks and for about an hour or so a day, I want you to freewrite.”
“You mean, just write about this novella idea I have?”
“No, Neal, freewrite about you. About your life, what’s going on, what’s been, what’s to come. About your inside life. Your outside life. Your family. Work. Friends. Faith. Anything that comes to mind. Don’t stop for an hour–just write.”
My thoughts at this moment: “Peter, are you CRAZY? I am teaching full time. I am on a deadline. I do not have the time or interest to play your little freewriting game. I just want to get this thing finished. So no, I CAN’T and I WON’T do that. And by the way, you’re supposed to just ENCOURAGE me, be my CHEERLEADER.”
My words at this moment: “Oh, okay.”
After the frustratingly productive freewriting, which ends up changing in wonderful ways the entire story I will tell, Peter and I begin three months of tortuous joy. I learn from a master. Our weekly schedule goes something like this:
1. Neal spends hours and hours and hours writing for a week. Usually trying to get one scene done.
2. Neal puts his folder of work (pretty good work in Neal’s mind) into Peter’s mailbox at the end of the day.
3. The next afternoon Neal gets up from his desk and walks halfway across the hall towards Peter’s office, changes his mind and walks back to his own office and sits down.
4. Neal feels silly at this childish behavior, gets up again and walks three-forths the way to Peter’s office, then returns to his own office once again.
5. Neal calls himself all sorts of shaming names and finally walks all the way into Peter’s office, often simply because Peter has seen him walking back and forth, and tells him to COME IN.
6. Peter smiles.
7. Peter speaks: “I can tell you put a lot of work into this, Neal. But….”
8. Neal revises. And revises. And revises.
9. Neal realizes Peter is gifted beyond measure.
When we approach the end of the novella work, and I am fretting over a title for it, Peter tells me with a laugh, “Don’t worry about that. I’m good with titles. I’ll come up with one. My gift.”
One of the young characters in my story, Kellie, LOVES flowers, grows them everywhere she can. Her favorite is the yellow gladiolus. (“It stands up in a garden. It’s not afraid to be seen.”) And since my tale shows a small group of high school students who come to realize that they have viable voices which are important and should/must be heard, Peter names my novella, “Something Blooming, Something Found.”
I am nervous as the dissertation defense begins. I have foolishly invited folks from across campus to attend and quite a few are here. Days before, when I asked Peter his advice about defending, he said that I should forget the negative concept of defense and just let my novella’s characters speak. So that’s what I do.
I look at all those gathered in the Dean’s Conference Room in the College of Ed, take a deep breath, and begin my defenseless defense. As I start, I see and sense Peter (“rock” in Greek) confer upon me three things: his trademark encouraging smile; a subtle and hidden to all but me “you-can-do-it!” thumbs up; and the realization, as my characters begin to breathe and speak, that something is blooming in me, and I am finding something, something I have not really grasped or undertsood until this moment in this room: I am a writer, not just a teacher of writing.
The next day, I walk into Peter’s office (without the ridiculous false starts) and present him with a bouquet of proud yellow gladioli. He hoots in delight. Hours later I hear a tap on my door, look up, and there he stands.
“Neal, I have been sitting at my desk looking at your flowers. Really looking at them. Seeing them. They’re lovely. They are so intricate, the way they turn and twist,” he says as he makes a circular gesture with one hand.
“And there’s really only one word to describe them: GLORIOUS. They are glorious. Thank You.”
We chat and laugh a while. Then Peter leaves.
But that’s okay. He’s just across the hall.
[I write this in present tense for two reasons: One, Peter has me write my novella in present tense. And two, in ways that are important, perhaps most important, transcendent, eternal, Peter is with us. Ever will be. His smile that you and I came to appreciate so so much. His always gentle spirit. His instruction he gave to so many. His embodiment of encouragement. His model of living. And His beautiful closing for each email and note he penned–“All thrive!”]
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Here we are after I defended my dissertation:
On a whim, right before I published this post a few moments ago, I typed “GSU + Peter Christopher” in a search engine. A Rate My Professor link from 2008 popped up. One student wrote:
PC was my mentor. I took every writing class he taught. Writing was only a minor when I went to GSU… I would have majored if I could have. He was a dear friend. He taught me more than just how to be a good writer, he taught me how to love life — to have a passion for life. He is gone from this earth, but never from my heart.
Rest peacefully, Peter. We remember you with appreciation and love.
Related Post: The Viewing & the Circle of Life
Five Friday Happy Bringers (5/3/13)
It’s Cinco de Mayo weekend, so let’s be happy! Here are five more reasons I’m smiling.
1. Ships
2. Getting good deals at the Dollar Tree.
(And being patriotic at the same time.)
3. Grandson Daniel trying to get Grandtwin Matthew to patty cake. (Wait a sec, is it pat-a-cake?)
4. Learning (great emphasis on “learning”) to go with the flow, instead of fighting against it.
5. Grilling pork chops the other night and creating a NealEnJoy Marinade with apple butter and Dale’s Seasoning. Yum, yum, yum! But I ate them before I thought to take a picture to show you. I considered snapping a quick photo of my belly, but I couldn’t stretch my iPhone out far enough for the reverse camera thingy to get my midsection so bloated. So I thought to myself, “You know, you could probably ‘Google image’ (I just created a new verb!) a pic that would pass as your NealEnJoy marinated pork chops, and, really, who would know?” But after the Googling, I was bamboozled by all the pork chop pictures that came up.
This could be a picture, for example, of my chops …
… except they are in a frying pan. But that frying pan does look like one of mine.
And don’t these look good?
And thick:
And these remind me SO MUCH of how my mama used to fry pork chops for supper.
Then the Internet surfing got weird. Here’s a man grilling pork chops with his standing dog watching.
And I discovered that Republican politicians absolutely LOVE pork chops. Here’s Mitt Romney eating one.
And Texas Governor Rick Perry.
And would you believe it? Here’s John McCain eating a pork chop too.
Not to mention Rudy Giuliani.
I started to call somebody to report my findings about partisan pork, but I didn’t know who. Then, lo and behold, guess who popped up chowing down on a chop?!
And a pork sandwich.
Fifteen minutes and gobs of chop pics later, I started to smell more pork. Then out jumped an advertisement of Miss Piggy hawking her line of perfume called … yep, Pork Chops.
Enough of this foolishness. May we all flow into a beautiful weekend ahead.
NealEnJoy 