Once There Was – The Best Catalog, Ever

20. October 2024 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic, Memoir

In the time before the internet became a thing, when I was mostly stationed at bases overseas, I could rejoice when the base post office put up the mail … we had numbered post boxes, the kind that one sees in the post offices now, with the little locking doors with a small glass window. My post office box was nearly always packed tightly with mail. On really, really good days, there was a pink cardboard slip which meant a package – take the slip to the window and collect your package. Depressing it might be to see a package slip, and the parcel window had already closed on a Saturday afternoon  which meant  waiting until  Monday to get the package. (In Greenland, though, whenever an airplane came in with mail, the post office clerks would call the radio station, and the duty announcer would read out that so many pounds of mail had been received, and the post box numbers who had gotten packages on the air. The post office window would be open for exactly half an hour then, no matter what the day, or hours – and on hearing your box number read out, everyone would beat feet for the post office. This was Greenland – everyone knew to the minute when an aircraft came in, and if it were coming from Stateside, there would be mail on it.)

I subscribed then to a number of magazines – magazines of news and cultural interest, mostly, with some hobby publications among them … and catalogues. Oh, I got catalogs – so many that the post office clerks swore that sometimes they had to wedge my mail into my post box with the aid of a crowbar. There were just so many things that weren’t available to  us through the exchange, or on the local economy. Clothing, books, household goods, hobby materials and supplies, small furniture kits, movies … even certain food items – anything the least bit non-standard had to come by catalog mail order. (In the case of Greenland, there was no local economy, only the souvenir booth on the Danish side of the runway, and the little trading post store, which was about  the size of a corner minimart.)

Of course I was the recipient of catalogs galore, for all the things that couldn’t be obtained locally and for which I had a taste or an interest. One of my very favorite clothing catalogs was the original Banana Republic line, when it was truly a vendor of quirky yet practical travel clothing and accessories. A fair number of their early items were military surplus of all sorts of other militaries, much of which came in color palettes which explored the vibrant spectrum of olive-drab green, tan, brown, gray and dull blue, but which had the benefit of being durable, practical and well-made. The original Banana Republic’s clothing tended to be pricy – rather like LL Bean items of the same era – but ever so worth it in the long run; comfortable, practical fabrics, flattering cuts, and modest – suitable for wear on countries where excessive displays of flesh were not advised – and infinitely variable. The ideal for their kind of traveler, I gathered from their content, was the one who could do a world tour with a single small piece of luggage, and still be comfortably, practically, and tastefully turned out for every possible occasion, from morning trek to see a ruined temple in the jungle to a tea party at an embassy that afternoon. I liked that kind of practicality – liked it very much, although I could only afford a couple of pieces from them. A mid-length khaki drill skirt was one of them, and another was a pair of flat-heeled ballet pumps that I wore all over Europe; the soles were ribbed rubber. Perfect for hiking through places and streets floored with slick stone and cobbles, which – wet or dry – were a hazard. The Banana Republic catalogues were literate, even just fun to read. They stood out among my collection of catalogs for that very reason. I understand that the handful of Banana Republic brick-and-mortar locations were just as spectacular, in décor and design. Alas, I never got to visit one in person. Eventually, the couple who had built the brand sold it to the company which already owned a big nationwide chain and a couple of other brands, and Banana Republic stopped being the quirky, original source for high-quality travel clothing and exotic military surplus. It became just another generic brand of mall-marketed clothes, just like all the other generic, cheaply-manufactured generic mall clothing brands.

I wish that I had kept some of the catalogs, though. Just for sentimental value. Maybe I have – and they are buried out in a box in the garage.

 

Now And Again

08. October 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

So, another busy week at Chez Hayes – some work for a client, and all but the finishing touches on the WIP, the YA pioneer adventure story, with the working title of West Towards the Sunset. I might make it into a series, in the spirit of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I loved that series, as a young reader, myself. Not all that fond of the TV series version, which spun radically away from the books in ways large and small. My everlasting conviction has been that historical fiction is a gateway drug into an interest in actual history. I think that more people initially became interested in the American Civil War through reading Gone With the Wind, or in the American Revolution through Johnny Tremain, or any number of other riveting narratives set in other historical periods … so why not throw my own books into the grand mix? My personal motto was always that of the Armed Forces Radio and Television  Service, an enterprise in which I served with  only moderate personal success. (Hey, I got a pension out of it, so, whatever…)

The motto was “To Inform and Entertain” – so it’s my hope that my own books inform and entertain, and perhaps inspire a life-enhancing further interest.

Anyway, West Towards the Sunset is all but done – just a few hundred words to the afterward/postscript, and out to the volunteer beta readers in the next day or so.

In the meantime – coping with a neighborhood concern. A close Aged Neighbor of advanced years and uncertain health passed away in hospital a week ago Friday. We were close – close enough that my daughter was on her Life Alert roster, and we had the names of her next of kin and their phone numbers (most of whom lived several states away.) We regularly walked her dog, Penny the Labradoodle, and had walked with her, when she was in better condition, so frequently that a couple of other neighbors thought that she was my mother. We found a kitten for her, a full sister to Miso, among the collection on the other side of the neighborhood, a fluffy white kitten which she named Snowy, who grew up to be affectionate and spectacularly dog-like, for a cat.

Then Penny the Labradoodle at 15 years old and arthritic, became reluctant to walk more than half a block.  Aged Neighbor fell a couple of times and went no farther than the group mailbox – propped on a walker, to the covert relief of us all. Then she crunched her car fender, and gave up the keys to the car to another neighbor … Anyway – a handful of us in the nearby houses were very fond of Aged Neighbor and kept a careful eye on her.

Aged Neighbor’s family are all touchingly grateful to all of us for having seen to her care and wellbeing. Snowy has been adopted by one neighbor. Another neighbor has a friend who may eventually adopt Penny the Labradoodle. Aged Neighbor’s family all gathered this week to sort out the house. They have no need of her household things, clothes, furniture, objects d’arte and monumental brand-new new cat tree, as they drove from out of state and have full households of their own anyway. We’ve been given a good share of them – including the cat tree! –  either to use for the Daughter Unit’s eventual home, or to pass on to Goodwill. The remainder have been given to other friends and neighbors. That took up the rest of our time this weekend.

And that was my week – yours?

Good Eats

28. September 2024 · 1 comment · Categories: Domestic

I’ve spent time in the kitchen  this week – time that I should have spent on finishing the last chapters of the W-I-P, but this writer does not live on bread alone … but regular meals of relatively healthy, and home-cooked foods. One of the projects in the kitchen was the disposition of half a bushel of carrots. A friend of my daughters is another single parent, and one in a sufficient state of want to be the object of a gift of foods from a church pantry … to be precise, an enormous number of enormous carrots. Very fresh carrots, and not a bit woody and flavorless because of their gargantuan size. But carrots … the friend gave half to my daughter, and I spent a morning peeling, slicing, and brewing up brine to make pickled carrots. Yes, I have a large stock pot, and a collection of canning jars … and so, pickled carrots. Eight quarts of pickled carrots. And then, another eight quarts of mixed vegetable pickles from the Ball canning cookbook – giardiniera, which is wicked expensive when bought in smallish jars from the specialty foreign foods selection at the grocery store. It’s not so pricy when made from fresh, and even though the costs for fresh vegetables in season is a bit more  than they were three or four years ago … scratch made giardiniera is still cheaper. Even though I couldn’t find the teeny pearl onions that some recipes call for; I didn’t mind; those specialty tiny onions have always been pricy and are a major pain to peel  and prep.

The other project in the kitchen came about because we tried out a pulled pork spice mix, which turned out to be a bit lacking, even in the slow-cooker with a boneless pork shoulder at $1.99 a pound. (Which is excellent for that cut of meat.) I thought of using it as a filling for tamales. My mother, being a cook with four or five hungry teenagers in the household was a master of cheap eats. In the town where I grew up, there were maybe four or five elderly Hispanic ladies who made tamales from scratch, and Mom was the only Anglo. Back in her early married life, Mom learned Mexican cooking from the couple living next door in GI grad student housing at UC Santa Barbara. Traditional Mexican food has the benefit of relying on inexpensive ingredients, and being tasty and filling. So – I refreshed my memory of making tamales, found a recipe on line for what looked to a pretty good version … and oh, my – they were better than good. Light, fluffy, flavorful. I think the trick to this one was creaming the lard or Crisco, and then mixing in alternate thirds of the masa and  broth. I made up another full batch for the rest of the pulled  pork and packaged them in sets of four with the vacuum sealer for the freezer. I don’t believe we’ll buy prepared tamales again – this recipe was so good, using the Mi Tienda masa from HEB.

And now, back to finishing off the last two chapters of West Towards the Sunset.

The Most Wrecked House

17. September 2024 · Comments Off on The Most Wrecked House · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

So, I am an aficionado of a certain kind of YouTube series – of ambitious DIYers who most usually have either mad professional building skills, or a generous income (most often both), plus absolutely insane levels of optimism, who take on a decrepit bit of housing, or at least something with all or most of a roof on it. Over a number of years or months, these skilled, and hopeful masochists take on an abandoned or derelict rural property – a tumbledown pig farm in Belgium, a decayed village house or farmstead in Portugal, a ruinous French chateau, a French village hoarder house with half the roof fallen in, or a burned-out country cottage in Sweden. Usually at least half the time-lapsed video is of tearing out the decayed bits, and sometimes the finished result is painfully ultra-modern interior and looks like one of the display rooms in an Ikea outlet … but if the owners are happy in it, who am I to quibble over their tastes in interior decoration.

Some of these spaces are very far gone – the Swedish cottage was burned out in a fire, and the Portuguese farm complex is such a tottering wreck that the best that the young couple can do with the remains is salvage the cut stone that it all was built from and use the stone to sheath new conblock walls of a construction in the original footprint. But I think this week, I have found the most thoroughly wrecked historic structure available in any real estate market – this first through a feature in the English Daily Mail newspaper. For some reason their newshounds lighted on a mid-19th century house in Frankfort, Maine – a mansard-roof mansion at the crossroads of a hiccup of a town, and one which is so visibly wrecked that even the most optimistic real estate listings can’t even begin to hide the decay.  When the listing warns you to wear safety shoes and bring a flashlight … and there aren’t even any pictures in the listing of the interior … yeah, this place is a real estate disaster.

If it were built of stone or brick, there might be hope for a renovator – but if it is all wood, the roof has leaked for decades, with wood-rot and black mold throughout all three stories and not a shred of anything resembling preventative maintenance … no; as my daughter the real estate agent says cheerfully – nothing wrong with it that a couple of gallons of gas and a book of matches couldn’t fix. We had a friend in South Ogden, when I was stationed at Hill AFB, who were trying their best to renovate an 1895 Italianate brick three-story on 5th Street. It had been the wife’s childhood home, and she had a sentimental attachment to the place. It eventually turned out that there was nothing much of good quality about the structure, save for perhaps the thick and solid brick exterior shell. If they knew at the beginning of the project what they knew by the end, they would have gutted the shell and built anew, bottom to top. She wound up hating the place – and was inexpressibly happy when they purchased and moved into a well-preserved 1920s Craftsman-era bungalow several blocks distant. In reality, I suspect that many hopeful renovators share  that discouraging experience.

The mansard historical wreck in Frankfort comes with an acre, which looks like woodland. Probably, the only workable solution is for a purchaser to salvage every shred of usable elements surviving decades of neglect, demolish the wreck – and build an exact replica incorporating those elements on a new site a bit farther back from a well-trafficked local road.

Well, I will be keeping track of the mansard wreck in Frankfort – it might very well turn up someday, as the focus of a madly optimistic, skilled and well-financed YouTube enthusiast. And I wish them the best of luck.

They’ll need it.

From “West Towards the Sunset”

13. September 2024 · Comments Off on From “West Towards the Sunset” · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book

(Yes, getting close to completing this YA novel – I plan to have it released in eBook and in print in time for Christmas. By Thanksgiving, anyway.)

The Kettering party of 1846  is traveling up the Truckee River, approaching the final mountain pass. It is autumn, and they have every chance of getting over the mountain pass before winter sets in. Other parties on the trail have not been so fortunate…)

So we set off, following the river farther and farther up into the hills, with the blue line of the mountains ever clearer every day. I think that we had been a week or more at it, when we came to a place where the hills gave way to a gentle, shallow valley. Rolling meadows of late-summer grass reminded me of those first days on the trail. The oxen were happy enough to spend a day of it, grazing at leisure on another Sunday.

Ma had Henry, Shiboone and I with the Herlihy brothers dipping buckets of water from the river, that Sunday afternoon after Deacon Zollicoffer held Sunday services. She and Mrs. Herlihy wanted do laundry. Mr. Herlihy had built up a good fire for us, with all of our kettles and pots heating water for the washtubs. Shiboone had just hoisted up a brim-full bucket, when she looked down the worn and rutted trail east of our camp.

“Oh, look – Sally – there’s a fellow on a poor shabby horse! It looks as though he is an advance scout for another company! Won’t that be a fine thing?”

“It might be!” I exclaimed, for though the man was at a good distance, I thought that he might be one that I recognized. I thought it was Ginny’s father, Mr. Reed, for his fine elegant horse, fine overcoat and flat-brimmed beaver – all them, horse, man and clothing battered, dusty and sadly worn from the hardships of travel. Still, I was inexpressibly happy at recognizing him, for then my friend Ginny and her little sister Patty and the rest of their company couldn’t possibly be far behind.

I couldn’t abandon Ma and Mrs. Herlihy and the pile of laundry to indulge my own curiosity, but I looked over my shoulder often enough, as we carried water, stirred and scrubbed. Mr. Reed – and it was him, no doubt in my mind – spoke first to Hansel, one of the German boys, who was cutting firewood by the wagon circle. I saw Hansel point toward our wagon, and Pa, who was conferring at our campfire with Mr. Herlihy, Mr. Glennie and Choctaw Joe. Henry Steitler was there too, as he most usually was when we had leisure for a day. Then Mr. Reed slid down from his horse, which Hansel led away. I thought at first Hansel was going to turn the horse unsaddled into the corral made from the wagon circle, all with the long wagon tongues chained to the wheel of the next wagon. Instead, Hansel rubbed the horses legs, and the place on his back where the saddle and blanket had been … and then put the saddle back on the horse!

That was curious, I thought. Did it mean that Mr. Reed would ride back down the trail to rejoin his own party? I guessed that it must mean they were a far bit behind. Still, I was so very happy, thinking their company would soon catch up to us and that I would see Ginny soon.

Mr. Reed spoke to Pa – spoke rather long, and that was when I sensed that something was not right. Pa’s expression was somber and worried. I could see the other men’s faces as well: Mr. Herlihy scowled, Mr. Glennie looked shocked … and Choctaw Joe was shaking his head, almost as if he had been confirmed in his own sad judgement.

But I could not walk away from helping Ma and the other women to hear what Mr. Reed was telling Pa and the others. I thought that I might be able to speak with Mr. Reed – but he was gone again within the hour – his horse rubbed down and saddled again, and it looked like he had been given a tow-sack of provisions.

I heard Pa tell him, “Goodspeed and good luck to you, James – we’ll look for your family, and if we can aid them in any way, be assured that we will!”

Then Mr. Reed was gone, riding up the trail towards the mountains, and Shiboone commented, “Holy Mary, he rides as if the very hellhounds are after him! I wonder what has happened now?”

And so did I wonder too, but I had to wait until that night to hear the full tale. All Pa would say at supper, when I asked, was, “Mr. Reed has ridden ahead to implore aid from Mr. Sutter, as his family and his friends are in dire need of supplies. It turned out that Mr. Hasting’s route was much more difficult than had been advertised. Their party is far behind – very far behind.”

“Ginny – are she and Patty all right?” I was shocked enough to speak out of turn, interrupting Pa and Choctaw Joe and Ma.

“Don’t interrupt the grownups, Sally,” Ma chided men. She sounded so serious and stern that I knew better than to ask any more.

“The girls are fine,” Pa replied, “They are with Mrs. Reed, and the hired folk, and their good friends. There isn’t anything to worry over, Sugar-plum.”

But Pa still looked somber, and Ma frowned in my direction when I opened my mouth to ask another question, but Henry Steitler also shook his head at me. I closed my mouth. Perhaps Henry would tell Jon and I later what it meant, that Mr. Reed went hurrying up the trail, without even stopping for the night. Not for the first time, I envied Henry for being only a year or so older but being an orphan and the owner of a wagon … so it was only a cart, cobbled out of the wreck of his father’s wagon – but when it came to trail business Henry counted as a grown-up, and not a child. He knew what was going on, for all of that, and I didn’t, just because I was a girl and younger, and that simply was not fair!

Instead, I kept pinching myself when we went to bed, so that I could stay awake and listen to Pa tell Ma what Mr. Reed had related to him.

“It was bad, Sue,” Pa said, his voice low and serious. “They hardly had an organized company when Reed left them …”  and then Pa’s voice went so quiet that I couldn’t hear what he was saying at all, just bits and snatches that I couldn’t make any sense out of. “Hastings will have a mortal lot to answer for to the Almighty!” Pa said then, and his voice went soft again.

Well, Mr.  Clyman and Mr. Greenwood had not said much good about Mr. Hastings’ shortcut. But what Pa said next riveted my attention. “… threw him out for committing a murder!”

“Oh, my God!” Ma exclaimed in horror. And her voice went even lower. They spoke in whispers; I couldn’t hear anything meaningful after that. I pulled the covers over my head and shivered in the dark until I fell asleep.

Before I did sleep, I resolved absolutely that I would find out what had happened with the Reed company – Poor Mrs. Reed with her sick headaches, feisty, fearless Ginny, little Patty and their blind Granny Keyes – all alone now, somewhere behind us on the desolate difficult trail to California.  In the morning, I would talk to Henry Steitler – the minute that I could corner him and speak to him privately.

 

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