Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Terrible Tom, or Mr. Terranova as be was respectfully known by his awestricken students and their boggled parents, bestrode Sunland Elementary School like a colossus, fierce and terrible like a storm, a whirlwind, a crackling bolt of electricity, an irresistible, primal force. In the early 1960ies, a neighborhood school like Sunland generally had two teachers in two classrooms for each grade level, from kindergarten to the 6th grade. I do not remember now who the other 6th grade teacher was, and fear that person would have been a nonentity, a mere shadow, next to the awful majesty of Mr. Terranova.

His reputation proceeded him, of course, and there were parents who hysterically begged, pled and threatened in order to move their children into the other 6th grade classroom. Many more begged, pled and threatened in order to move their offspring in the opposite direction. Mom was content to let the matter stand when I was listed for his class, as JP and I had already been in his after-school recorder orchestra for a year or so and survived unscathed.  But the recorder orchestra, an hour or so a week of rehearsal, tootling away mournfully on wooden flutes was one matter, full exposure to the Terranova experience entirely another. More »

It has happened to us again; we came home from morning walkies on Thursday with an extra dog, to the bafflement and apparent disgust of the Lesser Weevil and Connor … who seem to be getting over it, even as I write. The current canine find is small, attractive, and relatively well-behaved and seems to be agreeable to cats. Which a dog in our house had damn-well better be … the cats outnumber the dogs, and are Superior Beings – at least, as the cats see it, and woe betide the canine which doesn’t acknowledge this superiority immediately.

We have done this quite often – arrived home with another dog. Usually we can locate an owner almost at once – either the original owner or someone who will step up to the plate and take said dog on. Now and again we have had to turn them over to the county animal shelter; a concern which is trying their damndest to re-house the amiable and healthy animals which are turned into their facility. This time we do have some hopes of locating the owner who is missing him. How many people in a short range of our neighborhood have managed to misplace what appears to the expert eye (of a breeder just a short way away) to be a young pure-bred male Pomeranian, of an appealing reddish coloring, an amiable personality, and agreeable to other cats and dogs. He (an unmistakably un-neutered he) was running around on one of the main streets through our neighborhood. It took a bit of effort to catch him, as they are fast-moving little b****rds. Two of our neighbors stopped and told us – as we were carrying him home – that they had tried to catch him, as he was merrily skipping about in the traffic along that main feeder avenue. We were the first to be successful, probably because he was curious about Weevil and Connor, so that after about three blocks of pursuit, feints and dodges, my daughter  managed to scoop him up in her arms and carry him homewards – all eight pounds and some. Of which I think a pound or so is in the weight of his fur and about half a pound in the weight of his balls … un-neutered male, as I said.

He was gloriously filthy, having had a good couple of days of unsupervised freedom – enough to ravel the fur on his nether quarters into unspeakably filthy knots, bedecked with a huge quantity of foxtails, stickers and other matter best left undescribed. We stopped and talked to a handful of neighbors – some of whom said they had seen him at large and from a distance, as a fast-moving ball of fluff – for about a week, which seems about right, although where he was getting food and water from is anyone’s guess. He was quite cooperative about being bathed and groomed – which is a huge necessity for the breed, and was enthusiastic about accepting a harness and leash and going for the usual walkies this morning. One curious note – he prefers women; doesn’t care for men at all, and now and again growls at me when I come into the house wearing the gimme baseball cap that I wear when working in the garden. So, I deduce a female owner, with other cats and dogs in the household. Dismayingly, though – there are no posters out for him, and nothing like him listed on any of the local lost-pet websites, and he can’t possibly have come very far. We’ve been told by people who know that that there are pets being abandoned right and left, even here in San Antonio, where things are pretty much OK. It does say something, though – that the abandoned dogs that we have found lately aren’t the overgrown, untrained young mutts that someone apparently picked up as a cute puppy and ditched when they turned out to be too much of a handful. Connor is a Maltese-poodle of some years, well-trained, amiable and socialized, previously well-taken care of, and the lost Pomeranian looks to be the same sort.

Oh, and if we don’t find his owner – which is starting to shape up that way – we’re going to keep him. Lord knows – he won’t eat much.

It would seem that once there is a TV reality show about something than you can assume that it’s gone mainstream enough that the denizens of the mainstream media world are interested. So it seems to have happened with ‘prepping’ – that is, being prepared for the zombie apocalypse with a garage or a bunker full of shelf-stable and dried foods, a water purification system and a couple of cases of munitions. Meh … a lot of people went nutso over this just before New Years’ Day 2000, and there always has been a lunatic fringe … but then ensuring that you have a plentiful supply of food, drink and supplies on hand used to be pretty mainstream, actually. It was called ‘getting ready for winter’ in the 19^th century, especially if you lived on a homestead half a day’s journey from the nearest general store. It certainly has been a requirement for LDS church members, as I discovered when I lived in Utah. It seemed pretty sensible for me, actually – having an emergency stash of food. I remember my mother telling me of a friend of hers, whose husband was laid off from the Lockheed assembly line. They bought a hundred-pound sack of dried beans, which formed the largest part of their daily meals until he was employed again. We never were forced to that extreme, Dad being regularly employed, but on occasion my mother finished out the last day or two before his paychecks arrived with barely a handful of dollars and change to buy groceries with. The grandparents remembered not just the Depression, but hard times before that. They always – especially Granny Jessie who was raised on a farm – had a stash of foodstuffs on hand. So, it always seemed quite natural to read in the Little House Books, of how Pa and Ma Ingalls planted a garden, harvested from it, stored away potatoes and squash in a root cellar, butchered a pig and smoked the hams and made sausage, made apple butter and wild-berry jam. I don’t remember if Ma made cheese from fresh cow’s milk; but I do remember descriptions of churning butter from it.

Mind you, my own parents weren’t that hard-core about do-it-yourself food, but they had the can-do-it-yourself attitude about a lot of things, including landscaping and shade-tree auto repair. I came away from the assignment in Utah with a full-size freezer, a dehydrator with a lot of extra trays, and a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer with a lot of extra attachments … like a sausage stuffer, for instance. It just seemed quite natural to get interested in home brewing, and home cheese-making as well, as the results have been so delicious … and doing this had the added benefit of me being able to write fairly knowledgeably about a 19^th century homemaker doing all this. Although – I am not hard-core enough t do it over a wood-burning iron stove. There is something very satisfactory about eating a slice of home-made baguette with a slice of home-made cheese on it, to eating fresh salad greens from your own garden, tomatoes and beans and squash that you picked just that afternoon.

We’ve just started doing jams and pickles and relishes of our own, in addition to all the other things. How much better than the purchased food will they taste? I’m beginning to think the next thing will be keeping hens for eggs, and I just don’t know how the neighbors will feel about that. Keeping a small cow for milk, though – that is definitely out. The yard is just not large enough.