Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

A good few years ago – in the mid-1980s, as a matter of fact – when I was on home leave with my daughter at my parent’s then-half-built home in the wilds of Northern San Diego County, I had it my mind that my then elementary-school aged offspring should know about her various ancestors, since a number of them had already passed on. So I took a number of pictures of ancestral pictures in the family horde with my trusty Canon camera – this being, Oh, Best Beloved, before the wide availability of printer/scanner/copier/fax machines. Not that my parents would have ever embraced such technology with anything but the deepest suspicion. Although Dad would have been open to internet connection, and the endless possibilities presented to the DIY enthusiasts on YouTube. Mom remained and still remains adamant that such is a temptation to an indecent waste of time, at the very least. So I came home with a round of photographs of photographs, eventually to be developed and printed, and set into an assortment of small frames, for the edification of my daughter. See, my child – these are your ancestors!

Thank the deity for this fortunate impulse, and for the fact that I scanned a number of the resulting pictures in the years since – because my parents’ retirement home burned to the ground in 2003, destroying everything in it, including photo albums and all the original photographs. Gone Mom and Dad’s wedding album, the studio picture of Dad in his Army uniform, of Uncle Jimmy in his … and me in the official picture, taken at Lackland AFB in 1978, in a uniform jacket that wasn’t mine, and very dark lipstick that wasn’t mine, either. Granny Jessie had both of those official pictures displayed in a sacred place in her household, until her dying day. Which is mildly embarrassing, because Uncle Jimmy didn’t like his official picture either. He wrote in his letters home about it – letters that I fortunately transcribed before they were all burned in the 2003 conflagration. Die in a bloody war, and your fate is to be memorialized in a picture that you didn’t like and were only harassed by the family into having taken…

But anyway … the other fortunate thing about having taken pictures of pictures and scanned about all of them … is that I have them all, or at least most of them. And now I have the ability to print them out on photographic paper, having tweaked and corrected them through various photo-editing programs.  The various framed versions all got pissed on and ruined by a particularly destructive cat over the last couple of years. Is there any more destructive element in the world than cat pee, other than straight-out nuclear? I don’t think so. All the framed versions and their frames too, are comprehensively ruined, and out into the trash they go. In this iteration, they took up too much space anyway. Now I am going to put them into an album, with everyone’s name and approximate year, for the edification of Wee Jamie, when he begins to wonder where he came from and who his ancestors were.

Day after tomorrow, so Turkey day is about to descend upon us, in this troubled autumn of 2022. Frankly, after reading all kinds of direful stories around the holidays in 2021, we were wondering if we would be able to celebrate at all … so we cannily bought a turkey at a bargain price the day after Christmas last year and stashed it away in the garage deep freezer. We’re always a bit mixed in feelings about turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas anyway. When I was growing up and the grandparents were unable to do the feast alternately as they had early on, Mom was in the habit of doing an absolutely gargantuan bird … and then we would be eating the leftovers in various guises for three weeks. Just when we had finished the last of the eternal turkey soup, then we would start the cycle all over again with turkey for Christmas. I like roast turkey, really I do – but six or seven weeks of turkey leftovers is just too much. We’ll do turkey for Thanksgiving and practically anything else for Christmas. Last year we did Beef Wellington and it was lovely. We stashed away a beef tenderloin roast in the freezer, when it was comparatively cheaper this summer, so will do that again for Christmas.

The other thing is that my daughter and I don’t really care for the traditional sides, either. Green bean casserole is revolting, and so is baked sweet potatoes dotted with marshmallows and brown sugar and whatever. Mom used to make a casserole of tiny onions baked in cheese sauce, because her father liked it, but hardly anyone else did. Even stuffing – if barely OK the first time out, is disgusting when warmed over. I like pumpkin pie, but my daughter doesn’t, unless it’s just a thin wedge. We both dislike the tasteless take and bake rolls that almost everyone has. It’s all too heavy, and too much, and frankly, I really don’t care for eating myself into a coma, anyway. It’s nice to be with friends and family for the holiday – but honestly, I prefer my own cooking best. (And I still shudder over the ghastly Thanksgiving dinner when my Air Force supervisor invited me, with small daughter in tow – to his house for the holiday dinner. Only he hadn’t told his wife that he had, until we showed up at the door. Talk about an ice-cold atmosphere… I never accepted another invite from a supervisor for Thanksgiving, the rest of my time in the military. If it meant just my daughter and self with a half-breast of turkey baked in a small oven, then so be it. Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.) Of the traditional sides, mashed potatoes with giblet gravy, and cranberry sauce is about all that we really do relish. A couple of years ago, I found a recipe for a medley of brussels sprouts, red onion and slivers of Kielbasa sausage, spritzed with olive oil and broiled until done and served with a lemon-mustard-cream sauce – which we both adored and repeated frequently as a holiday side dish. This year, I found another recipe for a simple cheese and corn casserole, which looks pretty enticing, so will try it out – if successful, this will be added to our personal repertoire.

I did a batch of home-made cranberry sauce today – just cranberries, orange peel, sugar, water and a splash of Grand Marnier, and baked a pie. Prepped the brine mix for the turkey, and maybe I’ll put together the corn casserole … or maybe not, as the brined turkey will be taking up just about all the available space. And that’s my planned Thanksgiving – yours?

Last fall, when my daughter and I both fell temporarily to the covid plague, one of my respites was sitting at my computer with Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson in my lap, watching various videos on YouTube. We were not exactly sick … just not very well; easily tired, devoid of energy and interest in anything that lasted very long. Wee Jamie had a low-grad temperature for a day or so, and sniffles, so his health was never in any particular danger. Neither was ours, once some serious drugs had knocked out the covid-induced pneumonia … but the two of us, Wee Jamie and I came away from those weeks with a decided fondness for ten or a dozen YouTube series – some of the home renovation off-the-grid living, a couple of ‘build a shelter from raw materials and a few basic tools’ – look, hard work fascinates me, I could watch it for hours. (Our Restoration Nation, Red Poppy Ranch, Trent & Allie, Lesnoy_Craft … respectively, various locations in the south, somewhere in the inland northwest, in Utah, and somewhere in … maybe Russia? We also liked some of the model-building shows; one an Australian, the other a German, both of whom do the most amazing dioramas and small structures. (Luke Towan, and Samy-Modelblau. Oh, the things that you can make from thick cardboard, and a range of model-making supplies! And wire … and resin…)

But the ones that we liked the best, and from which I came away from with a severe case of power-tool envy were the various renovation/restoration channels; a variety of specialists doing amazing things in renovating, refinishing, and repairing old furniture, restoring seriously wrecked and rusted agricultural or domestic items, and restoring them to attractive functionality. It’s kind of soothing, watching rust being blasted away in a sand-blasting booth. I so wish now that I had been permitted to take wood and metal shop in junior high school – instead of cooking and sewing. I already knew how to cook and sew … but this was when shop classes were strictly reserved for the boys, and the home-making sills were likewise reserved for girls. (You know – back before the Noachian flood. Although Dad did his best to teach my brothers and sister and I, outside of school)

The thing that does get me is that these various specialists really ran the gamut of nationalities – and that some of them never even appeared as more than their hands, doing the work. Veradona Restoration is Czech, AT Restoration, as near as I can figure out, is based in Estonia, one of the Baltic States. LADB is French, and so mysterious that all one ever sees of the experts featured is their hands. I think that there are three of them – one young, one middle-aged, one old, just to judge from close-ups of the hands doing the detail work – woodwork, metal fabrication, rust removal. They have a charming ginger cat-familiar hanging about the incredibly-well equipped workshop; Avril, who appears in most episodes.

Then there is Epic Upcycling, featuring a stone-faced Canadian carpenter-genius, who builds the most ornate and substantial furniture out of old pallets and miscellaneous scrap. Seriously, never give this man an acre of old shipping containers, I think he would build a whole fantastically-original city, or at least a suburb out of them. The pieces of furniture are fantastic – complicated, ornate … and he builds his own metal hinges, handles, locks and stuff. My thought is that of course, the designs are that ornate because the wood he builds them out of is basically waste product, of which (from the occasional glimpses of his wood stash) he may have cornered the available market in used pallets. What he could do with fine wood would rival anything built for Versailles. Or any other 17^th, 18^th or 19^th century palace.

Ah, the pleasures of watching knowledgeable craftsmen and women at work … although I am pretty certain that all the disasters are off-camera or edited out.