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Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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10:35 a.m. - 2005-07-03
"Do you like blacksberry pie?"- Ala Bama the Magician The above is from the Bugs Bunny cartoon The Case of the Missing Hare, one of dozens of Bugs cartoons we quote from regularly. We are movie, TV show and cartoon quoting fools in this house. Every family and gang of friends has their private quote language. A verbal shorthand which carries more depth of meaning than the just the words of the quote themselves. We kind of take it to an extreme though, around here it's possible that an entire dinner conversation will be spoken in nothing but media quotes. Inevitably when we get on the Garden State Parkway and roll up on the first toll somebody in the car will say, "Go back to town and get a shitload of dimes!" When confronted with a project that turned out much larger and harder than anticipated one of us is bound to shake his head and say, "You're gonna need a bigger boat." Listening to us you'd think we had no words of our own at all and we've done nothing but watch TV for our entire lives. The reason I brought up Ala Bama and his blacksberry pies is because I've been getting blackberries. Now you techie types are all thrilled because you think I have some kind of electronic gizmo. Wrong! I am speaking of real blackberries, the fruit of the Rubus fruticosus plant. While we do have a designated berry patch, we also have large clumps of blackberry cane growing wild in several other places on our property. And I have been harvesting all of them. Taking on poison ivy, ticks, pissed off birds, mosquitoes, furious swarming ants, risking bleeding out on thorn gouges or snapping my leg bones in treacherous sink holes hidden beneath mulchy tree litter- all so I can gather enough berries to make jam. I am the lovechild of Martha Stewart and Steve Irwin the Croc Hunter. Who else would risk life and limb (not to mention another round of Lyme Disease) gathering quarts of itty-bitty berries for a shot at spending a steaming July day bent over a pot of boiling fruit juice and then ladling said juice into wicked hot mason jars? Nuts. I am nuts. Especially when you think that the 28oz jug of Smuckers was on sale at Shoprite this week for $2.69. I can't help myself. Sometimes a housewife has gotta do what a housewife has gotta do. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was squatting in the veggie garden with cornstalks jabbing my ass while I carefully untangled pumpkin vines off the tomato cages. It's not like any of this prodigious effort was necessary. My family's survival this winter doesn't depend on what I can grow and preserve this summer. God help us if it did. So what's it all for? Vanity, mostly. I dig and hoe and plant and tend and harvest and chop and boil so sometime this fall I can plop a crock on the counter at the salon and invite Zee and the crew to chow down on salsa I made myself from veggies I grew myself in my yard. Sheer vanity. I do all this so I can be praised for it. Of course there's the satisfaction of finding out I can do these things, but mostly it's the praise by others which is the real harvest. "Lookee what I did! Impressed, ain'tcha?" Once an honor roll geek always an honor roll geek. Some part of me will forever be jonesing for a shiny star sticker on the top of my spelling test. Granted it wasn't terribly difficult for me to be an A+ student, the gods gifted me with an audiographic sponge brain. I heard. I absorbed. I could squeeze it back out at test time. I was no grade grind. Especially during my teenage years, cracking the books interfered with my buzz. But by then I'd stumbled onto the secret of scoring good grades with minimal effort. The Extra Credit Project. Teachers fell all over themselves to heap goodies on students who seemed to actually think about class during non-school hours. Extra credit projects said to them that yours truly cared about learning even when not mandatorily ensconced in Room 222. Being a creative sort I always looked for something other than the usual term paper mit bibliography and footnotes. Instead I did puppet shows and dioramas. I wore costumes and bespoke famous speeches. I carved a bust of Shakespeare from a bar of Irish Spring. Anything to avoid the damn index cards. The big 'A-HA!' moment came in 7th grade. American history: Pilgrims to Patriots. We'd been assigned the task of bringing in an example of early settler life. Kids straggled in with construction paper Pilgrim hats and popsicle stick log cabins. I brought soup. Just after the project had been assigned I'd been lying around watching TV and saw Julia Child making beef stock. Bingo! I realized the Pilgrims had to make soup the same way! I took careful mental notes while the French Chef did her thing, and laid out my scheme. On the day of my presentation I lugged in a hot plate, some small paper cups and my mother's Dutch oven full of soup. As the soup was warming I explained the process of extracting stock from marrow bones and how the thrifty Pilgrims used up the scraps of a slaughtered animal so there wasn't any waste in their lean hungry times. I doled out Dixie cups of 'Pilgrim soup' laying it on thick about using up softened potatoes and wilting carrots to get every bit of food value from their struggling farms and scanty harvests. Mr Sperry the teacher almost cried. He was so impressed! All that effort to truly live the Pilgrim experience! Wonderful! A+!!!! It was my little secret I'd filled the Dutch oven with 3 cans of Progresso Beef and Barley. Shhhhhh…. ~LA
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