Peggy's Prompts

01/22/09……………COINS…..
I’ve noticed that there are two types of coin people—those that use them and those that don’t. You see them all the time at the Quik-Stops, and 7-11’s. That’s two-eighty-two, the cashier says. One type hands her three ones, or a five and waits for the change which he stuffs in his pocket or she drops into her purse. The other type reaches into his pocket or takes out a change purse and pokes around to see if there might be 82 cents in change in there. If so, he or she will pick through the coins, silently, or out loud, counting 25, 50, 60, 70, 80, 81, 82. Then they hand the coins to the cashier and fish out the bills from some other place in the purse or from another pocket. Meanwhile the folks in line behind are beginning to move around edgily, having no effect whatsoever on the coin counter-outer.

I’m usually a coin counter-outer myself, but I’m also, due to shyness, keenly aware of the people around me, so if it starts taking too long, based on movement behind me, I’ll abandon the coins and whip out the bills as if to say, who ever has correct change?

If you asked, at random, what a coin-counter has in change, there’ll be 2 quarters, 3 dimes, 2 nickels, and 4 pennies in their change purse or pocket. And when the non-coin-counter is asked, there’ll be 6 quarters, 1 dimes, 1 nickel, and 14 pennies in the pocket. But at home there will be a jar or a box or a drawer holding $92.67 in pennies, nickels, dimes, and a few quarters.

01/28/09……..VINEGAR……
What an appropriate word for today. Vinegar-y. Sharp edges, taken in small amounts, only a hint of the original sweetness.

Simon Le Cat died this morning. His body was still warm when I found him on the floor, but he wasn’t breathing and his body was getting rigid. I left him there, covered with the old towels that he loved. The other cats were curious at first, and Mr. Lucky wanted to bat at Simon’s ear with his paw, but I shooed him away. Sid will miss him the most, the two of them—Simon and Sid—having spent most of their lives together. But these last few weeks, Simon has preferred to be alone, preparing us all for today, I guess. I say he wanted to be left alone, but yesterday afternoon he managed to move himself near me and he meowed a few times – rare for him, Simon seldom spoke—and I sat down on the floor beside him and gently stroked and caressed him for a long, long time. And he relaxed and put his head down, something he’d been resisting these last days. Perhaps he felt that if he truly lay all the way down, there’d be no getting up again.

Slowly, but gradually I put the house back to the way it was before Simon’s last days required a heated nest for him in the living room. And dig his grave in my garden, moving carefully to protect my back and because Simon deserves a nice resting place.

And now the tears finally come.




01/29/09……..THE HOUSE I GREW UP IN SMELLED LIKE
fried fish most of the time, although occasionally it smelled like whatever Mama was cooking in her pressure cooker or in her version of a slow cooker—a big heavy oval metal pot with an extra heavy lid. That would be “roast beef”, or really chuck roast, or a picnic ham, whatever that is, or a whole stewed chicken. Those were our Sunday staples. The rest of the week it was fish, fish, fish. Not that I minded. Luckily for food-picky me, I loved fish. Although sometimes in the summer when the river and ocean water got warm and my commercial fisherman father’s catches were small and didn’t pay well, we’d have fish all seven days of the week. During those times my mother would try to vary the lunch menus (fish was for supper) with different kinds of “luncheon meat”—mostly boiled ham—they actually called it boiled ham on the label—or bologna, or something awful that my mother liked called liver cheese. All served on fresh, locally baked white bread, of course, slathered with lots of salad dressing—not plain mayonnaise—always salad dressing. But fried fish were the mainstay of our diet. Daddy would bring home raw fish that he had scaled and filleted at the dock, all wrapped in old newspaper (waste not, want not), and leave the package in the sink. Then when Mama had time, she’d take the fillets out of the newspaper wrapping, rinse them off really well under the tap, let them drain a bit and then put meal-size portions in plastic bread wrappers (waste not, want not again) to place in the freezer or the meat tray at the top of the fridge. I had no clue at the time of how well we were eating, both in terms of nutrition (if you ignore the fried part) and cost. All I knew was that winter or spring, fall or summer, if you walked through the front door of our house, you were going to smell fried fish.

Addendum:
And she fried the fish in a little tiny kitchen on a tiny little stove in a big black iron frying pan. (Mama called it a frying pan, not a skillet.)

And the stove was on a wall away from the two windows in the kitchen and there was no vent fan (I was so surprised when I went to college and lived in the Scholarship House to find the stoves had vent fans above) so naturally the fumes and aromas of whatever was cooking would hover in the tiny kitchen and then overflow to the rest of the house.

Some people look down their noses at houses that carry the aroma of cooking food, but I always thought our house smelled delicious!


02/02/09…….SOMETHING UNEXPECTED SHOWS UP IN A COFFEE CUP…….

Well, I’ll be daggoned. Looky here at what’s in my coffee.

I leaned over toward my Dad’s cup of coffee that he had just rested on the counter at the Sandy Shoes Coffee Shop.

What do you reckon that is? He asked, leaning his head down until it almost touched the rim of the cup.

Let me see, Daddy, I said. I’ll take a look. I hadn’t really wanted to go with my Dad to his ritual daily outing at the Sandy Shoes Coffee Shop, mostly because he arrived there by 5:30 am. He and the other old geezers who couldn’t sleep through the night and who would go back home later and doze in a chair reading a newspaper. But Daddy wanted me to meet his coffee buddies—to show me off, really. The kid who had a PhD even though her Dad had never gone to high school. He was prouder of my advanced education than I was.

See, right there! See it sorta glint?

I looked down into the cup which now held only a smidge of the black coffee that had been there earlier.

I don’t really see anything, Daddy.

Well, here, let me pour it out.

So he poured the smidge into the saucer and looked closely at the small puddle.

Well, dang, it ain’t in there.

By now the old geezer coffee buddies up and down the long counter were getting wind of a little excitement brewing.

Whatcha got there, Joe? from a short burly white-haired buy with a crewcut and a droopy mustache.

Yeah, Joe, let us see what Robbie’s been putting in our coffee. Big laughs up and down the counter.

By now, my Dad had turned his attention back to the cup itself.

Well, I’ll be damned, he said. If that ain’t gold, I’m a mullet.


02/11/09………..MY MOTHER’S HANDS…………….
My mother’s hands were an embarrassment to her during the years I knew her. Although I thought her hands looked just fine—she always kept her nails clean and trimmed and she used Jergens hand lotion every night—and to me they seemed soft and smooth. But to her, they were the hands of a farmer’s daughter—a daughter who had, as a child, worked in the fields picking beans and tomatoes and bell peppers. And they were the hands of someone who for many years washed clothes by hand, scrubbing them on a washboard, wringing them out by twisting and squeezing. She thought her knuckles were enlarged from hard work and the veins on the back of her hands were too prominent. More than anything, my mother wanted to be an educated middle-class lady, and she thought her hands put her squarely in the working class of maids and housekeepers and factory workers. As she got older, rheumatoid arthritis took an even heavier toll on her hands than the hard work did, and by the time she died, her hands were bony and misshapen.

When I was a child, I would sometimes place my hands up again my mother’s hand and compare them for size. But she didn’t care about the size. You have such nice hands, she’d say. I don’t want you to have to ruin them with hard work like I did. And so she consciously spared me and my sister from much in the way of heavy housework, and required no yard work of us at all, although she herself worked in her yard all the times and had over time created a lush sub-tropical landscaping.

I think about all that now when I look at my own aging hands, with knobby knuckles and short fingernails, and enough age spots to make a face-lift seem ridiculous. And I’m grateful that my mother had aspirations for me to have an easier life than she did, and to instill a love of learning and knowledge in me that serves me still. But I feel sad that she didn’t love her own hands like I loved them. For when I think of my mother, I often think of her warm, gentle, capable, hard-working, loving hands.