Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Peggy’s Prompt—February 28, 2011—stand still—25 minutes

Peggy’s Prompt—February 28, 2011—stand still—25 minutes

(not a true story----but it could be!)

“Stand still,” she said. “I can’t get this thing zipped up if you’re wiggling.” “This thing” was one of those “body shapers”—actually, they’re supposed to be body RE-shapers, but anyhow, it was my first experience with these torture devices. I’d worn elastic girdles in my youth, and once I owned one of those long-waisted bras that’s supposed to hid the bulges around the waistline. But in those days I didn’t really need body re-arrangers. I was thin enough that my natural self was good enough. But young women are never satisfied with how their bodies look, so that’s how I came to wear a few of them.

But, now, in the interest of keeping up with the times, I thought I’d try out one of these nearly whole-body thingys all the beautiful people seem to be wearing, as by now my body could use a whole lot of re-shaping. I passed up the opportunity to try one with no zipper that you just step into and pull up over your shoulders. I figured no amount of pulling would ever get that thingy up as far as my shoulders, not without taking off a few layers of skin along the way. So I settled for a sissy-version, one that has a zipper up the back, sort of like a wet-suit, I think, although I’ve never put on a wet-suit either. Anyhow, my friend Carol agreed to help me with this new cultural experience if I would make the purchase by myself. I think she was a little embarrassed to be seen in a store with a woman buying a re-shaper that clearly was not going to remake her body enough to warrant the expense. But I said OK, and now we’ll skip over the selection/buying experience and focus on the try-on experience.

Did you ever see Gone With the Wind, that scene where Scarlett is being laced up into her corset by her maid so that she’ll have an 18-inch waist? Well, my experience was nothing like that. Nothing like that at all. For one thing, my “maid” was my not-so-helpful friend Carol who couldn’t keep her wisecracks to herself, something Scarlett never had to contend with. And for another, there isn’t a garment made that could have gotten my waist anywhere near those 18 inches. Not even 28 inches. And I’ll stop there, although I could go on.

We started by my dusting my whole body with powder in order to reduce friction as much as possible when putting on the re-shaper. This got a little messy, and brought on a sneezing fit in my friend, who appeared to be allergic to Mary Kay’s best after-shower body-powder. Then I stepped into some polyester undies, again to reduce drag (hopefully) when I pulled the re-shaper up. I will say it wasn’t too bad getting the re-shaper up and fitted snugly around my thighs. (My thighs aren’t my biggest problem.) But then we arrived at the middle section of my body. With the zipper all the way down, I could just barely pull, drag, and tug the re-shaper up and over what seemed to be a lot more flesh than I’d remembered. Which said flesh wanted to roll upward along with the re-shaper, so that by the time I had the thingy up to my waist, I had developed a ring around my middle, sort of like those floating rings you use in the swimming pool.

Well, OK. Now came the struggle to get my arms into the sleeves and the top pulled up over my shoulders. I finally did manage to do this, again with the zipper still wide open, but now I couldn’t stand up straight. I seemed to have developed such a significant curve in my back that my chin almost touched my navel.

Now it was time to close the zipper. Who were we kidding? There was no way that zipper was going to be strong enough to hold together the two sides of that already stretched-to-the-limit re-shaper. But Carol insisted we give it a try. She gave the zipper a tug and it moved about a millimeter, managing to snag a few of those tiny, nearly invisible hairs that cover our bodies. Owwww, I said. No pain, no gain, she said. Here we go again, she said. And then she pulled with all her strength on the zipper tab. No movement whatsoever. Nothing. I told you, I said. This isn’t going to work. Don’t give up yet, she said. We’ve just begun the fight.

So she had me stand facing forward flush up to the bed so that I’d have something to lean my knees against, while she placed one of her knees firmly on my lower back/upper butt, just below the zipper. Thus stabilized, she simultaneously pulled on the zipper while she leaned into my butt with her (bony) knee. Uffff, I said. Hey, it went up a ways, she said. Let’s do that again. So, inch by inch, she man-handled the zipper up my back, all the while inflicting serious pressure (and pain) on my lower back with her (bony) knee. By the time the zipper was almost up to boob level, we were both panting, and to tell the truth, I was sweating a bit, too. And that didn’t help with the friction situation.

Now, she said, stand up real straight and pull your shoulders way back and I’ll get this last little bit of zipper. I did what she said as best I could, trying to straighten up without screaming, and with some success. Huhhhhh, she said. There you all. All zipped up. Let’s see how you look.

She turned me slowly around to face the full-length mirror on the closet door. Taking very tiny breaths and feeling like I might pass out at any second from the pressure, I let my eyes rise up far enough to catch a glimpse of my new self in the mirror. OMG! There stood a stooped tree trunk draped in white, pretty much the same circumference from top to bottom. The re-shaper had done its duty. It had rearranged my Pillsbury dough-boy original shape into a cylindrical tube, sans curves of any kind, even the wrong ones.

Get this thing off of me, I said to Carol, before I pass out from lack of oxygen. OK, she said. Stand still. Here we go.



Uh-oh, the zipper seems to be stuck.

Peggy’s Prompt—030211—hum—40 minutes

Peggy’s Prompt—030211—hum—40 minutes


Hum, hmmmm.

I once had a short Instant Messenger relationship with a rediscovered old friend. He’s a male. I’m a female. True to stereotype, I would send messages long enough to require two sendings, as I would run out of room on just one. He, on the other hand, was the master of short answers. Yep. Nope. Or my least favorite, hmmmmmm. Or sometimes, hmmm. Now how do you interpret hmmmm? Does it mean “I’m thinking about this, don’t push me” or perhaps “I really don’t agree, but I don’t want to say so,” or maybe even a shorthand way to say “uh-huh” which would mean “yes, I agree.” If ever there was a conversation stopper (and maybe this was the intention), it was “hmmmm.” And eventually the IM relationship did end, mostly because he really elaborated one time about a subject, and I didn’t like his take on it. So, maybe hmmm was just a way to stall the inevitable. Or, maybe it was a way to keep the IMs coming until he figured out what he thought of me. Anyway, it’s another of those past experiences that doesn’t seem to have much effect on my life today, except that I still don’t really like “hmmmmm.”



Hum. I sometimes hum (or sort of sing) quietly under my breath without realizing I’m doing it until I’ve been doing it for awhile. I’m not sure what that means, except that I seem to only do it when I’m in a pretty good mood, so maybe it’s a symptom of happiness, or satisfaction. My sister has little quiet, but out-loud conversations with herself, as did my Mother. “Gotta get the butter out”, she’ll say, while setting out dinner. Then she’ll retrieve the butter from the refrigerator and say “That’s done. Now the drinks.” On and on she goes until dinner is served and she turns her attention to the other folks. She’s done talking to herself for the time being.

I’ll admit to occasionally talking to myself. I usually only say something out loud to myself with I’m aggravated with myself, as when I forget to lock the back door (which goes into a locked garage, so it’s not really such a serious matter). I’ll notice the unlocked door in the morning when I come into the kitchen to make my coffee, and I’ll say, not under my breath, but out loud as if I were talking to someone else, “Gee-ma-net-ly, Gwendie, you did it again.”



My Dad used to whistle when he was standing at the bathroom sink shaving. I don’t know whether that helped or hindered the shaving process, but it probably was related to the fact that he was getting cleaned up to go out beer drinking with his buddies. He was cheerful, as opposed to my Mother’s reaction to his whistling, which was to turn down the corners of her mouth and exaggerate the frown line between her eyebrows. Interesting how the same sound could mean two completely different things.



I have a friend who makes little puffy grunting sounds when she’s thinking, not loud enough to be heard unless it’s very quiet and you are sitting very close to her. I wonder if she even knows she does it. Maybe it’s one of those Pavlovian learned behaviors. Somehow she associates the puffing sound to serious cogitation, and does it unconsciously.



Anyhow, we often seem to feel the need to orally communicate with ourselves. A little hum, a few quiet words, a series of puffy noises, a few whistled bars of a song….lots of us do it. Lots of us over fifty, that is. Except for tiny children talking to their dolls or toys, you don’t hear a lot of younger people talking to themselves, at least out loud. My explanation for that is that their hearing is still good enough for them to hear their thoughts so they don’t need to give voice to them. Their turn will come, though, and their children will be saying, “Mom, what did you say? You’re mumbling.” And they’ll be forced to reply, “Oh, nothing, I was just talking to myself.”

Peggy’s Prompt ---rattle---45 minutes—021611

Peggy’s Prompt ---rattle---45 minutes—021611


Rattle—shake, rattle and roll, a baby rattle, a rattlesnake rattle, to rattle one’s nerves, where shall I go with this?

I’m rattled, I will be rattled, rattling along a rutted road, I can think of all kinds of past scenarios where rattle was part of my experience, but nothing grabs my enthusiasm. There’s the time when I was very young, and Mama and I were going across the undeveloped lot between our house and our neighbor’s house for me to play with their kids, and Mama heard a rattlesnake near the base of the (only) pine tree on the path. We turned around and went home, and I never saw the snake.


Larry and I once lived down a dirt clay road near Havana, Florida, which is near both Tallahassee and the Georgia state line, and in dry spells it would become a “washboard” road. My little red VW Bug would rattle all the way from our trailer in the woods to the main paved road. I learned to drive in wet clay on that road, too, which in a VW Bug meant to floor the accelerator and fish-tail your way down the road, hoping no one would come from the other direction. Luckily it was a very wide dirt road, so there was plenty of room to fishtail in.



The only outdoor rock concert I ever attended where “shake, rattle, and roll” occurred was so early in the rock and roll era that people today wouldn’t believe how tame it was. It was in about 1957, and held in our town’s football field (not nearly big enough to call a stadium), with the audience seated on only one side of the field. The performers—The Everly Brothers, Bill Haley, and somebody else—The Big Bopper?—sang in front of ONE microphone, with no ‘extras”—no fireworks, laser-lights, fire, fog, nothing. No dope smoking in the audience. No hands in the air, no fingers clicking, no lighters, no screaming. Just applause that rapidly disappeared into the hot afternoon air in the football field. What evolved as rock shows today is like comparing the pyrotechnics of a Fourth of July fireworks display over the Charles River in Boston to a single popper sizzling on the sidewalk in front of the house. But we teenagers were excited just the same. I remember them singing Yellow Polka-dot Bikini, and Love Potion Number Nine, which are probably the only two “rock” songs that I actually know the words to.



And my nerves have been rattled more times than I can count, or even remember. As a matter of fact, I have deliberately sealed off, sequestered, repressed, forgotten most of the times I’ve been rattled. It isn’t my favorite emotional condition, so I usually choose not to replay those moments in my ruminations.

Peggy’s Prompt—021711—peeking out—10 minutes

Peggy’s Prompt—021711—peeking out—10 minutes






One of my small, but frequent pleasures is seeing one of my kitties peeking out from underneath a bed, or from behind a doorway, or down from a shelf, or through the slats of the plantation blinds. Often when I drive up in the driveway, I’ll spy Mr. Lucky jumping up on the chest by the front window to peek out through the blinds, assuring himself that it’s I who is arriving, and not some dangerous stranger that he’d be obliged to run under the bed for.

Sid’s favorite peeking out posture is from up high over the refrigerator, where there’s a cut-out in the partition beside the fridge that he can poke his head through. He’s been known to have caused me (and others) long searches through the house, looking under and behind pieces of furniture, when all along he was in plain sight, or at least his head was, peeking out from his high perch. Normally he meows a lot, but not when you are looking for him. Oh, no.

Eartha’s favorite place from which to peek out is not a place where she’s actually hidden, but instead is when it’s dark and her black fur disappears into whatever she’s lying on. Then only if she raises her head and opens her yellow eyes wide do you see her peeking at you, wondering what all the fuss is about.

Eartha doesn’t rattle easily, whereas Mr. Lucky is spooked by a gust of wind, and Sid is always two or three beats behind both of them. So when you are looking for a missing kitty, and calling and calling, Mr. Lucky usually appears within a few minutes, Eartha takes longer, and Sid never responds at all, unless he gets hungry or feels the subtle need to investigate the litter box.

Peggy’s Prompt—jelly—30 minutes—020611

Peggy’s Prompt—jelly—30 minutes—020611

Not too long after we moved to the Pfafftown house, with its crabapple tree, pear tree, plum tree, peach tree, and the muscadine grapes, I decided to become one of those women who “puts up” food for the winter. My Grandmother Roberts had, every year, made guava jelly (my favorite), from the guavas from the trees in their yard. I guess I was looking for my roots or something. Unfortunately for me, just after I’d bought all the canning jars and lids and long tongs and a wide-mouth funnel, I came down with Hepatitis A, what they used to call infectious hepatitis. Not hep C, which for a long time was incurable, or hep B which is usually sexually transmitted, but hep A, the kind you get from food that’s been handled by a restaurant worker who has ignored the sign in the restroom to wash hands with soap and water. (How I came to get hep A is another story.) So that hep A summer, I didn’t make any jellies or preserves or jams, but Grandma Camp did. She made peach preserves and plum jelly that was yum-yum good.

But I was still hankering to show that I, too, could live off the land, so the next summer I decided to make muscadine jelly from the muscadine grapes that grew for free beside our driveway. It would be much more exotic than peach preserves, more along the lines of guava jelly. Not everyone would have tasted muscadine jelly.

Making muscadine jelly is not for the faint of heart. First you have to pick the grapes (one at a time, as they don’t grow in clusters). And if you have a 2 ½ year old boy helping you, you have to face the fact that most of the grapes he picks are going into his mouth, not into the bucket. But finally, after picking grapes every night after supper for a week, I judged that we had enough for my first batch of jelly.

Now we had in this house a very small kitchen. Almost no counter space that wasn’t taken up with microwave or toaster or coffee maker. So right away I had to finesse some make-shift surfaces to hold my little canning jars—the ones I so carefully boiled and lifted with sterile tongs onto the make-shift surface. It turns out that I’d skipped a step, the part where you get the juice ready to pour into the canning jars. So, backing up on the recipe, I washed the grapes, de-stemmed them, and placed them in a large bowl to crush (no bare feet for me, thank you). First I mashed them as best I could with my grandmother’s heavy wire potato masher. Then I tried putting a smaller bowl inside the big bowl the semi-crushed grapes were in and pressing down very, very hard. Needless to say, a fair amount of juice shot out of the crack between the two bowls and splashed on everything. Undaunted though, I constructed a Rube Goldberg apparatus with which to strain the juice away from the mashed skins and pulp. This involved several layers of cheesecloth (I had to go to several hardware stores to find cheesecloth) folded into a bag-like shape, a shoestring to tie the bag to the handle of an overhead cabinet, and a large bowl on the counter under the cabinet for the strained juice to drip into. I’m not sure how canning pros would have done this, but not my way, I can assure you. Anyhow, next morning there was about three tablespoons of muscadine juice in the catching bowl, and the bagful of juice and pulp and skins hadn’t changed shape at all. Apparently I had used a few too many folds of cheesecloth, and had effectively made a leak-proof bag. Who knew? Anyhow, I poured out the contents of the bag into a big pot, re-assembled the (wet and gross) cheesecloth bag, got the *&@# grape juice/pulp/skin mixture back in the bag, and hung it up to do its business during the day while I was at work.

Voila! When I arrived home that afternoon, I had a large pool of muscadine juice (nearly colorless, almost a champagne color) in the collecting bowl, and with some judicious squeezing of the now-limp bag, I managed to get another fair portion of juice into the collecting bowl.

Now, I was ready for bear. I had my juice, my sterilized (well, they were a day or two ago and nobody’d touched them) jars, my sugar, and whatever else the recipe called for. I’ve blocked much of it out by now. So I cooked up the sugared juice, poured it through my new wide-mouth funnel into the little jelly jars, losing only about twenty percent in the process, and wound up with twenty-four beautiful home-made jellies.

Once they had cooled and the lids sealed, I packed them up in the box the jars came in, and proudly wrote Muscadine Jelly, Summer 1980 on the outside. I left one out for us to eat on our breakfast toast.

I ate that whole jar myself, and it was delicious, if I do say so myself, but not another member of the family would touch it. I hadn’t counted on the fact that most people would be a bit suspicious of a jar of nearly clear gelatin-like substance that I was passing off as homemade muscadine jelly. (Jelly is colorful, right?) So when Christmas came and I considered giving my little jars of homemade muscadine jelly from my own grapevines to friends and relatives, I had second thoughts. Leaving another jar or two out for myself, I gave that box of muscadine jelly to a half-way house for women, with a note explaining that muscadine grapes are white inside, and so make clear jelly. I hope someone there was willing to give it a taste.

That was the last time I ever “put up” anything from the fruit trees and vines. We ate the crops raw from then on.

Peggy’s prompt—crackers—30 minutes—020911

Peggy’s prompt—crackers—30 minutes—020911




My family are all Florida crackers. Both sides, although it goes back much further on my father’s side—both his mother’s family and his father’s family. That’s what they called themselves—Florida crackers, as opposed to the newly Floridaners, who were really New Yorkers or New Jerseyers, or Connecticutters, or Massachusetters. That’s where most of the immigration into Fort Pierce in the 40’s and 50’s came from. That and the folks from Georgia and South Carolina, who were pretty much crackers already, just not Florida crackers. Florida crackers were proud of their status, they felt (we felt) like pioneers, or, at least, descendents of pioneers. The southern part of Florida had very little population before the 1900’s, except for the Indians, and there weren’t all that many of them, either. So when we learned in school about American history starting in the 1600’s, that seemed like another planet to us. Imagine how I felt, later, in Europe, seeing buildings that already existed in the 1200’s!

Anyhow, we were crackers. Not conchs—those were the folks from the Keys and the Bahamas. Not frontiersmen, not white settlers. We were crackers. Self-sufficient, with minimal formal education, a strong work ethic, and a deep Southern accent. Unlike the snack called “crackers”, we bent, we didn’t break. We rolled with the punches, of which there were many—mosquitoes, sand flies, hurricanes, heat and humidity, mold and mildew, skin infections and hookworm, typhoid and tetanus. It wasn’t the sunshiny life now depicted in Florida ads.

But there was the upside. We crackers had “the sun in the morning and the moon at night”, so went the song. In third grade we all had to learn the words to “Florida”, which went:

I like to wake up In the sunshine
Where the orange blossoms grow.
Where the sun comes peepin’
Into where I’m sleepin’
And the songbirds say hello!

I like the fresh air and the sunshine
It’s so good for us, you know
So I’ll make my home in Flor-i-da
Da-da-da--da-da-da--da. ( I forget this line.)

Probably school kids don’t learn that song anymore. The air’s not as fresh any more, and the sunshine can give you skin cancer or heat stroke. But my childhood Florida was a lot like that song. And I just remembered another Florida song, which goes:

I’ll make my home in old Florida
F-L-O-R-I-D-A,
Where the girls are the fairest, the boys are the rarest,
Of any old state down our way.

We are all proud of old Florida
F-L-O-R-I-D-A,
In any old weather, we’ll all stick together
In F-L-O-R-I-D-A

Pretty hokey, huh? Do other states have similar songs? Probably. I don’t know any for North Carolina, though, where I’ve lived for a big chunk of my life. Texas, yes, where I also lived for a while. They’ve got plenty of songs, starting with “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” But then, they’d be expected to have a song as Texas was its own country for awhile. Even Florida can’t say that. We always belonged to someone—the Spanish or the English or the USA. Except of course for the Great Wahr of Nawthun Aggression, when Florida was part of the Confederacy. But I digress.

Florida crackers. Someone should develop a line of salty delicious, can’t-eat-just-one snack crackers called Florida Crackers. I’d buy them, just out of solidarity. Maybe they could have a little citrus flavor—orange, or lime. And they could be shaped like palm trees, or Brahma bulls, or crawfish, or Mickey Mouse—but wait, Mickey came much later. Anyhow, they could sell them in souvenir shops along the Florida Turnpike, alongside the rubber alligators, and the pecan rolls. Just a thought.

Peggy’s prompt—they hold courage—25 minutes—020111

Peggy’s prompt—they hold courage—25 minutes—020111




People say to me, you have such courage. What do they mean? Do they mean I go about my life like they do, even though they don’t have metastatic breast cancer (MBC, to those who have it)? Apparently, they hold courage as something to be admired, sought after, treasured. But I don’t know exactly what courage is, or where it comes from. It seems to me that courage is something like the Buddhist “acceptance.” Like living in the present as it is and not in the past or in the future. I don’t really know what I’m talking about here. I just know that the times when I have felt courageous were the times when I “did the right thing” and the times I’ve felt cowardly are the times when I felt I didn’t do the right thing. And what is the “right thing?” I guess it’s the same as what other people would consider right. But yet, not always. In the ‘60’s, many people thought I was wrong to be a part of civil rights activities, but I though I was right. Now most people probably agree with me. I think it’s right not to give up when life hands you a harsh blow—of which I have had several. So I try to do what I think is right. And maybe that is courage. I’m not sure everyone would agree with me. Some would think it’s doing something extraordinary, like rushing into a burning building to save a child. But to me, that’s more than courageous, that’s heroic. I think courage is doing the everyday things, even though it may be hard. So, by my definition, I’m often, but not always courageous. And that’s about as good as I’m going to get.

Peggy’s prompt—a yellow rose—15 minutes—021411

Peggy’s prompt—a yellow rose—15 minutes—021411




The man behind me in the check-out line today—Valentine’s Day—at the grocery store was holding four helium balloons shaped like hearts, with “I Love You” stenciled on them, a huge fluffy yellow stuffed doggie with a red bow, and a bouquet of six red roses surrounded by baby’s breath. I smiled at him and said “I’d be impressed if those were for me”, implying that I liked his selections. “Are you s’posed to get pink roses for Valentine’s Day?” he asked. “No,” I said, “red is just fine.” Red is really the best”, isn’t it? he asked. “Yep,” I said. “Red’s the best.”



Which reminds me of the (very few) times I’ve ever gotten flowers for any occasion. The most touching bouquet I ever received was a surprise gift from Jim Philp, my colleague in our two-year journey to create a new problem-based curriculum for Bowman Gray School of Medicine. We were beginning with just 18 students in our “Parallel Curriculum”, and on the first day they all arrived at medical school, he had delivered to my office 18 long-stemmed carnations. I’ve forgotten what color they were. Not red, but maybe white. Anyhow, I was very touched, and surprised, and unfortunately, it may have been the last time we were great friends as well as colleagues.



When Jonathan was born, Larry brought me a long-stemmed red rose to the hospital, which I’m sure he bought from a Moonie on the street corner, and then he tried to put it in the water glass beside my bed, but it was too tall and kept falling out. The rest of his present was a stick of Hickory Farms summer sausage (Jonathan was born in December). I guess he was a little rattled by the whole experience.



Sometimes other colleagues have given me flowers for various reasons, including the fact that I was their boss and it was “Bosses Day.” And once Jonathan had a bouquet of red roses sent to me for Mother’s Day. And I got flowers when I had surgery a few years ago. But never any flowers on Valentine’s Day. I tell myself the whole thing is a commercial event dreamed up by the florists, but secretly I wouldn’t mind getting flowers on Valentine’s day—even a single yellow rose.