social life
DIY recipes for the pantry: Hot sauce
I spent the day today with Mark’s Aunt Regina and his stepmom, Patti, at Regina’s house outside Kilgore. Patti had been telling me that the cookbook and recipe collection stuffed in the cupboard above Regina’s refrigerator was a treasure, and she was right.
We set aside two accordion files to go through today, hunting specifically for things Regina, or her mother (that would be my children’s great-grandmother), or Patti had written down. I ended up capturing more than 240 images this afternoon. And occasionally taking notes.
Sometimes Regina just had a list of ingredients and the barest of instructions. We talked through it all, to make sure we knew what we were hanging on to and what we were tossing.
I noticed, as I’ve often seen with older recipes, that most of them were quite simple. Regina clipped and saved a lot of recipes, but you could tell by the splatters which ones she used. Patti asked about one that had long instructions. “Did you make this?” she asked. “Oh, no!” Regina said. “When it takes two pages of instructions, no, I didn’t make it.”
I was the most excited to see some of her DIY recipes — salami and ravioli and brisket and hot sauce (below) and sweetened, condensed milk, “for those times when you can’t find it,” Regina said. There’s never been a time that there wasn’t sweetened condensed milk, even the nonfat variety, at the store when I wanted it for a recipe. But Regina is 91, with a life experience that transcends the Great Depression and several wars. That just gave me pause, thinking how much life can change.
We’ll start with the hot sauce. “It’s hot. You have to use gloves,” Regina says.
Hot Sauce
12 red peppers
12 green peppers
12 onions
Grind peppers and onions. Cover with boiling water and let set 5 minutes. Drain.2 cup sugar
2 cup vinegar
3 tablespoons salt
Combine sugar, vinegar and salt. Boil until sugar melts. Add peppers and onions. Cook 5 minutes.
Letters from camp
When I visited my parents last week, my mom brought out a pile of childhood arts and letters she set aside as keepsakes over the years. The basement had flooded in a bad hailstorm and the construction paper and mimeographs and report-cards-on-cardstock of my sisters and mine were threatened by the damp air.
She encouraged us to take our pieces back home. I found some watercolors I did as a teenager that weren’t half bad. We stumbled on several long lost family photos. Mom and Dad got to re-read heartfelt Mother’s Day and Father’s Day wishes. But the most fun came after we unearthed two letters my younger sisters, Chris and Karen, mailed home from Girl Scout camp one miserable Wisconsin summer.
Michael reveled in backcountry trips he took around the Texas Hill Country with Mr. Joe and the rest of the Georgetown Parks and Rec team. Paige’s complaints the year she joined them on a kayak and camping trip to Big Bend pale in comparison to those my younger sisters made of Chalk Hills Camp in Wausaukee. Both Michael and Paige later worked as camp counselors themselves at Balcones Springs.
The next time the kids start telling stories about their “character-building” childhood experiences and Mark’s and my role in deciding that they had to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways — well, I’m ready with these little classics.
Mom doesn’t remember her reaction to getting them. “I think they were coming home pretty soon after that,” she mused.
From Chris:
Tuesday, Aug. 5
Dear all,
Everyone is pretty homesick here. Karen has been crying a lot. She hasn’t been feeling too well. The bug has been flying around; it got into our tent last night.
Monday night everyone in our tent was crying of homesickness and mostly of the “friendly” counselors. Ha! The only one I like best is Baters.
Monday for lunch our patrol, Baters “Twick suel Jayujayleys” went on a bike hike to the dam and had lunch there and swam for about 10 minutes. There, I got a picture of a chipmunk eating some of our bread we gave it. I was about 2 ft away from it.
I finally found out my part in the play of Mary Poppins. I’m Michael but I don’t want to be in a musical where the parts are favored. They tell us to be fair!
Just as I was writing this letter, yours & Peg’s letter came in.
Karen Hart got stung by a bee.
Today, Karen’s unit (or patrol) is going on an overnight. I made a nature stationery, so the next time I write, I’ll use it.
A guy is here with his cameras. He’s going to [take] pictures all afternoon.
Sue has got a letter for Peg you can send up to her. I don’t know the address.
I better sign off now for tent inspection.
The weather cooled off, rain, too.
Love ya,
Chris
P.S. Can you write separate letters for Karen cause we don’t see each other often. Thanks.
From Karen:
30/31
Dear Mom and Dad,
It’s real hot up here. It took from 10 to 10 [9:50 a.m.] – 12:37 with a 20 minute stop at Clintonville. We went on a dumb treasure hunt that took us around the camp when it was boiling out and we ended up with a free swim. That was yesterday.
For today, it’s been good except my shoulder and my ears hurt when I talk.
We went for a swim and they put you back 2 or 3 steps. Liz is going in junior life saving and [they] put her in advanced beginners.
The food is good except the cornbread is rotten. Later, after rest hour, we’re going swimming and canoeing. We won a cleanest cabin award for the cleanest cabin.
If you want, you can send me more fungus stuff. The medicine says to apply four times daily. If Dad could write it out, it [would] be good. If you want me to, I’ll send along the medicine. I think I have fungus on my neck and I have it all over my face.
We went canoeing and the swimming alarm went. Someone just didn’t turn in their tag.
Love,
Karen
8/2
Dear Mom and Dad,
It rained yesterday while dinner but after dinner it didn’t rain. In our cabin, we have Tricia, Susan, Laura, Connie, Judy, Elizabeth, Karen. We sleep good except Cabin 2 is our alarm clock. They wake you up at 6:50. You don’t even need to wake up until 7:30 when the bell rings.
I had hopper yesterday. You have to set the table. You have to have perfect manners or they yell at you.
There is nothing real fun up here. You just go swimming and go to the arts and crafts center. Once we got to go boating in Michigan and the lost swimmer alarm went off. It was our leader’s tag that somebody else turned.
We had patrol and I’m patrol leader. I don’t want to be it, though. I’d rather be home than up here because it’s so boring.
I don’t ache much anymore except my toe. I smashed it going over the troll’s bridge when we were playing a game when somebody was leading us all around Chalk Hills camp.
The only time I get homesick is when you write letters or I write letters. I guess Peg is coming to camp tomorrow.
Love,
Karen
Here is a little more information about Chalk Hills, which was founded in 1939 and closed after the summer of 2001. Apparently other scouts have much fonder memories of camp than my sisters do.
Try the front row
The kids and I sat behind a family with three wiggly boys at Mass this morning. It didn’t take long for Michael, now a coach at Easter Seals, to notice that the youngest one was likely on the spectrum. I noticed, too, and remembered when my children could be that wiggly.
I thought for a moment about tapping the mom on the shoulder and offering her a tip, but then I remembered how I felt about advice from well-meaning strangers and kept my thoughts to myself.
Our church has Mass in the round. The altar is in the center of the room. It provides a good view for everyone, if you’re a grown-up. If you sit in the back, whether at St. Philip’s or at a church with a traditional layout, your kids seen only all the big people around you. But if you sit in the first row — and you have about six chances with a church in the round — all of the proceedings unfold right in front of you.
Mark had a bold idea when our church, St. Philip the Apostle in Lewisville, opened its new worship space in 1997. We wouldn’t sit in the back. We would sit right up front. If the kids wiggled, they would wiggle right onto the floor. And, they could see.
The first couple of times were a little scary. But it worked. The kids actually wiggled less because they could see what was going on. And, when they came back from children’s liturgy, they didn’t have to work too hard to remember where Mark and I were sitting because they only needed to scan the front rows.
I can’t remember when we realized the kids were calm enough that we could sit in other spots. But I do remember we started picking spots that would let Sam avoid the incense during the Gospel reading. He would slip out into the narthex and then slip back in at the end of the Homily, when it was done smoking so much. Eventually, we found a spot where the smell wasn’t as strong and we sat there so he could stay all the way through the service.
On the way home, as we shared our observations of the new Family Wiggly, I asked the kids if they could remember sitting in the front row and whether they liked it better. Could they see better? Did they know we did it so they wouldn’t wiggle so much? None of them could remember a bit of it.
Sam did remind us however, that while it may have been years since we’ve sat in a front row, we did for Mark’s funeral Mass.
Amen to that, Sam. Amen.
Two things
Two amazing things happened with Sam this week. I’m sure that, to Sam, they are not amazing, they are just living and being. But for me, who knows how far he’s come, and for other parents and caregivers out there who know what minor miracles look like for a person with autism here ya go …
First, I helped Sam navigate another application for work at the Target Distribution Center in Denton. He filled it out himself, but he hit a wall when they asked for his GPA, and he realized that, as a graduate, he couldn’t access that information as readily as before. I helped him brainstorm other places he could find that information and he found it on a copy of a degree audit he’d kept. Sometimes the questions in the online application weren’t clear and I translated for him. When he was done, he told me that since I’d helped him, he needed to return the favor. He put custom ringtones on my phone, which now sounds like birds and frogs, and confuse the cat, which is fun on so many levels.
Reciprocity.
Then, Sam was out with friends having dinner at Chili’s Wednesday when he saw a game on the Ziosk on the table that he recognized as one built by the clients at nonPareil Institute, where he interned. He took a photo of the game while he was there at the table, posted it on Facebook and tagged one of the institute’s directors.
Higher-order thinking (and in a social context).
Two big, gold stars this week.
Why I trail run and you should, too
Overheard in the Wolfe House #231
Peggy (seeing Sam resting his head on the back of a chair after a long search for his dress shirt): There are a lot of people in the house. It’s a little chaotic.
Sam: Yes. It’s nice.
Purple joy
Always a reporter, never a source (except maybe once)
For about six months in 1997, this tapestry lay over the table in the breakfast room at our house as we worked with two other couples and a high school student to turn it from bits of amazing fabric to the beautiful design you see here.
It is one of the five large tapestries that hangs during the Easter season at our church, St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in Lewisville. Three are conceived as panels in the main display, two more flank the sanctuary, and a sixth, smaller tapestry drapes over the altar.
For Easter season alone, we had to have enough volunteers to make the six tapestries. Multiply that by the many seasons of the church calendar — the bold red tapestries for Ascension and Pentecost (Sam’s favorites) hang for just two weeks — and you get the sense of what a barn-raising that was.
Mark announced in 1996 that he wanted to convert, something apparently he had been quietly thinking about for years. In the early 1990s, we’d found a good church home in Sacramento, at St. Francis, during, of all things, the time when they were retrofitting the sanctuary for earthquakes and Mass was being held in the school gym. Mark said he hadn’t known such a spiritual home when he was growing up, which always made me a little sad. I know there were times as a child I didn’t get what church was about, but there were times that I did.
The first year after Mark died, I came to help switch out the tapestries between Lent and Easter. There was a team of volunteers who did it regularly and they welcomed me. Once they knew I was part of the team that stitched it together, I got peppered with questions, as if they were historians that had just stumbled upon the best primary source ever.
They had a burning question. Was is true, that one of the Easter tapestries had a bit of a parishioner’s wedding dress on it?
Yes, I said, pointing to the tapestry that we had made.
Now, don’t get excited, dear Internet people, it wasn’t a piece of my wedding dress. Mark and I were such hipsters back in the day, I made our get-married-barefoot-on-the-beach-in-Kona clothes of a buttery linen. This tapestry is filled with bridal fabrics, but full of shiny silks and satins and sparkly lames and organzas.
Two Dominican nuns designed the work and set up all the volunteers with the patterns and fabrics needed. They included a little extra for errors.
Our team didn’t quite cut all the fabric at once, which we maybe should have, but we were also worried about losing track of some pieces. By the time we came to the very last piece, there wasn’t quite enough of the creamy white, rich brocade the sisters intended. We nearly panicked. No matter which way we turned the piece of remaining fabric and pattern, we couldn’t make it work.
Marcy, one of the volunteers, studied it closely. “It looks like my wedding dress. I bet I have enough fabric left,” she said. We were stunned when she brought the piece the next week. It was almost a dead ringer for what the sisters had given us to use.
We decided to sew it on and tell the sisters later. They thought it was a great solution, but the story still turned into church folklore. As my friend, Donna Fielder says, now that I am too old to die young, I see that’s what people do with certain stories.
Each Easter season, I get a little misty when I see this tapestry, knowing that Mark’s signature is on the back with mine and that of our friends and knowing the year the tapestry was started was the year he was welcomed into the church.
Random thoughts from the Possum Kingdom 20K
Running 4.5 hours of a 20K equals 17 miles, plus or minus. This proves that lesson from my parents that there’s a price to pay when you don’t think for yourself and just follow the guy in front of you. (But it did make up for the marked-too-short Easter 5K in Cowtown.) The wildflowers were many and the trail was varied, if you consider alternating between sand, rock and hills varied. The air was fresh and clear. Once it was filled the sweet, tangy smell of just-made cedar chips. Another time a smokey smell wafted our way, and then we realized it was just medicinal. Some runners wore “For Boston 4-15-13” shirts. When I got home, I started a batch of kolaches. And, let me say this: compression socks. 
UPDATE: On the way home from Possum Kingdom, we saw a dad helping his kid fly a kite. It was a great day for kite-flying and I remembered this video Mark shot with the kids one day not long after we moved here. Susan said kite-flying is a dad thing.
Again, this is something Paige rescued from the nearly magnetized tapes so it isn’t the best quality, but it’s nice to hear Mark’s voice. If you can hang out til the end, both bugs and more tennis shoes make it on screen.
Random thoughts on the Cowtown Easter 5K
Getting up early on Saturday and lining up with hundreds of people to run around, raising money for charity, is a nice way to connect with humanity. But, standing at the start line for 45 minutes waiting for a freight train downstream to clear out is its own kind of endurance test. A 5K feels like barely getting started after years of training for half-marathons. A man in a bunny suit with whiskers, pink ears and a pink pom-pom tail while also wearing a leather vest and carrying a six-shooter, even in the Fort Worth Stockyards, is just creepy. From a distance, an Iowan seeing your shirt and saying “Hey! A Hawkeye!” kind of sounds like “Hey! A Hot Guy!” Michael came in under 22 minutes, I finished under 25. Once you have kids, your whole life, you’re always chasing them.
Happy Easter, y’all!