Happy Fourth of July

Small Town Next Door has a festival going on, and I'll be covering some of the morning events for the paper, which is honestly not my strong point. My goal will be to get all the names spelled correctly. And then my big fat summer band will be giving a concert in the park in the evening. Assuming the weather holds up, it should be a fine night even if we do have to play "God Bless the USA." I can't help but think of the film "Wag the Dog" when I hear that thing, and I continue to be amazed when the audience stands for it as if it were the national anthem. Sit down!

Beyond that, the family will be leisurely and possibly spend some time at the lake and probably will not talk about things patriotic. Honestly, even if you privately feel a renewed sense of patriotism on July 4th, how often do you spend the day waving the flag figuratively or literally?

It is a notable day for reasons other than our nation's independence from the grubby king, after all. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on this day, as was Stephen Foster, Calvin Coolidge, Louis B. Mayer, Neil Simon and Ann Landers and her sister Abigail Van Buren.

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on this day in 1826. James Monroe died on July 4 a few years later. And then there was Eva Gabor, Charles Kuralt, Barry White and Bob Ross the soft-spoken painter who made happy trees all dying on this day in history.

On this day in 1845, Thoreau began his experiment at Walden Pond. And in 1939, Lou Gerig bid farewell to the Yankees, saying "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

Patriotism, or no patriotism, flag waving or no flag waving, stinking God Bless the USA or no—it's a big day. Personally, I do feel patriotic on this day, and I'm a huge sap for fireworks and the National Anthem. So, happy Fourth of July, and happy birthday to Koko the sign-language gorilla who loves kittens.

Tomato Tarts—Yum

I've been cooking again. It's one thing to make dinner every evening, and it's another thing entirely to make something fun for dinner.

This time around, the fun thing was a tomato tart with feta cheese and caramelized onions. If you're the type to make your own puff pastry, then this is a complicated dish, but if you're content with the frozen stuff, which I am, then it's relatively simple.

Here is what they look like fully assembled before baking:

And this is what they look like fresh out of the oven:

My only complaint is the wasted puff pastry, but if you make these smaller using sliced Roma tomatoes and serve them as appetizers, then you would probably not be throwing out so much pastry dough.

Tomato and Goat Cheese Tarts

1 package puff pastry, thawed
Olive oil
4 cups thinly sliced yellow onions
3 large garlic cloves cut into thin slivers
3 tablespoons dry white wine
2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme leaves
4 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
4 ounces goat cheese
1 large tomato cut into 4 slices (1/4-inch thick)
3 tablespoons julienned basil leaves
2 ounces Parmesan cheese shaved

Unfold the sheet of puff pastry on a lightly floured surface and roll it lightly to an 11 x 11 square. Using a 6-inch-wide saucer or other round object as a guide, cut 2 circles from the sheet of puff pastry, discarding the scraps. Repeat with the second pastry sheet to make 4 circles in all. Place the pastry circles on 2 sheet pans lined with parchment paper.

Preheat oven to 425˚.

Heat 3 tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet over medium to low heat and add the onions and garlic. Sauté for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring frequently, until the onions are translucent. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, the wine and the thyme and continue to cook for another 10 minutes until the onions are lightly browned. Remove from heat.

Score a 1/4-inch-wide border around each pastry circle. Prick the pastry inside the score lines with tines of a fork and sprinkle a tablespoon of grated Parmesan on each round, staying inside the border.

Place one fourth of the onion mixture on each circle, again staying within the scored edge. Crumble 1 ounce of the goat cheese on top of the onions. Place a slice of tomato in the center of each tart. Brush the tomato lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with basil, salt and pepper. Scatter 4 or 5 shards of Parmesan on each tart.

Bake 20 to 25 minutes until the pastry is golden brown.

from Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics

Walk Amid the Ruins

As No. 1 will tell you, Small Town doesn't have much going on, or it seems that way to a restless 20-something itching to get on with life outside this moldering place. We do actually have things going on, though, and one of the newer things is a towpath trail for walking and bike riding. You can ride horses on the trail, too, but I've yet to see a horse there.

The towpath trail follows the remains of the Ohio-Erie Canal, a marvel of ingenuity that was built in the early 1800s connecting Lake Erie with other waterways. The canal brought trade and travel to Ohio and surrounding places back when the place was mostly woods and wilderness. Boats were pulled by horses or mules that walked the towpath alongside the canal, and now these paths have been cleared just enough for a leisurely stroll.

What I find humbling is what has happened to this wonder of human engineering—it's all been reclaimed by the wilderness, which is exactly what would happen if we were all to walk away from everything we've built. We think we've tamed the planet, but really we're just marking time here, and when we're gone, all of our stuff will be swallowed up. The foresters I spent time with last week were quick to point out remnants of quarry work on their property, but you have to look closely to tell that humans had tried to do something there just 75 years before.

In the old photo above, you can see a clear path, but this is what it looks like now, overgrown with trees and brush.

The locks are covered in vines, and frogs and snakes and God knows what else live in the swampy bottom.

This is what's left of a mill that was built beside the canal:

and this is what nature has done with one of the old canal walls.
You can barely tell men were even here.

Music Is the Language of the Universe

This might be old news to some of you, but it's new to me. Prisoners in the Philippines, some of them convicted of very serious crimes, dance as part of a daily regimen of discipline and exercise, and the program has cut down on jail violence, drug use and a general feeling of hopelessness.

I stumbled on a video tribute to Michael Jackson at Salon, and I thought it was one of the most unusual things I'd ever seen. And I wondered if these prisoners were being forced to dance against their will.

But after doing a little digging, I have now learned the prisoners in the prison in Cebu, Philippines audition for this group, and they spend up to four hours a day in rehearsal. Their dancing troupe started out as an exercise class and turned into a dance class with a visiting choreographer, and now they have quite a repertoire. A NY Times article here explains it all.

A security consultant for the prison system, Byron Garcia, has uploaded their performances, which they give to audiences from the outside, to YouTube. Here is a short film that uses one of my favorite scenes from Shawshank Redemption to help explain why this program is so successful:



And now for the Michael Jackson tribute with 1,500 prisoners performing:

Belated for Father's Day

My father with his brothers (third from the left).

I have an article in Small Town Newspaper today. It isn't on line, so here it is as a belated Father's Day thing:

Father’s Day can seem only half full when your father is no longer living. My father died November of 2000, and since then I have spent this designated day focused on encouraging my children to make the day special for their father and only thinking about my own now and then.

This year, the girls gave their father a gift, and we all spent the day being leisurely and enjoying the occasional sunshine. We relaxed in the backyard for part of the afternoon reading books, chatting about this and that and watching the clouds float by. And in the quieter moments, I thought about my father and what he taught his daughters back when we were teachable.

My father, a hard-working construction worker who would have done well with sons, had four daughters all vying for the same bathroom he used, asking to use his car or painting our fingernails with foul-smelling polish he was sure would cause his lungs to seize.

We fought and whined when he wanted peace and quiet. We often played show tunes on the piano when he would have preferred his beloved southern gospel. And we dated boys he didn’t always care for and whom he didn’t trust as far as he could throw with his burly arms.

My father could have become part of the woodwork in that house full of girls, but he held his own and established a presence. He taught us to appreciate simple pleasures of food and music, and he laughed and loved and was loved.

In times of plenty, my father would cover the kitchen counter with ingredients for his favorite stew and then dump it all into a big pot—beef, chicken and pork; corn, assorted beans, tomatoes, onions and okra; salt, pepper, bay leaves and hot sauce. He would stir the bubbling concoction for hours, and as it simmered and filled the house with welcomed smells, he would sing and do a bit of clogging with his big shoes stomping the Linoleum. At suppertime, with each of us seated before her own bowl, he would crumble fistfuls of Saltines onto his serving, splash on some extra hot sauce and dig in with a spoon and a satisfied grin. “Eat up, girls,” he would say, “It sure is good.”

In leaner times, when my father was laid off from a construction job, he would come home with a box of government cheese or some powdered milk or a bag of rice from the carpenter's union hall. With what he could provide, combined with my mother’s thriftiness, we never went hungry. He loved Twinkies, of all things, and even in the leanest of winter months, he would make sure there was a box in the cabinet as a luxurious sign that we would be all right.

My father grew up surrounded by brothers who each played an instrument, and they spent their evenings on the front porch with their fiddles and banjos, mandolins and guitars (pronounced “gee-tars”). He passed on his love for that traditional music to his daughters, and we learned classic gospel tunes in four-part harmony, Daddy’s bass voice rising up over the rest of us as we stood around the piano.

Because there were no boys around, my father was quick to give us tools and make us do a little work. Not one of us was raised to be a helpless princess, and I knew how to swing a hammer and use a screwdriver by the time I was strong enough to hold the tools. He saw that we carried our load around the house, and he talked about the importance of being able to support ourselves as adults.

My father was not perfect by any stretch, and he tried to instill in his daughters some incorrect views of the world at times; but beyond that, he taught us to be independent, to understand the value of hard work and to be proud in our identities as individuals. It is these ideals I remember most on Father’s Day even as the memory of my father fades. It is what he gave to his daughters that is still as fresh in my mind as it was when we were children watching him make his precious stew.

So Long, Ed McMahon

With all this talk about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying, and on the same day, people seem to have forgotten the third in the series of celebrity deaths (and yes, they do happen in threes). Ed McMahon was barely mourned.

I harbor no ill will toward the man, but I never understood his place in television history. He seemed to have no discernible talent other than to be able to read cue cards with proper emphasis and without stammering.

In the mid 80s, the in-laws had a huge reunion in Pasadena, and we spent a week together doing things like watching the Cubs against the Dodgers, taking the kids to Disney Land and figuring out how to feed over 30 people three meals a day.

We also sat in the studio audience for TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes hosted by Dick Clark and Ed McMahon. We were coached to follow the applause signals, so if the hosts said something slightly funny, we knew to chuckle a little, but if they said something knee slapping, we would have to guffaw visibly in case the camera panning the audience were to record us. The thing is, we had to be told when something was funny and at what level by obeying signs held up the audience wrangler. The two hosts stood on the stage and introduced a video of a blooper or a joke, and then they would look toward a screen as if we were all going to watch the thing, but they never showed the film clips.

The director wasn't pleased with the flow of one of the readings and asked Dick and Ed to re-read it a few times, and Ed was so irritated and acted as if he were being put upon. I thought that if I had such a non-job and got paid to stand there and read a few lines and then go home, I wouldn't be so snippy about having to read the same line more than once or twice. I'd be grateful I wasn't told to get out there and get a real job and learn an actual skill.

Here is a terrible commercial for Budweiser featuring Frank Sinatra and Ed McMahon as small tribute to the forgotten deceased celebrity:

A Trip to the Woods

I went for a ride in the woods yesterday with some old friends. These people, Randy and Koral, are self-employed foresters, and they agreed to take me for a tour of their own private forest and talk to me about trees for a newspaper story. I'm an inside girl, as they well know, so it really was kind of them to indulge me.

We drove about 45 minutes south of Small Town to reach their property—they don't live out there, but they manage the forest and hang out there sometimes when they want to get away. Once we got to the barn, we got out of the nice comfy SUV and got into this, an 1983 Jeep:

The Jeep doesn't idle, apparently, and every time you stop to look at a tree or maneuver around a rut, it has to be restarted. We maneuvered around a lot of ruts. We followed what the tree people were calling a trail, but it really was more like a space without trees and overgrown with plants the height of the Jeep in places. We just barreled through with Randy's assurance that he hasn't killed anyone yet. Reassuring.

We stopped and walked around a couple of times, and they showed me different kinds of trees at different stages of growth. They talked about when it's OK to harvest trees (when they are at least 12 inches in diameter), how many to harvest per acre (8 to 15), and different ways to attract certain wildlife to a forest. If you want more deer in your woods, then thin out some of the trees so they have room to forage. If you want song birds, then leave some dead trees standing to attract the insects that birds eat. And if you want bats who will eat all those pesky mosquitoes, then keep some trees with shaggy bark because they like to sleep in the shagginess.

There is a stream that runs through the woods we were exploring, and a family of otters has moved in. We didn't get to see them, but it was nice to know they were there.

Now and then, on our trek along the "trail," we would drive under low-hanging branches and get smacked in the face. I handled that pretty well and generally followed a rule I had set for myself—don't act like an idiot, and no squealing like a girl. But when knocking away one of those low branches, a huge granddaddy long-leg fell down directly onto my lap. It couldn't have landed on one of the tree people who are accustomed to the outside—it had to choose me. I gasped but did not squeal, and I knocked it to the muddy floorboard, and I smashed the bastard with my indignant foot.

After a while, we stopped by a ravine with a waterfall (click on this picture to see it), one of their favorite spots, and we stood in the undergrowth and talked about trees and how important they are and how they act like giant filters to keep the air and water suitable for supporting life, human life included. Did you know that in the past, if people found a plant with leaves shaped like a body part, they would assume it was good for treating what might ail that body part? So, if you boil leaves shaped like a heart and drink the tea, it would help your heart. Koral showed me a plant that was named for the Latin word for kidney, although they rethought that and decided it might be a liver instead. The plant used to be used to "heal" people who had kidney, or liver, trouble but not successfully because the notion is hogwash.

I am so grateful Randy and Koral let me experience the woods for the sake of the story, despite the big bug and the green caterpillar I found crawling on the back of my neck. It was fun and good to actually be outside.

Tonight, I'll be interviewing a woman wrestler, but because I'll be talking to her over the phone, I won't be tempted to experience a smackdown.