Happy Birthday, Peg-o!!

Today is Peggy's birthday, and when I was rummaging through the few old photos I have from her childhood (many if not most were destroyed in a fire), I came across this one. I believe (and hope) this was taken in one of her dramatic turns at Mount Vernon High School. Peggy has always lusted after glamour, and you can see why in this picture. She has a natural flair for it. (Who are your fellow dramatists/bar flies, Peg-o?)

The day she was born was a day quite like today in Washington DC: hot, windy, a bit muggy. I went into the hospital at 9 a.m. so the doctor could induce labor. Don, Peggy's dad, had just come back to town, and everyone wanted the baby to arrive so we all could move on to Minneapolis, where Don had a job waiting for him, selling office supplies at Miller-Davis, Inc. The hospital, in Antigo, Wisconsin, was maybe 35 or 30 miles from Grandma and Grandpa Carew's home in Elcho, where Peggy's dad and I were staying temporarily after her dad's release from active duty at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, following the Berlin crisis. (I'm not telling her age, but you'll get the general range if you google "Berlin crisis.") Antigo had a small hospital--the first thing you smelled when you walked in was the toilets. As Peggy's dear departed Uncle Jim used to say (and Jim put in a few hospital stays there after what our niece Carey used to describe as "'mashing cars"), "Jeez laweez, some old lady comes around with a mop, then an hour or so later, she comes back with a nurse's hat on and gives you a shot!"

The doctor who ushered Peggy into the world was Dee Dailey, son and medical partner of Old Doc Dailey (don't know his name--that's what everyone called him), who had practiced medicine in Elcho for years. Dee and his wife, Marian, lived on Enterprise Lake. Marian, whose brother-in-law was publisher of the Kansas City (KS) Star, was a beautiful, athletic woman who trapped all the mink for her fur coat herself. Dee and Marian had no children of their own, but they were especially fond of the Carew kids: Don, Mary Ellen (not me), Jim, and Paul. Peggy's and my first visitor after Peggy was born was Marian.

It took Dee about 45 minutes to drive from his home on the lake to the hospital to deliver Peggy just shortly after 1 a.m. A happy, blessed event, though I was out cold when it happened. The nurses didn't want me participating until the doctor arrived.

Anyway, here's my dear hero Peggy acting glamorous. Happy birthday, sweetheart! I'm so lucky and glad that you were born!!

More wedding photos

Rikke Vognsen, Medea's stepmother, sent me a bunch of great wedding photos today, and here they are. Such a lively, appealing bunch! Who could imagine them all at one wedding?

The first one is of Medea and Ian with David and Rikke.


Next is David laughing himself soundless (an unusual event!--he has a loud, very contagious laugh). His friends Mickey and Jo (owners of the Chicago Diner and caterers of the wedding) stole over and sat beside him Saturday night after most people had gone. They had pieces of sticking plaster on their foreheads--just like David's. When David saw them, he laughed so hard he couldn't make a sound. The sticking plaster? David had cracked his head on one of the kitchen cabinets earlier in the day, and Mette Vognsen, Rikke's sister, employed her skills as a nurse to patch him up.


And here are the beautiful Vognsen sisters, Rikke and Mette. They are natives of Denmark, but now they live in Chicago and England, respectively.



Last, but definitely not least, here are the brothers again! Miah, Ian, Jeremy, and Sean/Smithfield (ham, baby!!)

Seanie & Laura

My second oldest grandson, Sean, and Laura, his steady girlfriend of four years, came over for Ian and Medea's wedding. Sally and I loved meeting Laura. She's a school teacher and a warm, lively young woman--a good match for the sweet, effervescent kid I used to call Seanie Bubbles when he was a toddler. Sean is working his way through university in Glasgow, and he now manages the bar where he started as a bartender/waiter. He LOVES acting and all matter of entertaining, and he snagged a role in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" when he was but a freshman. Laura will have a new challenge in the fall when the new year starts: she'll be teaching 2nd graders with emotional problems [that's most of them, dear....]. Sean says they hope to buy a house together in the fall. Can't wait to see it.

None of the photos I took of them at the wedding turned out, but Sean sent me this one today, taken of them in the Sears Tower last week. They did all the tourist things in Chicago while Ian and Medea were honeymooning in Toronto. [Xtreme English hopes to heck Ian and Medea went to the AGO!!!! a breathtaking museum. I had to go outside and sit in the hall to recover a bit from seeing the magnificent HUGE ROOM FULL of Henry Moore sculptures on the second floor. The Breughels on the first floor wiped me out.]

Anyway, aren't they a lovely pair? Even Lake Michigan looks good in the background.

Laundry bug!

Here's a rare sighting of the laundry bug: the wee critter responsible for tons of family laundry. I always used to think another family snuck into our house at night and dumped all their laundry off while we slept. But no....the heap of clothing to be washed every day was the work of the laundry bug. It's a very cute bug, which may explain why the species has survived over the decades.


The bug lives in a colorful little house constructed of...what else?...fabric!


And its favorite snack? You guessed it!

Wedding in Illinois

On Saturday, July 8, 2006, my beautiful oldest grandson, Ian Scott Denson, married the beautiful Medea Grillos-Saxner in Galena, Illinois. The wedding took place in Medea's father's summer home in the Galena Territories. Here are Ian and Medea (center) with Ian's second cousin Jeanne McGowan Letizia (my grandniece) on the left, and Stan, one of Ian's schoolmates from Waterbeck, on the right. Stan's brother Jack and his mother were there, too. Their mom now lives in Rome and is a tour guide in the Vatican!

Here's another photo of Ian and Medea with some of their Chicago friends.








Ian and Medea wrote their own vows and spoke them to each other while everyone mopped their eyes (including them). Then they exchanged rings and looked very happy.







Here are Ian and his brothers, left to right: Jeremy and Miah Denson from Kansas City, Ian, and Sean Denson Race from Glasgow, Scotland. Missing is Ian's cherished youngest brother, George Race, from Waterbeck, Scotland. George was scuba diving in the Red Sea with his parents Henry Race and Margaret Carew Race, Ian's mum. Is this a far-flung family, or what?!









Here, left to right, are Medea's mother, Penny Grillos; Medea; Medea's father, David Saxner; and Ian.









This photo shows Ian's Carew-Dwyer relatives in attendance. From left to right, Bea, an exchange student from Spain who is staying with the Letizias; Jeanne McGowan Letizia; Sarah Carew Woodruff, Ian's aunt; Susan Dwyer McGowan, my dear oldest niece; Sarah McGowan; and Jim Letizia, Jeanne's husband. Missing from the photo but back at Galena's Eagle Ridge resort are that charming, lively duo Annabelle Letizia, age 3, and Gaby Letizia, age 18 months or so.










Susan, bless her heart, sent these two photos today (July 16): the first is of Sally giving her post-wedding advice and appreciation speech to Ian and Medea. The second is of Ian and beautiful Sean with yrs truly.










On the way back to DC from the Dubuque airport (!), the crop duster dropped me off in Chicago, where my lovely and talented (www.letterartbyhelen.com) grandniece Helen McGowan Costello picked me up at O'Hare and took me to brunch at a nearby pancake house (!). Helen's husband, Andrew, took time out from his chores to join us and take this photo of Helen, precious little Mia (aged 6 months and 2 days), and me, the great-grandaunt. Andrew not only has a much better camera, he is a much better photographer. I'm sorry there's no photo of him, but you can tell from looking at Mia that he's handsome as all get out.

At last! My 2005 Christmas letter!!

[Xtreme English says...You can apply this Xmas letter to last year or this year, whichever is closest.]

2005: The year starts out with a trip to Central Park to see Cristos's and Jeanne-Claude's Gates. Here are dear Sally and the coolest girl on the planet, Annie, at lunch at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s cafeteria.


Cathy, Annie, and Sally at the Gates


Then in March or April, who can remember, came three angioplastys….complicated by allergy to the dye (from CAT scan or MRI, forget which) and also to two of the 5 meds I’m forced to take daily. Grim, but still here.


Spring! Just in time.


Cathy hauled me out to the beach at Ocean City for some clean air…


And my dear Peg-o came to visit, all the way from Scotland!! Here she is at the Sunday farmers market in Dupont Circle….


And in the National Gallery, queen of all she surveys…


This is art? It looks just like the stanes (she really does talk like this now....then she catches herself and says "stones to you") in the back yard at Race Acres!


Claire Elizabeth Abdou arrived on June 21. Mom Katie and Dad Al are proud and happy. She is adorable, has her dad’s brown hair and brown eyes. Her beautiful smile doesn’t show in these photos: she was very busy blowing bubbles. I think it’s sort of a prelinguistic thing. Now she babbles a mile a minute!


Blsssppptt! Blssppt! [This was written in November. Now she's talking and walking!]


For the 4th of July weekend, I flew to New Mexico to join Cathy, who had been at the National Deaf Latino Conference representing our little unit from the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center, our mostly beloved employer. Here is Cathy, who hates to have her photo taken.


Our hotel, the most photographed building in New Mexico.


Notice I am carefully observing the no salt rule. So that’s wot those little straws are for!!


Yes, more salsa, please, and another pitcher of margaritas!!


Ian Denson (Peggy’s oldest) and his fiancée, Medea Grillos-Saxner, come to DC for Thanksgiving. They are sweet and so much fun to have around.


I call this one "the thinkers"....that's Tom in the picture on the wall. I painted that when he was about 3, so it's almost 35 years old.


I celebrate my birthday this year by flying to Paris! Eyes wide shut, as usual….


The view out our kitchen window (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED apartment belongs to Michele, the lawyer in DC who drew up my last will & testament while the angioplasty bidness was going on)


St. Nicholas Day, Rue des Abbesses, Montmartre (9:00 a.m…The local artists and actors start hitting the bars early!)


Behind me by the blue van is #25 Rue Victor Masse, first home of Vincent Van Gogh when he arrived to live with his brother Theo in Paris in 1886.


Sacre Coeur, just a few blocks east of our apt.


Sweet living statue….he waited while I fiddled with the camera to make this gesture.


Inside the Musee de Montmartre…the zinc bar in the replica of Utrillo’s favorite café in the area.


“C’est pour nous” by Francisque Poulbot inside Musee de Montmartre. We were delighted and astonished by his paintings of local urchins (among whom were his own children, doubtless) and chagrined that neither of us had ever heard of him! The drummer reminded me of Sam, Sally’s 13-year-old who is a splendid drummer with a charming smile. [He is now 14, still splendid and charming, as is his brother Joe, now 16.]


La Tour Eiffel at night…. [you can hardly see this, but alas, i haven't the foggiest idea how to get another view, the wee video clip i took of the sparkling tower, to work on here]

Nightcrawlers

Tonight when I got home from work, I threw the mail on the couch, washed my hands, and made my favorite supper: buttered popcorn, washed down with a glass of Atkins sangria (red wine w/diet orange soda). After I wiped the grease off my fingers, I picked up my new book, Heat by Bill Buford. Buford is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, where he was fiction editor for eight years. The subtitle of his book is “An amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany.” My bookmark was now stuck at the chapter “Pasta Maker.” I loved reading about Buford’s adventures working in various restaurants, most particularly Babbo in NYC. I worked in a restaurant in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, for half a year once, and it was a great if exhausting experience. As I got into the chapter, I continued playing with the idea of making my own pasta, which had occurred to me the day before yesterday while reading about Buford’s initial experiences at the pasta station in Babbo.

How nuts! I don’t eat pasta these days, and a couple of years ago, somebody left a pasta machine on the basement give-away table in our condo building. I picked it up and kept it for a while, then gave it away myself without ever using it. In DC I can buy perfectly fine imported Italian pasta if I want for less than $1 a package at Litteri’s in the DC Farmers Market across 6th St. NE from Gallaudet. But I don’t want. I’ve been following a modified Atkins diet for a few months and have lost 26 pounds. Pasta is not one of the approved choices.

Anyway, the simplicity of the recipe (1 cup of flour, 1 egg) appealed to me, and I CAN have one serving of whole grain a day. An Atkins dieter can eat something made from whole wheat, I guess, like a slice of whole-wheat bread, although usually I have stone-ground oatmeal (or popcorn!). But my brain was ticking over, so yesterday I bought a small package of semolina flour and one of stone-ground whole wheat flour at Whole Foods…. just in case I wanted to make pasta.

Ha. I got up off the couch, went into the kitchen, put a big pot of water on to boil, and started cleaned up the cutting board next to the sink. Then I heaped half a cup of semolina (like very fine cornmeal) and half a cup of whole wheat flour into a big soup plate, added a good pinch of sea salt, and broke in two eggs. I stirred this around with a fork till all the flour was dampened, and then I started kneading the dough. I kneaded for a good 10 or 15 minutes, enjoying the way the dough loses its stickiness and becomes firm, smooth, and elastic. I stopped to sniff it, too, on the off chance that it might smell different once it got going. Then I got out my good maple rolling pin—the kind that looks like a stick, not the kind with handles and ball bearings—and started to roll out the dough. So far, so good.

The woman who first allows Buford to observe her making pasta in her restaurant in the mountains of northern Italy, then lets him try his own hand, tells him to roll the pasta so thin he can see the wood of the table through the dough. My dough soon stretched out to cover the cutting board completely. It wasn’t nearly thin enough, but I was out of space, so I figured what the heck? It looked pretty thin to me. I rolled it into a long tube and sliced off thin strips that, in theory at least, I could unwind into flat noodles.

Alas, the strips stuck together, and I wound up chopping the gummy disks into bits and pulling them apart. The results looked like nothing so much as night crawlers. By this time, the water was boiling, so I scooped up a nice double handful of noodles and dropped them in. The noodles felt very soft and light, and I was pretty excited, wondering what they would taste like when they were done. Somewhere in the book (or was it online), it says that fresh pasta floats when it’s cooked. My noodles popped up to the surface almost at once, but I didn’t think they were done, so I left them to boil while I made a sauce.

I got a sauté pan out and melted maybe a tablespoon of butter and added a splash of olive oil, too. There was a nice, fresh zucchini in the fridge, so I chopped about a fourth of it into very thin slices. Next I took a slice of yellow onion and chopped that fine, then dumped all the vegetables into the hot butter, seasoned it with salt and pepper, covered the pan, and checked on the noodles. They’d all sunk to the bottom of the pan. I fished one out of the pot and tasted it. It was cooked but very bland.

The pot has an insert for cooking pasta, so I lifted it up, draining the noodles as I did. I dumped them all into the sauté pan, added another tablespoon of butter, more salt and pepper, and a ladle full of the pasta water. When it looked nice and bubbly, I slid it all into a pasta bowl, added about 5 spoons of Parmesan cheese (which disappeared into the hot sauce!), and started eating.

It was not perfect, but it was very good and satisfying…. I could eat a dish of homemade pasta and vegetables every night and not need a scrap of meat.

After I ate, I went back into the kitchen to clean up the remaining pasta dough. I was just going to throw it out, but it seemed like a waste, so I decided to roll it out again, slice it into thin strips, and dry them overnight (or at least until bedtime). The more I sliced and draped, the more tired I got. Finally I started pinching off bits and making them into twisty things.

By the time I was done with the main piece of dough, I just chopped the scraps into little bits. Perhaps this is how all those tiny pasta shapes evolved—a tired housewife in her kitchen saying "hell with it" and chopping it all into tiny chunks.

Wedding Poems by Medea's Father, David Saxner

In 40 Hours

In 40 hours
You will not be
A Saxner or a Grillos
You will forge ahead
With your own identity
This time is yours
Even if you
Carry your parents
In the pocket of your genes

A signal
Or passing
In the split second
Of our lives
We learn
For the minute
But love
For eternity

July 6, 2006



Ian and Medea

Congratulations
On a lifetime together
You are now husband and wife
Best friends and lovers
Sharing a touch
Or a kiss
And may every obstacle
Be followed by
The ultimate bliss
You will be there
For one another
In sickness and in health
And will miss each other terribly
When you need to be apart

You must learn the art
Of compromise
And self- restraint
No more getting what
You want
When you want it
Because there are two now
The “I” has transformed
To “We”
So set your goals high
And work diligently to achieve
And never lose
That look of love
Glimmering in your eyes

July 8, 2006


This Is Your Day

This is your day
A new beginning
Brick by brick
You will lay your foundation
Over this jungle called life
You will make your path
Wielding a sharp tool of love
Clearing the dangling clutter
And chaos
To enable bright sunlight
To shine through

When cloud cover occurs
And storms will pass through
You will follow your compass
Buried in your heart
By climbing on rainbows
To guide your sight
The pastel colors
Will paint your dreams
And shower you
With the pleasures and treasures
Two share in marriage

July 8, 2006

[poems copyright 2006 by David Saxner]

Dear J. K. Rowling

Dear Ms. Rowling....Your superb books have entertained me more than almost anything I've read over the past...oh...50 years or so. Maybe Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy was surprising and wonderful, also, but Harry Potter in his closet under the stairs hooked me in from book #1. I IDENTIFIED with Harry, and I fell in love with the Weasleys, Hermione, Hagrid, and his other newfound Hogwarts family. To cut this short, I'm writing to plead with you not to kill off Harry--or anyone we like. I went through BAMBI's loss of his mother in the Walt Disney film. Too horrible! I'm almost 70, and I won't be around for another 70, so please....don't kill off Harry. Let him live and grow in future readers' imaginations. Why not bid goodbye to Dumbledore? It's time for him to shuffle off.

Guest blog

My first guest blog is a first for the guest blogger, Cathy, too. Cathy is editor of ODYSSEY, New Directions in Deaf Education. Here is her advice for contributors:

WRITING….When U Gotta
Sometimes you gotta write. Sometimes it is publish or perish…write or resign...do it...or find you blew it. In any case, I work in a place where lots of people commit good work—and are asked to write about it. As the saying goes, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Here’s what I tell our soon-to-be authors.

GETTING STARTED
Most people hate writing. Nothing is more difficult than taking an exciting event, project, or idea and trying to convey it through the stiff linearity of 2-dimensional Roman letters. Further, as teachers have noted since the time of the ancient Greeks, “We don’t truly understand something until we explain it to others...,” and writing is the ultimate challenge in explaining to others. There are no head nods from the audience…no light that appears in any eyes we can see…It is just us and the unforgiving alphabet. So....
1. Begin by knowing that any discomfort you are feeling is 100% normal. Ignore it.
2. Clarify your idea. What do you want to write about? An event? A performance? A teaching technique? A program?
3. The writing tool. Don’t work on a computer you don’t trust. On a computer you DO trust, save your work often. It is even harder to write the first draft a second time.

FIRST STEPS
1. Start writing SOMETHING. Some people prefer:
- An outline
- Venn diagram.
- Sentences or words strung in whatever order can be mustered.
2. Any method you prefer is fine. Don’t stop…Don’t edit or revise…If you can’t think of the precise verb, no matter. Keep going. You will come back. Just try to make sure that each aspect of the project/program/event finds its way on to the page in front of you. Concentrate on thoroughness.
3. Select a structure. ODYSSEY publishes expositions and narratives. Both are constructed in a quasi-journalistic style. We want the material readable, but it must be accurate too.
Consider first person. ODYSSEY often has first person narratives. First person allows writers to incorporate their feelings and craft personal text that is often intrinsically readable. First persons are probably also the easiest form of narrative to write.

GENERAL SHAPE OF ARTICLE
1. Begin with a telling incident. Did anything happen that illustrates what you are trying to say? Start here...with a real live incident...Work outward.
2. Describe the event/project/or idea. There are several ways to structure this description.
- Through time. “First we did this...Then we did that...Finally we did the other.”
- Through aspects of the project/event/ or idea. “The literacy program has nine components...The first component is....”
3. Cite research. This may support why you undertook the project as well as its results.
4. Use quotations. Quotations help maintain reader interest. Try to avoid statements like, "My students enjoy when I...." Try instead statements like, “'This is fun,' said 6-year-old Tyrone."
5. Press, beat, and weave your words and sentences into the structure that you selected. This is the real work of writing. If Venn diagrams were enough, we'd all be Shakespeare. [What's a Venn diagram?? It's borrowed from mathematics and shows the logical relationships between items.]


LENGTH
Don’t worry about this. Most articles published in ODYSSEY are 1200 words--about 5 double-spaced pages in 12-point type. But lots happens after the articles are submitted to shape articles into this. If you find yourself going into great length describing a particular aspect of your project, keep going! If we end up feeling the result is uneven, we can snip out the description or incorporate it separately as a side article.

STYLE
1. List references according the APA. Double check to make sure that they are correct.
2. Use deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing as adjectives...not as nouns. Never write “the deaf,” Always write “deaf people,” “deaf individuals,” “deaf students,” or “deaf consumers....”
3. Capitalization of deaf. ODYSSEY--in keeping with Gallaudet style--does not capitalize deaf. If an author feels this capitalization is important, he or she should talk with the editor. Occasionally capitalization of deaf is agreed to in deference to authors’ preference.
4. Style. If you are interested, we will be happy to lend you a copy of the Gallaudet University stylebook. But technicalities such as whether or not a state’s name can be abbreviated are okay to leave with us. You are doing enough work!
5. Keep it simple. LIFE magazine told its writers to write at the fifth grade level. If people have to work to read, chances are they won’t read at all.

SENTENCES
Sentence length. In news organizations, the ideal sentence length is said to be 15 words. You will find this almost impossible. [Xtreme English agrees with some long-ago expert that the ideal sentence length is 7 words--what the human eye can take in and comprehend at one glance. The idea is to avoid long, wordy sentences.] Still use it as a guideline after you have a first draft. It will help you keep sentences from taking off into strings of clauses that you have to parse and prune a second time.

WORDS
1. Avoid Latin-based words. English is wonderful in that it manages to carry the inheritance of its ancestral languages so extremely into the present day that we often have two words for exactly the same concept (e.g. CAT (Anglo Saxon) and FELINE (Latinate). Our Anglo Saxon heritage gives us simple, strong verbs (like shine, creep, fight, sing, fall) and nouns (like cat, pig, stone, bread, ear). Our Latin heritage gives us words like curriculum, idiot, television--plus a whole slew of words ending in -ation and -ology. Try to write in Anglo Saxon.
2. Use nouns and verbs. Good writing is done with nouns and verbs. Forget those well-intentioned adjectives & adverbs. (Imagine the previous sentence without my own adjectival indulgence…and it becomes “Forget adjectives & adverbs.” Much better, right?)
3. Omit needless words. This is a mantra of every English class, but it is especially true today in the age of the Internet. The fewer words you can use and the shorter they are, the more readers will tend to read what you write.

REVISION
1. As everyone knows this is so necessary for most people that it is really part of writing. This is a good thing. It means that your teachers were successful and you, as an author, are writing not only to explain, but using the process of writing to help you think.
2. Spell check. Why not? Someone’s gotta do it! Everything you as the author can do to make your paper technically correct will ease the editing process. Further it is amazing how little things like missing letters or absent periods can spin a reader’s head around. Even a single missing letter may cause a reader to forget where he is in a piece! As gaps are identified and filled, writers often find additional changes are necessary. Thank goodness for the computer…In the old days people used erasers, white-out, scissors, and glue!
3. The Martian test. When you re-read your work, pretend you are a Martian. As a Martian, words that Americans use every day, like “Whole Language,” “Total Communication,” and even “educational interpreting” suddenly are ambiguous. Further, as a Martian you realize that people who use these words often do not share the same understanding of their meaning at all, but use them in subtle but significantly different ways. As an author, you have to make sure that you define your terms.
4. Other eyes. Knowing what you want to say camouflages any contradictions, gaps, and even duplicated words and misspellings that appear in the text. Other people will find the gaps in your work before you do…Show your work to someone else. See what questions they have. Revise your work accordingly...which brings us to...

FINITO!
1. There comes a point in the revision, when you start to like aspects of the less-revised text more than aspects of the more-revised text. When this happens, STOP. If you have time, go back to the piece later. If time has disappeared (as it invariably will have done), hand in the piece, and...
2. Don’t worry. The editors have handed in lots of stuff that we knew still needed work and even more stuff that we thought was finished but found, after some other editor pointed out a stupid, embarrassing mistake, was not. Don’t be surprised if this happens. It’s normal. And it’s worth getting it off your desk! GO FOR IT!

English changes

English, the name given to the official language of England, is growing and changing every day, every year. From day to day, the changes are so slight we hardly notice them. For example, how many people write e-mail now and not email? Most editors and proofreaders still go for e-mail, but the people online are using email or just plain e to name what they’re sending back and forth. At some point in the future, everyone, including the editors and proofreaders, will accept email as good standard English. Much of the change happens when people move to a different part of the country, bring their habitual way of speaking with them, and pick up new local expressions at the same time.

The same was true when English got its start: people moved into (actually, invaded) England, bringing their own languages with them, and gradually their words caught on. Like flower. From about 500-1100 A.D., people spoke what we now call Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, and the word for flower then was blosme. They borrowed this word from the Saxons, or Germans, who had invaded the attractive little island in the North Sea and brought their word for “flower” with them. (Who knows what they called flowers before the year 500?) And blosme is still with us. It’s still a perfectly good word in the English language, and it still means “flower.” Except now we spell it “blossom.”

After the Germans came the French, and they had their own word for what the Anglo-Saxons called a blosme. The French called it a flour. Actually, the French weren’t even called “the French” in those days. They were called “Normans” (because they came from Normandy). The Norman invasion took place in the year 1066 A.D., or toward the end of the 11th century. And sure enough, by 1225, the word flour had popped up in the English language.

How did they pronounce this word flour? The Norman word flour sounded much like the present French word fleur. The “ou” made an “oo” sound. Middle English, however, sounded more like German. So the “ou” in Middle English made an “ow” sound…like “flower.” Flour with the “ow” sound is still around, except it’s the white stuff you bake with, not a pretty blossom.

But wait….where did the French get flour or later fleur? From the Romans! The Roman were busy invading France (and England) from 51-58 B.C. And the Roman word for flower was flora. Flora is still with us in various forms, too…Where do you buy your flowers? At the FLORIST! What do brides order for the tables at the reception? FLORAL arrangements!

The world is ever changing and growing….people move from here to there….and the languages they speak are growing and changing, too.

Rainy Wensday

I had a visitor this afternoon. Squeak came to call on his way to the vet. It's the first time he's been here since his accident almost three weeks ago. His bright blue bandage is hardly visible in this photo, but it covers a plastic splint that is attached to his left leg by something like eight steel pins. So far, he's had to have the pins replaced or reset three times, and today the vet said they had to do it again. Cathy is doing her best to keep him quiet and confined to his crate, but he's a very strong, rambunctious puppy (and a big one, too, at 8.5 months - he's part coon hound, and his coon hound parent weights 118 lbs!). They have to keep him zonked out with a combination of pain-killers, tranquillizers, and sleeping pills, but as soon as the pills wear off, he's ready to play. He didn't start out with a bandage on his leg, but he managed to chew through three of the pins even with one of those cones on his head. So now he gets a nice, new bandage (of a different color, too) every day.

I think he's going to wind up back in the doggy hospital, though, so they can keep an eye on him around the clock. Don't ask what all of this is going to cost. The vet bill is at $7,000+ and running. All of this because Cathy dropped his leash one day while scooping poop, and Squeak dashed off into the traffic by the National Mall. The truck that hit him was not going very fast. There was no big THUMP! so he didn't have any internal injuries, but the ligaments in his leg were badly torn. The vet said this is harder to treat than a broken leg.



After getting Squeak settled (?) in his visitor crate here, Cathy sat down at the kitchen table to work on another book. We both called in sick today....she's recovering from a cold, and my eye with its new plastic lens has been acting cockeyed for a couple of days. I keep forgetting to put the drops in on time. God knows why they work, but they do - if I remember them, that is. So I had a nice, quiet rainy day at home with the added benefit of two special favorite visitors to keep me company (and prevent me from working crossword puzzles till my eyes cross!)

Picnic!

This is blog #1 on this, and I'm totally intimidated. I want to blog about the English language, and I really know zip about it, despite having spoken it for nearly 70 years. Still, what the hey...it's the language I know and love, so here goes.

I want to look at a word that's really big today on July 4, our nation's birthday. The word is "picnic." I went to a picnic this afternoon at the invitation of Rosalie, who was celebrating her new U.S. citizenship. The picnic was held at Fort Washington Park in Maryland, and I got lost en route. Cathy came with me and asked if I had the directions. I said, "Sure...in my head." Ha.

After driving around for an hour and a half, Cathy (!) (you can see who the adult is in this cabal) noticed we were running low on gas. We stopped for gas and asked a very nice fellow how to get to MD Highway 210 and thence to Fort Washington Park. He told us, showed us a shortcut, and tada! We arrived!

Anyway, here are my thoughts on the word "picnic." PICNIC comes from the French word "pique-nique." Here's what www.arts-culinaires.com says about "picnic," translated from the French:

"If, as of the arrival of the beautiful days, you test an irresistible desire for eating outside, with the sun or the moonlight, the picnic is for you. It is appropriate for all those which want freedom to leave on their premises. It can be the occasion to find a great number of people, without needing to spend the hours to arrange your house and to make the crockery.

"Envy user-friendliness, of division or quite simply to take the air, invite your friends or your family for a picnic.

"For that, nothing simpler: isothermal tablecloths or covers, refrigerators or bags, crockery out of paperboard, glasses, forks and spoons and especially of food easy to transport and eat.
Do not forget the coffee thermos flask and the hot water thermos flask for the followers of the tea.

"There is no age to appreciate a picnic and even the very young children will be able to make their nap in the shade in poussette."

Regarding the origin of the word "picnic," Bibliographic instruction and reference librarian Ted Nesbitt says on www.allexperts.com:

"The English word [first introduced in our language in 1748] is from the French "pique-nique." "Pique" comes from the French verb, "piquer," meaning "to pick." The "nique" actually means "little pieces." Thus, to the French, a "pique-nique" was a meal in which little pieces were picked. Instead of a lavish banquet or a seven-course dinner, a pique-nique was a small kind of meal in which people could choose their own "little pieces."

"The English simply adopted the phrase, dropping the "ue" endings and changing each "q" to a "c."

Well, I think so, too.

The people at the picnic this afternoon were mostly from the Philippines. On the dessert table, there were three kinds of of cake made from casava which involved a lot of pounding and scraping of the casava root. One was a lot like flan, and t'other a lot like upsidedown cake minus the cake part (are you following me?), and the third was all of that plus peaches. All were delicious. I brought brownies, but I should have left them at home. I didn't have any mascarpone so i just used cream cheese instead. Wrong! I should have used cottage cheese or cream cheese+sour cream+whipped cream. As a result, the brownies were a bit dry.



After we finally arrived, Edmar, Rosalie's husband, handed each of us a skewer with barbequed pork on it. Rather than being soaked with smokey red BBQ sauce, the pork was flavored with Adobo seasoning (with which I am familiar from my frequent attempts at frying tofu), and it was quite delicious. There also were two big pots of shark fin soup, a huge container of green salad, several rice cookers, and many large dishes of various veggies, the likes of which I had never seen before but which tasted very good.

The people at the picnic all belonged to a church which caters to the DC area Philippino population. I have never belonged to a church that had picnics. The Friends Meeting of Washington (where I am a lapsed attender) does not seem to go in for picnics, per se. We have lots of book sales, rummage sales, and retreats but no picnics. I told Cathy that I would join a church if it had picnics. Well....that's maybe a lie. I'd go for the picnics, anyway. None of my religions has ever been much fun.

Meanwhile, I shall continue to search for new insights into "picnic." Webster's New Collegiate (the old one, the one with all the colleges in it) says "pique" also can mean "savoury" in French. No matter how many little pieces are involved, what's a picnic if it isn't savoury?