Cochlear Implant 10

A wonderful Daily Om meditation arrived in my e-mail this morning, and how appropriate it is! It suggests that we have a ceremony to say goodbye to a role before we welcome a new one. Tomorrow I will begin the process of shedding a role that's been with me for almost 44 years: the deaf person. I'll still be deaf, but with the help of technology, I'll be able to hear much more than I have for a long time. What kind of ceremony would be fitting to mark this transition to the new role? Shall I donate my right hearing aid to a deaf person who needs it but maybe hasn't got the $3000 to buy one? It's a powerful digital hearing aid, just a couple of years old. After the surgery, my right ear will never again be able to hear with a hearing aid. Once the implant is turned on next month, however, it may be able to hear music, voices over the telephone, small children's voices, radio programs. It may not be able to hear all of that, but it'll hear more than it has for 43 years. My ceremony will consist of boxing up the hearing aid in preparation for giving it to the next person, lighting a candle, and enjoying a Rob Roy, Grandpa Carew's favorite beverage at family dinners. I'm sure I had one the weekend when I started taking the antibiotic that killed my hearing. Bottoms up!

Cochlear Implant 9

From: "Sue and Dan
To: "Mary Ellen"
Subject: adventure ahead
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:58:58 -0600

Hi M.E.! So, you're going in for the "procedure" this week? From what you've said, it sounds like they do it, then you just wait around for awhile until they start gradually tuning you in. I'll be thinking of you. Here's something to wait for: I'm listening right now to an album by a singer I'd never heard of - Eva Cassidy. She used to sing around DC and environs, but got cancer and died young around 2001. Did you ever know about her? She had a phenomenal bluesy, folksy voice. I thought it was an Ella Fitzgerald singalike, but she was this little bitty white girl! Anyway, here's to cochlear implants - long may they thrum. Love, Susan


My Reply:

eva cassidy? i've never heard of her, alas. and rest in peace. but i'll for sure look up her work if i can hear music in the future. only two more days without a metal probe in my skull forever. tune-in will be on april 3, then april 4, and april 9. so it'll be a while before anything changes, audiologically speaking.

i was thinking today that my children have never known me when i was not either severely or profoundly deaf. it'll be a new thing for them, too. i was trying to remember today when it was that i stopped laughing out loud. i used to laugh until i was red-faced and breathless (remember Grandma Peters??), but haven't for years. life always tickled the hell out of me, though it doesn't much now. maybe that'll return. as it said in my horoscope back in january, "the long meltdown of your life is almost over." interesting, that.

via blogging, i've "met" another CI implantee from Canada, and asked her if she'd noticed any cognitive differences since she got hers two years ago....and she said that question has inspired her to write a whole new post on her blog (www.hearingloss.blogspot.com). she hasn't yet, so i'm waiting for it. what kind of a change will this be?

you know, i wrote my master's thesis at city college on becoming deaf. the title was "the zen of deafness." now i think i need to rewrite it and at least give it a subtitle: "my life as a moron."

how wonderful to be able to share all this with you folks....

lots of love, m.e.

Mrs. Gallimore

Nosing around online this a.m. for news about the blizzard in eastern Iowa/southern Minnesota, I of course checked in with the Cedar Rapids Gazette gazetteonline.com, and after I read the storm stories, I of course checked the political coverage of Mike Hlas, one of my favorite sportswriters ever from our Iowa days. (We hired his brother Craig, also a writer, as an editor for my former employer out there, and he's done very well with the company. He now writes reports and travels around the country to present them.) Like Craig, Mike is funny and smart but not a smartass, which is probably why the Gazette also has him covering the campaign trail out there in "A Year in Iowa."

In one column on John McCain's Iowa appearances, he throws in a few of McCain's warmup jokes--
"Two inmates at a state prison are in a chow line. One of them said to the other one 'The food was a lot better in here when you were the governor.'"
AND
"Following Phil Gramm [who introduced McCain to the crowd] sometimes, I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband where on the wedding night he said 'I know what I'm supposed to do, I just don't know how to make it interesting.'"

In another column, Hlas gives light to why the MSM call Barack Obama a rock star--
When Hlas asked one 60-year old Cedar Rapidian what he liked about Obama, the man replied, "Just his charisma. He seems to have good ideas, he's intelligent."
AND
Another person in the crowd said, "He just has that ability to transcend generations, races. Very articulate. He just has that charisma."
AND
"Oh, that 'rock star' stuff? That became far more perceptible after Obama's 'conversation' as he oh, so slowly worked his way out of the gym while signing autographs and getting his picture taken.

"A girl wearing sweatpants that identified her as a member of Kennedy's cross country squad squealed and hopped around after Obama signed her copy of his book 'The Audacity of Hope.'

" 'I touched his hand!' another teenaged girl giddily shouted at a friend. 'I touched his hand, too!' was the reply. 'I'm not gonna wash it!'

"Who knew that advocating better pay for schoolteachers and a withdrawl of U.S. troops from Iraq by March, 2008 got kids so excited?"

Hlas also has something called "the Hlog," a sports blog about...duh...sports in Iowa, specifically Iowa basketball--"No Iowa State men's basketball starter scored more than seven points at Kansas Saturday. Guess who won by 37 points?" And on the Hlog, he has recommended sites, one of which is Mrs. Gallimore's Blog http://mrsgallimoresblog.blogspot.com/

Who is Mrs. Gallimore? She's a junior high teacher in a small town, and she blogs her assignments and instructions for homework, etc., for every school day. Mrs. Gallimore's Blog is subtitled, appropriately, Mrs. Gallimore's Homework Network. There is no way you can leave a comment in this blog, though. No matter how up-to-date they are technologically, teachers are still coming down firmly on the side of NO BACK TALK!!

I think it's a great idea. Wonder if any teachers at the Clerc Center are already doing this???

The good old Iowa ice storm, meanwhile, is scheduled to continue until noon today, after which utility crews will start the 24-hour red-eye labor of cutting down trees that have fallen across the power lines and restoring sagging, ice-burdened lines that have flipped the system simply by touching something. It's not too cold there--34 degrees above right now--so people have been content to stay off the roads and keep their refrigerator and freezer doors shut (not so it doesn't cool the house off, but so the appliances stay cold).

Son Tom in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, lives within walking distance of his job at Gary's Foods, which probably has a generator to keep the store's coolers going. I'll try to get through to his cell phone later today and see how he's doing.

Cochlear Implant 8

Had lunch today with Cynthia, a deaf woman I met just after I moved to my current neck of the woods...good god...9 years ago! How time flies when you haven't got a clue as to what's going on! She was in graduate school at Gallaudet at the time, and she lived very close to where I used to live on 17th Street. That was half a block from Safeway, of course. (Have you noticed the FOOD THEME in this blog?)

Cynthia lives in NJ now, and she got a c.i. almost a year ago. She says she loves it. Also, now that she can hear some of the things she's been missing, she says it's made it very clear just how deaf she really is. I can understand that. I remember the shock of hearing the grocery bags rustle after I got some great new hearing aids once. I mean, who knew grocery bags made all that racket? I can't hear them anymore now. Maybe they'll turn up again soon.

Cynthia also says that one of the best things is if she's in a relatively quiet restaurant, she can overhear the conversations at the nearby tables! Oh, joy! I hope I'll be able to OVERHEAR things. Listening to people's accents and ways of speaking used to be one of my primary pleasures. Now people all sound like me. BORING....

The Illustrious Co-worker says she's afraid that after I can hear her voice, I won't like her any more. She's a native of Bal'mer, which means her accent is half southern and half eastern. I can't imagine not liking it. The one time I heard a Baltimorean for any length of time was in 1960, when Liturgical Press send me to Liturgical Week in Pittsburgh (Cynthia's birthplace, btw). There was a young publisher there from Baltimore, and his accent was soft and enchanting. I decided then and there that I'd like to live in Baltimore sometime. It's not for lack of looking that I haven't found a house there.

Anyway, it's now only one week from today when they will thread that electrode into my cochlea and then sew up my scalp and send me home to heal for several weeks before they start tuning in the gizmo. Lo and behold, also, the student health service turns out to have the very kind of flu shot I need to prevent meningitis! And instead of the usual $65 a pop, I can get it free! Leap and the net appears....

Welcome, Ronnie!!

Ronnie, a 41-year-old policy analyst for a nonprofit in Atlantic(?) Canada, left a comment on "Cochlear Implant 7" and introduced her wonderful blog, HEARING/LOSS - A journal of a "post-lingual acquired hearing loss in adulthood" or how I went deaf - and got a cochlear implant - at 39. Please check it out: www.hearingloss.blogspot.com

i love her answer to that inane blogger question:

Do you believe that forks are evolved from spoons?

Don't be ridiculous. God created both forks and spoons, on the same day 5,000 years ago and anyone who says He didn't is going to Hell.

She also appears to be a cat lover. I love cats, but I'm wildly allergic to them. Still, one of the best parts of this book I'm reading now (Peach Cobbler Murder by Joanne Fluke, a former Minnesotan and "national bestselling author" according to the book cover, is Moishe, the cat belonging to Hanna Swensen, Fluke's detective/crime solver ala Agatha Christie. For example:

She was just sitting down again when her phone rang.
"Is it Mother?" Hannah asked the cat whose tail had suddenly swelled into a bush. Moishe wasn't fond of Delores Swensen and he'd shredded several pairs of her pantyhose to prove it. As the phone rang again, Moishe's hackles rose and he arched his back like a Halloween cat. It was definitely her mother, Hannah decided, and she reached for the phone. "Hello, Mother," she said.

Some of the most interesting bloggers I've "met" are from Canada. What's with those folks, anyway? They seem so smart and civilized. Not like us 'murkins. Well, I can't take time to think about this now...Rachael Ray is on the Food Network....ciao....

Happy 107th Birthday, Mary!

Here's a picture of the most glamorous 107 year old in Chicago! Her birthday was yesterday, February 17. We should all look so good NOW, let alone when we reach 107!! Mary's son, Dan, outlined the following highlights of his mother's long, hard-working life [I've added maps where I could find them and also other commentary]:

Mary McGowan celebrated her 107th birthday at St. Benedict Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, Niles, IL where she is recovering from a recent injury. St. Benedict residents and staff joined Mary and her family at a birthday party February 16. Mary’s family hosted another party for her on her actual birthday, February 17, 2007.

Highlights of Mary’s 107 years

Born: February 17, 1900 at home in Dunmore, Pennsylvania

Parents: Helen (Tkach) and John Kolibaba, immigrants from Slovakia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). John Kolibaba was injured in a Pennsylvania coal mine accident.

[Slovakia is relatively small, but not this small!!! Still, you can see where they came from.]

Siblings: Five sisters, all deceased (two died before Mary’s birth)

Early Life: 1900-1905 Dunmore, Pennsylvania



[The big building with the A on it is the Catholic church in Dunmore. The picture is from a large hand-drawn topical map of Dunmore in 1905.]

1905-1920 Homestead farming SW of Glen Ullin, North Dakota

[Can't get a photo of Glen Ullin....It is still just a wide spot in the road about 50 miles west of Bismarck. The next town west of Glen Ullin is Richardton, where Aunt Joyce Carew was born and raised.]

In Glen Ullin, Mary and her family survived the 1918 flu, but she had a couple other brushes with death. She was thrown from a horse one time and landed on her back. She said it was months before she could walk again. Another time, she was coming down a steep hill. It had rained recently and the hill was muddy, the famous thick North Dakota gumbo, and her horse slipped. Mary and the horse kind of fell sideways onto the side of the hill with her still sitting on the horse, but luckily she wasn't injured. The impression of her on the horse stayed in the mud even after it dried. A less-direct brush happened on the first year they moved out to that land. Some neighbors came by and asked where they were going to spend the winter because they'd never survive in the shanty house that had been built temporarily. Her father admitted he had no place to go, and they were planning to stay there. Later a group of neighbors came, plowed the soil, cut bricks, and surrounded the house with them, which allowed the family to get through that first winter. The next spring they built a real sod house. In 1916, the family built a frame house, and Mary said it was never as warm as the sod house had been. She saw Halley's Comet as a child and worked the farm with her father at planting and harvesting time since they had no boys and she was the oldest girl. In addition to learning how to build a sod house, Mary knew how to milk cows and butcher them, smoke hams, and make cottage cheese--essential survival skills in those pioneer days.

In 1928, Mary married Daniel E. McGowan, a native of Chicago. They later divorced. Mary became the sole support of their only child, Daniel J. McGowan, Chicago. Daniel J. married Susan Marie Dwyer in the early 70s. They produced three daughters--Helen, Sarah, and Jeanne--and one son, Steven, all of Chicago. Two of the girls are married, and Mary is now the proud great-grandmother of two girls, and a boy. [Mary's granddaughter Helen is the source of the stories about Mary's life in Glen Ullin, and she also has taped Mary telling stories about her life.]

Before her marriage to Mr. McGowan, Mary did housekeeping and restaurant work in North Dakota, then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she studied and worked in beauty culture. From 1926 to 1971, she worked as a licensed beautician in Chicago.

A brilliant woman, Mary returned to the studies she'd had to forego to earn a living in her early days, and she was awarded her GED high school equivalency degree in 1979. Mary was a former member of the St. Clement Parish and Messiah choirs. She also served as an election judge in Chicago's 45th ward. After her retirement from full-time work, she managed and operated Cuneo Hospital Nursing Center beauty shop from 1979 to 1980.

Dan quotes his mother's recipe for a long life: “Work hard”

Lunch at Montmartre and pease porridge...

A few slips and slides down the icy sidewalk from Eastern Market (the building) is a little French restaurant called Montmartre. How we managed to find ourselves in there for lunch yesterday is anybody's guess...we were on our way to either Marvelous Market on the near corner or Bread & Chocolate on the far corner on Pennsylvania Ave. My illustrious coworker (ICW) wanted a salad, and I wanted soup. We were going to take our lunch back to the office and eat at our desks (BAD!), but....we were cold, and the word Montmartre pulled us in (see earlier birthday in Paris post). Once inside we discovered the place was warm and cozy and filled with Hill workers (we both thought "Republicans" due to the number of thin young blondes wearing fur coats, but there are plenty of both in DC...it doesn't have to mean "reactionary" when fur coat and skinny young blonde converge). So we asked for a table and wound up by the big tall windows at the end of the room.

Le garcon was cute as a bug's ear, and he asked us what we wanted to drink. ICW asked for a glass of pinot, and I said "Water for me, please." Then as he took my wine glass away, I said, "No, I'll have a glass of red wine, too, but NOT pinot." The restaurant looked very like another of our favorite watering holes, Bistrot au Coin on Connecticut Ave near Dupont Circle, and they have a great Cotes du Rhone red for their house wine. Besides, this was a French restaurant. Children drink wine at lunch in France. "Cotes du Rhone, please" I said, thinking one glass won't hurt--that is, make my breath smell noticeably if I encountered Madge/Margot/Marguerita the Boss. The waiter hustled over with the wine, and we toasted the afternoon--FRIDAY afternoon, our favorite one of the week, especially since there were no meetings.

Then we tackled the menu. There were three kinds of soup available: #1 was pureed cauliflower with mussels (hanh?), #2 was pureed zucchini with Boursin cheese, and #3 was I forget...NOT French onion, which was nowhere in sight. ICW wound up getting the zucchini soup and a salad (slices of asparagus, red and yellow peppers, and parmesan cheese stacked up on the plate and drizzled with red wine vinaigrette. She loved the salad but said the zucchini soup was nowhere near as flavorful as my version, which has lots of salt & pepper, garlic, and green peas in it and is cooked in chicken broth with a tablespoon or so of dill weed, then pureed. I add a bit of cream at the end instead of cheese, but we both liked the little glob of cheese, so I'll try it next time I make it.

I kept waffling and wavering (my typical restaurant behavior) between this (mussels?) and that (hangar steak?), but what finally came out of my mouth was pot au feu (beef cheeks, carrots, turnips, and leeks). Mario Batali is always cooking beef cheeks on Iron Chef America, so I had to try this. I liked the broth, dark and rich, and the carrots. There was even a little grit of sand in there, probably from the leeks, and I liked that, too. The beef cheeks? Well....I think beef short ribs would be better, but they're about the same. Cheeks have far less fat, which might be why the meat is not as flavorful as short ribs.

Well, it was all delicious, and we each wound up having 2 and a half glasses of wine. Plus dessert, plus coffee. ICW's dessert (raspberry&blackberry tart) was great. Mine (chocolate mousse)...well, you can get lots better at Las Placitas, the Salvadoran restaurant a couple of blocks down 8th St.

Pease Porridge

I mentioned this past week to NDB that I was not having good luck cooking pea soup from one of those cellophane packets that look so appealing and easy (Just add water!!). I poured the lot into a deep skillet yesterday a.m., added the bacon grease from breakfast (I know, I know), and boiled it for an hour before I left for work. Last night I was going to throw it out, but I boiled it some more...for maybe another hour and a half. This morning I turned on the heat again, and let it burble away...Finally I could smell scorched peas, so I went out to the kitchen and turned it all off. It wasn't badly burnt...just a few around the edge of the pan had turned a nice toasty brown. I scraped it all up and thought, well, it's a shame to throw this out. So I ate it for breakfast. It was about the texture of oatmeal. "Pease porridge hot!" came to mind. Also, "9 days old!" It won't be 9 days old till tmw, and there's still plenty left. But I dunno. It's still not very good. The scorching added the most flavor, but the beans are still very chewy. Hmmm.

Love Letters

Note the ND sunglasses!!! I am about 35 here, Peggy is probably 10, Donna next to her is a couple years older.

Peggy had a great post on Valentine's Day about the lost art of letter writing. Lots of people bemoan the advent of e-mail as the cause of fewer letters being written, but I think it's not even related. E-mail is its own art form and is alive and well. What has killed letter writing, I think is the CELL PHONE...blahblahblah, yakketyyakkety....You've already said everything that's on your mind, so why take the time to write it, too? Blogging seems to be bringing letter writing back, largely because most blogging communicates over vast distances....the same kind of distance that soldiers and sailors used to experience between themselves and their loved ones.

Just about every word of communication comes to me through my eyes. My phone calls are typed, ditto the TV programs I watch. I've got several suitcases full of letters that I began to write after I lost my hearing. What strikes me now as valuable is what I recorded of my life in those days as a young mother.

Here's a sample:

From me to S., no date:



Gr - [short for Grendel, after Beowulf]
I am taking a bath surrounded by the spoor of small child bathers--soggy towels, broken soap, bubble pipes, Legos in the drain, filthy socks kicked behind the toilet. An image for eternity. At least it shuts out the demise of the green plant. And the cutting-down of 100-year-old cottonwoods to make room for a crane. (Across the street.) You had better get here soon.

My mother is home from Texas and moaning about the quiet, but rather evasive. I think she has a boyfriend somewhere. In Texas, that is. She really needs someone to direct her.

People are getting gloomy about the world. More & more the simple people are really comforting.

Our garden is 1/8 planted with 100 lbs of seed potatoes in. Too cold for anything else, as yet.

Went to May devotions for the 1st time in many years. So few people. Highly emotional, despite the editing out of all purple phrases from hymns to O.L. [Our Lady]. Funny, how the religionizers decry the emotional coldness of modern Americans, and yet perpetrate the felony lest anyone accuse them of sentiment. The same religionizers who rhapsodize over the Search and Cursillo can't bring themselves to sing "Our hearts are on fire." Oh, shit....

The kids are waiting for you. You'd better show up.

Greetings always
from where I live

Mary Ellen

Another letter, dated only "Sunday"

Dear S.,
Lest you misunderstand (not the right word) when your package arrives...it was hatched on Thursday afternoon during a pouring rain--I didn't feel like working--and mailed Thursday night. In other words, long before your letter came yesterday about myths. I have been laughing out loud periodically for a day now. And I'm beginning to be spooked. [I made her a "de-mythologizer," a device I shall explain sometime when you can see a wastebasket, etc.]
...
Quite a week. The path of g.r. [greatest resistance--a convent phrase, as in "take the path of greatest resistance"] was pretty steep, but I gained some ground, despite all the backsliding. As additional therapy I went downtown and bought a few new garments, got the hair cut & curly: the works. Now that Donald has recovered from the shock, he really enjoys the new look. And me, too.

Friday I saw a little boy who had been struck by a car. Terrifying: four squad cars with lights flashing, a mob of fascinated children, and in the center of the street a little fellow covered by a plaid blanket - he with hair the color of barley staw, and pale, and wiping blood from his eye. Both legs broken. Took the long way home - slowly.
Mother: I saw a little boy hit by a car just now.
Children (eagerly): Was he killed??

Yesterday afternoon we went to a buffalo barbeque at United Tribes. Afterward, after a brief nap, we went swimming where Thomas swallowed some water and promptly threw up in the water. I wish you could have seen the sleek teenagers lolling at pool's edge, viewing the whole scene with disgust. I hauled him (protesting) out as the entire pool turned milky murky and left the Youth to cope with the bits of watermelon floating by and the beans, bright and brown, bobbing singly.

Last night the girls and I went to a pow-wow, scheduled for 7 p.m. We arrived at 7:30 feeling guilty (o jeez) for being late. However, by Indian time we were three hours early. When we left at 10:30 it was just starting to roll. The girls spent the three-hour wait tripping back & forth to the concession stand with an Indian friend--arms around each other, faces anointed with orange pop, lips spewing peanut shells. And Mother sat on the bleachers and grooved with the evening. Sky like pearlescent plastic, wind in the microphone like thunder, an old brown dog rolling in the wood shavings spread out on the dance floor to protect elegant white moccasins fitting like skin. The beauty was overwhelming, and ancient: chant and drums, new flesh - boys bobbing, men swaying, happy women with divine serenity moving, moving. Dignity and unity and community. It was a hell of a lot better than going to church. The girls joined in for two dances. Over the microphone the Indian version of Little Big Horn handed down by the speaker's grandmother. Thus: the white brothers started the fight on the way home (cowards, but no fools) by shooting an Indian in the back. And Custer was not scalped (true) because the Indians respected him (false) but because he committed suicide, as did most of the other white brothers. That is, he was no trophy since he had not fought.

So, you see, all is not as it seems, and yet the Moment survives, is now, and ever shall be.

In hope,
Mary Ellen

Southren lunch....

[M'reen sent me this cartoon today in an email titled "Old is When...." I thought it fit real good with the whole lunch theme]

Some days, the only thing that works to get your face off the pavement is to head to Eastern Market Lunch on Capitol Hill and have a genyoowine Southren lunch: Fried flounder on a homemade roll (lettuce & tomato added free) or a fried fish platter with THREE HUGE fillets plus two sides and a homemade roll. The fish is the freshest I've ever tasted outside of my mother's kitchen at Lake Sallie, where she cooked the fish that my dad and I caught and cleaned about 10 minutes before. The tartar sauce is also homemade from the thickest, creamiest mayo you ever et plus some chopped pickle and onion. You dip it yourself out of the bucket into little plastic cups. Sides at EML include French fries, fresh collards (pronounced "cullyards" if you're from around Bal'mer), slaw, and potato salad. You wash it all down with sweet tea, which is how they drink tea in the South here. Yeah, D.C. is South. The Mason-Dixon line runs across the country up north of here. Iced tea is also on the menu, but you have to add your own sugar if you want it sweet.

The whole thing costs about 10 bucks, and there's usually enough to take a whole 'nother lunch back to work for somebody else who's still hungry. Life is beautiful....

Happy Nirvana Day

Well, I missed Valentine's Day this year by several miles. My brother Bob sent his usual delightful homemade Valentine greeting. I even got another Valentine's Day e-card from Jimmy Feeney, on whom I had a crush in 5th grade. Jimmy is of course married to his lovely and accomplished high school sweetheart, Sandy, and sends these cards out of the goodness of his big heart. Needless to say, Jimmy (and everyone else in my acquaintance) did not get a card from me.

So here's a greeting for February 15, 2007: Nirvana Day. Nirvana Day is the day when Buddhists, especially Tibetan Buddhists, celebrate Buddha's final achievement of complete Nirvana (Paranirvana).

This is a quotation from the Nirvana Sutra:

" ... if you perceive things truly, you will become free from attachment, separated from them, you will indeed be liberated. I have well crossed the watery waste of existence. I abide in bliss, having transcended suffering, therefore I am devoid of unending desire, I have eliminated attachment and gained Liberation [moksha]. There is no old age, sickness or death for me, my life is forever without end. I proceed burning bright like a flame. You must not think that I shall cease to exist. Consider the Tathagata [i.e. Buddha] to be like [Mount] Sumeru: though I shall pass into Nirvana here [i.e. physically die], that supreme bliss is my true nature [dharmata]." (Tibetan version)

I wouldn't know much about this. I am still struggling to BE HERE NOW. There used to be a great shop in Dupont Circle just off P Street near the Georgetown border. It had a t-shirt I coveted:

"Everything I've ever tried to give up has claw marks all over it."

Death on a Popsicle Stick

The 16th Winter Deaflympics, just concluded in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 10, 2007, produced a cookbook. It reminds me of the KFYR cookbooks from Bismarck or the Frank N. Magid Associates cookbooks from the 70s and 80s, or even the White Trash Cookbook, which attained actual publication. I'm sure most people can relate to this kind of cookbook or this kind of recipe. Maybe you've even eaten something like this and lived to tell about it.

Here's a recipe that calls forth the kind of cooking that killed our relatives: Deep Fried Twinkies, or Death on a Popsicle Stick.

Deep Fried Twinkies/Death on a Popsicle Stick
6 Twinkies
6 Popsicle sticks
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 tablespoon oil
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
recommended amount of cooking oil for your fryer

Take your Twinkies and impale them on the popsicle sticks. Leave enough stick protruding from the Twinkies to get a decent grip and toss the Twinkies into the freezer overnight. On the day of the deed, mix your flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate dish, mix your milk, vinegar, and oil. Once the liquids are mixed, whisk them into the dry mix and stir until smooth. This is your batter. Toss it into the fridge.

Heat your fryer to about 375. Once the oil is at the proper temperature, take your Twinkies from the freezer, dust lightly with flour, and swish through the batter mix, making sure to coat evenly and fully.

Holding your Twinkie stick with some tongs, dunk it into the oil. It's going to try to float, so hold it under the surface until it turns a nice golden brown--usually about three to four minutes. Toss Twinkie onto a paper towel, allow to drain, and consume.

If your cardiologist finds out you've been eating these, I didn't post this. I wasn't here, and you must have gotten the recipe from my evil twin, Skippy.
-Anonymous

Here's another recipe of a similar genre: 7 Layer Salad.

1 head lettuce, chopped
1 layer red onions
1 layer cauliflower
1 layer carrots, grated
1 layer bacon, crumbled
1 cup salad dressing (mayonnaise or other)

Layer each ingredient in dish. Spread salad dressing over top. Cover, refrigerate overnight.
-J. R., Woods Cross, Utah

And for dessert? 7-Up Cake!

1 - 2/3 cup margarine
3 cups sugar (!)
5 eggs
3 cups flour
1 tablespoon lemon extract
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup 7-Up
Powdered sugar

Cream together margarine and sugar.
Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Add flour and extracts and beat well.
Gently fold in 7-Up.
Pour into well greased 10-cup bundt pan.

Bake at 325 degrees for 1-1/4 hours.
Dust with powdered sugar and serve.

Makes 10-15 servings.
-B. T., Clinton, Arkansas

As they say in these kinds of cookbooks, "Enjoy!"

Cochlear Implant 7

I had lunch with Deb today, and she told me that on day 5 after her surgery, she got DIZZY!!! and she stayed dizzy for another 10 days!!! Holy Toledo! She also said it took her a long time to wake up from the anesthetic.

Well, all of that rang my bells....probably the worst thing about becoming deaf was the vertigo (Latin for dizzy). It was as if my brain were on a spindle. I'd be walking along, and all of a sudden and somebody would give the old brain a good SPIN! Whooo! I'd fall down, vomit, etc. I never really knew when this was going to happen, so I spent a lot of my late 20s and early 30s in a state of apprehension. I was always worried that it might happen when I was carrying one of the babies around, or walking down a flight of stairs, or driving the car (never did, any of those times).

And as for not waking up on schedule after surgery....that has been my pattern, too. Most people wake up after the kinds of surgery I've had in....hmmm....maybe an hour or two, but it'd take me a day or so.

Well, I have to face facts. They're gonna stick a rod in my head and thread it around in my cochlea, and it's gonna stay there. My brain tissue is gonna react, and it's possible I'll get dizzy. Hope not.

Meanwhile, I ran into Linda at work, and I asked her how her new rats were doing. Linda acquired a PhD in some esoteric kinda mathematical subject from NYU, and while she was getting this, in addition to Marcus, her neat husband, she was working with rats. She loves rats. And she's got two new ones. Her old rats didn't last too long. (Well, rats don't.) She's got two males now, and she calls one "Big Cheese." I forget what she calls the other one, but he's littler, and he reminds her of her female rat that just died. That is, he's game for anything and has great SPIRIT!! I think she calls him "Eek," which is what she called the female he reminds her of. For example: when she opens the cage, the new Eek jumps right out into her lap. And so it goes. Linda's a FINE photographer, and I'm gonna ask her for some photos of "the kids." I'll stick em on the blog here.

There's really more to life than work and being deaf and all that. In fact, life outside of work and one's disabilities is surprising! We don't think of it as anything but housework and that, but it's LIFE!!!!!

Cochlear Implant 6

Yesterday at lunchtime I ran into Deb, a prof on campus. She and I went to the same women's college in Minnesota. She is much younger than I am, and we were at our alma mater years apart. She was a music major when she first arrived, but then her hearing loss (begun when she was about 17) got worse, and she switched to psychology. She got married back in the 90s sometime, and she has a set of twins in nursery school. We hadn't seen each other for a while, so we stood on the icy sidewalk in the wind and signed a few sentences to bring each other up to date. She told me she was on sabbatical right now, and I told her I was going to get a cochlear implant in March. With a big smile, she reached up and removed her own processor and held it out to show me. "Wow! When did you get it?" I said. "Last June," she said. "I love it!!" I asked her if she could hear her little children's voices now, and she said she called them on the phone on turn-on day! I asked if she could hear and play music, too, and she said, "Yes...both. It's thrilling." She's always had a confident glow about her, so I can't really say that she looked any different or happier, but she kept saying, "I love it!" If we can arrange it, we're going to meet for lunch possibly tomorrow, and I'll get to ask her lots more about the whole experience.

Before lunch, I also heard from Bev Biderman. Bev is Canadian and the author of Wired for Sound, a great book that details her process of learning to hear again with a cochlear implant. Cathy asked me to review the book for Odyssey back in 1997 or 1998 when the book first came out, and I loved it. It was personal and informative and even-handed. When Bev came to give a talk here five or six years ago, we met for breakfast. She was getting better and better at hearing with the implant, and I was struck by how easily she handled conversation. Yesterday morning, out of curiosity, I looked her up online at U of Toronto and sent her an email, telling her about my upcoming implant in March. She wrote back immediately saying this was "wonderful news!" Bev is now an adaptive technology consultant and planning analyst at the University of Toronto. She told me she now has two cochlear implants and is enjoying the stereo effect of hearing with both ears. Bev's surgeon at Johns Hopkins for her first cochlear implant is the same guy who will be doing mine.

I have to say that my excitement about the possibilities being opened went sky high after I talked with Deb and heard from Bev. I haven't allowed myself to get too fired up about this in case it doesn't work, but now I'm just kind of humming along. Surgery will be three weeks from today! I have to remember to stop taking aspirin next Thursday.

Schwarzie! Wo sind Sie gewesen??

Well, guess wot greeted me in the lobby when I got home tonight? A nice red box from FRANCE!!!! I brought it in while I took off my coat and set it next to my plants so that it might have some nice red company after its long journey across.



Then I opened the box and took out...tada! Lieber Schwarzeleh!!


Am I seeing things, though? Is Schwarzie a little grey??? Maybe. She's 24 years old, which is pretty old for a coat! I wanted to take a good SNIFF of the box, too, to see if it smelled of the apartment. But alas, I can't smell anything in this weather. The cold has my nosed stopped up tight. Shooot! (A good North Dakota expression of dismay or consternation)

Anyway, the lost is found. Schwarzie has a whole bunch of long, blonde hairs all over her, though. Which makes me wonder if perhaps the good Parisian assistant didn't wear her on her vacation? The hair (or hairs, as they say in ND) definitely does/do not come from us. George and Cathy have blonde hair, but it's shorter than this. Peggy is the only one of us whose hair is as long, but hers is auburn. My hair doesn't match in length or color.

Btw....lest you think I know any German, I used the wonderful AltaVista Babelfish translator software: http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr
With Babelfish, you can translate just about any expression as long as it's formal or a bit stilted. If you get too colloquial, it comes out English.

Now I have to tell the good assistant that the coat has indeed arrived and would she please send me her address so I can fire off a check to her. Maybe I'll send the check back the same way she sent the coat. Ha.

Auf Wiedersehen, lieber schwarzer Mantel!

In 1983, Debbie gave me a wonderful Louis Feraud coat for my birthday. It was $300 on sale at Armstrong's, and since she worked there, she got it for even less with her employee discount. The coat was not in the regular Armstrong's coat department, called "Coatland." It was in the designer department. (The Armstrong's women's department was next to Coatland, and the employees used to call it "Fatland." Oof! Pow!)

Anyway, I wore the coat to Paris in December, and the above photo may well be its last sighting. In our rush to clear out and find a way to the airport, I left it in the closet in the apartment where we stayed. I emailed the apartment manager as soon as I got back to see if it was still there. It was, and the manager asked one of her helpers to mail it to me.

On December 9, I got the following email from the helper:

Hello Mary Ellen,

This is K---, E----'s assistant. I picked up your coat from the Abbesses apartment yesterday- it was indeed right where you left it, hanging in the closet.

I will ship it to you next week and email you a confirmation + shipping information once I've sent it.

Thanks and have a great weekend,

The following email arrived on January 16:

Hello Mary Ellen,

I just wanted to check to see if you have received the coat yet. I sent it on January 5th. I meant to send it before that, but I wasn't able to do so before going out of town for the holidays. My apologies for the delay- I did it as soon as I got back. In any case, if you haven't received it already, you should very soon.

The cost for the shipping was 39.05 Euros + 10 Euros for the time spent [As IF]. Figured at $1.29 = 1€ , 49.05 € = $63.34.

Please let me know as soon as you get the coat and then I can give you my US address where you can send the check.

Best wishes for the new year.

And this morning's e-post brought this:

Hi Mary Ellen,

Just wanted to check if you're gotten your coat back yet...I hope so! Let me know.

Well, of course the coat has not yet arrived. Louis Feraud, the coat's designer, died in 1999 at the age of 79, and a Google search produced this article from BBC news online:

Tuesday, 28 December, 1999, 18:19 GMT
Designer Feraud dies

French fashion designer Louis Feraud, who designed clothes for Brigitte Bardot in the 1960s, has died aged 79.
...
Feraud was born in Arles, southern France and left his job as a ski instructor in the Alps to open his first boutique in the 1950s in the French Riviera city of Cannes, where he sold clothes to the sun-worshipping jet set.

His first success came in 1955 when Brigitte Bardot walked into his shop and purchased a girlish, white sun dress.

"Photographers and journalists followed her," he once said.
"Within a week, every woman up and down the Cote d'Azur was wearing my little white dress. We sold 500 of them in a matter of days."

In 1956 he opened a boutique in Paris for clients including actresses Kim Novak and Ingrid Bergman as well as Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the late French president Francois Mitterrand.

As much artist as couturier, he kept painting throughout most his life, crafting stylish nudes, landscapes and flowers which were exhibited and sold in Paris and New York.
His clever and amusing black and white geometrics and graphics often went directly into his outfits, and some of his most beautiful, luminous scarves were his own colourful designs.

"What I always wanted to do was please women," he once said.

There are about 50 Feraud outlets around the world whose annual turnover is about £81m.

Feraud also created several perfumes for the American company Avon and made contributions to the work of other designers, including Daniel Hechter and Jean-Louis Scherrer.

After he retired in 1995, his business was run by his daughter Kiki - his only child - his ex-wife Zizi, and colleagues until earlier this year when it was taken over by Dutch firm Secon.

He will be buried in his home town of Arles.

Despite Feraud's French origins, the coat itself, which I loved, was made in Germany! It had a row of buttons down the front (which I could just barely button this year, thanks to the increase in my shoe size, among other things). It reminded me of the photo I saw of my grandfather's sister, Tante Franziska. In the photo she was wearing a long black dress with many small buttons down the front, almost like a priest's cassock. The coat may have appealed to me on some deep ancestral level.

Anyway, I fear the coat has gone home to its final resting place. I've lugged it around for years, not being able to fit into it but also not wanting to part with such a beautiful garment. But now it's gone. Goodbye, dear little black coat!

Wind Chill

Here's a chart from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NOTE: click on the chart if it's not fully displayed in your window on this post.

We never heard of wind chill back when I was growing up in Fargo, ND, and the temps were often waaay below zero. Since Fargo is the windiest spot in ND (even windier than Grand Forks!, which is 80 miles north of Fargo), the wind chill numbers would have driven everyone away. The average wind speed in Fargo year-round is about 12 mph. So--and pardon my creaky math (Ha. All my brothers with the possible exception of John were geniuses in math and wound up as engineers...I was a writer...John turned out to be a doctor)--in theory if the air temperature on any given day in January was -2F, and the wind was puffing away at 12 mph, the wind chill would be somewhere around -16F to - 19F!! I think. I just remember the way Judy Henning and I figured out to tell if it was colder than -20F when we walked to school in the a.m.: the outsides of our legs would get stiff. When we got to school, we had to go through a few minutes or hours of pain while our legs warmed up! Sting and burn!

Happy Birthday, Dad - repost

[NOTE: I posted this two years ago, but I like it, so here it is again.] Sorry I missed your birthday, Pop. I always get it mixed up with my h.s. boyfriend's, whose birthday is tomorrow, Feb. 5.}


Yesterday was the 115th anniversary of the birth of my father, Francis Thomas Dwyer. He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 5, 1894, and he died at Shoreham, Minnesota, on January 3, 1968, a night of bitter cold. (It was -41 degrees in Bismarck the following morning when I dropped off the girls with our neighbor Iris and took the train to Detroit Lakes for his funeral. Tom was not yet born.)

Here are some of the photos I have of Dad. There are more, but they're not organized, to put it mildly. These are the framed photos I have in the den.

First is the earliest photo I have (maybe anyone has) of Dad. He's maybe a year to 18 months. Notice his lovely blonde ringlets. Dad's hair was blondish until he was 13, when it turned black. It stayed curly, although he always combed it flat so that it wouldn't curl.

The bright-eyed girl is my Aunt Ellen, who was a year and a half older than Dad.



The next photo shows Dad with Ellen and little Edgar in the middle. Dad was the oldest boy in their family of seven children: Ellen, Francis, Edgar, Rose, Ann, and Mary. The seventh child, Theresa (Susan says "Mary"), died as an infant, and she followed Francis.



Here's a photo of Grandma and Grandpa and their lovely family of teenagers. It's the only photo I have of the whole group, and the only one I have of my grandmother. The two boys, Edgar and Francis, are in the back row. In the middle row are Ellen (soon to become Sister Mary Mark, I.H.M. (Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, Michigan), Mary, Ann, and Rose. Grandma was teaching school in Cherokee, Iowa, when Grandpa came back from Iowa Normal School in Cedar Falls with a teaching certificate. His father had wanted him to stay home and work the farm, but he did not want to be a farmer. He ran away from home at age 15 and worked his way through college in Cedar Falls and then Valparaiso College in Valparaiso, Indiana. (Grandma and Grandpa actually met at Valparaiso where they were both students.) Arriving back home, he taught school during the day, studied for the law at night, and presumably courted Grandma at the same time. Soon he applied for admission to the University of Michigan law school, was accepted, married Grandma, the lovely Alicia Hogan, and moved to Ann Arbor. Ellen was born the day Grandpa graduated from the U of M with his law degree.

The following picture is of the St. Thomas Parish baseball team of 1912. My dad is in the middle of the back row wearing his Shaker knit sweater, and my grandfather is on the end at the right. He was now a lawyer in private practice in Ann Arbor and coach of the team. Grandpa at various times also was the city attorney for Ann Arbor and the bishop's lawyer as well. Right after Grandpa's graduation from the U of M, he taught law there, also. The two guys on either side of my dad, Leo and Everett, were his pals growing up, and I remember him talking about their baseball exploits and canoeing trips on the river. Dad played shortstop or second base, I forget which, and shortly after this, he won a baseball scholarship to the University of Michigan.



His graduation photo is next, but I'm not sure which graduation this was taken for, high school or college. I thought I remembered Mom saying this was his U of M graduation photo, but Susan said it's his high school photo. He looks older than high school in this one, and certainly older than he does in the family photo.





The U.S. Army appropriated him after he graduated from the U. of M. with a degree in English, and they stationed him for the duration of WWI in Newport News, Virginia, as a typing clerk. Mom took this photo of him on the farm in Iowa when he was home on furlough. Mom met Dad while he was still in college. Grandpa used to send Dad back to Iowa during his summer vacations to help Grandpa's two old maid sisters, Nora and Ellen, who wound up running the farm after all the boys in the family defected or proved incapable of managing the place. Mom taught school with Aunt Nora, who was eager to introduce her handsome nephew to her bright, bubbly co-worker. Dad wrote home after the introduction, "I've met the liveliest girl in town."



Fast-forward to the 50s....Grandpa is dead, and Dad bought a lake cottage on Lake Sallie with his inheritance. Here he is out back of the cottage by our 1947 green DeSoto, which he bought when I was in 8th grade. It boasted the forerunner of automatic transmission. When you started out, you'd step on the gas until you got to maybe 15-18 mph, then you'd let up on the gas, the car would shift itself--Ka-KLUNK!--and you'd be at driving speed.

Dad always wore khakis from L.L. Bean on the weekends, plus a yellow terry cloth longsleeved t-shirt like he has on in the picture. He carried his Pall Malls in the pocket in front. On his feet, he wore old wingtips that were too scuffed to wear to work. And he usually wore a cap like this.

The smoke from his Pall Malls was deadly, and when we drove to the lake every Friday night after Dad got off work, Mom and I would beg him to open the window a little wider so we could breathe. He always did, but ever afterward, I could tell Pall Mall smoke from any other cigarette's. It was tarry and raw, and it stunk upwind.

The big house behind Dad belonged to Jack and Babe Maloney, parents of my growing-up playmates at the lake, Michael and Marcia. It used to be the main house of a resort, and our cottage was one of the little rental places. It had a living room, a bedroom, and a porch on two sides...the kitchen on the side, and a big round table & chairs plus a big squeaky spring bed in front.

Here are Dad and Gene getting ready to put the dock in for the summer. Dad is pulling something out from under the front porch, where he stored the dock over the winter. Part of the dock is stacked to the right. The trees are not yet in leaf, but the snow is gone, so it must be the end of May. I took these little photos with my 8th grade graduation present camera. I wish I'd taken hundreds more.



Last photo: "Brothers of the Brush" - Fargo's Diamond Jubilee, 1950. Dad, like most other men in town, grew a beard for the Centennial celebration. He sent a copy of this photo to Aunt Mary Barnes, I think, and on the back, though the ink has almost completely faded, he wrote "Is this Pop Hogan or a duke's mixture? With love, Francis"



Love to you, Francis. You were my best pal as a kid. You took me everywhere with you: fishing, hunting, even bowling at night during the winter when the NW Bell team had league bowling--you'd park me at the bar with a glass of 7Up while you rolled up one great game after another. You were a natural athlete and a lover of the outdoors. Your temper scared me to death when I was little, but I learned that yelling back would shut you up good. I only did it once, actually, because I was so appalled to see you silenced like that. Thanks for giving me life and a share of your unique spirit....

Found Things

Found this gem in a suitcase full of old letters tonight.

It's Peggy's first (and only) postcard from Camp Dominic Savio in Riverdale, ND. She mailed it on August 18, maybe 1970 or 1971? So...she was like 8 or 9?

It says

Dear Mom
I'm Having a good time.
Tell The Family Hi. And
Tell dad The rod Broke
I Need More Money. Love Peggy

That's my girl, the writer!!