A Stalwart Falls
“Are you catching colds?” our friend asked as the funeral ended.
“No, no, I said, funerals just find us very vulnerable, and we have to deal with losses, past, present . . . and future. We have an ongoing fight over who is going to bury whom.”
We did not know the man well who had died, but we knew him as a stalwart. He was a greeter and usher at our service, and he was only rarely ever not there. He served the church. He was always there. I had asked his wife to help me with tickets, and she had laughed and said “of course, I’ll be there because my husband will be there, and if you need me just holler.”
They weren’t there. It made me uneasy, it nagged at me. I didn’t need her, but I missed her, and as I said – they are ALWAYS there. Sometimes it’s what is missing that catches your attention. It caught mine.
When I learned her husband had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as the Antique Fair was starting, it came almost as a physical blow. It’s not that I knew him that well. It’s that his presence at the church was something we took for granted, he was stalwart. You could count on him. We attended out of respect, respect for him, support for his wife.
And I know that the two of them spend (spent) as much time together as AdventureMan and I do. I don’t like to think that it could happen to me, that I could be suddenly left. AdventureMan was a military man, he would often leave, all these years, and he might tell me where he was going but I never knew for sure where he was going. We had a code to use if he was lying, but although he never used the code, I know there are times he lied, all for that bitch, national security. Yes, yes, I know, strong language from Intlxpatr, but strong times call for strong language. We both knew that there were times when there was a risk he wouldn’t come back.
We didn’t have to deal with death a lot in our life abroad. Of course, in the military, everyone is young. In all the countries where we worked in the Gulf, there were upper age limits – people retired and people left; you can’t live out your years in Qatar or Kuwait, there are laws against it. You can’t even be buried there without special permission. We learned to deal with the losses of people coming into our lives and leaving, but we didn’t have to deal with the great finality of death. We’re learning.
AdventureMan insists he is going to go first. I am tough in a lot of ways, but I don’t know that I am tough enough to go through his funeral. The very thought of it makes me sick to my stomach.
He tells me not to worry. He wants a Viking funeral; he wants to be sent out in a kerosene soaked ship and for archers to set it on fire as it sails off, disintegrating in flames. Isn’t going to happen, AdventureMan, but if it did, I might give some thought to pitching myself on the ship as it departs . . . otherwise, I’m afraid I might live the rest of my life as the one of the walking wounded.
Love At First Sight: Gumbo Spoons
Vanity, vanity. When I was in university, along with our studies, we all picked out our china patterns and silver flatware. We were preparing for the rest of our lives, which meant getting married. My parents gave me six place settings when I graduated university and through the years, AdventureMan and I added settings. We used the sterling all the time, military people entertained more formally. We haunted French and German antique markets and flea markets, seeking obscure pieces we didn’t have, it was fun.
These days, not so much. I haven’t bought any silver for years. We do very little formal entertaining. My sister and her daughters have taken to using their good silver for every day. I haven’t reached that point – yet – but I am thinking about it.
In spite of the fact that we are not often using our silver flatware, at the recent Christ Church Antique Fair, a woman celebrated having found gumbo spoons.
Gumbo spoons? I have a lot of pieces, mostly French and German. I have asparagus servers, yes, really! I have pieces for all kinds of exotic foods, but no. No, I did not have gumbo spoons. I had never even heard of gumbo spoons.
Gumbo spoons are a little larger than soup spoons, wider, rounder, a little deeper.
As it turns out, they don’t even make gumbo spoons in my sterling, but they had some beautiful ones that will go with my everyday flatware; these had shells on the base of the handles. They are beautiful, and I can hardly wait to eat gumbo in such grand style. These will be well loved – and well used!
A First For AdventureMan
You may think this is ‘just’ a beautiful pecan pie, but it is better than that. This is AdventureMan’s very first pie, ever. He debated even making it for the Great Gathering, because there are so many truly gifted cooks in the family, but in the end, being the courageous soul he is, he tackled it. It looks exactly like the photo of the pie in Southern Living magazine which inspired his effort. I don’t think I have ever seen a more beautiful pecan pie. 🙂 Bravo! Bravo, AdventureMan!
“How Have You Managed . . . ?”
“What do you mean?” I asked the elegant grinning lady who was asking me the question. Three former military wives, one Army, one Air Force and one Navy, and we had been talking about our world-wide lives and adventures.
“How are you doing? You haven’t been here long. Are you managing to settle in?” asked with enormous sympathy.
She caught me off guard.
Yes, I am happy. I’ve settled in. I have friends. I’m connected.
But her question caught me off guard, and all of a sudden I couldn’t answer.
“I’m doing OK” I managed to start. “But it’s like this church. I love this church, and at the same time, there are times I walk in and oh, how I miss our churches in the Middle East, where I would walk in and think ‘this is what heaven must look like’ especially at Christmas, with all the Indian families in their saris and finery, and the Africans in their brocades and elaborate head-dresses, and the people from all over the world. The music was simpler, and at the Christmas Eve service, we sang ‘Silent Night’ in every language in the church . . . Â I miss that.”
There are times the memories catch me unaware, and leave me breathless.
AdventueMan and I went grocery shopping today and when the cashier told me the total, AdventureMan almost gasped. I just laughed and told him that’s why I never took him grocery shopping with me in Kuwait – the sticker shock would have killed him.
Life here is definitely easier.
On the other hand, we have had to revise our ideas about Kuwait drivers. At first, we just thought there were a lot of Kuwaitis living in Pensacola; now we have realized that there are people who just drive as they please. Some of them are stoned out of their minds. I witnessed an accident last week where when I checked the driver of the car that was hit, she grinned at me loopily – and then disappeared. It was bizarre, and I wonder how many people are on the roads as impaired as she was. She went right through a stop sign as if it weren’t even there, and if the car had hit 6 inches more forward, she would have been dead. She didn’t have a scratch. And she was not at all concerned, just that loopy grin. “Elegantly wasted” said the driver of the car who hit her.
We both have a lot going on. With connection comes commitment and obligation. We try to coordinate our schedules at the beginning of the week so we can help one another out. The highlight is that each afternoon I am taking care of our new little granddaughter. AdventureMan/Baba often comes by and naps in the peaceful environment just to be with us. She is a sweet, laughing little baby, never very fussy. He offers me a day off, which occasionally I take, or he takes a time when I have a meeting or an appointment. We have both discovered how very much we like the ‘work’ of grandparenting. 🙂
We’re managing. 🙂
Speaking More Than One Language Delays Alzheimer’s
From AOL Everyday Health:
WEDNESDAY, November 6, 2013 — A small but growing body of research is finding that people who are proficient in multiple languages have a lower risk of cognitive decline. In the largest study to date on the relationship between bilingualism and dementia, researchers from Hyderabad, India, and Edinburgh, Scotland, demonstrated that bilingualism may stave off symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia for several years. Their study was published in the journal Neurology.
The research team in Hyderabad evaluated 648 people who had dementia symptoms for 6 months to 11 years before enrolling in the study; 391 of the subjects were bilingual. The researchers found those who were bilingual developed dementia on average 4.5 years later than people who spoke only one language. On average, bilinguals developed dementia symptoms by age 65.6 compared with age 61.1 in people who spoke only one language.
“Nowadays, a lot of companies are having expensive brain-training programs, but I’d say bilingualism is very cheap,” said Thomas Bak, MD, a lecturer in human cognitive neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, and second author on the study. “The crucial thing about bilingualism is that it offers what we say is constant brain training. A bilingual person Is forced to switch to different sounds, words, concepts, grammatical structure, and social norms.”
Dr. Bak’s study demonstrated the impact bilingualism has not only on the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, but also on other types of dementia. Though the majority of patients in the group studied (37 percent) had Alzheimer’s-related dementia, 29.2 percent had vascular dementia, a type caused by reduced blood flow in the brain from stroke. Frontotemporal lobe dementia — from atrophy or shrinkage of certain areas of the brain — accounted for 17.9 percent of the diagnoses. Lewy body dementia, the second most common type of progressive dementia and one that is related to Parkinson’s disease, accounted for 8.5 percent, while 7.4 percent of people in the study were diagnosed with mixed dementia.
The researchers found bilingualism had the most dramatic effect on people who were diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe dementia. Knowing multiple languages delayed dementia symptoms by as much as six years in this group. Individuals with vascular dementia had an average of almost four extra years before dementia symptoms set in. However, individuals who knew three or four languages weren’t protected longer from dementia symptoms than those who were only proficient in two languages.
The More Different the Languages, the Better
The World Health Organization estimates 35.6 million people in the world have dementia, with 7.7 million new cases every year. And in India the problem is expected to grow even more dire. In 2009, the World Alzheimer’s Report projected India will have 10 million dementia patients by the year 2020. This was the impetus behind the new research, said Suvarna Alladi,MD, lead author of the study, which was funded by the Indian Department of Science and Technology.
“Dementia has become a major public health problem in India, and research that explores potentially protective mechanisms is of tremendous importance,” said Dr. Alladi. “Since many people in India can fluently speak two or more languages in their daily life, it’s heartening for us to know that something that we take for granted may protect our brains from developing dementia early.”
Teluga is the official state language in Hyderabad. Natives of the city are often also proficient in Hindi and Dakkhini, which more closely shares roots with English than with Teluga. This raises questions about the brain and “linguistic distance,” said Bak.
“You could argue the more different languages are, the better they are for the brain,” Bak said. “However you can also argue that when you speak languages that are so closely related you have to suppress one.”
Scientists have also become interested in whether cognitive abilities can be retained in similar ways if a person doesn’t learn a second language until later on in life, but there are yet no studies on this topic. However, many researchers, including Bak, speculate that a person who learns a second language later on life could glean similar benefits. “There are theories that would say you need the constant practice,” he said. “The fact that I can swim won’t make me healthy. If I actually go swimming it will make me healthier.”
Exercising the Brain
Numerous studies have found one of the best ways to slow cognitive decline is by mindfully engaging in brain-flexing activities, such as playing Suduko and crossword puzzles or reading books. I-Chant Andrea Chiang, MD, a professor who specializes in language psychology at Quest University Canada in Squamish, B.C., sees very little difference between language learning and any other type of brain exercise. “The brain is a muscle and it needs to be worked out like any other muscle,” said Dr. Chiang. “All those mental activities stimulate the brain and build up a cognitive reserve, even though there may be physical decline.”
Chiang has consulted with Ryan McMunn, who runs BRIC Language Systems headquartered in New York City. McMunn said a number of Alzheimer’s patients have sought out BRIC language classes online to help offset the symptoms of the disease, or are learning a second language because Alzheimer’s runs in the family. McMunn, who is American and lived in China after college, said his grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease, but he wasn’t aware of the research on bilingualism and dementia until after he began learning to speak Mandarin, which he now does fluently.
“Honestly I can’t think of a more fun way of trying to postpone these things,” said McMunn. “Learn any language; it’s a fun thing to do and it allows you to communicate with new people. I look at it as very beneficial.”
Steamer Trunks
I saw this ad in a higher end magazine and felt a bolt of recognition pass through me . . . my Mom had a suitcase, probably from her Mom or grandmother, that looked like this. She stored special fabrics in it for later use. It always smelled like faraway places.
Look at the space! You can pack everything neatly into drawers, you can hang your hanging clothes.
These were for ship travel, where someone would deliver your trunk to the ship and sometimes, even unpack it for you and store the trunk in the hold while you dined and supped your way across the Atlantic – maybe ten to fourteen days. There were no restrictions on numbers of bags, no restrictions on bag size.
Even as a child, going back and forth to university from Germany, we had BIG bags, huge bags we could stuff full. The two bag limit was 77 pounds, but it seems to me that the airline staff always looked the other way. I still get steamed every time I fly a “foreign” (i.e. not an airline I have privileges on) airline and have to pay a baggage fee for even one bag. Stuffed in like sardines, even in business class. Unspeakable food, tinier and tinier restrooms . . . People fighting for space in the overhead bins . . .
Oh my gosh; I am talking like an OLD person.
Dining at Captain Pattie’s, the Best Meal of our Trip
We’d been driving since breakfast, stopping, getting out, maybe hiking a little, taking photos, and we wanted a nice lunch. The weather is gorgeous, even hot, and we head for the Homer spit.
The name Homer Spit just cracks AdventureMan up, even though he knows Spit in this usage means a long, thin, flat beach that goes out into the sea (Definition of spit noun (LAND) from the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press), he still cracks up just like a little boy when he hears it or says it. This is what Homer Spit looks like:
It is actually like four or five miles long, longer than it looks on the maps. While a lot of people hike out there, we drove; we want to continue exploring after we eat.
The nicest restaurant we can see is Captain Patties, and we decide to give it a try.
From the moment we walk in, we are so glad me made this choice. The interior is clean and neat and sunny, there is sea memorabilia on the walls, and the place if filled with people who look like they live here.
This is the view from Captain Patties:
We love the place, and we love it that they are fine with us each ordering soup and splitting the main dish. We have found that we just can’t eat as much as restaurants want to put on our plates. At home, it is no problem, we ask them to pack it up and we have it for dinner, or lunch another day. We don’t want to waste food, and we don’t want to pack it up, either, so sharing a main dish works for us.
Today we choose seafood chowder – oh man, we’ve been eating chowders everywhere but this one is THE best. And we split a grilled local seafood platter, everything on the plate, the scallops, the shrimp, the salmon and the halibut, all local. It is unbelievably good. It is so simply prepared, no elaborate sauces, and it is so tasty, so good.
On the wall hangs this piece. From our whaling adventures with Captain Alan on the Scania, we know that this is baleen, what the whale uses to screen fish as he ingests them. 🙂
We wanted to go to The Mermaid for dinner, but they were fully booked, right up to closing. We could see people waiting outside at Fat Olives, a lot of people, so we decided we had such a good lunch at Captain Pattie’s that we would go back for dinner. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha on us. Whoda thunk, but in Homer on a gorgeous Saturday night, you had better have reservations for dinner. We ended up having a nice enough dinner, but nothing special, across the street, wishing we were back at Captain Patties.
Our dinner somewhere else, nice enough, but not the same:
AdventureMan had salad and salmon quesadillas; I had Ceasar salad with grilled salmon:
A few last views of Homer:
The Homer Airport, cozy and efficient:
Public art at the airport 🙂
Sign on a property outside of Homer:
One of several thriving community gardens we saw in Homer, full of delicious things to eat. We love it that Pensacola also has good community gardens.
Presenter Ses Condoléances
Some things you do. Some things are hard, and you do them anyway. I always think of them in the formal – pour prendre conge’, respondez, pour rendre petite assistance . . . must do’s, societal niceties, the grease that keeps civilization running, never mind smoothly.
I had to call a friend this morning to tell her how sorry I am that her husband had died. When she came to the phone, I was initially shocked. For months, since her husband’s stroke, she has been subdued and tired, but this morning she sounded happy and energetic.
“He’s free!” she said to me. “”As it says in the Bible, his passing was a breath; if I hadn’t been holding his hand and paying attention, I wouldn’t have known he was gone. It was so easy.” She was joyful. We wept together, for joy. He was free of the burden his life had become.
What I thought was going to be a sad call turned out to be a joyful call. She loves her husband still. They had years and years and children and grandchildren together, and she let him go with joy because he was ready.
Thanks be to God.
No Internet??? No Wi-Fi??? No Phone Service???
No, I have not abandoned you.
When my son asked about communicating with us from Alaska, I confidently assured him “oh, Alaska will be like Africa! Land lines are so expensive to install, there will be cell towers everywhere, and besides, my iPhone is covered everywhere! I can use the internet.”
Oh Pride, Intlxpatr, Pride. You speak whereof you do not know!
Our time in Juneau was a lot of fun. From the moment we arrived, it was just so smooth. The airport is small, like Africa. You can be in and out of the airport in minutes. We picked up our car; it was so easy, the reservation was waiting, and the car is out in the small lot. It is a car a lot like our own and we really like it. Not five minutes later, we are in our room at a nearby hotel, and it is a nice room, and of course it has Wi-Fi, that’s how I sent the earlier entries.
I called an old friend of my Mother’s, a friend I remember well from my childhood, she and my mother would laugh a lot together, and our families travelled together, out on a big old Coast Guard cutter fishing in Alaska, or out to islands where we would pick berries, or out, just out, because it was a beautiful weekend and when the weather is good, Alaskans go outside.
We planned to meet up for coffee, and when we did, she was just like the old days, only older. I laughed and told her I am now older than when I knew her before. She laughed at AdventureMan’s jokes, and she had a beautiful living place near where my family used to live, with a view to die for. It reminded me of Kuwait. I could lose hours looking out her window, if I lived there. Eagles flying by, cruise ships coming in and out, the weather changing on the mountain across the way – it was a magnificent location, and it was all made even better by good coffee, good conversation and a great deal of love based on old relationships.
But we needed to go! We had things we needed to see!
This is the view from our friend’s house in West Juneau:
My old school:
Alaskan Indian art, painted over a garage door:
The beach we used to go to, called Sandy Beach. Occasionally a dead walrus would wash up there, causing no end of excitement to us young people.
AdventureMan found a piece of the sea glass I love:
I thought this school above was a lot bigger than this . . . . I remember it being a lot bigger . . . LOL!
This is our old house, many many years ago. It used to have a much bigger front yard, before they widened the road. It also seemed farther from the little grocery store near the bridge that my Mom would send me to, but it’s gotten shorter!
This is the Baranof Hotel, where my parents met. It used to be a very grand hotel, but it is now a Westmark hotel, and while it pretends to still be grand, it is shopworn and tired, and needs a major overhaul to be back in the game. We ate lunch there – to honor my parents meeting – and it was also a very mediocre meal. The very chipper waitress, Holly, tried to make it nice, but the Capitol restaurant needs better lighting and brighter colors. It was very, very dark.
Some public art. Later as we passed the same location we heard guys call out “The police are coming!” and saw them approach three men who looked like maybe they were drinking or drugging.
AdventureMan is so patient with me. When I spotted a quilt shop, he said he was going down the street and to call him when I was finished. 🙂
The best part of the day was picking up our friend for dinner, and hearing her stories. We loved hearing about Juneau in the old days, and hearing her laugh.
For Unto Us a Child is Given . . .
I am hearing those wonderful lines from Handel’s Messiah, because on this wonderful day, just after noon, a new child came into this world, a treasured girl-child, a warrior-princess is born. Thanks be to God, al hamd’allah!
Her Mother’s prayer for her is that she be the child that God created her to be. She hopes her daughter has courage, and a heart for adventure. When we met her, this amazing daughter-in-law, she played rugby, and she went off to France for a year to teach English.
We all pray that she will be healthy, and compassionate, with a heart for others. Courageous and passionate, and a woman of strength who will, like her Father, “give voice to those who have no voices.”
It is taking all our strength not to run to the hospital to visit. We feel very Middle-Eastern at this time; I am remembering my friend who went to Hamad hospital to have her babies. I took her daughters there the next morning, laden with canisters of coffee to serve guests.
“Guests?” I thought to myself. I had NO idea. Our Western idea is to give the new parents and their new baby time to recover from the physical and mental exertion of giving birth, time to bond as a small family unit.
When we got to Hamad Hospital, my friend had a huge suite, like a hotel suite, and her hospital bed was maybe King sized, with a curtain that could be drawn around it. She had a wall of mirrored closets and a seating area for about twenty people. No. I am not kidding.
We got there around seven in the morning, and within fifteen minutes, guests started arriving, all women, of course, come to give congratulations to the new Mom. Each came, greeted the new Mother, sat and drank a couple cups of coffee served by the delighted older daughters, greeted their friends, cousins and new arrivals, and then departed. Waves of guests arrived, and, thank God, waves of re-inforcing coffee pots.
So so different from our own customs, but today, oh, how I would love to fill a canister or two and be at the hospital sooner, rather than later, to greet the parents and to meet my new little lion-hearted grand-daughter, who insisted she would arrive when SHE wanted, LOL, not on schedule.
Here is the quilt I made for her:
And here is the guide to the colors; I bought the border five years ago:
When AdventureMan say it, he said “that doesn’t look like a baby quilt” because it is so black and white, but, if you have eyes to see, it isn’t all black and white, it also has shades of purple, fuchsia, and a celery Spring green. I made the center Kaleidoscope pieces with a variety of blacks and whites, because babies LOVE black and white, and it can fascinate them and calm them.
I call it “I See Things Differently” because no, it doesn’t look like a baby quilt, but it is very much a baby quilt, it just doesn’t meet our cultural expectations. The longer I live, the less I meet any one’s expectations, LOL!
Thanks be to God! Thanks be to God for the safe delivery of this precious baby!
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