80 Memories for 80 Years: #33 Containment

... patina from 64 years of use ...

I have been thinking about cedar chests because Moiya blogged about how mother gave Moiya her old cedar chest.

I own mother’s cedar chest, the one that preceded the one that Moiya owns.

The really old cedar chest became I got mine in a similar fashion to the way Moiya got her newer one.

One Christmas when I was in my teens, Christmas morning had finished.

I hadn’t noticed that there was not a present from Santa Claus for me.

I must have been in my middle to late teens, for the fact is, Christmas day was going along merrily for me and I hadn’t really thought about “what is in this for me”. I had wanted a wrist watch that Christmas. But I hadn’t told my folks, which I now know is the obvious way to get gifts at Christmas.

I knew there wasn’t much money for Christmas. We didn’t use the phrase “being on a budget” in our family. We ate food from the garden, we got new shoes if we needed them, (only one pair at a time -- serviceable ones), and my dad bought a cow and had it pastured just a few blocks from our house. We got the morning milk. The farmer took the evening milk. I had enough spending money to get me to the movies, since I had regular babysitting jobs. At first I earned $.25 an hour. Then I got new clients who just paid me $.35 an hour. As I said, that was enough money to get me entrance to the movies, and an occasional pair of earrings.

... the sides are in better shape than the top ...

In fact, my dad didn’t have a regular job most of my life.

I thought that is the way most families worked. Doral was one of the early geologists who looked for oil in Alberta.

He also built an insulation plant but with that business, he worked from home or he was out selling his product in rural Alberta.

So back to the Christmas morning in question. 

When the ribbons and bows had been gathered up and when my mother had straightened the wrinkles out of the Christmas paper that she hoped to re-use the next year, and when she had slipped a 25 pound turkey into the oven, Doral and Wyora took me to their bedroom and told me that my mother was getting a new cedar chest and that I would be getting her old one.

Now the kicker was, in those days the cedar chest was often called a hope chest.

I didn’t want to have hope.

Contents of the Cedar Chest: 
table clothes that are too hard to iron,
bolts of out-of-fashion material that need to be sewn,
black netting used to decorate at Halloween,
Irish linen, too good to use,
doilies, once popular but now out of fashion

Catherine?
If you take the cedar chest you have to take the contents.

I had zero desire to collect linens or kitchen items.

I felt a social pressure to say thank you to my parents, but I couldn’t really figure out what I was going to do with that thing – that wooden box.

I didn’t know the phrase having an albatross around your neck, but I now knew the feeling.

Well, I probably had a good idea what I was going to do with it.

Nothing.

I still have that cedar chest.

The only hope I have when I look at it is hope I can remember what I put in it last.

When Catherine was helping me last month, I asked her whatever am I going to do with that cedar chest when I die.

“I’ll take it,” she said.

I should write a nice provenance to go along with it.

Arta

On Dying of Opera Overdose

Can a person die of opera overdose?

Rodion Pogossov as Figaro Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

I am testing out the theory that opera only strengthens the body, it does not kill.

For my experiment, I keep a notebook beside me as I watch opera now so I can take data.

I didn’t get anything written during The Barber of Seville (2012).

I was just too full of laughter.

Oh, I did catch one sentence that perked up my interest and so wrote I that down: “slander is a mild breeze”. What came after that phrase was so complelling to me me that I went out to the web  and found the lyrics for the whole song.

I just love the last line: "[a]nd the miserable one who is defamed, degraded, trampled, and scourged by the public opinion fortunately dies".

Yes, only in the opera!

 Here is the translation.

The Calumny (read slander)

The calumny is a little wind,
a very gentle little breeze
which numbly, softly,
lightly, kindly,
begins to whisper.

Little by little, mildly,
in a low voice, hissing,
it goes flowing, it goes buzzing;
in people's ears
it enters deftly
and makes heads and brains
stun and blow.

Getting out from the mouth
the clamour grows:
it slowly strengthens,
it already flies from one place to another.
It seems like the thunder, like the storm
that in the depth of the forest
go whistling, grumbling,
and makes your blood run cold.

In the end it spills over and blow up,
it spreads, it doubles
and provokes an explosion
like a cannon shot,
an earthquake, a rain storm,
a general tumult
which makes the air peal.

And the miserable one who is defamed,
degraded, trampled,
scourged by the public opinion
fortunately dies.

I love that for a great dramatic last line in a song.

Arta

Eighty Memories for 80 Years: #34 The World Has Changed

When I decided to write 80 memories for 80 years, I also thought of the time it would take to post such memories. So I started writing early. That is, I took out a paper and wrote 80 words that might cue me about possible vignettes. That is what I call doing things early.

I sorted my list alphabetically, not caring which ideas might be more important than others. I didn’t think the weight of my project out that well. I hadn’t considered that sometimes the words would flow from my fingers, and that sometimes the words would be excruciatingly painful to write –so much so that days would go by when I could only think about the process, not how to get the ideas that were blocking me down on paper.

And of course I had no idea that in the middle of all of that, a pandemic would emerge, slowly making its way around the world, eventually to the place where I live.

My world has shifted.

Thus, I must interrupt my former list.  Now I am posting as one of the memories for 80 years, entering the world of a pandemic.

This illustration provided by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) in January 2020 shows the
2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV). (CDC via AP, File)

I didn’t know how carefully I would start to listen to the advice of government health officials.

I didn’t know how much attention I would pay to the simple act of washing my hands.

I hadn’t ever considered the importance of the act of social distancing.

I hadn’t thought how to sift out the science-based information around me from words that are fraught with fear and anxiety.

History will write much about the pandemic of 2020.

I am counting it as making the list of eighty important memories in eighty years.

Arta

Eighty Memories About Eighty Years: #35 Dipping Chocolates

When I think about dipping chocolates, I sit up a little straighter and begin to open and close my right hand as though it doing a few warm-ups before I submerge my hand in a pool of melted Callebaut chocolate.

Mentally, I get ready to enrobe a cream filled centre and drop it lightly onto a tray.

My hand doesn’t open and close as smoothly as it used to. Still, I practise for a few minutes.

I learned to make candy from my mother.

I can smell the fondant boiling.

I can feel my arms ache as I beat the candy on her kitchen counter.

I know how to roll the centres and put them on a platter so that she can set them out in the cold before she dips them.

I’ve made candy for so many years that now I can tell when to take the candy off the stove, just by the smell in the air, or by looking at the ingredients as they boil.

Still I might test a spoonful of the mixture by dropping it in a cup of cold water – or even better, by looking at the temperature of the candy thermometer, if I am so lucky as to find the place where I carefully stored it from the year.

As a child, my favourite part of making candy was the handrolls: chocolate centres that had been dipped and then were placed in toasted coconut to be rolled and covered on all sides. 

Or perhaps the chocolate would be dropped in crushed walnuts.

I learned that if I were to eat too many of the walnut-covered handrolls, I would get cankers on my tongue.

That was a lesson that I had to relearn every year.

Elsewhere I have published the recipes for fondant, caramels, divinity, and nougats. I have written about the history of candy-making in the 1940 and ‘50s in Alberta. I have purchased candy molds, chocolate cups, sucker sticks, and marble dipping slabs. I had Kelvin make me a 6-foot-high set of shelves just wide that each would hold a tray of chocolates. Trays and trays of chocolates.

I don’t think many people make hand-dipped chocolates for Christmas anymore.

There is a book-full of stories still to be written about this old tradition.

Arta

Nixon in China via metopera.org

Nixon in China

I watched John Adams conduct his opera, Nixon in China, last night.

I am wondering if I am getting to be like other people who say, when asked, what is the best opera you have seen, they say,“It would be the one I just saw”.

That is the case for me.

I woke up wondering how I could fit in another 3 hours of viewing time this morning before it stops streaming.

Mao with his secretaries on the left
Nixon on the right

Richard came over last night and showed me how to take the picture off of my computer and get it up to my TV screen.

 That enhances the viewing experience. Then I used one of the waffle cones I have in my cupboard. Nothing like topping up a cone with Cookies and Cream Ice Cream from my freezer to watch the opera.

The show was brilliant. I have gone out to the Met links this morning. In the second act it would have been nice for me to know that I was seeing a Peking Glass Factory, the Evergreen People’s Commune, the Summer Palace (and the Gate of Longevity and Good Will), the Ming Tombs and a ballet by the Red Detachment of Women. I am sure my sister, Moiya, would have enjoyed that segment.

The opening handshake in the opera was later quoted by Chou saying “that handshake was over the vastest distance in the world, 25 years of no communication.” Chinese sources later said it was Nixon who made the comment. The reporter speaking in a supplementary article that the met publishes says, “Either way, the ice began to melt”.

Greg Bates? Thank you for inviting me to come to China in the 1990’s. That trip is still deep in my heart and one of the reasons I am going now to watch that opera again.

And yes, after the second viewing this morning I had more research to do on the internet. ie Tell me more about Peter Sellers, the director.  Who was Lan P'ing?  How did Mao die?  And so the morning went as though I were out with my friends at the opera.

Arta

More of My Warm Memories of Vi Hudson

I don’t remember the year, but I remember the season: spring. In Calgary,the Kiwanis Festival was over. Timothy Hudson and Rebecca had both won their respective speech classes and had been invited to go to the Provincial Festival. Now I don’t remember where it was held other than a long way up into northern Alberta. My best guess would be in High Level. Vi asked if Rebecca and I would like to go along in the car with Timothy and her. Along the drive there, Vi taught Rebecca and me a game which we know now as the Hudson Game.

When it is your turn, you say, I am thinking of a word that rhymes with loss. Then another person in the car says, Are you thinking of something that might grow under a trees to which the original person would say, no, it is not moss. You are out when you can’t give a word back that makes sense to the person who asked you a question. To win, the other people in the car can never think of the word that is in your mind. In the example above, the word in my mind was boss.

We played this game in our family for years. Such an excellent game to pass the time on a long drive. Now I have been in cars where this game has been played with many of my grandchildren. A wonderful game. And thank you for sharing, Viola Hudson.

I have another outstanding memory from that trip. The distance was long, Vi got tired, and she asked me if I would like to drive. She had a beautiful car which had been topped up with an accessory I had never used: cruise control. When I put that on, I can remember thinking, driving can never get better than this. I was probably right.

What I learned from Viola Hudson

February 20, 1930 - March 28, 2020

The last time I saw Viola Hudson was at the funeral of Nevaida Reis.

Those two women shared common grandchildren from the Doug and Andrea Hudson family.

I am glad I got a chance to speak to Viola that day.

She taught me an important lesson.

Actually, it was Blaine who verbalized the lesson, but I always felt that Viola was the most important part of his story.

He told me that she and he had always had separate cars. He went to church earlier than she, and she came home earlier than he, so they needed two vehicles all of their lives. It wasn’t until they went on a mission to South Africa that they shared a vehicle. He told me that since they had never really driven with one another, that whomever was driving got a lot of help from the person in the passenger side of the vehicle. They decided that they would agree about a way to solve that problem. When advice was given, the person who was driving would, instead of saying “I’ve already got that”, or whatever it was that could be said, that instead, the driver would always just say thank you. Now I don’t know how close I have come to recounting the story correctly, but I have taken that story to heart and tried to live by that principle. Whenever I do, I think of Vi (and Blaine).

Arta