The Silent "I"

Happy Mothers Day 2012!

I woke up this morning and found a lovely bouquet of orange, yellow and pink roses on the table by my computer.  I guess the Mothers Day Fairy must have landed here last night and just happened to know that my son's favorite color is orange and my favorite flowers are yellow roses.  Such a sweet gesture from my husband and son, along with cards and hugs and reminders of why I love being a mom.

I called my own mom, who marveled at the fact that for the first time in years my card arrived on time, along with a personalized card from my son to her, courtesy of the amazing Treat.com.  

I will forgive him the notion that her cooking (and not mine) is the best, because he is exactly right. I hope your Mothers Day is filled with joy, laughter, love, and great cooking.

 

Happy Mothers Day!

Granny's Chicken & Dumplings Recipe: DailyBuzz Moms 9x9

 

Granny's Chicken and Dumplings

Growing up in Ohio, Sunday dinner meant one thing to me: Granny's Chicken & Dumplings, a warm and hearty stew made of the simplest ingredients of flour, chicken, salt and pepper. A staple in the Midwest and South, chicken and dumplings is about as comforting  as a comfort food can get. It seems to be something born of hard times, when only the bare necessities were on-hand to make a meal for a crowd.

As a child, I watched my grandmother roll out dumpling and make quick work of cutting out dumplings into little bite-sized squares. Her knife skills would put even the Top Chef Masters to shame. I often helped knead the dough, standing on a chair to put my whole body into the process of shaping and rolling the dough into a ball, then using a rolling pin to flatten it out.  Granny coached me through it, making sure my dumplings were not too lumpy or too thick.  Making dumplings was better than play-doh for keeping little hands busy. 

Granny didn't use a recipe, so for the longest time I had only a vague idea of how to make chicken and dumplings.  My mother showed me how to make it, using the "eyeball it and throw things in until it tastes right" method.  My brother Mike is a chef, and he coached me through turning it into a real recipe a few years ago. The recipe that follows is an approximation of what you need to make Chicken & Dumplings, just like Granny used to make. The original recipe only uses salt and pepper for seasoning. I've added some chicken stock base and herbs for extra flavor.

 

 Ingredients

For Stock:

12 c water

3 bone-in chicken breasts

2 sprigs fresh thyme (optional)

2-3 leaves of fresh sage (optional)

1 packet Knorr Homestyle Condensed Chicken Stock (optional)

Salt & Pepper to taste

For Dumplings:

6 c + 1 c Gold Medal Self-Rising Flour

1 c water

1 t dried sage (optional)

1 t dried thyme (optional)

1 T salt

1 T black pepper

 

Home is Where the Heart Is

When I was in kindergarten, our teacher posed a question to our class of rambunctious five year olds: What is a home?  I recall many kids raising their hands, describing a house, a yard, a mom, a dad, maybe grandparents, a dog. One kid said, "where your toys are."  Another said, "A house you own."

I thought about the downstairs apartment where my family lived, my mom, my dad, my baby brothers and me.  We didn't own it; there was a landlord who came around to collect the rent and cut the grass. Our apartment was the entire downstairs of the old house, painted slate blue, with white windows and a dark red door. My mom was always there, it seemed, since she didn't know how to drive.  My dad wasn't always there with us, since his job as a trucker had him out on the road for days at a time.

There was an elderly lady who lived upstairs in one apartment. She would take me on excursions downtown to buy nylons at the local dress shop. The two of us would stop in a diner afterwards, where she bought me  pineapple sundaes and gave me a nickel for helping her decide which color stockings to buy, though there really wasn't much choice, since I really couldn't tell the difference between "nude" and "taupe". She smelled like vanilla and wore headscarves tied neatly below her chin.

In the apartment next to hers lived a young couple, barely out of their teens. The young wife would play Bobby Darrin and the Beatles 45s while we baked cookies together and danced around in her living room. I thought she was terribly sophisticated. She showed me pictures of Paris in a scrapbook, and told me it was her dream to go there someday.

Was this a home? I thought to myself.  My family and these two strangers above us? Then, it hit me.  I shyly raised my hand.  "A home is where the people who love you are."

I remember the teacher beaming down at me. "That's right," she said. "Home is where love is."

She drew a house on the board, with a big heart in the middle of it. For a moment, all the kids got quiet, as though they had to think long and hard about that, before commencing their normal routine of eating paste and toppling over blocks.  Looking back, that seemed a little abstract for five year olds.

I've lived in a number of places in my life. From that apartment house in Middletown, Ohio, to my parents fulfillment of the American dream, a three bedroom tract house in the suburbs of Dayton. As an adult, I've lived in dorm rooms and shared apartments in New York and Chicago. In Austin, Texas, I shared a house with my brothers' rock and roll band, aptly named "Sourlawn", then rented a small house on a dead end street where I could hear freight trains rumble by in the middle of the night. Frank and I lived in a big house with a pool overlooking the Austin skyline for a time, then moved west to California and a tiny corporate apartment.  We've made our home in a modest townhome in Palo Alto since then, full of paper and books and artifacts of our travels.

I remember all of these places fondly, with all the laughter and tears, joy and heartache that comes along with life.  I have been proud to call these places home, whether I lived alone or with family or friends or total strangers at times. I was thinking about these places recently and was reminded of one of my favorite songs, by singer-songwriter Sally Fingerett.  Her message is about tolerance and understanding of families of all kinds, and the refrain is:

Home is where the heart is
No matter how the heart lives
Inside your heart where love is
That's where you've got to make yourself
At home

I have boxes and piles and scrapbooks full of photos of the places I've lived. I have a few pictures of the houses and apartments, but mostly, the pictures are of people.  Even so, there are some images that are missing and reside in my memory alone.  I sometimes wish that I had better records of the places I have called home over the years, more photos or recordings, but I will have to make due with what I have, and the knowledge that wherever I go, as long as I'm with people I love, I will always be at home.

***

If you have photos or videos that need to be digitized, check out LiveOn Rewind. Use the code HOLIDAYREWIND now for 30% off your purchase!

 If you have oldThank you to LiveOn for sponsoring this blog post. Please LiveOn to learn more about sharing and preserving your most important memories. I was selected for this sponsorship by Clever Girls Collective. Although story ideas were provided, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

LiveOn: Memory Keeping at its Best

Thank you to LiveOnfor sponsoring this blog post. Please click here to learn more about storing and sharing your most special memories. I was selected for this sponsorship by Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

I've been a scrapbooker, storyteller, memory keeper and archivist for many years.  I got bit by the scrapbooking bug as a small child, keeping boxes and photo albums of photos and memorabilia.  Most of those scrapbooks fell apart over time, but I continued to keep the flotsam and jetsam of my life story n shoe boxes, then archival-quality scrapbooks, and more recently, online through my blog, Flickr, and Facebook accounts.

When I was approached by the Clever Girls Collective to check out the new LiveOn site, I thought it was a natural fit for me.  I've got photos and stories stored in photo albums, shoeboxes, CDs, DVDs, videotapes, websites, and harddrives. I've always thought it would be nice to have a place to combine all the digital media into one handy location, and voila! LiveOn appears like a beacon in the night to rescue me from my multi-media morass.

LiveOn uses a simple timeline layout that you add memories to by filling in a date along the timeline, along with any photos, videos or music you want to include.  You just click and drag photos from your Facebook account, or upload them from your computer into a slideshow on LiveOn, add a text slide, add some pre-programed music, and you have a slick video slideshow.  You can add descriptions to each photo, either by typing in text or adding audio.  This would be a great way to store your mom or your Grandma's voice telling the family stories (you know, the embarassing ones they keep repeating at every family gathering).

I created my first memory of my 50th Birthday party in January. It only took about ten minutes to compile a slick slideshow of some of the highlights of the party, then insert it into the timeline.  The photos were easily imported from Facebook, then shared online via a link.  It could not have been easier.  I'm hoping that they will develop a similar link to Flickr, since I tend to keep more photos there than in Facebook, due to Facebook's ever-changing privacy policies.  The company is just getting LiveOn off the ground, so hopefully, there will be great things ahead for them.  It is a great idea whose time has come.

Thank you again to LiveOn for this sponsored opportunity to blog about storing and sharing my most important memories with those closest to me. Although story ideas were provided, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

San Francisco Chinatown: Fun Things to Do on a Budget

One of my favorite movie musicals as a child was Rogers & Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song, mainly because it was the first movie I ever saw that had Asian and Asian-American actors in leading roles. It didn't matter to me that the plot was ridiculous or that some of the actors weren't even Chinese (or even Asian in some cases).  I just remember being proud of the fact that people who somewhat resembled people in my family had made it to the big screen. 

One of the most memorable songs was the song called "Grant Avenue".

A western street with eastern manners,
Tall pagodas and golden banners
Throw their shadows through the lantern glow.

You can shop for precious jade
or teakwood tables or silk brocade
Or see a bold and brassy night club show,
On the most exciting thoroughfare I know.

We call it
Grant Avenue, San Francisco,
California, U.S.A.
Looks down from Chinatown
Over a foggy bay.

I had this romantic notion of San Francisco's Chinatown as a child.  I thought of it as an exotic, bustling thoroughfare of commerce and cable cars in the town where they invented Rice-a-Roni, quite possibly on Grant Avenue itself.  I think I made up that last part, but it made sense to me, since that was all I knew of San Francisco as a kid in Ohio in the 1960's was what I saw on television.  When I was about five, I used to stomp around the house singing "Grant Avenue! San Francisco! Cal-i-forn-i-a! U! S! A!" until my mother informed me that we were not Chinese and I needed to knock it off.

Anyway, San Francisco's Chinatown holds a special place in my heart.  Last weekend, we did a little mini-vacation and spent the weekend in San Francisco.  We stayed at the Orchard Garden Hotel, courtesy of the We Blog Travels Travel Writing Contest that I won last year with this post about San Francisco for kids.  We decided to see what we could do in San Francisco on a tight budget, and we started off with a walk through Chinatown.

The Orchard Garden is located next to the the Chinatown Gate, on Bush and Grant Avenue.  We were able to walk down the famed Grant Avenue, checking out a thousand and one souvenir shops, selling everything from silk purses to shoes to sculptures to tourist trinkets.  I have to admit, I had the "Grant Avenue" song stuck in my head as we walked along, stopping at nearly every souvenir shop along the way.

Althought it's called "Chinatown", the wares sold on Grant Avenue are sort of Pan-Asian, so you can find imports from Korea, Japan, India, and Thailand as well as China. Some of the best buys are comfy shoes and slippers, porceline dishes, and souvenirs of San Francisco. Alex salivated over racks of reproduction Samurai swords in one shop, and we beat a hasty retreat out of another that featured posters of nude Chinese women from the 1940's.  Every time my mom comes to town, we go jewelry shopping in Chinatown. The jewelers are usually open to bargaining on prices if you chat with them, and will usually throw in a jade bracelet or earrings if you press them. 

Some of the shops feature upscale artwork, Buddha sculptures, pottery, and fake designer bags.  I like the more Zen-inspired ones, with incense, stone garden Buddhas, and inspirational paper weights. 

Heart of Haiti Mother's Day Tribute: To My Granny

The very clever Clever Girls Collective asked its bloggers to write a post in honor of Mother's Day and in support of the Heart of Haiti campaign about a woman who helped us along the way.  This Mothers Day, The Clever Girls would like to offer you the chance to buy something from the Heart of Haiti collection, to benefit rebuilding of Haiti by local artisans. Get 15% off your purchase from May 3-8 by using the code: CLEVERGIRLS. 

I've been blessed many times in my life with help and assistance from some amazing women, but none more wonderful than my grandmother, Haley Campbell.  My grandmother, or Granny as she liked to be called, was a tiny, scrappy woman from the hills of Kentucky who was probably my first role model for hard work, perserverence, and having a positive outlook on life, no matter what cards you are dealt.

Family lore has it that I was a large and fussy baby, nearly too much for my 90 pound mom to handle.  Mom and I traveled from Korea to the US when I was nine months old.  It took four layovers and 47 hours to get from Seoul to Louisville, Kentucky. To hear my mom tell it, I screamed the entire time.  I am a much better traveler now, and try to keep the screaming to a minimum.

A magical thing happened when we arrived in Louisville.  My mom had never met my grandparents and my aunts, who were waiting at the gate for us, looking exactly like the faded black and white photos she was clutching in her had.  According to my mom, I took one look at them, and immediately quieted and reached out my arms.  Somehow, I knew I'd come home. 

Throughout my early life, Granny was my strongest ally, best friend, and biggest cheerleader.  My mom and I lived with her during my toddlerhood, while my dad was stationed in Germany.  When my dad came back to the US and was stationed at Fort Knox, my grandparents would drive from Ohio to Kentucky every Friday to pick me up, and return on Sunday with me.  When we moved back to Ohio, I spent nearly every weekend of my childhood at her house, mostly with my cousin Barb and other cousins as they grew older. 

 I remember being in her tiny kitchen, a pot of chicken & dumplings simmering on the stove, cornbread baking in the oven, with gospel music blaring on a tiny radio, and all of us dancing.  Granny had a special kind of dance, part shuffle, part clog-stomp, keeping time to the music, while the kids joined hands and danced in a ring around her.  By today's standards, we were probably very poor, but we didn't know it.  What we knew was that we were in a house full of the richness of love.

As I grew older, Granny encouraged me to study hard, and when I graduated from high school, she was there, in the front row.  She never let an opportunity go by to brag about me, to the neighbors, people in the grocery store, at the doctor's office, or just about anyone who would listen.

I went off to college in the fall of 1979. Granny wrote me letters, telling me what was happening at home, how her garden was faring, and whatever she happened to be thinking of at the time.  She didn't have much money, because by now she was no longer working, but she always managed to tuck a neatly folded $5 bill into the letter "just in case" I needed it.  It seemed like her letters and her $5 bill seemed to always arrive at the exact moment I was down to my last $1 and subway token, a few days before my work-study check was due and I could breathe again.  That $5 saved me more than once. I knew that $5 was a great deal of money to her, and it meant the world to me.

Granny died when I was in law school, after a battle with stomach cancer.  I've missed her every day since.  I like to think that somewhere in heaven, there's a little woman from Kentucky, dancing her special dance, with a choir of gospel-singing angels as back-up.

I was selected for this very special “CleverHaiti” opportunity by Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity. All opinions are my own.

Whittier, Alaska: Fishing with Grandpa, Just for the Halibut

 
One of the highlights of our recent trip to Alaska was going fishing with my dad and son in Prince William Sound.  We chartered a boat through Bread n Butter Charters in Whittier, Alaska, based on a recommendation from an avid fisherman who lives next door to my friend, Susanne, in Anchorage.  He told Susanne that Bread n Butter would not disappoint us, and he was right. 

We got up at 3:45 am to drive down to Whittier so we wouldn't miss our 7 am launch.  Fortunately, it was light outside, so it didn't seem as early as it actually was.  When my dad says we're leaving at 4:15, by golly, we are leaving at 4:15.  We ended up driving Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell to the airport on our way out.  Dr. Mitchell was a featured speaker at the conference, and asked if he could hitch a ride, so we obliged.  He is a lovely man, and it's not every day you get to hang out with a true American hero. Dr. Mitchell, my dad, Alex, Ralph, and I all bundled into the car at exactly 4:15 am and set out.

The reason for the early rise was that we had to catch the Whittier Tunnel opening by 6:30 am, or we might miss the boat.  The Whittier tunnel is a one lane tunnel through the mountains that is used by cars and the train.  You have to time your trips to and from Whittier to coincide with the tunnel's schedule, or be off by an hour. We made it to the tunnel at 5:45, and were the last car through before they opened for traffic going back the other way. 

The tunnel was carved out by the Army, to connect their former secret military installation there to the main road for supplies.  We heard that they managed to blast out the two and a half mile tunnel in 6 months, with two crews working on each side, meeting up within 6 inches of each other in the middle.  The crudely carved-out tunnel looked like John Henry himself had just used his pick axe all the way through it.  It was kind of dark and creepy inside, and we were the only cars passing through at 5:30 am.

Bread n Butter Charters is owned and operated by Mary & Jim Norris.  Jim is the captain of the boat, and Mary does the bookings.  We got to the Charter office at the marina before they opened, but there was already another group waiting.  They were going on a different boat.  Mary came to open the office, and sold us our fishing licenses and took our payments for the trip.  The trip was pricey ($280/per person), but we were going out with an expert guide and would be out all day long.  I figured that I probably wouldn't have the chance to fish in Alaska with my dad again, so it was well worth it.

Easter Island: The Birdmen of Orongo

February 7, 2004

On our third day in Easter Island, Chile, our fabulous tour guide, China picked us up at our hotel for a day exploring another aspect of Rapa Nui Culture: the Birdman competition.  After seeing the modern-day version involving skimpily-clad men running around a lake carrying bundles of banana, we were interested to see some of original sites.

China drove us to Orongo, part of the Rapa Nui National Park.  Orongo was formerly a village set on a cliff with spectacular views of the Ocean, over looking a small island called Moto Nui.  The micro-island was famous as a nesting ground for the sooty tern, a bird whose eggs were prized by the early Rapa Nui people.  In the 17th to 19th centuries, European explorers wrote of a "birdman cult" in which young men would compete in a contest to see who could recover the first sooty tern egg of the season by jumping off the cliff at Orongo, swimming across shark-infested waters, stealing an egg, and then scaling the cliff without breaking the egg.  The first to do so would hold be crowned as Tangata Manu ("bird man") and hold a place in the tribe for the following year.  The Birdman competitions were held long after the moai-building ceased, despite any Hollywood representations to the contrary.

Argentina: Three Borders Monument (Tres Fronteras)

This post is part of a retrospective series on our trip to South America in 2004.  In this episode, we drive back from viewing Iguazu Falls from the Brazilian side to our hotel in Argentina.

February 1, 2004

After exiting the Bird Park (through the Gift Shop, of course) and noshing on a traditional Brazilian snack of ice cream and cookies, we hopped in the car with our tour guide, Edson, and drove back across the border to Argentina.  There was no hassle re-entering Argentina, although we had to give the guard a "tip," a common practice at certain borders. And by "tip" I don't mean, "Don't drink the water," but cash, pesos, moolah, dinero, or whatever the currency happens to be.  Anyway, as long as we weren't subjected to body-cavity searches, I  was not too upset by the process.  I'm not sure the customs officials would have cared for what they found in Alexander's pull-up diaper, which came in handy for long car-rides, and was our secret weapon against overly intrusive border crossing guards.

Edson drove us to the town of Puerto Iguazu for a look around.  It was a quiet place, with most shops closed on Sunday.  It felt like a mixture of a German hamlet and a Mexican border town.  The town had some quaint European-style buildings, painted in pastel colors bleached out by the sun.  A few skinny dogs roamed the streets, but otherwise, there was not much happening. The entire town looked like it was taking one long siesta. We drove on through and didn't stop, since there was not much worth stopping for.

Frank wanted to go to the Three Borders Monument or Tres Fronteras, an historic marker with a view of the place where the rivers meet to form the borders of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraquay.  I was completely paranoid about this little stop, because I had read a review on TripAdvisor that said, "DO NOT GO TO THREE BORDERS! This place is a tourist trap full of drug-addicted children who will rob and kill you!"

I didn't stop to think that if this were true, the writer would be both broke and dead, so how would he have had the wherewithal to write his opinion on TripAdvisor? Unless, this were his dying wish, to have this warning placed for all to see.  It was a warning in ALL CAPS, and you just don't get more serious than that, right?

Anyway, I was wary of the place, and didn't quite like the notion of hanging out with drug-addicted children ready to pounce and force Alexander to start downing tequila at age 3, like Drew Barrymore or Mackenzie Phillips.  Edson assured us that it was quite safe during the day, but at night it got a little seedy with teens hanging out with nothing better to do.  Kind of like the neighborhood skate park. Or in our town, Starbucks.

Alex fell asleep in the car, so I decided to stay in the car with him while Frank and Edson went to take pictures of the Monument.  There was a beat-up sedan parked nearby, with a man and three kids inside.  I was looking out the window, eyeballing the sedan and holding Alexander's head in my lap. Suddenly, the door on Alexander's side flew open, startling me.  Standing there was a little girl of about seven, in a raggedy green dress and flip-flops, holding a cardboard box, and asking me questions in Spanish, pointing to the box in her hands.

Oh, my God! I thought. A drug-addled child has come to rob and kill us. With God as my witness, I will never doubt TripAdvisor again!

I threw my body over Alex and slammed the door shut, saying, "No gracias! No No No!"

Alex stirred a little, but didn't wake up. The dejected little girl hung her head, and went back to her car. I looked around the car for a weapon, or an blunt object I could hurl if her gang of street urchins decided to try to tip the car over. If Edson had left the keys in the ignition, I had every intention of laying down some rubber and leaving the two men to fend for themselves, so long as my baby was safe.

A few minutes later, the little girl got out of the car and approached Frank & Edson with her box.  They both shook their heads, Edson shooed her away, and she retreated.  I rolled down the window when the girl was out of sight, and asked Frank what was in the box, fully expecting the answer to be either heroin or hand grenades.

"Cookies," he said.

Cookies? I just slammed the door on a Girl Scout?

"What did you think she was selling?" Frank asked.

"I dunno," I shrugged sheepishly.

As a former Girl Scout, I was certain that I would be stripped of every badge I'd ever earned, except the "Paranoid Tourist" badge. Today, I earned that one.

Photos by Frank, because I would not get out of the car.

To Blog or Not to Blog? That is the Question

For the past six months or so, I've contemplated shutting down my blog.  I've done a great deal of soul-searching about my motivation for doing it and whether or not it's worth it to me to continue.  I might be fine to just turn what I normally put on my blog into a series of endless tweets or Flickr stream or Facebook entries. Why bother blogging at all?

I started blogging in 2005, right after a trip to Louisiana to bring needed supplies to families hit hard by Hurricane Katrina.  I was President of our local Parent's Club at the time, a group with 2,000 members, a volunteer position that was more like running a corporation than a playgroup.  I started a blog because what I observed in Louisiana profoundly touched me to my being's core. I felt that that the stories of the people I met there deserved to be told.  I started a blog because many people supported my trip there, people who would have gone themselves had they had time and resources to go.  I felt I owed it to my community to record what I saw and how the money, the air mattresses, the cribs, the clothes, and all the $300,000 worth of items they donated were received. I wanted them to know that the $30,000 we raised in a one-day bake sale for the Red Cross was going to good use. It actually didn't occur to me that anyone who didn't know me would read my blog.

After writing about the trip, I realized that I loved writing. I loved the process of putting thoughts to words, to finding the right phrase or word to describe an experience or an emotion. I have always been a writer and a storyteller.