Pickled, stoned and all jazzed up.

Hi Carolyn,

These are busy and interesting times 'round here lately.

First, however, I gotta congratulate you on being adoptive grandparents. I had heard from my good friend who taught with Zack, and who is presently over in Hungary still doing the same teaching abroad  thing, that they were adopting.  It's one thing to have a child from the very beginning. But it is surely a different and exponentially more generous, courageous and selfless thing to take on a child from another - wow !






Your brothers  " resume of experiences " take on  the passage of time and our perception thereof as we age is smack  on, as I see it.

 For me,  as a youngster, "wait til next year" was like saying " never" . Now "next year" might as well be next month. It's sure easy to see why so much art, literature and music has been inspired by and devoted to the simple but inexorable passage of time.






The last while has been, as noted above, quite a whirlwind. First off, there's been a good deal of self-preservation, shall we say, going on. Each year we've gotten more and more into pickling, preserving and " putting up" as the elder folk call it. This year it seems everything came to market ripe and ready at the same time. So we've been madly pickling and blanching and making jams and relishes and a whole wackload of stuff. I now have a small but highly empathetic understanding of how pioneer folk must have felt once the harvest was over and they could look into their fruit cellars and see a wall of preserved fruits and veggies that would help see them through the coming winter. That is what our fruit cellar looks like now and there have been lotsa days where the kitchen has been awash in the compelling smells of dills and bread and butter pickles and various relishes and all manner of fruit jams and pickled veggies.  









So, in the midst of all of this alchemy we find ourselves celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary and find that family members who we've not seen for awhile have decided to make this the summer that they come and spend time with us here. One of them hadn't been here to see us for close to two decades. As well as these visits we discovered that our offspring had masterminded a scheme whereby the whole extended family will be sending us to a most funky and magical city to help us celebrate this four decade event.

And where might that be, you may be asking?  Lemme give ya a hint or two - the birthplace of Louis " Satchmo" Armstrong, at one time the southern terminus of the good ship Robert E. Lee and it's ilk, and affectionately known as " The Big Easy"   Yup, we are off to New Orleans sometime in the near future. Can't think of too many better choices to see than " Nawlins". So many treats for the eyes, ears, nose and taste buds.









 

We've always had a soft spot for Quebec City and have been there about a dozen times over the decades and I'm thinking that the whole French/Acadian ambiance will make us feel  at home there, as well










Got a real kick out of an item that appeared in various places online in the last little bit having to do with a serious academic study/inquiry into whether or not Shakespeare had been using marijuana while penning his timeless works. A number of the articles had a definite " holier than thou" ambiance about them. That was the most off-putting aspect, I think. Frankly, I could care less whether Hamlet was written as a " joint effort" or not  ( pun certainly intended ) It certainly doesn't diminish it's impact one atom. Actually, considering that the Bard was, in his early years, a struggling writer with deadlines and such - who could blame him for enlisting some assistance.  

While I was nosing about in cyberspace about this topic I did come upon a huge trove of info about writers who were, as Monty Python put it, " a bugger for the bottle ". There were, of course, the names we all know Faulkner, Poe, Hemingway, Joyce, Behan, Fitzgerald, and Dylan Thomas. But there were also some names that I was surprised to see as writers who employed the bottle as their muse. Among them were James Thurber, Jack Kerouac, Jack London, Raymond Chandler and O. Henry. Hmmmmm 



Anyhow, it sure has been a busy bunch of days. I'm gonna leave you with a Twainism that, I think, helps, in a small way, to explain just why my lsbh and I have the good fortune to be celebrating a forty-year collaboration:

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away.

 He must have time to modify his shape.

 

 

Continue having fun.........


Don




All images sourced from Google Images:

Fig. 1 - en.wikipedia.org
Fig.2 - urbanadamah.org
Fig. 3 - movieweb.com
Fig. 4 - terribleminds.com
Fig. 5 - c-mw.net
Fig. 6 - eil.com
Fig. 7 - btmagazine.n
Fig. 8 - quebecityhotels.com