Family, summer - and cake!

We celebrated Jake's 16th birthday yesterday. It seems not that long ago that Gabi and I were in Togo, getting ready to head back to the states, and Gabi got word from her brother that he and Jen were new, proud parents of a wonderful baby boy.

Now this baby boy is much taller than I am and plotting the means to buy a car with $635 and no plans of how to pay the insurance. So very sixteen.

So the whole family came together yesterday, and it was a wonderful thing. At one point I was in the house and looked out at the scene: Gabi playing lawn games with the kids, Jen, Nick, and both grandmothers sitting at the garden table laden with chips and cherries, talking like old friends. I've been thinking too much about my family of birth lately, and that moment crystalized for me just how good and precious the heart-family can be.

As dusk and mosquito-time neared, we headed indoors for cake. Ah, cake. I made, per Jake's request, German Chocolate Cake. It was named, in case you don't know, not because it has any Germanic heritage but due to the name of it's creator: an Englishman named Samuel German. In 1852, Mr. German created the cake as a showpiece for Baker's Chocolate (for more on the story, go here).

But Jake has recently returned from a five-week trip to Germany and Switzerland, and so it seemed only fitting to make this particular cake.

Yesterday was the first time I'd made German Chocolate, and it turned out lovely. I've seen (and tasted) homemade versions where the frosting was made with evaporate or sweetened condensed milk (I think that's the version on the Baker's Sweet Chocolate package). I was never too impressed. Leave it to Bon Appetit to come up with a version that lifts the bar. The frosting has a true caramel flavor that melds beautifully with the coconut and nuts (the original BA recipe called for macadamia nuts, but I used the more traditional pecans).

So, here's to heart-family, summer days and, of course, good cake. Nothing better than a real good cake to celebrate the blessings of a real good day.

*****

German Chocolate Cake

from The Bon Appetit Cookbook, edited by Barbara Fairchild, © 2006

CAKE

½ cup water

1 4-ounce package sweet baking chocolate, chopped

2 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

2 cups sugar

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

4 large eggs, separated

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup buttermilk

pinch cream of tartar

FROSTING

1 ½ cups (packed) golden brown sugar

1 cup whipping cream

¼ cup whole milk

4 large egg yolks, beaten to blend

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups sweetened flaked coconut, lightly toasted

1 cup coarsely chopped pecans or macadamia nuts, lightly toasted

FOR CAKE:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter 3 9-inch-diameter cake pans with 1 ½-inch sides. Line bottoms with parchment paper. Butter parchment. Bring ½ cup water to simmer in heavy small saucepan. Remove from heat. Add chocolate and stir until melted and smooth.

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in medium bowl. Using electric mixer, beat sugar and butter un large bowl until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add chocolate mixture and vanilla; mix until blended. Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour mixture and beating well after each addition. Using clean dry beaters, beat egg whites and cream of tartar in large bowl until stiff but not dry. Fold whites into batter in two additions.

Divide batter equally among prepared pans. Bake cakes until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 35 minutes. Cool cakes in pans on racks 15 minutes. Turn cakes out onto racks. Remove parchment; cool completely. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and store at room temperature.)

FOR FROSTING

Combine first 5 ingredients in heavy medium saucepan and whisk until blended. Stir constantly over medium heat until mixture thickens to consistency of caramel sauce and coats spoon, about 10 minutes (do not boil). Remove from heat. Stir in coconut and pecans/macadamia nuts. Let frosting stand at room temperature until cool and spreadable, about 1 ½ hours. (Can be prepared 4 hours ahead. Let stand at room temperature.)

Tears, laughter and the whole big mess of it

Yesterday was a day full of both sadness and joy, one of those weird kinds of days that leaves you feeling both stuffed full and drained empty at the end.

We had our family Thanksgiving yesterday because Nick has come home for his 3 weeks of R&R from Alaska. So I spent the morning cooking desserts and a rice stuffing. Gabi helped with a few things, but mostly she prepped for her physics classes (she's spending hours and hours every weekend getting ready for her AP class. I just keep telling her, "next year will be easier.")

I made both pumpkin and pecan pies as well as a gluten-free chocolate cake (from a mix, and it turned out really well!). Then a brown and white rice stuffing that was yummy enough that even gluten-eaters would enjoy it.

So there was all that joy to look forward to... but at the same time much grief and sorrow. Our friend Jan passed away yesterday morning. Jan was diagnosed with cancer over the summer ~ in both her colon and lungs. Thankfully, she was well enough to go home for a few hours on Thanksgiving to spend with her family. Then on Monday or Tuesday she came down with an infection and the end came very quickly.

Jan was such an amazing woman. She had that grace of spirit ~ born of generosity, kindness, strength and being absolutely grounded ~ that is both profoundly compelling and deeply comfortable to be around. Everyone loved Jan. I think we all aspired to be like her on some level.

Jan worked for the Elk River School District until she retired a year or two ago. She was the librarian, working first at the elementary school and later at the high school. Gabi came home a few days ago and told me that, when she told her classes that Jan was very sick, her seniors told her how they could still remember Jan reading to them when they were little kids. She used different voices and made the stories come alive.

So, after crying and baking and lighting a candle for Jan, we took our plunder to Nick and Amanda's house and spent a great afternoon hanging out with family, feasting and chatting. It's the sort of thing Jan would approve of. Jake and Max are getting to be so grown up, and both know all the plays that the Vikings should have run. Sofia is bright and articulate and can talk about anything, and Eli continues to be the bundle of fun, playing with everyone. It was great fun.

And it was snowing lightly, that first real snow of the season, and everything looks so clean and fresh and lovely.

After we came home we checked our e-mail to see if there was a new CaringBridge posting about Jan. There wasn't, but instead we received an e-mail from Gabi's cousin Kathryn in England to let us know that Kathryn's stepfather Andrew passed away last week. We were both a little dumbfounded at the timing, but that's the way it works, isn't it? Andrew had been a member of Parliament for many years, so Kathryn included an article about him written by the Guardian. It made me proud to have met him.

We closed the day with more physics for Gabi; she's teaching a unit on thermodynamics this week. I cleaned up the last of the pie-making mess and then made some earrings and worked on a little felt credit card case. It was a quiet close to an all-over-the-map kind of day.

Of Goodness and Guilt

A couple of months ago we received an amazing surprise in the mail: a letter from Kodjo, the son of Afoua, my best Togolese friend while I was in the Peace Corps. Gabi and I were both misty-eyed as we read Kodjo's letter, and we were full of pride when he told us that he was attending university in Lome while his younger sister, Adjo, was in high school. The Togolese education system is enormously expensive as well as mercilessly meritocratic ~ exams cull all but the brightest students from entering high school. So for both Adjo and Kodjo to be doing so well says a great deal of good about their intelligence, perseverence and good fortune.

I found a letter that I wrote home on May 26, 1991:

Still it is raining – nearly a “white out” of fog and sheets of water. The acacia trees are thrashing back and forth; the palm about a hundred yards away is all but invisible. A couple of women from the marché are hiding out with Afoua under the eaves, and a goat somewhere is bleating plaintively. It is raining too much for any work to be done. But this also means it’s raining too much for anyone to fight a civil war or revolution. It’s been very quiet politically these last couple of days. It’s raining too much for anything but showers.

Kodjo and Adjo are dancing naked under the sheets of water falling off the roof. They kick and jump and sing at the top of their voices to drown out the roar of the storm. Kodjo shadow-boxes like the Ninja warriors someone saw in an American “B” movie and then told him about. He plants his feet and strikes out his hands while the water all but envelops him. Adjo stomps in the water, head down, blowing water out of her mouth – PWOO! PWOO! – and reaches up to rub her fuzzy head while the water pelts it. Then suddenly the rain stops and the two dash off, streaking through mud puddles and grass to go gather fallen mangoes that the storm knocked off the tree.

I admit that Kodjo's letter sat beside the computer for a few weeks before we wrote back. It's not that I wasn't thinking about my reply, it's not that I didn't want to write him. No. It was the French.

During the three years that I lived in Togo, I learned to speak French with a decent amount of fluency. Actually, perhaps I should have put that in quotes, as in "speak French." As in, the language I cobbled together would have sounded horrifyingly plebeian to anyone born in France. In the former French colony of Togo, I had teachers who tried hard to teach me proper French grammar, pronunciation and speech patterns. But I lived in a small village and worked with people who had little formal education. With them, I either spoke “pidgin” French or I wasn’t understood.

Formal, written French has always been beyond my grasp. I tried to read a few French novels while in country and gave up. It was just too different and difficult, and it made it more difficult to speak with the Togolese around me. I was able to read Kodjo's letter well enough ~ I understood a large enough majority of the words to guess my way through those that I didn't recognize, and so arrive at the general gist of the letter.

However, my written French, even when I was speaking French every day, was awful. Now, for me to write in French is all but impossible.

By the way, Yahoo's Babel Fish is a great tool. Yes, we used it. But like most translating tools, web-based or otherwise, it's also fundamentally ignorant of language. Synonyms, homonyms, colloquialisms, all these tend to get mixed up so that your translated text has the occasional bits of word-salad nonsense. It is particularly entertaining when the proper nouns can be translated as well. Par example: my name translates to "held up" in French. I never knew that until I started writing to Kodjo and translated the letter first from English to French and then back to English. It's odd to me that I lived for three years in a French-speaking country and only learned about the unsavory character of my name last week.

In spite of the difficulty, we wrote back to Kodjo. We translated, checked and rechecked the language and the spelling until we felt pretty sure that we would not completely embarrass ourselves or confuse him with baffling syntax. Then we e-mailed our letter. That's right. Kodjo has an e-mail address. He's not just attending the university, he's computer literate.

From our friend and fellow RPCV Jennie, we know that there are now Internet Cafes in Lome as well as in other major cities in Togo. This is so inconceivable for me, in part because she has also told us that the standard of living in Togo has fallen dramatically since we were there. Roads that had a few pot-holes while we served in Togo are all but impassable now. Even the national highway is down to a single lane in places. The value of the currency (CFA) has fallen dramatically, while AIDS and other maladies have grown more widespread (guinea worm being one of the few exceptions to this). Poverty is acute and government corruption is endemic.

But technological progress has made its inroads, and now there are cell phones and Internet cafes in Togo as in other developing nations. It boggles my mind. I've written about this before, I know, but technological advances can look so schizophrenic when juxtaposed with such profound poverty and a miserable standard of living.

So, back to my original thread: we e-mailed Kodjo, telling him how happy we were to hear from him, how proud we were of him and his sister for still being in school, etc. He wrote us back, enthused about hearing from us. That was good, but his letter was also oozing with the guilt-inducing tendencies of Togolese conversations.

I don't want to get stereotypical here, but different cultures do have certain unique tendencies in the way people express themselves. I think often in the US we tend toward sarcasm and cynicism and shy from heartfelt emotion. Gabi tells me that when wishing a Swiss person happy birthday, a simple card with "have a great day" will not do. One must add in some flowery verbage as well.

And in Togo, I think one of the ways to let someone know "I care about and miss you" is to say how dreadful your life has been without him/her and how you've been bereft over the long silence/absence and no one else cares for or helps him/her the way you did and...

This style of language might not be so troubling except that I do feel guilty about the people and work I left behind in Togo. When I left to come back to the US I made promises that I could not keep, everything from "Yes, I will write you" to "You'll be okay, I know it." I did not keep writing. I lost the language so quickly when I came back to the US, especially since I had very rarely written French when I was living there. I got distracted by grad school, difficulties with my family, and making a life with Gabi in Minnesota. I felt angry and helpless because every letter from Togo came with a guilt-inducing message followed by a plea for money, please send some CFA, no one will help us since you left, we despair every day without you.

The simple truth is that things did get worse for Kodjo and his family after I left. Afoua lost her home after she lost the income I gave her for helping me. She had to leave Agou village and move in with her sister in Lome. She now works for her sister as a domestic servant instead of working for herself. Her health declined, and when Jennie saw her a couple of years ago (in Togo again to do fieldwork for her dissertation), Afoua had an endless litany of woes and maladies.

After I returned to the US, I laid awake nights worrying about Afoua. More specifically, I worried that somehow, in spite of my very real efforts to help, I had done her wrong. I employed her for the three years I lived in Togo, and she provided immeasurable help to me. Not just things like carrying water and washing clothes, but also helping me to navigate the social and cultural norms and customs, to remember names and learn family connections. I truly would not have made it in Peace Corps without her. But I worried that even as she helped me, and I did pay her well, there wouldn't be anything in place for her and her family after I left. She made palm oil, a horrifically demanding job, and during the three years she worked for me she used her money very wisely, I thought, and gradually bought larger and larger pots so that she could make more oil to sell. She was thinking about "after Blandina" (as she called me), and that was good. But she couldn't make enough with the oil to make up for the salary she lost when I left. I suspected this would happen, and I worried about it so much, wondering if I had helped her better her life at all or only helped raise her standard of living temporarily so she'd have farther to fall.

However, she was able to keep Kodjo and Adjo in school, so things were not as bad as they could have been. We are so proud of all of them for this. For these two young people to make it this far in the Togolese education system is just huge. And I do intend to write back to Kodjo, and we'll send some money from time to time. It seems like the least I can do.

The Fruit Season

We’re coming into the time of year that I love: fruit season.

I just came home from grocery shopping, and it was almost an overwhelming experience. The smell of ripe peaches stretched across aisles, pulling me right past the cookies without even a pause for temptation. A beautiful display of melons greeted me as well, half a dozen varieties laid out in neat rows like organic, geometric art.

I came home with a Crenshaw and sliced it up immediately. It’s so sweet and juicy. Lovely beyond reason.

I also brought home gorgeous organic strawberries and avocados. I wanted to bring home peaches and plumicots and nectarines as well, but there’s the small problem of eating all this bounty. I’ll go back for more in a couple days, when I’ve finished the melon and berries.

In the meantime, this feast of fruit made me think of when I was a kid in California. We had apricot and mulberry trees, and I spent many a summer morning and afternoon high in the branches, gobbling up sun warmed, perfectly ripened fruit.

To give the full picture, I must digress. We lived on the desert, so trees were precious. To grow the trees strong and healthy, my parents came up with a solution that sounds “green” now but was merely cost effective and sensible thirty years ago. They redirected water from the washing machine and used it to water the trees. We had a huge, black pvc-type hose that we moved from tree to tree, filling the wide, deep reservoir around every elm, cottonwood and mulberry.

Along with the trees, the wash-water made the grass grow as well, and we had a lovely little glade behind the house that was like an oasis in the desert: speckled with shade from the trees, lush with grass from all that carefully directed water.

And, we had horses. Specifically, I had a pony, at one time two. Peanuts and Goldie are the ones I remember the best.

When the mulberries ripened I would take my pony to the tree, drop the lead so that she could graze on deep grass, and stand on her back so that I could reach the higher branches where the larger, plumper berries waited. By then I’d stripped the bottom branches, and the birds had plundered the outer reaches, so the best berries were those that were sheltered between. Sometimes my best friend Leslie joined me, with her pony, and we feasted until our faces and hands turned purple.

When we moved to Northern Nevada, when I was 15, one of the first things my mom did was plant more mulberry trees. When we spoke last weekend she told me that she expects a bumper crop this year and is looking forward to lots of cobblers and jam.

Now, far away from California and Nevada, Gabi and I have a white mulberry tree in our yard and there’s a sweeter, more familiar purple variety on the empty lot next door. In years past we’ve never gotten much from the purple tree because our nephews and niece, who lived just behind the empty lot, would strip all the berries as soon as they hinted at pink. Perhaps because there were four of them competing for the berries on one small tree, they never waited until the berries were really ripe before picking them. And I, spoiled from growing up on plump, sweet berries so ripe they fell with the light touch of a single finger, never could bring myself to eat many of that tart, pink fruit.

But last year there was a separation and dislocation, and now our kids don’t live next door anymore. This morning I went to check on the tree to see what kind of gifts it would be giving us this year.

And I found that the tree has died. There’s not so much as a single leaf on those grey branches. And definitely no fruit.

Photo credits: I found both these images on Flickr. The lovely shot of a rainbow over Bell Mountain is by Y. Sky atwww.flickr.com/photos/ysky/389806234. And the equally lovely pic of mulberries is at www.flickr.com/photos/25454549@N03/2586274355

Whirl-a-weekend

I had such a great weekend ~ far too entertaining to pause in the midst of it and blog. It is that time of year, however, when I want to spend all my time outside. Kayaking, playing in the dirt, going for walks, just sitting on the patio watching birds splash in the fountain... anything and everything. I didn't read a thing all weekend. Barely watched t.v. (excepting, of course, for Battlestar Galactica), didn't want to cook, absolutely no interest in the computer... ah what bliss.

Friday, for my birthday, seven of us went to a new restaurant in town... Mi Famiglia. The ambiance is so elegantly swanky. We did not go for dinner, no, we went for cocktails and desserts. We ordered seven different desserts and then shared them all. The best part: each dessert came with a candle in it, and we lit all the candles. Then my friends held them all up for me to blow out after singing Happy Birthday. Very, very fun. We stayed three hours. Laughed ourselves silly.

Saturday, we had the family birthday party. We loaded up the nephews and niece, along with Gabi's brother and mom, and all headed out to Lake Maria State Park. We took the kayaks, although it was too windy for the boys to venture far from shore. I took a tour of the lake and saw blue and green herons, deer, turtles and lots of pelicans. Also had a couple (only) swells come over the side of the kayak when I was on the far side of the lake where the wind/wave momentum had some time to build. Thank goodness for the skirt! I was still soaked. But it was very fun.


(green heron pic from 10000birds.com)

After picnicking and kayaking we loaded up and went to another part of the park where we hiked out to a more secluded little lake. It was mating time for the toads, and their chorus was incredibly loud. The kids spent about 45 minutes investigating and catching toads before we walked back. I think we all were exhausted by the time we got home.

Sunday was cold and rainy, and we spent the day cleaning house and grading tests and homework. Gabi needed to get a huge pile of work done so that she could post grades today ~ and so certain kids would have the time, should they also have the inclination, to rescue their grades before the end of the year.

We had an amazing hail storm on Sunday. Fortunately, there aren't too many flowers out right now (the garden is about 10 days behind schedule). The only hail damage we found is some torn daylily leaves. Most of the hail was nickel or dime sized, although there were a few that were much bigger. After the hail came an impressive rainstorm. Dumped about 1/2 an inch of rain in a matter of minutes. Thank goodness, however, that we were spared the tornadoes. I've watched news footage of Hugo, MN and, as always, am dumbfounded by the devastation they bring.






Fortunately the iris buds are still tight ~ no damage from the hail.

MySpace Rant

Okay, first confession: I really abhor the use of Internet sites for ranting. I hate that whole mentality that blogs and other online tools are the perfect opportunity to say to yourself ooh, here's my chance to say every mean thing I ever wanted to say but didn't because of societal taboos.. Well, politeness and proper grammar are two things I am always in favor of. And I like it when people use their "library voice" (which is not the same as a whispery church voice) online and everywhere.

So you will realize how badly MySpace has annoyed me that now I want to come to my friendly neighborhood blogger blog and rant about it.

You will recall that my sister invited me to be her friend on MySpace. So, big sister and generous soul that I am, I accepted and have made a very real attempt to make, if not a home, at least a quasi-comfy box there. I even went back and re-learned some basic HTML code so that my profile info would not look like word salad.

Did you catch that? MySpace, the reigning king/queen of Internet socializing sites, forces you to use HTML or CSS if you want to add any kind of formatting -- including line breaks (!!!) to your profile. That is so ridiculous!

Just for sheer entertainment value, I googled "Why MySpace Sucks" and found a DIGG article by that title, as well as some others. I don't agree with that rant -- it's really just a chance to bash the people who use MySpace. That's not my beef. I don't care if someone wants to write on their profile that they don't have much to talk about. That's fine by me.

What really annoys me about MySpace is not the people who join it, but the people who have made it, and have infused it with a proprietary nature that prohibits javascript and widgets and all the fun stuff that's out there to use to make your blog/site really interesting. After all, I thought one of the great fundamental values of Web 2.0 was interconnectivity: collaboration, sharing, communicating, creating. MySpace is set up to prohibit much of that -- or at least make it difficult enough that users might be tempted to purchase (for anywhere from $12 to $25) books that have been written about how to personalize your profile.

Also, I don't like how everything about MySpace seems to be about steering the user toward ads for music, movies and television shows. For me, clicking into MySpace music or videos is instantaneous information overload. I feel bombarded by ads, flashing icons and pictures of pretty, preening people. I get a headache just thinking about it. (Ooh, how old does this make me?)

So, without a doubt, I dislike MySpace.

But...

And you knew there was a "but" coming...

My sister wrote a short blog entry about the great day she had with my nephews. She doesn't often write letters or call - she's a busy mother of two young sons - but she'll blog. And I'm in heaven because I get a glimpse of her and my nephews. She wrote about holding 2 year old Tommy to watch jets fly low over the Northern Nevada plains, so close that she could almost see the pilot grinning back at her. It was sweet and honest and almost made me cry from missing them so much.

So, thank goodness for MySpace.

Thing 6 - More gizmos

More fun with Flickr today. First off, a little Early Literacy trading card (obviously, using the terminology I had the most difficult time remembering).

And, a slideshow of the pictures from the Royalton library.



These gizmos were fairly easy to use, so no complaints there. And there might be some utility to them. I like the idea of the trading card, but then I don't have a color printer at work. Perhaps I could send the request through our HQ printing... I can imagine making up some SRP trading cards, and offering different ones every week of the program. I will ponder this more.

Last night I had the chance to talk about Flickr with my sixth-grade nephew. He's a bit book-phobic (bless his heart anyway) and his teacher allows him to do power-point projects instead of reading for an allotted time. He's always used Google image to find the pictures for his power points, so I told him about some of the fun stuff he could find and do mashups with on Flickr. We didn't have a chance to go online to look at Flickr together, but perhaps that will happen later. Regardless, it was nice to feel that I was applying what I'm learning here.

***

Caveat oops-or: I just played the slide show and discovered that the descriptions don't always match the pictures. I went back and tried to fix it and recreate the slide show, but it did the same thing the second time.