My own ‘National Lampoon’s Vacation’

A kid who grows up in Minnesota will eventually visit Mount Rushmore.

I suppose DisneyWorldLand is an iconic vacation destination for families in California and Florida, and I suppose East Coast kids invariable spend some time at Niagara Falls or Virginia Beach, but Midwest kids — especially ones with “uff da” and “campin’” in their vocabularies — visit the rock-faced presidents.

The destination is on the edge of reasonable driving distance for Minnesota families who can’t invest in airfare, yet it still carries star value.

My family visited Mount Rushmore on a whirlwind tour of the American west in the early ’80s. I recall literally holding down the fort with my dad in our pop-up camper one night during a wild storm. I returned to the memorial as an adult in the late ’90s and almost got rammed by a live buffalo my tiny Geo Tracker.

My Beloved visited the national memorial in June 1975. He remembers the big news at the time was the shoot-out involving two FBI agents and a Native American, activist Leonard Peltier.

While I gather Illinois families are less likely to visit western South Dakota, my Minnesota residing stepson has never been to Mount Rushmore, and that seems wrong somehow. So we’re thinking about returning to this must-see destination this summer with a 17-year-old in tow (if he’ll agree to spend four days with his boring parental units in a vehicle on the rolling roads of South Dakota).

What’s the vacation you remember most about your youth? The one you absolutely must take your own kids to someday?

A rare name for a rare woman: My mother

My cherished mother turns 71 today. Happy birthday, dear Mother! How I adore you.

She is the best mother on the planet, at least for me. She loves me no matter what and that’s just what a flawed, struggling middle-aged woman like me needs some days.

She is an interesting person in her 70s, but in honor of her birthday today, let’s turn to her early years.

She was born Karen Meleese in 1941 in western North Dakota. You can see by this picture, presumably taken on the farm where she lived, how flat the landscape was.

“Karen” was the 19th most popular girl’s name in America that year, according to the Social Security Administration. It’s her unique middle name, “Meleese,” that fascinates me. Both my sister and I have talked about using that name for a daughter but, alas, I did not bear children and my sister delivered only sons.

“Meleese” comes from a 1910 book by James Oliver Curwood, “The Danger Trail.” My grandfather appreciated language — he loved to read, recited poetry and once sold magazine subscriptions for a living — so I suppose he ran across this uncommon name and committed it to memory, intending to use it at some point.

When my mother was born, he found his use.

Thanks to the World Wide Web, I discovered the character’s name plays a major role in Curwood’s book. Here’s an excerpt:

He stood looking down into her glowing face in silence. Then, “They are gone,” he repeated. “They were the men who tried to kill me at Prince Albert. I have let them go — for you. Will you tell me your name?”

“Yes — that much — now. It is Meleese.”

“Meleese!”

The name fell from him sharply. In an instant there recurred to him all that Croisset had said, and there almost came from his lips the half-breed’s words, which had burned themselves in his memory, “Perhaps you will understand when I tell you this warning is sent to you by the little Meleese.” What had Croisset meant?

“Meleese,” he repeated, looking strangely into the girl’s face.

“Yes — Meleese — “

She drew back from him slowly, the color fading from her cheeks; and as she saw the light in his eyes, there burst from her a short, stifled cry.

“Now — you understand — you understand why you must go back into the South,” she almost sobbed. “Oh, I have sinned to tell you my name! But you will go, won’t you? You will go — for me –”

In an album she made for me, Mother mused, “In my dreams about growing up, I was going to live on a ranch in Wyoming and be a cowgirl and change my name to Lovica.”

Whatever you call her — “Karen,” “Karen Meleese,” perhaps “Lovica” — her best name to me is “Mom.”

May you have a blessed day, Mom. I love you!

Tasty crepes, sweet or savory

The old family recipe for lemon crepes is written in pencil in my stepdaughter’s handwriting on a slip of notepaper from her alma mater.

Once every couple of months, I fish it out of Ye Old Pile Of Recipes (several inches of interesting dishes ripped from magazines and newspapers) and my Beloved whips up a batch with a few expert flicks of his wrist and a nonstick pan.

It’s Morgan’s favorite breakfast and she stayed with us last night, so it was on the menu this morning. She enjoys it served with lemon sauce, and that’s the way they are almost always served. Since I experiment with all my recipes, I fiddled with this sacred recipe, too, and I discovered this morning these crepes are delicious in a savory version, too.

Perhaps you’ll enjoy them for Easter morning or another special morning coming up.

Crepes

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1-1/2 cups milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup flour

Instructions:

1. Blend all ingredients except flour.
2. Add flour and mix well.
3. Heat a crepe pan or non-stick frying pan over medium heat. Brush with melted butter to lightly grease. Pour 2 tablespoons of batter into the pan and tilt the pan in a circular motion, swirling the batter to evenly cover the base. Cook until the edge of the crepe begins to curl. Turn and cook until golden underneath. Your crepes should ideally be almost thin enough for you to see through.
4. Prepare the crepes and pile on a plate until serving.
5. Serve with Lemon Sauce if you’re a purist or with a savory filling (see following).

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup evaporated milk
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract

Instructions:

1. Boil milk, butter and sugar together in a saucepan on the stove.
2. Remove from heat and add lemon extract.
3. To serve, fold two or three crepes on a plate, and pour lemon sauce over all. Also good if you stuff crepes with fresh raspberries or strawberries and top everything with whipped cream.

Savory Stuffing

Ingredients:

• 1 teaspoon oil
• 1 green onion, sliced
• 1/2 cup fresh spinach leaves, chopped
• 2 slices bacon, fried
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1/4 cup cottage cheese
• 1 tablespoon parmesan cheese
• salt & pepper to taste

1. Heat oil in nonstick skillet over medium high heat. Add onion and spinach and saute until wilted.
2. Add cheeses to beaten eggs and add to pan with onion and spinach. Add bacon. Cook like scrambled eggs until curdled.
3. To serve, fill two crepes with filling and roll. Top with sour cream if desired.

My happy place

During my fifth year of college  … yeah, I attended one of those state schools that have a four-year graduation rate of a whopping 15 percent, so your point is?

Anyway, during my fifth year of college, I was editor in chief … yeah, that was the official title: Editor in chief. Sort of inflated, but I’ve always thought it was cool and important sounding. (One of my managing editors, by the way, was in his sixth or seventh year of college.)

Anyway, during my fifth year of college, I was editor in chief of the student newspaper. I was made for that job. If you can call it a “job.” I was paid a stipend of next to nothing. But I guess I was paid so it qualifies.

We published twice a week, and I remember many a Sunday and Wednesday nights when I would sit in front of a computer terminal to edit copy and puzzle together the edition’s design. To be clear, I didn’t do any of it by myself. The office was abuzz with people who designed ads, wrote headlines, developed photos and pasted together bits and pieces of news to make a newspaper.

On the way to our basement office, I would often stop at the deli and get a three-cheese bagel and a bag of Doritos to munch while editing. Despite my deplorable meal choices, I lost weight that year because I would forget to eat. I was engrossed in my work, and time meant nothing on those nights. We were there until the bitter end and we had the “we’ll sleep when we’re dead” attitude of a good group of 20somethings no matter how long it took so it didn’t really pay to watch the clock.

I was underpaid, and we worked hard, but I felt like I was doing valuable work. We were putting out the news. We were telling important stories.

This is how I judge a good day’s work, even today. Watching the clock or checking off an endless to-do list of meaningless tasks or sitting in tedious meetings or biting my lip during noisy conference calls is not important work. Telling important stories is valuable work and it is one of the reasons I love to write this blog.

Is my interview posted a couple of days ago with an 8-year-old who colors cats “important”?

Sure it is. It’s important to him. It’s important to me. It made some readers laugh. And it’s forever captured on the internet (which sounds eerily self-important like “editor in chief” but so be it). Roughly once a week, I nail it with a post like that. I capture someone’s interesting story.

And that’s valuable.

What’s new is old again

“More grains. Less you.”

That’s what Peanut Butter Multi Grain Cheerios brags about on the front.

The back features the silhouette of a woman wearing a Cheerios dress. Ooh, 16 grams of whole grains and only 110 calories. And get this: When one reads the fine print, one discovers a serving contains 45% of the recommended daily amount of iron. Typically, women of child-bearing age are low on iron so this flavor of Cheerios scores another point with women. Adult women.

Clearly, Peanut Butter Cheerios isn’t going for the kid crowd.

I picked up a box tonight and ate cereal for dinner (don’t ask). But I didn’t buy it and eat it because it’s so good for me or because the marketing was so effective or because there would be less me in the end. I bought it for a man.

Cap’n Crunch.

When I first heard about the new Peanut Butter Cheerios, I thought it might be my chance to enjoy something like Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch.

That’s good stuff, man (or should I say m’n?), but it makes my mouth bleed.

If you eat any amount of Cap’n Crunch, you know what I mean. And I hate, hate, hate anything that resembles wet bread so I eat my breakfast (or dinner) cereal as fast as I can shovel it in so it’s still crunchy when I hit the last bite. When you eat Cap’n Crunch that way, there’s not enough milk to soften all the crunchy rough edges and they scrape my tender mouth.

Well?

It ain’t Cap’n Crunch.

I gave my Beloved a bite without telling him what it was, and he guessed it was chocolate flavor.

Ouch. He’s right, it doesn’t taste very peanut buttery. More grains. More or less artificial flavor (Cheerios touts “real peanut butter” so maybe whatever glow-in-the-dark stuff the Cap’n is using is like MSG — it works but you hate yourself in the morning).

On the plus side, it isn’t so sickening that I can eat more than one bowl. With half-and-half.

More grains. And more me.

Memories as clear as smudge

Music is a powerful catalyst to evoking a memory.

Someday, when I’m 102 and sitting around the social hall at the nursing home, some old fogey who’s retired and out volunteering but not yet old enough for my chair will come in with an antique electric guitar and start playing “Beth” by Kiss, and I’ll start chattering on and on about some short boy named Chris and how I slow-danced with him while he stood on a chair in the junior high cafeteria during a Friday night dance in seventh grade. “Where’s Chris? I don’t want to dance with a short boy. And why are the lights on? Turn off the lights!” And then I’ll start singing along: “Beth, I hear you calling but I can’t come home right now. …”

And the nurse’s aides, who are 20something and standing around eldersitting us, will roll their genetically engineered eyes and text to each other, “God, I hate it when we play the oldies around here and the old ladies just won’t shut up.”

Something like that anyway.

While I was sitting in Ash Wednesday service tonight, we sang “Just As I Am, Without One Plea” and I was suddenly struck with thoughts of my sister. Not sure why that hymn reminds me of my sister who I would describe as a God-loving Christian who is, at best, lukewarm about going to church.

I think she had to learn that hymn as a child for some public event having to do with church or school, and she wandered around the house for weeks singing those lyrics. I called her to get the 411 (“Good for you for going to church,” she said), and she can’t remember either, but she immediately started reciting the lyrics.

Music is like that. I can remember all 50 U.S. states because of a song. I know the words to 1 John 4: 7-8 because I learned the verses set to music at Lutheran Island Camp when I was 12. And I think of a freakishly short kid named Chris when I hear Kiss.

At least I think his name was Chris.

Just as I am, without one plea,
but that thy blood was shed for me,
and that thou bidst me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

~ Charlotte Eliot

What a difference 31 years makes

Valentine’s Day 1981

Dear Diary,

Yesterday after our basketball game (we lost; 54-3 — ugh!), I sat up in the bleachers and B. said, ” I really hate you — but I like your sister, Kay. She’s neat. Tell her hi from me and I’ll ask her if you did, and if you don’t, I’ll beat you up.” He said that with kinda a nice smile on his face. Then just a little while later, I was sitting on the bleachers with my knees on them and B. said, “Move your knees” and he sat down right beside me!!! Even Carrie noticed! Wow! And he knows I like him because I wrote a poem for English and Mr. O read it to the 7th hour class and T.J. found out about it and now everyone knows. Here’s the poem:

This Guy

The boy, his name is Anthony.
He’s got it all as you will see.
He’s bright, he’s tall, he runs real fast,
And in a race, he’s never last.

In basketball, he is the best.
He is so smart, he’ll ace a test.
But when he looks at me, I’m shy
And that is why I like this guy.

Whadya think? If I ever go with B., I’m gonna give this poem to him.

* * *

I laugh at my 14-year-old self on so many levels when I read this entry. First of all, I guess I had my priorities right on Valentine’s Day. I can’t imagine that 54-3 basketball game now, but I’m sure it was pure torture for my poor coach. All the attention it got from me was “ugh.” The rest of my entry was about the most important thing in my life: Boys! Or at least, one boy.

Are eighth grade boys still like that? Do they say, “I hate you” and “I’ll beat you up” when they like you? And can eighth grade girls see through it? From my limited experience with eighth graders in recent years, I’m thinking this is fourth grade behavior. Eighth graders are doing a lot more than sitting next to each other on the bleachers. Makes one yearn for the good ol’ days.

And I can’t believe my English teacher Mr. O really thought my poetry had any value beyond amusing himself as he outed me as lovestruck. He might have enjoyed the unfolding soap opera he unleashed by reading my work out loud, not to my class, but to a different one. If you’re teaching eighth grade English, that’s probably as good as it gets.

* * *

Valentine’s Day 2012

Minnesota Transplant blog

Well, I know for sure I’m part of an old married couple. We went out for dinner at a corner cafe (because we were avoiding the crowd at the local pub) and I ate my entire 10-ounce burger with bleu cheese, bacon and onions. I can’t believe I at the whole thing. A Valentine’s meal on a date with someone you’re trying to impress would never include onions or be completely eaten.

I got a portable FM radio for Valentine’s Day so I can listen to MPR while running. And I gave my Beloved a carrot cake muffin. And a Valentine that said, “Be my Valentine.”

Over dinner, we reminisced about the past five Valentine’s Days together, and I asked my Beloved what makes him happy when he thinks back about our relationship. And he said, “I’m happy that I’m happier every year.”

Now that’s progress. A lot better than being in eighth grade and being told, “I hate you.” That’s happily every after.

Point A: 15 live chickens in the trunk. Point B: 15 dead chickens in the freezer. What’s it take to get from Point A to Point B?

The fresher the food, the better it tastes.

Right?

This maxim applies to a lot of foods. Shore lunch, restaurant lobster tanks, garden tomatoes and warm-from-the-oven brownies come to mind.

But not chicken.

Over a workmanlike dinner of sautéed chicken breast on a bed of quinoa pilaf with a side of steamed broccoli, my Beloved commented on the freshness of the chicken.

Frankly, he’s lucky when he gets chicken at all. I have a policy against bone-in chicken. I do not prepare bone-in-chicken. The thought of tackling those joints with a butcher knife makes me shudder.

The chicken wasn’t organic. It wasn’t free-range. It wasn’t grass-fed.

But it was boneless, skinless and purchased in bulk at Costco, where the chicken is injected with less water than the chicken at the super supermarket.

Like most suburbanites, we are far removed from the origins of our meal. Our neighbor once had a chicken, but I think that chicken was a pet, not dinner.

I do, however, know what it means to run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

You know how some early memories of momentous occasions are seared into your brain? One of my first memories is my hand on my mother’s belly when my little brother was kicking. From the inside out. Realizing an alien is alive inside your mother is a pretty momentous occasion.

So is a headless, wild chicken dancing around your driveway.

When I was 7 or 8, my town-dwelling parents butchered chickens in their garage.

My mother thought she could save some money by buying live chickens and butchering them herself. “I grew up on a farm and watched my dad kill them and my mother clean them, but I had never actually cleaned one,” she remembers now.

“But I bought 15 chickens. Live chickens. I thought, ‘I can do that.’”

My dad didn’t know she intended to buy live chickens, but he’s a little like my Beloved. He can do pretty much anything. Sometimes, there are swear words involved, but he can pull off complicated tasks like fixing hot rollers and installing crown molding. And butchering chickens.

So he brings them home in the trunk of the car. Fifteen chickens in a crate in the trunk. On a sweltering summer day in shadeless southern Minnesota.

And wouldn’t you know it? Besides courier duty, Dad’s not off the hook yet with Mom’s great money-saving idea. They’re a team after all. He had actually butchered chickens before, not just as an observer. He was the go-to butcher when he was a boy and my grandmother wanted chicken for dinner.

So Dad cut off the heads of Mom’s chickens.

That’s when I saw chickens run around like, well, chickens with their heads cut off. I don’t remember much after that. I assume I made myself scarce. But Mom remembers.

“It was so hot, maybe it was hotter than normal,” my mother remembers. “And we had to get this job done. Fifteen chickens seemed like 1,500 chickens before we got done.”

Nope, Dad’s not off duty yet. “Then I realized I had never plucked a chicken or drawn the insides out,” Mom says. “So he had to do that, too.”

I’m on the phone with Mom, and Dad is hearing the conversation. “You just reach in there and pull ‘em out!” Dad chimes in.

Yuck.

“After you remove the feathers, you still have pin feathers,” Mom says. “You have to singe off the pin feathers. If you ever smelled burning chicken feathers, that was worse than the garbage later. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.”

So my parents have the feathers and guts of 15 chickens to dispose of. One garbage bag isn’t enough, so they use two bags.

Still not enough.

Remember, it’s the middle of summer. It’s hot. And in suburbia, garbage gets picked up once a week. And it doesn’t get picked up the Day of the Chicken Massacre.

“Every fly in the country came to our garage,” Mom says. “Then every cat and dog in the neighborhood came to our garage.”

My parents were familiar with the garbage man, and they begged him to make a special stop to please come pick up their garbage early.

He did. Thank the Lord, the garbage was gone, and the freezer was full.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “You didn’t eat them right away? Fresh chicken?”

Turns out, there’s a downside to being familiar with the origin of your chicken.

“We froze ‘em!” Mom says. “Put ‘em in the freezer for later on. You have to understand, it is very difficult to eat that chicken for dinnertime when you just did that in the morning. So we didn’t eat those chickens right after we killed them. Later on, they tasted just fine, but the whole process, I never want to do it again.”

Skinless, boneless chicken breasts from Costco never sounded so good.

New job, new opportunity to tell stories

October 24 was a red-letter day at Minnesota Transplant’s house.

The term originated in Medieval times when the church printed its calendars with saint’s days in red. Special days came to be known as “red-letter days,” and a week ago Monday was indeed a special day.

I started a new job.

Yes, after four and a half months of unemployment, a hundred job applications and five job interviews, I landed a position with the Association of Personal Photo Organizers (Appo) as a training specialist.

I remember the first day of all the jobs I’ve held in my adult life:

• July 2, 1990: First day as a reporter at the Middletown Journal newspaper in Middletown, Ohio. Two days later, I earned my first paid holiday on the Fourth of July.
• March 11, 1994: First day as a copy editor at the St. Cloud Times newspaper in St. Cloud, Minn.
• Nov. 10, 1997: First day as marketing coordinator at Creative Memories, a direct selling photo album/memory preservation company in St. Cloud, Minn. A week later, I was in Cincinnati helping with the filming of a training video.
• July 19, 2007: First day as a field development manager at Homemade Gourmet, a direct seller of food mixes headquartered in Canton, Texas. That day was the first day of the company’s national convention. Talk about baptism by fire!

And now, today: Oct. 24, 2011, first day with the Association of Personal Photo Organizers. It’s not a newspaper, and it’s not a direct selling company, but I know I will draw on all I’ve learned in those past roles to rock and roll at the Appo. My parents asked me if I felt better about myself after being employed again for a week (like I was some sort of hopeless loser on the dole for a whole four months). “Nope,” I said. “I’m over the whole work-is-where-I-get-value attitude.” I was a workaholic in my 30s, and it didn’t get me far. I am, however, happy to be working for an exciting new venture in the technology sector that values people and relationships.

The Appo is a non-profit association integrated with a start-up company called Linea Photosharing, specializing in technology and other products to store and share digital images and printed photos. I’ll share more about the Appo and Linea in future posts, but the members of the Appo are here for anyone who takes photos and wishes they could enjoy them more, rather than feel guilty about how they’re lost in a drawer or a hard drive.

Photos represent stories, and the common thread that runs through my resumé is that I help people tell stories. Stories should be told — in a newspaper, in an album, around the dinner table or online (if I had been around before the printing press, I probably would have been telling people’s stories around a fire). Storytelling makes a difference, and I love the opportunity to make the world a better place!

Looking forward

Today, I shall remember, but I will not dwell. I shall focus on life, not death. Courage, not fear. Hope, not despair. Triumph, not terror.