Boursin Cheese, once a gourmet delight!

 Growing up, our family didn't have fancy cheese. (This was the 1950-60's, by the way.)  We had sliced American cheese for the grilling of sandwiches and a block of cheap cheddar for things like enchiladas and tacos. Our parmesan cheese came in that green container, ubiquitous to all Baby Boomer kids.

The first time I tasted Boursin cheese was early in the 1970's. I was married, we were at some friends  house drinking cheap wine and this cheese was there, a little round thing, dotted with herbs, and we spread it on a cracker and ate it. (Cheese-and-crackers was a relatively new experience to me as well. I knew nothing about the appetizer scene.) But this new cheese was amazing! It was soft!  Tasty! Nothing like American cheese or cheap cheddar! I loved it.

Fast forward 50 years. I am currently house/dog sitting for Gabe and Annie and in their fridge is a half circle of Boursin cheese!  "How delightful is this?"  I think.  I spread some on a gourmet cracker (no Ritz crackers here) and it is still pretty good. It's still soft and tasty and herby but there is a tiny taste of ..... fakeness.  Something artificial is living in this cheesy treat. This is surprising. Looking at the ingredients, there are none that would give it a 'fake' taste. So I chalk it up to the difference between my palate 50 years ago and my palate now. Maybe my taste buds have gotten snotty in their old age and Boursin just tastes like the 1970's to those taste buds.  Who knows?

Still, it was nice to revisit an old acquaintance. It was nostalgic, remembering lots of meals with old friends, thinking back on semi-drunken, what foods we thought were the epitome of sophistication then, the wines we drank (or guzzled) and the late-night conversations fueled by that wine. Good memories. 

Bad Dog Day Afternoon, No Biscuit for Me: Part 8

Sorry, I couldn't resist that title.  "Dog Day Afternoon" is a good movie and the title fit, sort of.    (I have been watching old Al Pacino movies lately, pre "Godfather," which is one of my all-time favorite movies.  "Serpico" is on Netflix and holds up well, by the way). 

And my dog time is not the afternoon, as you well know, it's 7:00 a.m. so the afternoon reference is also bogus.

But the non-bogus part of this is that it was a bad morning for me and the dogs.  Every other  Wednesday that I have been at the SPCA walking the dogs has been either good or very good. Sometimes I walk 4 dogs but usually it's 6 or 7, depending on the dogs, the time and the other volunteers.  Today I walked 2 dogs. That's it.  Just 2 dogs and both of them were dogs I have walked previously.

Clover is a smallish female mix, maybe 40 pounds and she has been in prison at SPCA Sonoma for a couple of months and I can't believe she hasn't been adopted. She's calm when walking, knows how to fetch a ball, is personable and loving.  I walked her today and gave her lots of pets and treats. She loves hot dog bites.  

And this is Harry.   

Harry is huge!  Like 100 pounds huge. But beautiful and calm and I am sort of in love with him. Almost all the dogs at the SPCA wear a harness to walk which means we put those harnesses on the dogs when we take them from their cells.  Some are so difficult to harness (see below) and some are easy.  (Some fall in between terrible and easy.)  Harry, even with his size, is easy.  He knows that going out means peeing and pooping (which he won't do in his cell) and a romp around and Harry loves to smell stuff. He also likes treats, dog treats, hot dog bites, anything.  I love this dog. Even as big as he is, he is gentle most of the time and once our jaunt is over and I return him to his cell, he is happy to get more treats. But then, when I close the door and look at him, he has the sincerely sad face that only a lovely dog can have. He breaks my heart every time.

So, Clover and Harry. My pals. So far, great.

But then I ventured into unknown territory. Usually there is a regular employee there who also walks dogs early in the morning and stands with me at the white board and gives me guidance on who I should leash up. This man knows my hesitancy with really large, jumpy dogs.  However, he was not there today so I relied on the notes all dog walkers are required to leave on the computer.  Keep in mind that these are dogs that were not there last week.  The notes said things like "easy to leash" and "jumpy but easy" and "once harnessed he was an angel" and so forth.  I picked three of these unknown dogs and got into their cells and I could not harness one of them.  The smallest was an 8 month old puppy, maybe 30 pounds, but his cell was full of poop and pee (which I usually tolerate just fine) and he jumped and nipped at me and spun around and around and barked for about 3 minutes, at which time I called it quits.  The same thing happened with two other dogs but they were larger, 50-60 pounds, not housetrained so lots of pee and poop on their paws (which, again, is fine if they are willing to be coerced into the harness) and way too jumpy and pushy for me.

In defeat, I signed out and left the shelter. I felt like I had failed the dogs. Not just the dogs, but that I had failed myself. Of course, as we humans do, I conveniently extrapolated that experience into this: What a failure I am. What a joke my life is. I can't even harness a dog. What is the point of anything?

Humans are so good at that, aren't we? Taking one thing that happens and making it the entire point of our existence?  

It took me a while to get past that mind-set. It brings up the entire point of being retired, of course. What's the point? I don't want to play any sort of card here, but the cards are on the table for a reason.  But that's a blog for another day.

Thanks for reading. I wish I could say something like "strange things are afoot at the Circle K" but I am sure those cards are not in the mix.

To be clear, I did not walk the bunny or the cat, nor did I attempt to walk either of them.  Perhaps that would have turned my day around. Perhaps not. Just saying....

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Reading John Irving

 John Irving fans know this: to read him is to commit. His books are long and involved, many subplots, many characters who change over the course of 400-500-600 pages. The reader must be in for the long haul and like it. There's no reading Irving if you don't like his work or are just "meh" about it. Needless to say, I am a fan and I have liked every one of his novels, some of them I have read more than once.

But his latest, "The Last Chairlift" clocks in at close to 900 pages!!!  That's not a commitment, that's a kind of craziness.  Seriously, I took it out of the library, kept it past it's due date, returned it and put it back on my request list to read the second half.  Irving's books aren't quick reads, either. They do not accommodate skimming. Every time you try to skip past a paragraph or two you realize, at paragraph three, that you missed something crucial and need to backtrack.  So you don't skip ahead too much.

But the writing and the plot and the characters! It's been a while since I've read his other novels (he hasn't written one in seven years)  but the characters in this one are so shimmering and almost ethereal and yet completely real and alive.  And beguiling and frustrating and maddening and joyful.  

The story begins in the 1940's, in Colorado, at a real hotel, the Hotel Jerome, now a luxury auberge hotel.  Things happen there, ghosts are present, lives change. The story moves to the East Coast, to New Hampshire (of course, Irving is always going back to his roots) and New York and other locations but the Hotel Jerome appears in the book many times.

A lot of John Irving's novels revolve around political themes (war, injustice, civil rights) and there is always a sexual component to them as well. He champions, in  his novels, the queer and trans world and the struggles of groups outside the "norm," whatever that might be. This novel is no different. The main characters are straight, bisexual, gay, lesbian, trans and questioning.  Just like the real world. A lot of the story takes place in the 1980's, when Reagan was President and ignored the AIDS epidemic, and it continues until present day.  In 900 pages there's time to span 80 years!

"The Last Chairlift" is quite a tale and I enjoyed it immensely.  It makes me want to re-read some of his older novels but not quite yet. There are too many new novels out there in the literary world and too little time.  I'll go back and revisit older ones when I am too old to go to the library and pick up new books. But if you like Irving, you will like this book. 

Dogs on My Mind: Part 7

 Walking lots of dogs early in the morning is a little like speed dating:  you interact with each dog for a very short time for a very specific purpose.  That's where the analogy ends: in speed dating one is not intent on getting the subject to pee and poop as quickly as possible.  With dogs, at least with the dogs we know are house-trained, they have been inside for 12-15 hours and they REALLY NEED TO PEE!  Some get five feet outside the door and pee becomes a certainty.  (Poop takes a little longer.)

It's always a gamble when I arrive at 7:00 on Wednesday mornings to see who is still there and who has found their home. Stan, the frisky one-year-old I mentioned previously, has found that home, thankfully.  There are my old favorites, of course, like Shiloh, who I hope gets a home soon because he is such a love. Nora and Clover have been at the shelter for a few weeks and are doing well. And there's a new dog, Penny, a mix between a Pitbull and Catahoula, neither of which are on the small side of dogdom. 

Penny is beautiful and so gentle. She will take a cookie out of my hand like she is whispering to it, just a little tiny movement of her mouth. She walks on a leash perfectly and is spirited but responsive and respectful. If I had the space, I would take this dog home with me in a second.

Nora is another newish dog, a cross between some sort of husky and maybe a German Shepherd.  She's not too big and she is a great walker, plus she knows how to play fetch and is happy tossing the ball into the air and playing with it like a cat.

The SPCA has acquired a few other dogs and some are so endearing that I know they'll be gone in a week or two. I try not to fall in love each week, but like with speed dating, it's difficult to ignore the great qualities I see in some of these dogs. Not a Wednesday goes by that I don't drive away thinking "... maybe.  Maybe."

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All the good dogs: Part 6

 It's a guessing game as I get to the SPCA at 7:00 in the morning: which dogs will be there and which dogs will have magically vanished?  I want my best dogs to be there but at the same time I want them to be gone, to have been adopted in the seven days since I walked them.  So it's always a bittersweet morning.

There is a lovely young (one year old, a bouncy puppy) black lab and pit bull mix, named Stan. (Come on, you gotta love a dog named Stan.) On the early shift we try to walk the dogs who are house trained first, because they have been waiting for at least 12 hours (more like 15) to pee and poop.  Stan is jumpy when I squeeze my body through the door, holding a piece of a hot dog in my hand to distract him from trying to bolt out the door. Stan wants to get escape, definitely, but at this hour he just wants to pee.  We get out, he walks about ten feet and he pees. And pees.  And pees. Seriously, he pees for about 45 seconds, which is a lot of pee!  Stan calms down a bit. We go to one of the large yards where he can be off leash and he zooms around like a crazy animal (!) and then, whew!  He poops.  (I know, TMI)  And now he is totally just a dog. Not a dog with huge needs, just a dog. Stan doesn't fetch, he cares nothing about a ball being tossed. He just zooms.  And then he jumps on the structures and waits for me to come over and I pet him and his entire body just relaxes into the petting. That's really what he needs: love.

And don't we all? 

Then Stan and I go back to his cell.  He gets some sliced hot dogs that I bring from home, he still wants to escape from  his cell but he fetches the sliced hot dogs that I toss across his little habitat and I scoot out the door.

Next is Shiloh, an older pit bull mix, the one that looks like a piggy bank, white with big black spots. Shiloh has been there for a while, like five months. It's difficult to figure out why he hasn't been "chosen" because he's so cool, so calm, such a lovely older dog. He also goes out, walks  20 feet and then pees a lot. Shiloh is so happy just walking around, so happy to be out of his cell. An easy walk, a romp in the play yard, back into his cell.

And so it goes. Some new dogs, a couple of huskies that are actually lovely, not as hyper as huskies can be. A small, older chihuahua mix that needs to get out to pee but you can feel the distain radiating off of her, like she knows she must do her business but she would rather 1) do it without someone watching her, 2) do it without being on a leash and 3) she would rather be anywhere but here. All she wants is to be on someone's couch, in a warm home and be loved all day. She cares nothing about me, and no offense is taken.

So many other dogs: I walked eight dogs on Wednesday in two hours..... and covered almost three miles doing so. It was a good morning.

A Coach for Everything in My Sad, Small Life

It's not that I want a coach for anything in my life but perhaps I am missing out on an opportunity to totally turn my life around! Like those ads you see on Instagram or on the back of cheap magazines that promise instant money, instant weight loss, instant success in everything, coaches now seem to be the answer to every prayer, all day, 24/7. Life coaches, pet coaches, dating coaches, baby coaches, kitchen-bathroom-patio coaches:  they are swarming around every single aspect of your life. These coaches can do anything you want: make you money, get you laid, train your dog or your kid, fix your marriage, teach you to cook, curb your addictions and help you find Jesus or Allah or Jehovah.  Or Satan, I suppose.

Not that this is a new phenomenon, but I didn't realize how prevalent this coaching thing is until a friend told me that a friend of his was using a "dating coach" to help write personal on-line ads on some platform like Bumble or Grumble or match.com. Seriously, if you are looking for a mate you should be able to write your own ad, unless you are looking for a fictionalized version of your life. If that's the case, it should be totally easy: "Hunky guy with black curly hair and blue eyes looking for a cute dolphin with sleek lines and a slim tail who loves swimming in the ocean under the moonlight and eating tiny fresh fish."  How difficult is that?  You need to pay someone good money to write up a lie? People are paying $250 a shot for a good ad.  Hell, I would do it for $25, a bargain! And I would guarantee results! I will go out and get those tiny fresh fish myself!  And feed them to you ! 

And a coach for your kid to get that kid to sleep through the night? Read a parenting book, let the kid cry a couple of nights and done!  Same with a kitchen coach: watch youtube and find everything you need for free!  I actually found a coach who will teach you, if you pay her, in two days, how to make and maintain a sourdough starter! Two days! For a loaf of bread! Holy cow.

I want a coach who will do exercises for me, clean my kitchen, finish the jigsaw puzzle that has been sitting on the table for a week, steal my knee pain and make it theirs, tell me the meaning of life and make me really good cocktails. I am willing to employ an intern for this purpose, an unpaid intern, and will give them a glowing line on their resume.

Just saying.  Man up. Do it yourself.  DIY, right?

Being alone and being happy about it.

 A friend called me a few days ago to read a quote from Hunter S. Thompson about being alone and about self respect. Because this subject has been my obsession lately, it was like a lucky star just dropped into my lap. That someone else out there in the wide universe read a few sentences and knew that those words were meant for me was humbling and validating. 

We are all unique individuals, even if we are with someone. Our society puts such emphasis on "partnering up" that sometimes one can feel like an outsider when one doesn't want a mate. Whether it's a long-term partner or a short-term relationship, it's what is expected of us in our culture. How many times has someone said to me something like "...but don't you want to meet someone?"  Meaning, of course, don't I want someone in my life, in my house, in my bed, for the long term.  The answer, for me, is a strong NO. 

I have long-term mates. I have friends I have known for over 50 years, I have kids and siblings  and I have known them forever. These are not casual relationships: they mean the world to me. No one can or should go through life without friends, without contacts. But these friendships are enough for me right now. I can see the people I want when I want. No one needs to be with me every hour of every day. No one needs to be my companion on more than a now-and-then basis.

Sometimes I wonder if my childhood prompted this need for the solitary life. We had 8 people in a three bedroom house and there was never a chance for privacy or alone time. Until I was in my late 40's I never lived alone. Three of my six siblings live alone like myself. Maybe there's a genetic (or environmental) reason some of us are solitary beings, living alone quite contentedly. 

There is a huge difference in being alone and being lonely. Being alone is a choice to not have someone else around. It doesn't mean I am lonely, it means I am happy by myself. And if I am not happy, another person isn't going to fix that.

In the words of Hunter S. Thompson:

We are all alone, born alone, die alone and we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way.  I do not say lonely - at least, not all the time - but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.