Archive - 2011
November 26th
Five Kernels of Corn
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/26/2011 - 10:37(For those just joining in, this month I've been writing an experimental memoir as part of National Novel Writing Month. Today's entry includes political commentary so I'm sharing it more broadly.)
It was a period of prosperity and protest. I would sit in the hard wood pews of the big white First Congregational Church and look out over the quad to the student union of an ivy league college. It was the world I grew up in. In the evenings, on our small black and white television, we would hear Walter Cronkite tell his viewers how many U.S. troops had died in Vietnam that day. A few years later, he would be telling us about how many U.S. students had died in the United States protesting that war. Yet Vietnam and Kent State were worlds away to an elementary school kid raised by fairly conservative parents.
We were still going to church in those days. My mother would bake bread for communion. This was the Protestant style of communion, with grape juice in little shot glasses and small cubes of bread my mother had baked. Years later, my father left the church because of its opposition to the war in Vietnam. He had a square peace sign on the back of his truck proclaiming Peace thru Victory and had supported Barry Goldwater.
At Thanksgiving, we would sign hymns, like “Now thank we all our God, with heart and hand and voices”. We would sing about gathering together to ask the Lord’s blessing. On our way home, we would sign about going to Grandmother’s house, even though there were no snowy woods to go through.
It was a world of Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell. It was a world where the pilgrims looked large, and many could trace their families back to the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Traditions were strong and important. We were not like the well off families living in town. We lived up on the top of Henderson Road, a ride from town. Later, it would make it more difficult taking the late bus home from band, which would drop me off a mile and a half from my house. I would wear cast off clothing, from older brothers or friends in the church with older kids. We would shop the Women’s Exchange for used clothes for the kids and at factory outlets that were really part of an old factory, and not a trendy shopping mall.
Kids used to make fun of me for what I wore, but that too, just seemed like part of daily life.
At Halloween, we would dress up in whatever costumes my mother could make and visit our neighbors. Several were elderly and it was an important time for them to have visitors. I kept trick or treating for years, partly just because I knew it was important, and I would sit down and talk with them as they offered me an apple. At some point we started trick or treating for Unicef. Living on a poor section of the hill, we didn’t bring in as much as my friends who lived downtown near the nice houses, but it was important for each of us to do our part.
When Thanksgiving came around, we would get a little envelope at church that we would bring home. It was very much like the pledge envelope that we would put our nickels and dimes in for church. Back then, it was important for even young folks to learn to give a little bit back to their church and to their community.
Yet the envelope that we would bring home was different. We would save it until Thanksgiving Day, and then open it. Inside would be five kernels of corn. We would open the little envelopes and hear about how the early pilgrims had had to ration food and were unsure if they would make it through the winter. We would hear about how through hard work, cooperation, and through kindness shown to them by the natives they made it through the winter. It was a time of moral stories around the family table.
Thanksgiving was not about opulence and abundance, it was about survival, and although I never thought of myself as coming from a poor family, uncertain about where the next meal came from, it was part of my family history. My father’s father had died when my father was twelve and they face difficult times. My mother had lived through The Depression on a small New England farm beside the Connecticut River. The second hand clothes I wore were simply the way everyone got clothes, I thought.
Looking back at those days from today’s lens, it seems so different. Some have started to point out that Thanksgiving is not a day for Native American’s to be thankful. The settlers brought with them disease and war and wrecked havoc on Native American life. Others have drawn contrasts between what happened when the Europeans came to North America and people trying to enter our country today.
Yet it seems as if the key point of the debate is being missed. Those pilgrims facing hunger and possible death, as represented by the five kernels of corn, survived because the people already in the land helped them out. Perhaps we should be more like those Native Americans, and instead of building a larger fence, and passing laws to make it more difficult for the new comers to our country, we should be helping them out.
Likewise, the five kernels of corn should be a reminder for us to be thankful, not for the new flat screen television that we had to fight for Thursday evening amidst a large crowd of shoppers, but for the simple sustenance we receive in difficult times.
Connecticut soup kitchens, which provide today’s equivalent of five kernels of corn, lost food to spoilage as a result of the power outage. The needs for food of the hungry increase in our state even as donations go down.
On Thanksgiving Day, I saw a tweet from a church in Bridgeport, inviting anyone and everyone who would be thankful for a hot meal to come enjoy a free Thanksgiving day feast, complete with roast turkey and all the trimmings. I retweeted the message because it occurred to me that the meal in the church hall in Bridgeport would probably be closer to an authentic Thanksgiving meal that the large feast immortalized in the painting by Norman Rockwell.
My mind wandered to those dour old Pilgrims who came to this country out of love of God, and not the love of money that dominates so much of the political discourse. I thought of those who knew that the key to survival was the ability to cooperate with one another and help them out, and not to take advantage of ones neighbor. I thought of those for whom giving back to their community was a Godly responsibility.
Where have we gone wrong? My idyllic childhood faded as my parents separated. Some blame the demise of the American family on our decline; the lack of dinner time discussions about five kernels of corn. That seems a bit facile and incomplete. What caused the American family to decline in the first place? Even if that is the case, what can we do now to revive our country?
I talk with my kids at the dinner table, and I’m sure they roll their eyes as much as I rolled mine when I was their age. We no longer have Walter Cronkite telling us all we need to know about the days’ news, and perhaps we need each of us to tell the news. Perhaps Walter Cronkite and the dinner time discussions are merging into a new form, the blog post. Yet I look at a lot of the blog, and I’m not so sure.
November 25th
The Experimental Memoir - Day 25 Thanksgiving, part 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/25/2011 - 14:23I don’t have a lot of recollections of Thanksgiving meals when I first moved to Connecticut. I can vaguely imagine what they were like, sitting at the large table in the dining room of the old house in Stamford. They most likely were the standard faire; turkey, potatoes, corn, green beans, and carrots. Other parts of the activities around Thanksgiving are easier to remember.
Stamford started having an annual pre-Thanksgiving day parade while we lived in Stamford, and we would go down to it. It was on Sundays and we would go down right after church. There are several major north south roads heading down from North Stamford into Stamford. However, they would get really congested as you got closer to the parade. We would typically take back roads in North Stamford to head east before heading south. We could then find parking to the East of the parade, and not a far walk from it. Often we would watch the parade on Atlantic, Bedford of Summer Streets. It was often cold and we would bundle up. There would be the street vendors and many times, we would see friends, especially the girls classmates and their families.
A few weeks later, we would head downtown again to see Santa Claus repel down the side of one of the buildings in the downtown district. The trip down and the parking, the crowds, venders and friends were often the same.
One year, we were invited down to a party on West Seventy Seventh Street in Manhattan the night before Thanksgiving. A coworker’s parents lived in a nice apartment overlooking the American Museum of Natural History and the streets where all the balloons were inflated. On our way to the party, I showed Kim and the girls where I had lived when Mairead was born. It was just around the corner at West Seventy Eighth Street. We looked at various stores that had been my stomping ground before trying to get to the party. The street was blocked off, and we had to speak with a police officer about the details of the party we were going to. It was crowded but uneventful.
When Kim and I met, she was living in Guilford, and I learned about Gozzi’s Turkey Farm. I’ve always been predisposed to buying from local vendors whenever possible, so it was great to find a local turkey farm. To make things all the more enjoyable, every year at Thanksgiving, they color several of the turkeys bright florescent colors, pink, green, blue, orange, yellow, and probably a few other colors. It has always been great fun to go pick up the Thanksgiving turkey and look at the ones who had been spared to become part of a colorful display.
We’ve also sought to purchase Connecticut raised ducks and geese, but that’s always been a challenge. One year, we found a farm claiming to sell Connecticut geese, but when we got the goose, the package said it was from Pennsylvania. Another time, we got a goose but it had been poorly butchered. None of the giblets were in the goose and it was a very lean goose. Some people might like their goose this way, but an important part of our tradition has been to make a pate out of the liver, and to rend the fat for cooking. Connecticut has recently passed new laws to make it easier for people to get produce straight from the farms, so hopefully, this will result in better options for geese and ducks going forward.
As a side note, I read a tweet the other day from a Minnesota politician talking about how Minnesota provides more turkeys to the United States than any other state. I assume she was talking about Thanksgiving Dinners, and not about some of her fellow Minnesotan politicians. That works out to be a trip of about 1500 miles. This doesn’t seem especially efficient.
This carries over to other forms of shopping. We buy Christmas trees raised on local Connecticut farms. We gather up the whole family to traipse out to the farm, hike up and down the hills in search of the perfect Christmas Tree. When the oldest girls were young, I would read them “The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree” about a family in Appalachia during World War I. The father was off at war and the mother and daughter headed off into the mountains to pick the perfect Christmas Tree. It was a balsam fir, known for their fragrance.
So, every year, we head out to find our own perfect Christmas Tree. We try to get a Balsam fir, or if not, a fir fairly similar. Years later, Kim noted how I often seem to get sick around the holidays; congestion, runny nose. She suggested that perhaps it is an allergy to the Christmas Tree. I suspect this is the case, but having an aromatic tree, even if it causes me a little suffering, is worth it, so I just stock up on decongestants before getting the tree.
Our pumpkin gathering is, likewise, a holiday family tradition, including a hayride, and sometimes, when there is enough time and money, getting lost in a corn maze. This is followed by a stop to the cider mill for fresh hot spiced cider and cider donuts.
During the warmer months, schedules permitting, we also try to pick various fruits and berries at pick your own farms in Connecticut. Fiona and I usually go out and pick fresh strawberries. The farm fresh strawberries and sweeter and tastier than anything you’ll find in most stores, however, even these don’t compare with the fresh wild strawberries I used to find in the woods near the house I grew up in. We’ve also made trips to go blueberry and raspberry picking. Like the strawberries, these are particularly good, but not the same as the berries from my youth.
For raspberries, we had a neighbor who had a small cultivated raspberry patch. We would go pick raspberries there. From blueberries, we would hike up onto Mount Greylock to various areas where wild blueberries grew in abundance and pick as many as we could. I don’t remember reading the book, Blueberries for Sal when I was young, but when I read it to my children, it brought back memories of picking berries up on Mount Greylock as a kid.
November 24th
The Experimental Memoir - Day 24 Thanksgiving, part 1
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/24/2011 - 10:33I believe I was seven years old when our family got its first television. It was Christmas and their was this big thing on a table next to the Christmas tree. It had a dark brownish green piece of glass in the front, some knobs on the upper right hand section of the front of it and was made of some sort of beige plastic. My siblings and I gathered around in wonder and amazement. I didn’t know what it was, but my older brothers did. They turned it on, spun the dial and eventually a snowy staticy image appeared. It was a drawing of a dog flying, out of the speaker, came the words, “Here I come to save the day…” I didn’t know what that meant, but my older brothers, whom I guess had seen televisions before at friends’ houses and probably had even seen the show, Underdog, knew that underdog was on the way.
My father didn’t have much use for television, and at best we would watch, “The FBI” or “The Wonderful World of Disney” as a family. More often, he would berate us for watching Gilligan’s Island, or Bewitched. There would be exceptions, such when The Wizard of Oz was on, or certain holiday specials. Although, it was many years before I learned that The Wizard of Oz wasn’t all in black and white.
We seemed to get a pass when Charlie Brown was on, and watching the Thanksgiving Day Parades was an acceptable activity.
We only got three channels back then, and ABC, NBC and CBS affiliate. We would gather around the television in the living room and watch as giant balloons were guided down the avenues of New York City. We would watch the bands. As a young kid, this spectacle was as remote as Oz, and also in black and white.
While we watched the parade, the turkey would be baking in the oven. This was in a day before self-basting turkeys and little plastic things that would pop up indicating that the turkey was done. To baste the turkey, my mother would cover it with strips of bacon. As the turkey cooked, the bacon cooked and the grease trickled down into the turkey meat, providing us with a moist, and nicely flavored turkey.
As the turkey cooked and our hunger grew, we would eat special food for the season, grapes, nuts, and celery stuffed with peanut butter and with cream cheese. Being a New England home, we grew up with all the rituals of Thanksgiving, stories of the pilgrims, five kernels of corn, and decorations made by kids in elementary school.
When I was older and went off to college, even though my parents and separated and my older siblings had headed out on their own, I always made it home for Thanksgiving. I went to college in Ohio and it was a long trip home. I would be tired, but the remnant of the family would celebrate Thanksgiving together. We too often forget that thanksgiving grew out of giving thanks more for making it through difficult times than for the abundance that followed.
After college, I moved to New York City, that black and white land of an Oz like Thanksgiving Day parade. Perhaps because the real parade could not recreate the magic of the small black and white image from my childhood, perhaps because I didn’t relish fighting the crowds, or more likely because I would head up to New England for Thanksgiving, I never made it to the parade.
One of my first roommates did. He worked in food service for CBS news and needed to make sure that all the crews covering the parade had sufficient food, coffee, and hot chocolate to make it through the long cold mornings broadcasting the parade. The first year I lived with him and a few other guys in an old spice factory in Brooklyn that had been partially converted into artists’ lofts, I stayed in the city and we had our own Thanksgiving dinner. I cooked the turkey similar to the way my mother had, with the exception that I didn’t know where to find the giblets. I had taken everything that had been put in the stomach cavity and stuffed the bird with a bread dressing. However, I didn’t know about the other place to look for the giblets, and they cooked in a plastic bag in the end of the turkey.
Later, when I moved to the Upper West Side, I would head over to the Museum of Natural History to watch the giant balloons being blown up. This had more of a magical feeling, in a Fellini-esque sort of way.
Still, I liked heading up to New England. My mother lives near a ski slope, so I would go up, spend the day skiing and then come home with a large appetite for Thanksgiving dinner.
November 23rd
The Experimental Memoir Day 23
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/23/2011 - 20:29(Note: For those who are not regular readers, this is a National Novel Writing Month related entry)
It is early in the evening before Thanksgiving. Last night, the cat jumped up on the bed in the middle of the night and spent an extended period trying to get comfortable. As a result, I did not sleep well and again am very tired. I struggled through work.
Tuesday was another day that I struggled through work, but on that day, for a different reason. As I’ve gotten older my medical conditions have increased. It has been going on twenty years that I’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure. My blood pressure had always been a bit high, as it has been, I believe, for various members of my family. One year, however, it was high enough for the doctor to recommend that I start taking medications for my blood pressure.
Simply the idea of having to start taking medications for blood pressure, which I would probably have to do for the rest of my life, was depressing. It was the first sign of frailty and coming old age, even though I was still fairly young. To make things worse, when I started taking the medication, I developed a persistent cough. I started sucking on cough drops all the time and I believe this annoyed my wife of the time as well, particularly when we went to events like the theatre or symphony.
Eventually, we found a combination of blood pressure medications that worked well, but over the years we’ve had to try different combinations. With the medications, there came a need to track my liver enzymes, and from time to time, they would be elevated.
I was sent for an ultrasound a couple times. The first time, they didn’t find anything, but the second time, they technicians appeared more concerned. Someone else was brought into the room who looked at the images, and I was told that I had a simple kidney cyst. I was told that they are not uncommon, are typically only discovered during an ultrasound and rarely were anything to be concerned about.
Over time, other conditions have developed. One year, while preparing shrimp for Kim on Mother’s Day, by hands swelled up and started breaking out. We figured it was some sort of allergic reaction, perhaps to the shrimp. So, when I had my next physical, I told the doctor. She ran some blood tests which showed indications of several allergies. I went to an allergist and was run through a battery of different allergy tests. I was, in fact, allergic to shrimp. I was also allergic to lobster and crab. I was not allergic to clams, other bivalves or fish. I was also allergic to dust, and had various allergies to pollen.
I remember as a kid always getting runny noses when playing out in the fields, so the hay fever was not a surprise, but the shrimp, lobster and crab allergies was a disappointing surprise. I had always eaten as much shrimp, lobster and crabs as I could get my hands on.
My allergy isn’t that bad. I don’t need an epi pen. In fact, I’ve eaten shrimp and crab by mistake at times without any serious consequences. I remember once, I went to a Thai restaurant. I had some sweet and sour soup to start with. I found my mouth feeling a little numb and tingly, which I attributed to the spices. However, when I got to the bottom of the bowl of soup, there was a nice big shrimp sitting in the bottom. I didn’t eat the shrimp, and continued my meal without any other incidents.
Another time, we were on Cape Cod, and I had some stuffed flounder. It was very good, but it turned out that the stuffing was made with crab. Again, there was no noticeable reaction. I’ve also eaten at Hibachi restaurants where the meal where everything was prepared on the same large grill. Eating hibachi from a grill that has been used to prepare shrimp created no ill effects.
Another condition that seems to be hereditary is high cholesterol. Eventually, I was put on medication for this. Since then, I’ve taken to eating oatmeal much more often, and sometimes, when I remember, taking fish oil capsules. Since then, my blood pressure has continued to inch upward, but my cholesterol seems to be doing pretty well.
Nonetheless, with all these pills, it is important for me to have blood tests every now and then. Some of these blood tests need to be done when you have been fasting, so, since I had had oatmeal for breakfast before my doctor’s appointment, I couldn’t have my blood test the day of the appointment.
The doctor wrote up an order for me to get my blood tested at the lab at her office. However, that would require me to come into work late another day. Since I work for a health clinic, I asked to see if I could get my lab work down with the lab the clinic uses. In fact, that worked out better. The doctor could send the request electronically and get the results electronically.
So, on Tuesday, I skipped my morning oatmeal and headed into work. As if often the case, it was a chaotic morning, and I didn’t get a chance to head over to the lab to get my blood drawn until later in the morning. However, I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible so I could break my fast with some yoghurt and fruit I had brought to the office.
I went to the lab, and the phlebotomist said that she could see me right away. She went on the computer and got the lab request that my doctor had submitted and printed it out, along with the bar coded labels for the tubes of blood she would draw. She was a congenial woman and we chatted about various things.
I’ve never been great with needles, and always flinch when I get shots or have blood drawn. When I was a kid, my father would also give blood at the local blood drives. When I went off to college, I resolved to do the same thing. However, I skipped my senior year of high school and started college when I was seventeen. Because of this, they wouldn’t accept my blood the first time I tried to donate, unless a parent came along and gave permission. My parents were hundreds of miles away, so I didn’t start giving blood until my sophomore year of college.
I would explain to the blood drive workers my strong dislike of needles and my hope to get over it by giving blood at blood drives. I gave blood in college. I gave blood when I was home on summer vacation. When I moved to New York, I gave blood at various places I worked. After a few years, however, AIDS came onto the scene. The screening was a lot more rigorous and it just made the time it took to give blood take longer. Friends of mine who were gay were told they couldn’t give blood and the whole experience started to sour for me, so I drifted away from giving blood.
Now, I give a few vials of blood when I need to, to check my cholesterol, liver enzymes, and anything else that might need testing.
The blood was quickly drawn, with a minimum of discomfort and I headed back to my office.
Another reason that I wanted to use the lab that I did was that it is possible to get your results back online. I’m very interested in personal and electronic health records and I hope to be able to get the test results online. Some of the results, like my cholesterol are numbers that I have a good sense at the acceptable levels. Other numbers, I’ll have no idea what they really mean. For them, I expect the doctor will simply say that they’re in an acceptable range.
However, other times that I’ve been to the doctor, I’ve been told what my cholesterol levels were, but I typically forget them on the way home, except for the general range. I would be nice to be able to look them up at any point, as well as to track them year to year.
The system that the lab uses requires the doctor to give a pin to the patient that can be used to verify that the doctor has given permission to the patient to see the data. I can understand the reasons doctors might want that. However, I believe the government just put into effect a ruling that patients should be able to get to the data without requiring the doctors permission. I may try to find that ruling and contact the lab and ask them to permission my account, even without the doctor’s permission.
This is for a few reasons. One, I like to stir things up a little bit. Two, I would like to encourage the lab to get with the new Federal ruling. Three, while I don’t imagine my doctor would have any objection issuing a pin to me to access the data, it is just one more thing that the doctor’s shouldn’t have to be dealing with. Their time is busy enough already without needing more medical bureaucracy.
November 22nd
Random Notes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/22/2011 - 21:50Well, I should be writing more for NaNoWriMo, but I’m too tired. Long day at work. Meeting in the evening.
I’ve been fascinated by the way the UC Davis Pepper Spray Cop has been dealt with online, with his image superimposed on famous painting, the reviews of pepper spray on Amazon, etc. Some sort of interesting group dynamics worth exploring at some point.
Another idea I’ve been kicking around: In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, a famous Supreme Court case about freedom of speech, the “speech” was wearing armbands. It will be interesting to see if setting up a tent and/or sleeping in the tent in a public space will end up being viewed as speech, similar to wearing an armband.
For another thought, the Supreme Court is currently considering U.S. v Jones, about using GPS tracking to track a person’s movements. Is this an invasion of privacy? A violation of the Fourth Amendment? Many of the articles talk about using the device to “track his movements on public streets”. However, it seems like there are a lot of other issues here that seem not to be tackled. First, having a GPS device on a vehicle doesn’t necessarily say anything about the suspect, unless the police can prove that the suspect was always the person in the vehicle. On top of that, they would have to prove that the GPS device was never tampered with, or temporarily moved to another vehicle. I imagine that someday, someone will find a GPS device on their vehicle and move it to a truck or a bus headed across the country. Finally, there is the issue of what happens when a person pulls off of a public street. Does the GPS stop working once it is off of public property to ensure people’s privacy? And are GPS’s that accurate anyway?
Enough for random thoughts for this evening.
