David is sick.  It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to kill him or even cause him permanent damage, but it is chronic, painful, and distressing.  We think it’s severe IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome.)  He called me a couple of weeks ago and needed me to bring him home.  I’ve been taking him back and forth to college, marshalling doctors, and getting him tested.  He needs to relearn how to eat and deal with stress.   He’s dropped some of his classes and is struggling to complete the rest.  He needs physical and mental support and a lot of my time and energy.   I haven’t been able to focus on writing or look forward to this blog and I think there will be several weeks more like this.

So, I’m going to take a few weeks off and concentrate on taking care of my family.  If you’ve stopped by, I hope you’ll stop back later.  If you’ve made comments in previous entries, thanks so much for your time and thoughts.  I look forward to hearing from you in the future.

Talk to you later,
Dolly

P.S.  Maria is a budding photographer with real talent and limited resources.   Above isn’t her best picture, but it is the one that best illustrates how I feel right now.  I am impressed that she caught it with our dinky point-and-shoot.

POINTLESS

It would be pointless to have nice weather and not go out and enjoy it.
It would be pointless to have a weekend and not spend some time with the family.
It would be pointless to have a hammock and not use it.

We certainly wouldn’t want our lives to be pointless, so we combined all three:

Pete and Jewels on the hammock.

Maria on the hammock.

Inspired by a veteran hammock user, Pop-pop, (Pete’s dad).

I, alas, was hammockless.

When I decided to go to college, Dad was against it and gave me a very hard time, but I was determined.  Not having a high school transcript, I knew I would have to do well on the SATs.  I got one of those big, thick study guides and, being undistracted by silly things like school or work, studied it full-bore for a month.

The morning of the test, I got up early and ran two miles to make sure I was alert. A friend gave me a ride to the testing site.  I felt like I was going to be sick in my stomach but, surprisingly, I did well.  Back then, home-schooling wasn’t legal, so universities didn’t have experience with kids who had good SAT scores but no high school transcript.  Surprisingly, only one school I applied to turned me down.

I moved in with my boyfriend and, to save money for college, went looking for my first full-time job.  I applied at a machine shop that made customized vacuum furnaces.  Totally clueless about what the job entailed, when the interviewer stepped out, I frantically rifled through the blue prints on his desk.  Returning suddenly, he caught me red-handed.  Later, he told me “I hired you because you showed an interest in what we were doing”!  After having hired many people myself, I can kind of understand that.

Working in a machine shop was interesting.  I’d get a blueprint of a part, carefully transfer the measurements to a piece of metal, then drill, saw, stamp, or wield until it matched the blueprint.  It was amazing to transform a plain piece of metal into an honest-to-god, useful piece of machinery.  It…it…was like having superpowers!

Being the only female there was never a problem because the guys were nice.  Still, I kept to myself and didn’t talk much–I was busy observing.   By then I had learned not to say much about my possum days.  It turns out that starting a conversation with things like “Have you ever watched a flock of geese sleep at night?”, or “You know how when you go spear fishing for spawning suckers…”, or “Even though I’ve had road-killed dog and it was very good, I wouldn’t kill one to eat it” just makes people stare at you.

Many years later, when it came time for my eldest child, David, to go off to college, I had a decidedly different attitude than my Dad’s.  Given that David and I frequently didn’t see eye-to-eye, I cheerfully waved him on his way.

In the family photo below, David is the tall one in the middle.  Looking at this picture, I can empathize with my Dad’s shock at realizing I was grown up and his angst at me moving on.  When did my David get to be so big?  Where did my little boy go?  It’s a hard thing to deal with.  But after this summer, I’ve come to peace with it.  This summer, in a very satisfying turn of events, David was an intern at a custom machine shop.

A while back, I was in a grocery store waiting for the manager to reveal the price of ginger root to me because heaven knows it wasn’t marked anywhere, when I noticed a women holding a bunch of kale also waiting to have the price of produce personally divulged to her.  Feeling that we had a bond, I cozied up to her and asked how she intended to cook the kale, assuming that she would, indeed, be able to afford it.
I do this kind of thing regularly.  When I see people in the grocery store buying something that looks interesting that I don’t know how to use, I ask them how they plan to cook it.  I’ve never had anyone not cheerfully tell me.  I’ve learned how to use chayote, exotic Asian produce, miso, tofu, jicama, and lots of other stuff this way.
I am familiar with kale and like it in all its forms–steamed, stir fried, soups, colcannon–and it’s easy to grow, but the rest of my family hates it.  Maybe this lady would have a way to cook it that my family would like.  And she did!  It turns out she roasts it.  I bought some, roasted it, and, lo, it was good.  Everyone ate it!
Flushed with my success, I looked online, and sure enough, there were lots of roasted kale recipes.  Some advocated cooking it quickly with a hot oven and some advocated cooking it slowly with a low oven, but the end results were the same; delicious, crunchy kale.
With the recipes that called for a hotter oven, I found it too easy to go from crispy to burnt within minutes while the low oven took forever.  After some experimenting, here’s the version I developed for my family:

Roasted Kale
Ingredients:
whole kale leaves (do not use old kale that has been sitting in your refrigerator for a week,
wilted kale, really huge kale, or kale that has a funny sulfur-like smell)
olive oil
salt
1.    Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
2.    Wash kale leaves and pat dry.
3.    Cut out the main stem if it’s more than a 1/8” thick.  (Do this by folding the leaf in half long ways with the dull side up and chopping off the white stem along the back.)
4.    Coat leaves with olive oil.  (I dip my fingers in a bowl of olive oil and rub it on the leaves.  These aren’t low fat!)
5.    Place oiled leaves on a cookie sheet and space them so they aren’t overlapping.
6.    Bake for 5 min., then flip leaves over.  Return to oven.
7.    Cook for another 5 to 10 minutes.  (How much longer to cook depends on the size and age of your leaves. You want them to be bright green but crispy.  Dark green spots are OK, but you don’t want even light brown spots.  Experiment until you get leaves that are very crunchy, like potato chips, but not burnt.  You may need to take out the smaller leaves while the big ones continue to cook. )
8.    Remove the leaves from the oven and let cool.  Sprinkle with salt.  Serve immediately.
(If you get a tough vein while munching, just nibble around it.   For variety, I’ll sometimes sprinkle the leaves with garlic powder, fresh lemon juice, or vinegar.  If you use lemon juice or vinegar, put it on right before you eat the leaf or it will get soft.)

Trimming the kale:
Oiling the kale:
The roasted kale:

Then last week, I saw a lady buy “baby bok choy” (which I think is actually a cultivar called pak choi).  I know how to stir fry and braise it but I was curious what she was going to do with it.  She was Chinese and used it in stir fries, chopped up in soups, and boiled with a light oyster sauce dressing; which reminded me that we were served the last dish frequently in China and loved it.  So I bought a bunch and looked up the recipe.  Here you go:

Chinese Greens
Ingredients
1 lb. of baby bok choy or similar green
1 Tablespoon of peanut oil (you can substitute olive oil)
½ teaspoon of minced garlic or ¼ teaspoon garlic powder
1 Tablespoon of oyster sauce (available in the Asian section of the grocery store)
1 teaspoon of corn starch (optional)
¼ cup of water plus a pot of water
Soy sauce

1.    Put a large pot of water to boil on the stove.
2.    Pull the baby bok choy leaves from the stem and wash.
3.    When the pot comes to a boil, put in the greens.  Let return to a boil and cook for 1 to 2 minutes.  (You want the leaves to be bright green and just tender.  They will continue to cook after you remove them from the water.  If they are overcooked, they will get mushy and nasty tasting.)
4.    Drain the greens and set aside.  (If you think you’ve let them cook a little too long, drain them, return the leaves to the pot, fill it with cool water, and drain again.)
5.    Wipe the pot, put it on medium, and add the peanut oil.
6.    When the oil is warm, add the garlic or garlic powder and cook for a few seconds. (Don’t let it get brown.)
7.    Add the oyster sauce and stir.
8.    Blend the cornstarch with a ¼ cup water and add, stirring quickly.  If not using corn starch, just add the water.
9.    Bring to a gentle boil and stir until the sauce thickens.
10.    Add the cooked greens to the sauce in the pot, toss to coat, and remove from the heat.
11.    Serve with soy sauce.

I meant to get a picture of this dish when it was finished, but it got eaten too fast.  You’ll have to settle for a picture of the greens getting washed.

When I was in New York doing publicity for the book, I met a filmmaker, Nancy Schreiber, who wanted to do a short documentary on possum living.  I liked Nancy a lot.  She seemed so mature and wise even though she was only in her twenties and she was a lot of fun.  I remember one night in New York when she took me out for sushi then to a drag bar with a musical and trapeze show.  (The drinking age was 18 then).  We didn’t have anything like that in Pennsburg!

I liked her so much, I agreed to the documentary, and I’m glad I did.  I learned about how a movie is made and edited and I haven’t watched a film in quite the same way since.  No matter how intimate or spontaneous a scene may seem, there’s at least a camera person and probably a sound and a lighting person present.  I lost touch with Nancy for a long time, but after the reprint, she found me and we caught up.  She’s still in film, and she’s still amazing.  (The documentary has been divided into three parts and posted on YouTube; you can see them here.

When she and her crew were filming, I got an offer to appear on the Merv Griffin Show, which, at the time, was one of the top television talk shows.  I flew out to Los Angeles for the live taping.  California was a whole ‘nother world.  You could take a glass elevator up the outside of a hotel for an awe-inspiring view of the city while being jostled by super serious businessmen in conservative suits yet the very same hotel sold avocado and alfalfa sprout sandwiches.  Red, yellow, and orange flowers grew everywhere.  In nearby Venice, bodybuilders worked out on the beach with a complete set of weights as scantily clad people zoomed down the sidewalks on roller skates doing fancy footwork.  Even a film crew following me around was taken in stride.  What a hoot!

Going on the Merv Griffin Show was scary.  Walking from behind a curtain to face a big audience on national TV was like jumping off the high dive—you can’t go back.  But Merv was a cordial host and all went well.

Dad didn’t like the hubbub or me being gone so long, and he was happy when things quieted down.  I enjoyed the free trips but after a while I, too, was glad to get back to the simple life.

But at the age of nineteen and after five years of possum living, I started getting restless.  I wanted to do something important in my life.

After much thinking, I decided that there was no work more important than understanding the Earth and our place in the universe. Wanting to be part of the bigger world is why I wrote Possum Living and why I eventually moved on from possum living.  Wanting to help mankind move forward to greater adventure and understanding made me decide to become a NASA engineer.  To do that, I’d have to go to college; which sounds like a perfect subject for another blog.