Sheila's LiveJournal

Christmas puddings mixed and steaming on the stove top, Christmas lights up outside (but not operating quite right yet), Thanksgiving goodies assembled to take to family gathering, suitcase ready to be packed for LosCon over the weekend --

Yes, it's beginning to look a lot like the holidays are approaching.

At last -- a cracker that is truly gluten free and tasty too! Blue Diamond (the nut people) has put out six varieties of "Nut-Thins" made with crushed nuts and rice flour, and absolutely no gluten. So far, I've tried the cheddar cheese, smokehouse and country ranch, and they live up to the advertising.

Unless you have problems with gluten, you won't appreciate how wonderful it is to find a cracker to eat with cheese that doesn't taste like sawdust (rice cakes, ugh!). But even if you can tolerate wheat, these make a nice change.

Today's the day for some personal grumbling. The problems of the world can go to the back of the queue for a while. I'm tired of allergies.

A couple of years ago, I found out I was allergic to wheat – Wow! That explains why I had never been able to eat breakfast (toast, muffins, cereal, french toast, pancakes....) Okay, I adjusted; I could manage a very little bit of gluten (a small buttered crust of San Francisco Sourdough, hot from the oven, with the soft part pulled out, yum!) once in a while. But last night, the small amount of flour in the batter of my fish and chips just about did me in. I was up for two hours with nasty stomach pain that antacids can't touch (of course, since it isn't indigestion).

Several years ago while I was still teaching, I discovered I was allergic to chalk dust, and naturally the administration was very slow in replacing the chalk boards with the dry eraser kind. I think the money had to go to recarpeting the prez's office or something crucial like that. I wasn't too surprised because I'd also just recently found out that I was developing hay fever and dust allergies. Smoke from forest fires miles away give my lungs such a problem the docs suspect pneumonia until the X-rays come in.

Well that wasn't too much of a surprise because before *that* I'd found out I was allergic to bee and wasp venom (and also Greek mosquitoes – don't ask).

Looking back, there were other episodes of allergic reactions: I broke out in hives the first time I ate strawberries as a kid; I couldn't dab perfume behind my ears as a teenager going on a date because I had what seemed to be permanent red patches as a result; I developed a nasty skin rash on my hands from agricultural pesticides while working on the conveyor belt one summer in a Birds Eye Frozen Foods factory as a student. But I didn't put it all together until the wheat problem was diagnosed.

Now I'm the kind of person who believes in the religion of Modern Medicine, and I'm not a happy camper when the docs don't come up with the pill that fixes everything once and for all. And I'm also the kind of person who believes in learning valuable lessons from everything life throws at me.

So, I've learned already! What, you think I'm a slow learner? Come up with the pill!

Memorial Day always brings back a specific childhood memory for me. I grew up in London during World War II, and as the war progressed, the city increasingly came under attack from the German Luftwaffe. Night after night, waves of enemy planes flew over London and dropped their bombs. At one point, my mother and grandmother got tired of the nightly rush for the (not terribly safe) bomb shelters, and they decided to go to the Essex countryside and stay with my grandmother's sister. My great-aunt lived in a cottage with a thatched roof in a tiny village called Boreham.

There was very little to distinguish this quiet village except for one thing: In 1941, America came into the war on the side of Britain and the Allies, and after a while they began to build airbases in the English countryside. One was a mile or so outside of Boreham. The American servicemen at this base had a big effect on country life in Essex. We called them all "Yanks" even if perhaps they were Westerners or Southerners. And we kids did our best to copy their slang – much to the horror of our proper British mothers. There are many stories I could tell about the airmen – young boys really, but they seemed old to eight and nine year-old me – but there's one particular event I'm thinking of today.

These young men were very good to the English kids. Whenever they had a pass to come into the village, we followed them around chanting, "Got any gum, chum?" and they'd almost always find sticks of chewing gum in their pockets for us, and maybe chocolate. Because of the sad and dangerous conditions during the war, and with my father being away with the British army – and of course food rationing – we don't seem to have celebrated Christmas much. I suppose my family must've given small presents on those wartime Christmases, especially to the younger members, but money was tight and few shops were open to sell things other than food and necessities. Anything beyond the very basic was out of the question “for the duration.” as the adults used to say. The one Christmas I do have a memory of was from that time in Boreham.

The young American airmen gave a Christmas party on the base for the village children. They decorated the mess hut with streamers and served us foods we hadn't seen for a very long time, like Jell-O, and cake and ice-cream. We sang Christmas carols together, and I seem to remember we were each given a small gift to take home. Those airmen were almost all of them in their early twenties, and they probably missed their own families at home in America. Yet they gave their time and paid for everything out of their own pockets so some English kids could have a few moments of peaceful celebration in the midst of war.

What I came to understand once I was an adult was the terrible mathematics of war which ate up young pilots at a horrific rate. How many of those boys who helped the village kids have a semblance of normal Christmas joy never returned to make families of their own?
Today, I don't doubt there are young servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who find time to pause in the midst of their own danger to be kind to kids who have little to be joyous about. I think about them all on Memorial Day.

Peace in our time, O Lord.

Every year, on the first Saturday in October, the little village of Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains of California, puts on an Art Walk/Wine Tasting event. It's a lot of fun to go to, and I've attended seven, counting by the glasses in my cupboard. You pay a fee – this year it was $25 – and you get a pretty wine glass which you carry up and down the road to the different galleries, gathering samples at each stop. A lot of very fine wineries based in Temecula come up to pour their wines, and there's always food, cheese and crackers and fruit, and usually live music too. This is where I first tasted Barefoot wines, a favorite of mine now. A trolley runs along the route if you need it. This year we were a party of six people and had five dogs along with us, and we couldn't have used it if we'd needed it (we didn't). One year, they had a horse-drawn trolley which was a great attraction for the children who'd come along with their parents.

I enjoy this event, and usually browse the galleries and craft stalls looking for unusual Christmas gifts. Idyllwild is an arts community, with a thriving culture of artists of many kinds, and an internationally known, private arts high school where I taught creative writing for several summer camps. Since I have a small cabin just outside Idyllwild, I often come up to the mountains during the year, but the Art event has to be one of the best occasions of the year.

Making this even more special was the fact that my oldest granddaughter had invited her just-found birth-father to meet the family and enjoy the village scene. I am so happy for her: this is something she's always longed to do, and he seems overjoyed to get to know the daughter he never knew he had. As if the wine itself wasn't enough, this was pretty heady stuff!

The only negative thing was that it rained, not hard at first, but enough to soak through my sweatshirt to my t-shirt. We had umbrellas, but they were in the car. The dogs put up with it just as we did, which is to say not without some complaining. I think that the weather must have affected the number of visitors because the crowd didn't seem as dense this time as in other years. That's not good for the artists and craftspeople. We bought three kinds of bread at a bakery and left a bit early to go down to my daughter's house at the foot of the mountains. There we were joined by another daughter and her family, eager to meet my granddaughter's “New Dad,” and we had a great barbecue (It wasn't raining down there, of course).

Now I have to find where in Long Beach I can get bottles of the port wine I fell in love with this time!

My middle daughter, who lives out in the country, keeps goats. As far as I can tell, they're just short-tempered pets, eating and doing nothing productive. I keep trying to find respectable occupations for them so they can at least earn their feed.

I read an article about using goats to keep the brush trimmed in forest fire areas and I thought that might be a grand way to occupy these guys. I have some property up in the San Jacinto Mountains, about an hour away from where my daughter lives, and I'm always having to do fire abatement up there if I don't want the next wildfire to destroy my property. Since my cabin is on sloping ground at 6000 feet elevation, raking the brush gets tiresome rather quickly. But it ought to be a snap for goats. The article said they'd used goats successfully in places such as the hillsides of Laguna Beach, and I'd seen goats all over the place in Rwanda, eating everything in sight, tended by little children. So that ought to work, don't you think? Pile them all into the horse trailer and away we go. Alas, my daughter points out that unless someone is prepared to play Little Goatherd (as in Heidi), the herd is likely to wander off and clear other people's brush that is tastier than mine. Not to mention that the local coyotes would probably consider the presence of the goats as an invitation to dine.

So I was pondering this as I browsed my local specialty market, looking for something delectable to take my mind off insoluble problems. I always check out the cheese section, and I usually come home with a nice piece of Stilton or Maytag or Gorgonzola for my lunch. But on this particular day, they seemed to have everything in stock but blue (or green) cheeses. I spotted something new, a rather creamy-looking cheese with a dark border and an ashy stripe through the middle. I'll try anything once if it has the label “cheese” on it, so I purchased a small piece. (I was a little leery of the ashy stripe.)

Oh joy! The poetically named “Humboldt Fog” tastes like a cross between Camembert and English Stilton and is wonderful with olives – of which this particular market has a large variety for sale. And – guess what – it's made from goats' milk. You can imagine the speed with which I looked up the web site for the goat farm that produced it, and how fast I sent the link to my daughter. If her billy and the nannies won't protect my cabin, at least they could supply me with cheese. Alas again. My daughter says that in order for the nannies to produce milk, they have to be or have been pregnant in the recent past. But her billy has had a little date with a snipper. So no cheese.

I'd wondered why there were no cute little kids (other than my grandbabies) frolicking in the horse pasture this spring.