Brrr Baby It's Slightly Chilly Outside

Recently in line at my local grocery store, I overheard the couple in front of me laughing because most everyone was wearing jackets and it was only 65 degrees outside.  “These people don’t know what real cold is!” the gentleman bragged.  I’m sure if he had turned around he would have gotten a chuckle at the UGG boots on my feet and the knitted scarf wound around my neck.  Well sir, I may not know what real cold is, but I do know heat.  And I know humidity.  It’s those two factors that contribute to most Floridians donning sweaters as soon as the temps dip below 70°.  Something I’m sure my fellow mocking customer had no real experience with. 

Each year in mid-January every person in the North (the North is how southerners describe any other region in the country besides the South) declares that this will be their last winter because they are moving to the Florida.  In Florida you don’t have blizzards, you don’t have to shovel your driveway and you don’t have to salt anything other than the rim of your margarita glass.  A lot of people make good on their threat and actually move – usually in the fall just before school starts.  At first, they love it!  The gentle waves of temperature highs and lows throughout the fall and winter and spring make for a welcome change from months of freezing weather.  It gets warm, it gets cool.  It’s cold and then it’s balmy.  Then right around Mother’s Day - kablam – it gets hot. Really, really hot.  And it stays that way.  No more cool nights and warm days.  The humidity begins to move in right around July 4^th.  This is not your ordinary humidity.  This is southern humidity.  Humidity that coats your skin and weights you down the moment you walk outside.  It suffocates your pores and forces your lungs to work twice as hard. It saps your physical strength and causes your hair to double in volume and stand on end.  The shorts and t-shirts you’ve been wearing since the end of March now feel like a snowsuit.  Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any hotter, July turns into August.  August is the month that separates the true southerners from the wannabes. 

August is the reason retirees are glad they get to escape back to their northern homes after Easter.  August is when many newcomers realize that they didn’t move to a warmer climate; they moved to a tropical one.  The daily afternoon thunderstorms make the heat and humidity feel worse instead of cooling off the atmosphere.  Add in a few hurricanes and the inevitable wildfires and many northerners run, not walk, to the state line and keep on going.  But those brave souls who stick it out eventually get rewarded sometime in November with a cool western breeze and a few nights when you can turn off the air conditioner and sleep with opened windows.  Finally, you can actually run a brush through your hair!  The sun warms your skin instead of blistering it in seconds.  You start to get excited about highs of only 80°.  By the time our southern winter rolls around, you have dug out your sweaters and stocked up on firewood.  You wait impatiently for the weatherman to tell you that the low will be in the mid-forties.  Then you are just as impatient after a couple of days for the thermometer to rise again.  It always does.

The man in the grocery store was right; I don’t know what real cold is.  I’ve never had to dig out my car from a snowdrift or worry about the high cost of heating oil.  I’m sure he would have been baffled at my warm layers since he was wearing golf shorts had he just turned around. I’m also sure that once his vacation was over he went back North and is complaining right now about his real cold and making plans to return to the Sunshine State on a more permanent basis.  No sir, I don’t know real cold but I’m pretty sure you don’t know real heat and real humidity.  Or that palmetto bugs fly!   

Give Thanks - Then Pass The Potatoes

Wedged in-between Halloween and Christmas is my favorite day of the entire year – Thanksgiving.  No, Thanksgiving doesn’t have the fun factor and pounds of treats Halloween brings and it sure can’t compete with the glamour and magic of Christmas, but that’s exactly why I love it.  Smack dab in the middle of fall, when the weather tends to be a little dreary and our brains are so focused on those ‘must-have holiday gifts’ that have been advertised since August, there is this wonderful day that asks us only to take a moment and be grateful for what we have and who we have to share it with.  Plus, you get to sit down and eat as much yummy fair as you possibly can without anyone batting an eye! And late afternoon naps are encouraged!  You couldn’t ask for a more perfect holiday. 

Growing up, I was lucky to have had what some people would call ‘Norman Rockwell’ Thanksgivings.  The picture perfect turkey with all the trimmings and a house full of family that actually liked one another.  As a kid I always looked forward to Thanksgiving Eve.  Our family prepared the turkey on that night.  I loved listening to my mother and grandma and aunts in the kitchen talking about old times while they chopped the celery and onions for the stuffing.  But waking up Thanksgiving morning to the most fantastic smells drifting from the oven is my most precious memory.  As soon as I took a whiff, I knew it was going to be a great day.    Later in the afternoon the family would trickle in and it was always a day full of laughing and teasing and family stories and, of course, the best food on the planet.  When the men gathered around the television set for the football game, the women and girls gathered up the dirty dishes.  Don’t tell my mom, but I never minded being on kitchen clean-up that day.  Then after most everything was cleaned up and put away, the leftovers bundled into aluminum foil or spooned into Tupperware the best part was still to come.  The cans of cooked milk.  Topped with Cool Whip, this strange family delicacy was the best way to end a day filled with lots of family, lots of food, and most importantly, lots of love.

These days I host Thanksgiving at my house.  Although a much smaller event than the Thanksgivings I grew up enjoying, it is still a day filled with family, friends, food, and conversation.  It’s the only time I don’t mind the tedious preparations, the endless chopping, or rolling so much pie dough it seems as if my countertops will never be rid of the flour coating them! After everyone stuffs themselves full of roasted turkey and giblet stuffing the men waddle off to the television for some all-American football.  But now instead of huddling around a 25”consol in folding chairs, they lounge on leather sofas in front of a 65” monstrosity. Later in the day there are still the pies to enjoy and lots of wine to be drunk and more reminiscing to be done.  My kids spend their Thanksgiving laughing with their grandparents, getting teased by their uncle and hear all about the old days.  A lot like my childhood Thanksgivings.  

I skipped Thanksgiving one year.  Actually skipped it.  It had been a bad year and I was in a bad mood and I didn’t want to go to all the trouble.  There were no mouth-watering scents filling my home that Thursday in November, no homemade pies cooling on my kitchen countertop.  I didn’t even turn the Macy’s parade on.  Instead my kids, husband and I volunteered at a retirement home for veterans.  We met many heroes that day.  We were privileged to talk to them and play cards with them and push their wheelchairs down the hallways.  We heard stories about their families, and their Thanksgivings of long ago.  We heard what it was like to have Thanksgiving dinner in the middle of a battlefield, on a ship thousands of miles from home, and in a military hospital.  The residents were baffled why we were there and not having Thanksgiving dinner at our own home.  My husband and kids were a little confused as well, but I insisted.  I had forgotten what I was thankful for. That year was the best Thanksgiving I had ever had.

Next Thursday a similar scene will play out in homes all around our nation.  We will gather together with those we love and share a meal that takes hours to prepare but only minutes to devour.  We will remember the past and be hopeful for the future.  But most of all, we will be thankful.  Thankful for our families and thankful for our friends. Thankful for our jobs and our homes and our health.  Thankful for the amazing country we live in and to those who make it so we can be thankful not just on Thanksgiving Day, but every other day of the year.   As for me, I’ll be thankful for all of the above plus one more little thing.  I’m thankful no one but me likes to eat the cooked milk.  I get the can all to myself!



I've Got The Music In Me

Recently at a Jacksonville Suns minor league baseball game, my kids noticed that each time a home-team player went to bat; a snippet of a song was played.  It got them talking about what their theme music would be and it got me thinking how much music is intertwined in our lives.  It’s in commercials, television shows, movies, heck - even our cell phone ring tones.  In the immortal words of the Miami Sound Machine – “the rhythm is gonna get you!” Like it or not.

The President arrives to the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” the Queen reins to “God Save the Queen,” and the Pope addresses his followers after the “Papal Anthem.”  These heads of state inherited a theme song along with their powerful positions.  Sadly, real life doesn’t come with a built-in soundtrack.  As cool as it would be to have the first few measures of “Eye of the Tiger” play every time you enter a room; it’s probably not going to happen.  But there are a few rare moments that music does accompany our real life.  All brides know that as soon as the first notes of Wagner’s “Bridal March” are played that every eye in the church will be on her.  We all sing the same song on our birthday, usually without fear of any copyright infringement we might be committing.  Internally we all have had the theme from Rocky play inside our head on those days when we need extra motivation, have heard those  two simple notes from Jaws when things seem slightly ominous, and a single moaning mental bugle has blown “Taps” when we have a personal epic fail! Plato said “Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.”  So take heart! Even though the rest of the world can’t hear Justin Timberlake singing “Sexy Back” while you’re walking down the street, you can, and that’s all that matters!

Commercial jingles jangle inside our minds; exactly as they are designed to do.  Even non-music lovers have their favorites to love and hate.  Classic jingles such as Alka Seltzer’s “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz”, Oscar Mayer’s “The Bologna Song”, and McDonald’s “Big Mac” chant are now part of our unique American culture.  Some tunes are simply irritating such as “Viva Viagra” and the Meow Mix’s “Meow Meow Meow Meow” wail.  Pop icon Barry Manilow got his start writing jingles.  You can thank him for Band Aid’s “I Am Stuck On Band Aid’s”, McDonald’s “You Deserve A Break Today”, and Dr. Pepper’s “Be A Pepper”.  The St. Louis Cardinals use the tune from Budweiser’s “King of Beers” as their team song. Whether you like the ad’s tune or not, it usually gets your attention and although you may not necessarily remember what it’s trying to sell you, you usually remember the song. .  Music not only sells, it sticks, way past the shelf-life of the product it was written for and into our everyday lives.

Name this TV show—

You take the good, you take the bad,

You take them both and there you have….

Yep, the “Facts of Life”!  One of my all-time favorite television shows growing up.  Along with “The Love Boat”, “Magnum P.I”, and “Different Strokes”.  And they all have something in common – memorable theme songs.  The music we listened to on the radio growing up, the albums we bought, and the television show themes we heard all played a part in the symphony of our lives.  One of the odd things about music is that you don’t have to be a true music lover for it to have an effect on you personally.  It’s just there in the background making memories for us.   Just hearing a familiar tune can sometimes spark images of good and even bad times.  Music marks the timeline of our lives.  But why is it that just a few notes of “Ice Ice Baby” instantly gives me a mental Polaroid  of my brother in red parachute pants riding his BMX bike down the street?  In 2009, the University of California proved through a brain-scan study that music serves as a soundtrack for memories that play like a movie inside our heads.  Just a few notes of a song you loved in high school can instantly bring you back to a particular person or place and all of sudden you are experiencing that moment all over again.  That definitely explains why I can’t hear the 1985 hit “No One Is To Blame” without wanting to physically fight someone, but that is for a different blog.  Tolstoy said “music is the shorthand of emotion.”  That’s a very powerful and very short sentence, unlike his epic novels.  I have a feeling Leo liked to listen to very melancholy melodies.

To borrow a bit from my good friends at America’s Cotton Producers, music is the fabric of our lives.  It helps to weave bits of love and celebration and fun and pain and heartache into our frontal cortex and stores it there, just waiting for us to rediscover.  Music is the exclamation point to what we need to know which is probably why it’s used to tell us things and sell us things. But most importantly, music helps us to remember who we were and who we are.  So although we don’t actually get our own theme song like those lucky baseball players we do get our own unique internal playlist.     Just remember to not hit the replay button too much and keep on downloading new hits.  And if you ever run into Howard Jones, let him know I’d like to have a few words with him! 

Go Old School This New Year

I have a favorite pencil. The Mirado Black Warrior. It’s a black, rounded pencil and writing with it feels like you are writing with silk. But the best part is how this pencil smells. One whiff and I’m instantly transported back in time. It’s the night before starting 4th grade and I’m out in the garage where the pencil sharpener hung, sharpening a box of #2’s and carefully placing them in my brand new pencil pouch. Trust me; the smell of the Black Warrior is so addicting you will never touch a mechanical pencil again!

Writing with a pencil is old fashioned. And jotting down notes and to-do lists with a pencil on actual paper is so last century. There are handy dandy apps I can download to my phone for grocery lists and to-do lists. Heck, there are even virtual Post-It notes! But there is something amazing about being able to have a thought and then pick up a writing instrument and turn that thought into something visible. Viola! What was in your head is now solid and tangible and can be easily shared with others. Our thoughts, our words, our wishes are suddenly real. We are the only living thing on earth that can achieve this feat. How awesome is that?

Whether your 2011 resolution was to lose 10 lbs, organize your closet or cook more meals for your family – take my advice and grab a small notebook and a fist-full of Mirado’s and jot down those resolutions. Next week I guarantee that while you are munching on peanut M&M’s while trying to find your left black pump as you punch the number to Pizza Hut into your cell because you’re too tired to cook – your Black Warriors will still be with you!