Lunch Date
One thing I’d like that I will mention
is a bit of old-fashioned attention.
The kind with no device in hand
is the kind that I can stand
better than the sort with texting
minds caught in “before” and “next”ing
and not a thought for whom you’re with
until I’m sure that it’s a myth
that I’m the one you want to see,
even though you have invited me.
For though our table is for two,
you bring so many more with you–
every relative and friend.
Your texts to them just never end.
Our tete a tete‘s become absurd.
I never get to speak a word!
So there’s one thing I’d like to state.
Please cancel our next luncheon date.
The next time you desire a munch,
just take your iPhone out to lunch!
My prompt was “Old-fashioned Attention.” To get a prompt or see more JNW Prompt-Generated posts, go HERE.
Needless to say, there will be no sequel to this lunch date, but to see posts about sequels to movies, go here: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/missing-seqeuls/
My chile bush has grown by leaps and bounds this year, thanks to a vigorous rainy season. This is a closeup of its bloom. It is actually very tiny. Perhaps 1/2 inch across.
As you can see, some little spider has been very busy indeed on this plant.
If I make a lunch for workers, they often nab a few chiles off this bush to spice up my tame gringa food. Perhaps they, too, will be nabbed–by this busy spider.
Chiles in all stages from green to yellow to red can be seen on my former plant, now bush, soon to be tree!!! (Given another rainy season like this one.)
To get an idea of the scale of these miniature chiles, go HERE.
http://ceenphotography.com/2015/08/29/flower-of-the-day-august-29-2015-rose/
Hen Minus Chick
The Latin name of Hen and Chicks is Sempervivum, which means “live forever” because they are so easy to grow and propagate so easily. One of my favorite succulents.
https://nadiamerrillphotography.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/a-photo-a-week-challenge-fill-the-frame/
Birds of Paradise
For glorious tulips, go here: http://ceenphotography.com/2015/08/28/flower-of-the-day-august-28-2015-tulips/
Reading
The book I’ve chosen for the plane ride
sits open on my lap
as the stranger on the plane
opens himself—
his life pulled leaf by leaf from his family tree.
His words come faltering and sputtering at first,
like water from a tap newly opened,
then rush out cool and even,
telling of a life that is a richness
of jobs held, wives loved, children raised.
He is going back to Mexico for the saints day
of the small pueblo where he was born.
The parade. The effigies. The life-sized santos
standing in their boats to tour the lake like kings.
I’ve been to this celebration; and as he speaks,
I sit like an honored guest beside him,
reading my memory as well
“Come,“ he tells me, giving me directions and a date.
I do not tell him I have been to that fiesta years ago.
“Perhaps,” I say, sliding his instructions to his family’s house
to form a bookmark in the book now closed upon my lap,
then go on, listening.
What were we born for
if it was not to read each other?
In the rush from the plane, that old man falls behind
and it is you I see as I come out into the world of Mexico,
leaving the plane ride, immigration and customs
in its place behind the swinging doors.
This flower that you give me is a mystery book.
I read it—stamen, pistil and corolla—
as well as the hand that holds it out to me
and then the warm embrace that you enfold me in.
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Middle Seat.” It turns out that your neighbor on the plane/bus/train (or the person sitting at the next table at the coffee shop) is a very, very chatty tourist. Do you try to switch seats, go for a non-committal brief small talk, or make this person your new best friend?
At Irene’s request, I am publishing the poem that I published the ending to yesterday in its entirety today. Audrey and Betty–you may not want to read this one!
The Combiners
They used to roll in mile-long parades
down the two-lane highway that led to our town–
big trucks carrying bigger combines,
like mothers still carrying their much-too-large sons.
Once we followed a string of twenty combines
for fifty miles—
Passing them all an impossibility,
as much for their sheer numbers
as for the almost constant tourist traffic
in the oncoming lane.
When the caravan pulled off the road at last,
sixty cars squealed by, accelerating.
From opened windows, fists were raised,
and not in solidarity.
They ringed the football field,
parking far out against the fence
like floats after a homecoming parade.
In an inner ring, camping trailers, cars and pickups
With license plates from Kansas or from Oklahoma,
drew into a not-much-smaller circle,
like wagons protecting themselves
from a too-easy invasion of natives.
The next morning, the combines
and most of the cars and trucks
pulled out,
leaving the trailers like war brides behind them
as men and machines moved out to the land
to bring in the harvest
before the hail or rain hit.
These machine monsters
Were not the air-conditioned luxury cruisers
of today, but the dusty, scratched, hot,
wheat chaff-blanketed, insect-filled,
open-to-the-one-hundred-degree air
combines of the fifties.
Each summer in July,
when these droves of men and boys
came northwest
from Kansas and Oklahoma,
we were told by our mothers to
stay away from the school football field
for the weeks of the harvest,
to stay away from the boys
in the downtown cafes
and the movie theaters
and the weekend dances.
Especially, to stay away from boys
in pickups or in cars
with out-of-state license plates
as they “U’d” main on Saturday night.
To stay away from their soft southern drawling voices
and their sun-baked work-hardened hands
and the tanned sinews of their arms.
Away from their breath
and their eyes,
their slow smiles
and their syrup voices.
These same boys we came to know
as shy farm boys
or college students
earning tuition with a summer job,
were dangerous in the minds of our mothers,
who either remembered
magnetic strangers of their own
or knew the dangers in the way of small towns:
by watching the lives of others.
Our fathers’ memories
of teenage yearnings
or present urges, fulfilled or unfulfilled,
swelled their minds with possibilities as well;
but fathers didn’t talk to daughters about such things.
The mothers were their buffers and their adjutants,
and so the fathers watched and mothers warned
the day the combiners came to town, plague or gift,
to camp in their Airstreams in the high school football field.
What better gift could be brought to a teenaged girl
In a prairie town of 700 people?
It was a treeless, riverless, lakeless town
sixty miles from nowhere.
A town where most of the boys went home
right after football practice
or basketball practice
or track.
Where on weekends they shot rats at the city dump.
Where in the summers, they worked
on their dads’ farms
And barely came to town at all.
A town where my particular age group of boys–
five of them in a class of fifteen–
were all late bloomers when it came to girls
and who even when they did bloom in their senior year,
didn’t date us,
but dated, instead,
freshman girls who made them feel secure.
What better gift, then, could be brought to us
than Oklahoma boys, soft-speaking, tanned and dangerous?
There were three restaurants in our town–
two for locals, one
for tourists and special occasions–
And in all three,
the majority of waitresses
were high school girls.
It was here that we came to know their
soft-drawl voices as they ordered,
sly-shy smiles when we filled their tea glasses,
the bump of their tanned knuckles against our wrists
as they took the ketchup bottle.
Here, our mothers could not insulate us from
the clean smell of their after-work showers
and the scent of wheat chaff lingering under it,
their tanned arms and their tanned faces,
their foreignness and their taboo charm.
The dances in Vivian, 40 miles away,
started at 10, when the shows let out,
and ended at 1:30.
There were kids from all the high schools
for 60 miles around.
The drinking dads of some of my school friends went there,
and college kids,
guys from Pierre–the biggest town we knew–
as well as from Presho and Kennebec and Chamberlain.
These dances in the town gym were famous.
Only sodapop or coffee were sold at the concession stand,
but drinking went on in cars
and in the bar down the street,
before, during and after.
The summer I was sixteen,
sneaking a smoke in the parking lot before the dance,
we noticed the pickups with the out-of-state license plates.
This was a first for us–
an extension of the neutral ground of restaurants.
Later, inside, we saw them dancing with the Vivian girls.
Each of us felt like we owned a particular combiner
that we’d noticed on the street or,
more likely, in some cafe,
so that their dancing with Vivian girls
seemed to us an infidelity
that we might or might not forgive them for.
I saw him first on the bleachers
on the other side of the floor.
As dancers came together and parted,
I saw him and then didn’t see him.
After the music stopped, I craned my neck
around the legs that stood in front of me,
trying to see him across the cleared dance floor.
Then the voice at the top of the legs
asked me to dance, and I looked up–at him.
Feeling uncertain, wicked and wild,
I answered yes.
I’d served him once or twice
at Restaurant 16–
that highway-fronting restaurant
as exotic as its name.
I knew he was working the Weston place
with an outfit my dad had never used.
He liked his steak well-done,
French dressing, no tomatoes.
Butterscotch sundaes made him cough.
Over the water pitcher and order pad,
we had traded a look or two.
I knew he wore Old Spice
and drank Cokes with breakfast,
but I didn’t know his name.
When we got to the dance floor,
he took my hand,
put his other hand on my damp waist.
It was a slow dance and the night was hot.
The dance was work.
I was awkward–too inhibited to get as intimate
as following in dancing requires.
Over the music, we tried to shout our names,
tried to find a mutual rhythm,
finally giving up both endeavors
to dance the slow song, untouching,
moving our arms in fast song 60’s style
to the slow song rhythms.
When the music stopped,
he walked me back again
to the bleacher
he had plucked me from,
reinserted me into the correct space in the line of girls,
smiled, and walked away.
My friends closed around me
like a sensitive plant
to hear the news.
I watched his back,
blue short-sleeved shirt,
his pressed Levis
and his cowboy boots.
I watched the Oklahoma swing of his hips–
danger on the hoof.
He wouldn’t ask me to dance again,
yet, his sun-blackened arms,so finely muscled,
had held me for a minute or two.
His bleached blue eyes
had seen something of worth in me.
He had asked my name, touched my waist,
and walked me off the dance floor.
And, since this was as spicy
as any of our stories would likely be
all summer long,
I turned to my friends to tell the tale.
I definitely think this suits today’s prompt: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/take-a-chance-on-me/
Photo and article reprinted from the Natural News
Biologist Explains how Marijuana Causes Tumor Cells to Commit Suicide
(NaturalNews) The therapeutic potential of cannabis appears limitless, extending far beyond just relieving nausea or pain in the terminally ill. Christina Sanchez, a molecular biologist from Compultense University in Madrid, Spain, has been studying the molecular activity of cannabinoids for more than 10 years, and during this time she and her colleagues have learned that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the primary psychoactive component of cannabis, induces tumor cell “suicide” while leaving healthy cells alone.
This amazing discovery was somewhat unexpected, as Sanchez and her team had initially been studying brain cancer cells for the purpose of better understanding how they function. But in the process, they observed that, when exposed to THC, tumoral cells not only ceased to multiply and proliferate but also destroyed themselves, both in lab tests and animal trials. Sanchez first reported on this back in 1998, publishing a paper on the anti-cancer effects of THC in the European biochemistry journal FEBS Letters.
“In the early 1960s, Raphael Mechoulam from the Hebrew University in Israel categorized the main compound in marijuana producing the psychoactive effects that we all know,” explained Sanchez during an interview with Cannabis Planet. “After the discovery of this compound that is called THC, it was pretty obvious that this compound had to be acting on the cells, on our organism, through a molecular mechanism.”
Sanchez expounds upon this and much more in a five-minute video segment available here:
Vimeo.com.
For more of the article, go HERE.
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Take a Chance on Me.” This is by no means the biggest chance I ever took, but sometimes we should really heed that inner voice that says we should not do something. In this case, it involved eating at a restaurant when from the beginning, I felt there was something wrong!
How a hamburger and fries should look!
Dinner at Uncle Zack’s
It’s hard to believe that someone has had a presentiment of disaster after it has happened, but since I am the one who had the premonition, I’m going to remain true to myself and admit that I had a feeling of disaster the minute we walked into the restaurant. It wasn’t our first choice, or even our second, but we knew the first choice was closed and when we arrived at the second, although it seemed full of people having some kind of a meeting, the sign on the door said, “Closed.” I was all for stopping by McDonald’s for a fast hamburger, but my friend said she didn’t like fast food, so we settled on our third or fourth alternative, depending on which of us was making the choice. We opted for Uncle Zack’s.
It was a stark room with two other tables of diners and a table near the kitchen that sported a big chunk of prime rib that someone must have been carving on since lunch time, since when my friend asked if they had any rare, the owner, overhearing, came and said that they had carved away all the rare meat. Hard to believe, since one would think the rare meat would be in the middle, but I judged her to be lucky not to be eating any meat that must have been sitting there most of the afternoon. It was 5 o’clock, we were fresh out of seeing the movie “Blue Jasmine,” a bit depressed and pretty hungry for a dinner that would lift our mood.
Right.
Our adventure began when my friend asked the waiter if they could serve her a Cosmo. “Well, I don’t know what that is, but I could probably figure out how to mix you one,” he admitted, without too much enthusiasm.
My friend opted for water, unsure of whether she wanted a barman/waiter who had never heard of a Cosmo to mix her one.
“Well, to me alcohol is just something you clean out a wound with,” he admitted, as he hurried off for her water and my Diet Coke. I swear to God he said this.
They arrived in tall glasses with plenty of ice and a lemon slice. Her water was fine . My Coke was flat and tasted of disinfectant.
When the waiter came back for our orders, my friend was unsure of what she wanted to order. I told the waiter about the Diet Coke and asked for a glass of water and a hamburger, well-done with fries.
A very very very long time later, our waiter returned, apologizing by saying he had been attending to my last complaint. By that I took it that they were washing the disinfectant off the soda dispenser and aerating it, yet he offered me no new glass of Coke, and I had no intention of ordering another one.
My friend asked if the turkey Reuben was fresh turkey or luncheon meat. After a trip to the kitchen, he admitted it was luncheon meat but then in a flash of inspiration, admitted they might be able to use the turkey they were cutting off the same steam table that contained the bones of the Prime Rib.
In the interim between the time we ordered and the time we finally got our meals, I experienced a few additional sights that made me regret our decision to eat with Uncle Zack. The first was the sight of the other waiter picking pieces off the prime rib and eating them. The other was the sight of him scratching his nostril soon after and making no hasty exit to the sink to wash his hands.
I knew if I mentioned this to my friend, that we would be out of there. He was not our waiter, we hadn’t ordered the prime rib, so I remained mute. It was her hometown. I didn’t want to embarrass her, and to be truthful, I didn’t want to embarrass myself by appearing to be a difficult customer. Hindsight. Only in hindsight did I gain the knowledge that we should have left then.
Our meals arrived some time later. I bit into a fry enthusiastically, only to discover that it was soggy on the outside, raw on the inside. When I commented, my friend slid the only crisp French Fry out of the stack and pronounced it fine. I then handed her one of the limp others, which she agreed was still raw. I bit into the hamburger, which sort of rebounded off my teeth. It was the consistency of rubber—slightly resistant to chewing. When I tried to cut it, I had to saw at it as thought I was trying to slice a rubber ball. I took a bite. Tasteless. I cut it in half horizontally, thinking it might help and that I could at least eat the cheese and bacon, but they were equally tasteless.
My friend ate most of her Reuben, which she pronounced as tasteless as the hamburger, if not as difficult to masticate.
At the end of our meal, the young man waiter asked if I wanted a doggy bag for my hamburger and fries. No. I did not. When he brought the check, he asked if we had enjoyed our meals. No. We had not. I suggested that he instruct the cook to actually cook the fries and that the hamburger had a rubber consistency reminiscent of meat left in the freezer too long. “Oh,” he said.
“I’m now going to McDonald’s to get a real hamburger and fries” I said. We paid the bill, left a 20 % tip to let him know we weren’t just trying to stiff the establishment and the waiter, and drove to McDonald’s, where in place of an order of fries (I was totally “off” hamburgers at that point) and a Diet Coke, we were served a regular Coke and a Diet Coke instead.
As we sat at the drive-up window waiting for our correct order, my friend told me that when the people in the booth next to us were served their prime rib, she heard the waiter apologize and say, “The next time you come, we’ll give you a bigger serving. We sorta ran out of prime rib tonight.” Will they be back? Will we?
Sometimes, it’s better to eat at home.
Note: The name of the restaurant has been changed to protect the guilty. Perhaps it was just an off-day?
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 