Eating ugly

     Ever wonder what those exotic, weird-looking fruits and vegetables you sometimes pass in the produce aisle taste like?

     Today I decided to find out, when I picked up an aptly-named Ugli fruit and a couple of chayote squash, which look like mummified little granny doll faces.

     “Tastes like honeyed tangerine and tart grapefruit,” the little sign at Hannaford’s promised of the Ugli fruit, perhaps the most unsightly specimen of produce I have ever seen. The Jamaican import has a rough, wrinkly, misshapen rind that looks way too loose for whatever fruit might be inside.

     The chayote isn’t much prettier. Originally from Mexico, chayotes look a little like large granny smith apples, but with a whoops-lost-my-dentures crease in the middle of them. These days, they’re most often imported from Veracruz and Costa Rica, which is where mine came from, and they’re used in Hispanic, Creole, Indian and Asian cuisines.

     Interestingly, a rumor in Australia that chayotes were being used instead of apples in McDonald’s apple pies led to the fast food giant publicly emphasizing that real apples were going into its pastries, according to Wikipedia. Also, chayotes are purported to have cell-regenerative properties and some people believe that the people in San Bernardo, Colombia, who ate lots of it, became mummified from their consumption. (I wonder if they looked anything like what they ate…)

     Anyway, I decided to sauté the chayotes with garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper and a little red wine vinegar and serve them as a side dish with a Weight Watcher recipe, Spanish chick pea, tomato and kale stew (I threw in a little vegetarian sausage for protein) and serve the Ugli fruit with greens as a salad.

     Results? The Weight Watcher recipe was so-so, the chayote squash was bland (but firm; like a slightly nutty zucchini, with promise for another recipe) and the Ugli fruit was pretty darn good, both tasted separately and mixed with greens and a vinaigrette.

     Now I’m thinking it would be fun to have an Ugly Food party where everybody brought a dish made with the ugliest produce they could find.

     Anybody game?

Stepping into a snow globe

     The snow was driving horizontally, evergreen branches snagging the flakes. The wind yowled and played like a cat, sending dancing spirals of snow across the pond, into the distant white void, across our faces.

     After a “winter” of no lingering snow, we had finally found the season, on a path I had never taken before, just across the street from the Pinkham Notch Visitors Center in the White Mountains.

     Rick and I spent yesterday there for a one-night getaway and took the “Lost Pond Trail” a guide had recommended – just after the area had gotten its first (eight-inch) snowfall of the year. A virgin hike on virgin snow.

     We hiked in maybe a half mile on a gently sloping trail next to a stream before we came upon the frozen pond where we stood, transfixed, for several long and wordless moments.

     “This would be a good place to meditate,” Rick finally said.

     “I think we are meditating,” I responded.

     I hope this short video allows you to share at least some of the afternoon’s magic.

     

You might not want to try this yourself

     For an entire day – more than 100 miles – I drove at the speed limit.

     On the winding, 35-mph back roads near my home, through “downtown” Derry, N.H., on interstates 93 and 495 and down scenic Route 2 -- even where there is an absurdly dictated 25 mph approaching the Concord rotary -- I honored those speed limit signs, and all the way home, as well.

     Vehicles driven by ticked-off motorists lined up behind me on the two-lane highways, motorists swooshed around me on the interstates and I nearly ended up with someone else’s front grill in my back seat as I slowed for that rotary.

     For this speed queen, it was agony.

     And yet…

     There was something liberating about going more slowly. I felt more in control, less at the mercy of other motorists’ unpredictable or crazy maneuvers. More even. It was like letting go of all the striving, not caring if I was literally passed by.

     When I arrived at work, I felt more calm and receptive than I can remember feeling in a long time.

     It made me wonder if there weren’t some lessons to be learned for my off-road activities, as well.

     I may even try this again.

     Not to mention the improvement in my gas mileage

Roasted hot dogs, anyone?

     This was one “virgin” experience I never expected to have – participating in an outdoor weiner roast in the middle of February.

     Yesterday’s meal was made all the more delectable by the fact that I and my dining companions had hiked in two and a half miles to a shelter in the middle of 8,000-acre Bear Brook State Park outside Allenstown, N.H. before building a fire for the feast. We were hungry.

     There were maybe a dozen of us, mostly strangers, brought together by an “events” listing in the magazine published by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), a venerable organization for lovers of the outdoors. But people rarely stay strangers at an AMC function – so much so that some refer to the group as the “Appalachian Meeting Club” for the many relationships it has fostered. A former coworker (you know who you are) met her husband because of AMC when they both showed up for a hike and were the only two there. They hiked anyway, and they’re still hiking together, years later.

     The day’s pleasure was also enhanced by the weather – 45 degrees and sunny, perfect for a brisk hike. But our friendly, knowledgeable group leader, Bill Darcy, had been exacting in his instructions beforehand – no matter how warm you think it is, wear warm winter boots, dress in layers, keep an extra jacket in your pack and make sure you have crampons for navigating icy trails.

     I had scoffed at the idea of crampons – there’s no snow or ice in the woods at our house – but his experience trumped my naivete. The trails were like glacier flow, white and icy and slippery as hell. Rick and my YakTrax friction cleats spared us from sudden horizontality but some others were not as fortunate (note: Bill’s favorite crampon-like device is called MICROspikes, which many of the more experience hikers were wearing).

     We roasted sausage and wieners (in our case, tofu dogs), as well as the marshmallows Bill had kindly provided, before carefully putting out the fire with snow and proceeding the two and a half miles back to the parking lot.

     I found the round trip a bit more tiring than I normally find a five-mile hike, perhaps because I kept tensing my leg muscles in fear of the ice on the trails. But we returned home having made new friends and having exercised our bodies and spirits – “sore, but happy” as Rick wrote in a note to a friend.

     We were in bed by 7:30. I slept 12 hours.    

On stopping a stranger to remove the toilet paper stuck to her shoe

     It was Valentine’s Day and Rick and I had gone out to dinner at a neighborhood place, where we settled in for some good food and celebration. As I usually do in a restaurant, I looked around to check out our “neighbors” and noticed a couple in my direct vision clearly enjoying their meal.

     At one point, the woman of the pair got up to go to the restroom and when she returned I couldn’t help noticing that she was dragging about a foot of toilet paper that had stuck to her shoe.

     “Maybe I should go over and tell her or pull it off for her,” I said.

     “You’re just trying to do something you’ve never done before so you can blog about it,” Rick accused.

     So I didn’t go over, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing to walk out of a crowded restaurant with a foot of toilet paper stuck to your shoe? Wouldn’t I want someone to tell me if I were in that situation?

     I held off, but when the couple got up to leave and walked past us, I could restrain myself no longer.

     “Excuse me,” I said to the woman, “let me help you.” Then I bent over and tore off the toilet paper with my napkin.

     “Thank you,” she said, with a glimmer in her eye.

     And that was that.

     But I couldn’t help thinking about other situations where strangers have stopped to perform little acts of charity. I have been the beneficiary of many – and they were much larger than simply removing paper from a shoe.

     Once – long before cell phones – when my car broke down on my way home from work on busy Route 3 in Nashua, N.H., a woman stopped and stayed with me until my auto club arrived. I asked if I could repay her in some way. “No,” she said. “Just pass it on.”

     And the next time I saw a broken-down motorist, I did.

     I love the Valentine’s Day anecdote on my “Random Acts of Kindness” calendar, about a woman who was working on a project that would keep her up most of the night and who went out for a bowl of soup and sat at the bar of a restaurant. Sitting there, she noticed a lonely-looking man who was trying to make conversation with the distracted bartender, to no avail. Not wanting to prolong her project but feeling sorry for the man nonetheless, the woman left a large tip for the female bartender, along with a note that said, “Be nice to that man; he’s lonely.”

     Weeks later, she went to the home of a seamstress she had never met to have some alterations done and was startled when the seamstress turned out to be that very bartender. The bartender laughed and admitted her in, where the woman observed – to her astonishment – the lonely man from the bar sitting on the couch. On the wall was the note she had left at the bar, which had led to their relationship.

     You never know where a random act of kindness will lead.

Grieving the Buddhist way

     I had never been to a “Parinirvana Day,” which is held annually at Buddhist centers like Aryaloka in Newmarket, N.H. The word “parinirvana” is a combination of “pari,” or “about,” and “nirvana,” or “enlightment,” and loosely translated it means “final enlightment.”

     It was a day about death.

     Rick and I wanted to go today not only because we had just lost our beloved dog Liberty, but because her death recalled all the other deaths we have experienced – our parents, my two previous husbands, a sister-in-law, my good friend Kathy Bruemmer, our beloved neighbor Bill and so many others. What to do with all the grief?

     The day began in meditation, which I find to be a way of calming the mind so that it is more receptive.

     Death does that, too. Have you ever noticed that, at least with some people, grief opens your heart? For some time after the death of a loved one, the smallest things – a falling leaf, wind in the trees – become profoundly meaningful, as though they were messages from another realm, or sacred occurrences we had never fully appreciated before. Maybe they are, and maybe they’ve always been sacred and it is just our present openness that allows us to see that.

     After a break, we returned for readings from the Parinibbana Sutta, basically a text about the Buddha’s final weeks of life, took another pause and regrouped to share stories about the loved ones we were there to remember and celebrate.

     There were some tears, yes, but also much joy.

     For Buddhists believe – and they are certainly not alone in this – that impermanence is inescapable, that death is life’s destination, that surrender and acceptance are our best means of coping.

     So there is sorrow, yes, but not the hand-wringing “why me” kind. More like an acknowledgement that yes, that person or that animal walked this earth and was loved by us and now is gone, as we someday will be, as well.

     My dear late friend Ed Buthmann, who was quite elderly when he died, used to use a German expression that means “shared joy is doubled joy.”

     After today, I might add that shared grief is lessened grief.

     I feel lighter than I did at the start of the day.

Farewell to our dear little dog daughter

     We loved her the moment we saw her, the only one in the litter with a crook at the end of her tail, curved like Cape Cod.

     Between her propensity for trying to escape from the box that contained her and the rest of the brood and the date when we picked her up, July 4, it was clear we should call her Liberty.  She always lived up to that name, escaping and running like the wind at every opportunity and doing “turbo-dog” circles around our other, younger, canine adoptee, Chewbacca.

     Isn’t it strange how an animal can capture your heart? I loved watching her ears bob as she trotted along on a walk, her sweet furry smell, the way she gave me a good-morning lick/kiss at the bottom of the stairs every day, her freedom-seeking ways, her constancy.

     We had her for 15 ½ years.

     Today’s was one “first-ever” activity I never wanted to have, saying goodbye to her.

     The cancer with which she was diagnosed some 16 months ago had been beaten back all this time with radiation and gentle chemotherapy pills, but it finally prevailed, as that horrible illness too often does.

     Our vet agreed to come to the house. Just beforehand, we took her for one last walk, savored the sight of her bobbing ears and sniffing curiosity, brought her in for some ice cream and held her while the injections were administered.

     I haven’t cried this hard in a long time.

     Tonight, Rick and I and Chewbacca are trying to stick to our routine, having dinner, being together. But one of our number is missing and we all feel it.

     I try to think of what our beloved pet sitter, Donna, told us after she visited yesterday.

     Liberty is going to make one fine angel.

The strange new world of QR codes

     I’ve seen it all now.

     Today, I held up my phone – my PHONE! – to the page of a magazine and listened while it made a snapping sound then immediately started playing a video of a cute guy standing outdoors and showing off the features of his new backpack. It even offered to let me share my new find with Facebook, Twitter or anyone I cared to email.

     Welcome to the world of QR codes.

      QR codes, or “quick response” codes, are those little one-inch-by-one-inch boxes with squiggle lines through them that you can find on some magazine pages, storefront posters or even on some restaurant menus.

     They allow you to use your mobile phone as a scanning device, working much as a bar code does when you check out at the grocery store, so you can be directed to… well, whatever online destination the originator of the QR code wants you to visit, most often a website.

     Obviously they’re a great marketing tool, and more and more companies are using them in their print promotions. But they can also be used to download an app, add someone’s contact information to an address book or even dial a phone number.

     Using one represented a “virgin” experience I was anxious to try.

     But first I needed an app to scan the codes. ITunes offers numerous free apps for that purpose and I actually ended up downloading two – I-nigma, which was fine for scanning basic QR codes, and Microsoft Tag, which also scans “tags” (kind of like QR codes but in color).

    Then I grabbed three magazines we had lying around the house, “Whole Living, “Self” and “Backpacker” (yes, we are a house of multi-interests) to check out the QR codes therein.

     The result? One visit to a basic La-Z-Boy website, a video on how to use a Neti Pot (way too much information), chances to register for both an island getaway sweepstakes and a Fort Lauderdale beach getaway contest, a solicitation for the “summit for someone” charity, an ad for a backpacker GPS app, a video of “exciting Norway,” a slide show about a new mascara with “sculpting fibers” and, of course, the video of the cute guy showing off his new Granite Gear backpack.

     Not an especially compelling lineup (the Granite Gear backpack guy notwithstanding) but think of the possibilities. What would you use a QR code for?

     I’m wondering if I could pass out business cards with QR codes directing the unsuspecting to this very blog.

     I just have to figure out how to make the right squiggly lines.

     But that’s a virgin experience for another day.

Huh? Me wear a hearing aid?

 

     I’m sick of asking soft-voiced people to repeat what they just said, tired of that sense of confusion I get in a crowded, noisy room and – most important – sad that I have been missing such delicate sounds as the song of a distant woodthrush in summer.

     So, after years of denial and the third audiogram in as many years to show mild to moderate hearing loss (too much Led Zeppelin?), today I took the “virgin” step of asking to test-drive a hearing aid.

     I’m wearing it now – though you’d probably never notice.

     Hearing aids have become so much sleeker since the days of the clunky, buzzing, ear-filling things that my grandmother used to wear.

     These days, you can buy jewelry-toned aids that look like tiny Bluetooths, or devices that are small and sophisticated enough that they fit entirely in your ear canal, so no one even notices them.

     My kind of hearing loss is in the high-frequency range, and with words that start with “s” or “f” or “th” as all of my favorite swear words do, and – like Bill Clinton, who now wears a hearing aid full-time – I have trouble understanding any kind of word in a crowded room without “help.”

     I watched while Michelle, my audiologist, programmed my “loaner” hearing aid on a computer across the room, adjusting volume and configuring it so it will gradually get louder over the course of a month (so as not to be overwhelming right away).

     “Can you hear me well?” she said when she was finished.

     “Why are you yelling?” I responded.

     You know when you get off an airplane and your ears are plugged and then you yawn or swallow and they “pop” and you can hear clearly again? Well, that was almost what it was like. Hearing clearly again after who-knows-how-many years.

     The rustling of paper on her desk. The murmur of people in the waiting room. The hum of an overhead light.

     Why have I resisted all this time?

     Of course, I know exactly why. The same reason that, until recently, I haven’t announced my age. So as not to be considered old. So as not to be dismissed.

     Well, “s,” “f” and “th” that.

     I’m 64. I am buying a hearing aid. I want to hear and participate as much as ever. Maybe more. And I’m proud to say so.

     Agree with my point of view? Well, give me a call. I can hear you now.