Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Barbara Martin’s Sweet Potato Casserole.

5 or 6 large sweet potatoes
3 T butter
fresh orange juice to soften
1/4 tsp each nutmeg, clove, ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon.
brown sugar to taste (1/4 to 1/2 cup)
Drizzles of maple syrup or pale molasses

Boil and peel sweet potatoes. Mash with other ingredients, mixing well.
Put into buttered casserole. Hatch top with fork, drizzle molasses or maple syrup over the top.
Bake at 350 for 45 minutes to an hour.

I’ve been cook-cook-cooking and getting ready for Easter. I always enjoyed that sentimental song “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” For those of us who wear the badge of “Mother”, we’ll be home for every holiday–because wherever we are we’ll be making some place into home for the people we love.

I got this recipe from my neighbor Barbara–now I live hundreds of miles from that neighborhood, and Barbara died of cancer not long after I moved away. But cooking the foods we shared is one of the ways we keep track of lost friends.

I miss my friend Barbara. I miss her courage. I miss her wit. I miss her enthusiasm. Barbara and I were “Early Birds” together. In Princeton, NJ, the Early Birds are an almost-religious cult. Devotees get up early and drive or walk to the YWCA to exercise every morning at 8 a.m. Barbara had been an Early Bird for 20 years before I met her, and we carpooled there together for 10 years more.

Barbara started going to Early Birds when it was a tiny group meeting in a basement at the Princeton Seminary. As a group, Early Birds predated aerobics, jazzercise, Pilates, and jogging. Before there was Earth Day. Before cars had seat belts. Before VCRs, before Xerox, back when the transistor radio was a novelty and that weighed more than a 5 lb. sack of sugar–Way, way back then, there were Early Birds and Barbara was Early-Birding.

Barbara wanted to keep her figure and her agility, and she kept them. I have a photo my daughter took of Barbara sitting on the floor, leaning forward and gripping the soles of her feet. I couldn’t do that! And she looked darn good in a leotard while she was doing it.

Barbara was a person who set high standards for herself. I think most of us do, but Barbara was of the generation that set high standards and then met them–whatever it took. I’ve heard it called the Greatest Generation because they lived through the Depression and World War II. I missed those events. I think of them as the Early Bird generation. They knew what they had to do and they did it. They didn’t expect to talk their way out of it.

More about my friend Barbara

I was so filled with hope after reading this op-ed today. If you long to find a Presidential candidate worth supporting, I urge you to check this out. Just a few excerpts:

Dean on Bush’s foreign policy: “The President who campaigned on a platform of a humble foreign policy has instead begun implementing a foreign policy characterized by dominance, arrogance and intimidation. The tidal wave of support and goodwill that engulfed us after the tragedy of 9/11 has dried up and been replaced by undercurrents of distrust, skepticism and hostility by many who had been among our closest allies. This unilateral approach to foreign policy is a disaster….”

Dean on his own domestic agenda:”I want to restore a sense of community in this country – where it’s not enough to worry whether your own kids have health care, but whether your neighbors’ kids have health care. I want to go to the South and talk about race. White southerners have been flocking to the Republican Party in recent years, but I want to offer them hope that their children will benefit from better schools and affordable health care, too. The Republican Party has done nothing for working people, black or white, and we need to remind Southern white folks that the only hope for better schools, and better job opportunities, and health care that is affordable is a Democratic President.”

Dean on fiscal responsibility: “I am what is commonly referred to as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. I am proud of the fact that as Governor I routinely balanced the budget – which I was not required to do by Vermont’s constitution – and paid down our state debt by nearly a quarter. I had to make tough decisions, and I will admit that some of them did not make the progressive community happy. But I made those decisions because I have a guiding principle that social justice must rest upon a foundation of fiscal discipline. Because of that approach to governance, Vermont today is not cutting education and is not cutting Medicaid despite the perilous economic times brought on by the Bush fiscal policies.”

You can learn more at Dean’s website www.DeanForAmerica.com.

Something strange has happened at Ivy League colleges since I was in college. A surprisingly large fraction of the entering students now come from strongly religious families. Why is this?

One simple explanation is that colleges are more diverse than when I was young. Many black families, and many “ethnic” families, are strongly Christian. But I don’t think that’s all.

So many of my fellow-leftist parents ran into trouble with their kids in high school. The lure of teen culture–if not drugs and alcohol then at least “hanging out”–was in powerful opposition to our ideals. The parents whose kids were afraid of going to hell–well, a lot of their kids did better in high school than our kids. Not that I think kids should spend adolescence worrying about hell….

I tried to google some numbers to back up my anecdotal evidence–couldn’t find any. But if I had another pre-high-school-age kid, I would spend more time encouraging self-control and less on glorifying self-expression.

Science heartlessly revealed information we all (sort of) knew but guys were hoping would never be public–“ Men Tend to Overestimate the Number of Sexual Partners They’ve Had.”

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,

And smale fowles maken melodye,

that slepen al the night with open yë,

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…

Geoffrey Chaucer (1385 -1400), The Canterbury Tales

The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed – the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to the papers of others. But with this excuse you journey to new and interesting places, meet new and interesting people, and form new and interesting relationships with them; exhange gossip and confidences (for your well-worn stories are fresh to them, and vice versa); eat, drink and make merry in their company every evening; and yet, at the end of it all, return home with an enhanced reputation for seriousness of mind.

David Lodge (1935 – ), Small World

Before I listen to anyone else’s bluster about the important objectives served by the war in Iraq, I would like to watch the blusterer try this little map game. Test your knowledge, at the most basic level, dragging and dropping the names of countries onto a map showing the Middle East. (Disclosure: I was embarrassed by mine.)

(Thanks to Joho for the link.)

Have you noticed that media frenzy over women POWs as exemplified by petite teenage Jessica Lynch hasn’t spilled over even one drop of extra compassion onto Shoshana Johnson, a 30-year-old black single mother from El Paso, Texas?

Shoshana is safe! And so are the rest of the POWs captured two-plus weeks ago when their truck took a wrong turn. My response at the time was that we should fire Rumsfeld and Hastert but bring Shoshana Johnson home to her two-year-old daughter.

I have to say that if Rumsfeld, Hastert, and Bush were all about to lose their jobs, I would not be as happy as I am now to learn that six US POWs are free, and one of them is Shoshana. The human heart is mysterious, don’t you think? But one of the very best things about us funny two-legged human animals is this: good news about people we care for brings us so much more happiness than news that bad things have happened to those we deplore.

Dave Winer told me he writes software for people who are very smart and very, very busy. I found his attitude refreshing–too many techy types treat the people who buy our stuff with secret contempt.

Jakob Nielsen, for instance, plans for users who are both lazy and stupid. (What was that joke–“Your interface is so ugly, Nielsen hates it”?) But why not give users ugly interfaces, whose simplicity shoves them rudely toward what they need?

Across the house, my husband is playing Mozart–the sound of it fills the kitchen and makes me smile. Even the odd blurred chord or hesitation tells its own story of struggle and aspiration.
Professional pianists, like professional tech folk, spend hours every day improving their skills. The rest of us fit in our practice-and-learning around the rest of our lives–which doesn’t make us lazy and stupid people.

And programmers, like Dave Winer, who understand that, write better software than people who just don’t get it.

As I sit in front of my computer blogging, I wander a small, friendly world of hobbit-y bloggers. But if I pick up a newspaper, the real world is run by Republican orcs. Don’t we want to change that? If so, we have to get beyond Tolkienesque wishful thinking about how powerful we already are.

Yes, webloggers “outed” the Republican astroturf scam. But Republicans are still running our country and scaring the heck out of everyone else’s country–and Bush is very popular with voters. James Moore’s vision of bloggers as a second superpower is a lovely fantasy we’d like to make true. (Of course, there are some bloggers scarier than Dick Cheney, but in a fantasy, I get to choose which bloggers end up with power.)

Even in our little web-world, who is winning–bloggers or the orcs of PR-advertising-spin? The bloggers I know all agree those spin-orcs tremble at our power:

“…the Internet provides the public relations profession with the opportunity for a rigorous self-examination. Straightforward practices based on full disclosure, genuine participation, honest listening, and real contributions to the net community will earn the community’s trust and permit a high level of useful two-way communication. Anything else will provide the net community with an opportunity to trash some manipulative PR people, which it will happily do. The choice is up to you.”

That reads like today’s consensus on the future, but in fact it comes from a 1995 online journal, The Network Observer. The “manipulative PR people” are still making money and plenty of it–the Network Observer died in 1996.

Check out James Surowiecki’s analysis of the Battle of Helms Deep: most battles are won by the side with power, not people with cleverness and “heart.” There are elections coming up, elections which will result a gigantic transfer of real-world power. Big business is throwing big dollars into Republican campaign funds, hoping to make the world safe for extended copyright, unregulated corporations, and even more tax breaks. The Left needs money too. We need to build infrastructure. And could we please stop telling each other how great things already are?

Go, Mikhaela!