a little red hen

Super Bawl* Sunday: Ads a Feminist Could Support

Much chatter* about this year's TV ads accompanying today's football event, the yearly display of testosterone with accompanying rise in spouse abuse.  Women's Media Center has coordinated shout-outs to  CBS to dump the ad.  And been ignored.  Everything more you'd want to know appears in the blog,  The Reclusive Leftist.  She rightly nails patriarchy as the true source of the problem.

For image, I offer one  saved on my desktop for a couple of years--a poster on bus kiosk around New York City.   I'd support variations on it year round.  Living closer to the ground, so to speak, these days in Portland, Oregon,  I now start the day with the  local Oregonian delivered to my door in contrast to the national NY Times (read later when picked up at the front desk of my retirement community).

Locally Portland would seem to harbour more women abusers than back east (I doubt this) because the "small" incidents here are reported by the media.   In NYC only prominent men receive notice by journalists.  Coast to coast, however, they are always lightly punished. 

Writing to promote the "Geezers' Crusade" , David Brooks on the Op-Ed page of the Times, wants us to do more on behalf of younger people.  Would he support a movement by older people that demands  more visible signs of respect for women in every American city--bold ones like this poster? 

Could it happen in  your city?

Bialy memories: Kossar's Bialy store, New York City

The other day Ron Bloom unearthed photos I took in the 1980s on one of our trips from Baltimore to New York to visit relatives and return home with provisions unavailable in what has been known as "Charm City."  Baltimore had its appealing qualities but "charm" was not one I'd identify.

Kossar's Bialy store (link has instructions on how to eat one!) has somehow stayed in place on the lower east side though the bakers have changed ethnicity.  As I mentioned on an earlier post, this is THE place for authentic bialys and we would fill our car trunk to enrich our Baltimore freezer with about 10 dozen--some to be shared with fortunate friends and neighbors, always plenty to last us till the next longing.

I offer this as a window into how deeply some are attached to particular food connected with memory.  This is Ron's, honed over many years in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn,(scroll down on the page)  a Jewish ghetto of an American style.

My own special food is tapioca (this public service link has recipe how to make it with real, not instant, pearls) probably tasted in a Manhattan cafeteria like Horn & Hardart (gorgeous photo of odd machine that delivered cocoa for a nickel in my memory--rather than coffee mentioned in copy.)  A far less emotion-filled food recollection than his.

Bialy via PDX...message to New Seasons: bigger but not better

We first noticed them last winter at New Seasons Market on Division Street on our visit to Portland to find an apartment.  They intrigued us with their boldness, bialy's twice as big as those we knew from New York City .  Maybe, we wondered, it's about the West, the frontier, the big sky, etcetera.

Last night at New Seasons, we made our move and bought one--all nine-inches of it.  [Once again I've taken an unauthorized photo and escaped being admonished by New Seasons' very pleasant monitors.] 

We negotiated ingesting it this morning--before I had a chance to take its picture in our own environment.   "Not sure how to divide this thing," Ron said.  Yes, it took real skill to suppress memories of our old 4-inch NYC bialy.  Those are the ones described in Mimi Sheraton's, The Bialy Eaters, A Story of a Bread and a Lost World** which includes a recipe (for the brave and hardy) to make an almost-authentic Kossar's bialy. 

Sheraton believes that Kossar's is the only place to buy an authentic one.   To order some by mail, you go HERE.

Taste?  According to the bialy maven here (whose late mother came from Bialystok, Poland), "At best, I'd give it a D-minus.  But what can you expect?  It's made with cibatta dough, not sticky enough...needed NYC water."  We're guessing this New Seasons' product is known as the "Montreal bialy."  The store held cooking classes on making these last year, I heard.

Other efforts to re-create this delicacy are on the King Arthur flour site, a blog from a Virginia-based librarian, and a guy with great photos of the baking process--but the belly-reduction ad on his blog is definitely at odds with the true intention of the bialy--bulk up!

**Thanks to our downstairs neighbor, Elisabeth, for the loan of Sheraton's book (the hardback one with removable  paper cover featuring two bialys lovingly held by a woman's hands, inside pages are only black and white).  This is what authentic ones look like, color and shape.

What I Miss about Manhattan: The Voting Booth

Let's start with how disappointed we are that the state of Oregon uses mail-in ballots.  That little oval to fill in (blue or black pen suggested) led me to  obsess about getting it right.  Annoying.

Ron and I loved going to our polling place, meeting neighbors, seeing how the poll workers did their jobs (very efficiently).  We've heard that mailed ballots increase participation.  Really?  My impression is this approach encourages proliferation of damned initiatives like 66 & 67, started by people who want to override decisions by the state legislature.  Oregon and the state of Washington are the two that have mail-in ballots.

And the cost?  I've been trying to track this one down without success.  Must be enough paper consumed to pay all the teachers in my grandson's elementary school (where they could use a few more teachers and classrooms, thank you).  And  the photo does not include the hefty Voters' Pamphlet, all 91 pages of it! Trying to resist are the founders of the  No Vote by Mail effort.  Good luck to them! 

Since I first voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1956, it's been exciting to get in line--New York City, Albuquerque, Oberlin, Baltimore--to pull the lever and feel the surge of participatory democracy.  Not a feeling I get in my living room.  But another change, after much resistance, is coming to the Big Apple, a holdout from the rest of New York state.  Now, folks there will vote electronically, wait in vain for the old familiar  "thump" of the lever, the sound that lets you know your vote has been recorded. 

Continuing  "yarn in the public interest," I knit my smallest YES patch and attempted to write the letters in single crochet.  Whatever it takes.  Judged readable by the very upbeat couple at the Happy Swallow, a coffee shop on Belmont Avenue that's brought kolaches to Portland from Austin, Texas.  This is result of immigration (story here).  Many surprises in our new digs, caffeine-land PDX.  Creative people always thinking how to differentiate themselves from the gazillion other cafes.

Kolaches, clever little cafes--work better for us than mail-in ballots and/or electronic voting.

What I Did NOT Wear...till Portland

Have you read "Love, Loss, and What I Wore" by Ilene Beckerman?  An east coast woman, middle class child of the 1940s/50s, she speaks to how we once thought about clothes.  Her New York City life was much tidier, more elegant than mine yet there's a resonance.  Similar to the sense I've always had when meeting Jewish women around my age in different cities:  a vibe, often brief, that we share until I learn she's a Republican.

"I wore this black bathing suit when I went to Florida with my grandmother.  I was fourteen," Ilene reports.  The drawing on the facing page--I wish that were a skill of mine--tells me more.  While I never had a Florida grandma nor a black bathing suit till now, the pose is familiar.  Second position, the one we learned in ballet class.  That came along with the expected piano lessons that other first generation Jewish mothers like mine understood as required for our upwardness in America. 

Here then is my first black bathing suit.  Bought it maybe 15 years ago to wear to the beach, a place enjoyed by the rest of my family.  I have a purple one that is equally sensible and unused.

On our 1970s and 80s summer  vacations in Cape May, New Jersey, or on Cape Cod, I was comfortable under our generous green and white striped umbrella with my knitting.  Sometimes Ron coaxed me into the salt water which I reluctantly admitted enjoying.  He had been a lifeguard at Coney Island in his youth.  At the same time, after years of summer camp and beginner swim class, I was a day camp counselor (no water required) in St. Louis.

Yet, this very month I have dipped my toes in the excellent warm water of the pool at Terwilliger Plaza.  Four times so far in "Gentle Water Aerobics."  Chlorine not too strong.  Still have to master/mistress the dressing room thing.  Afterwards I put in some minutes on the treadmill, conveniently located on the way back to our apartment.

The first time into the pool, I recalled a suggestion sent me by Hattie when I mentioned my reluctance to take the water.   She likes trim Land's End  ladies' swim suits minus the skirt.  That would be my nod to the 21st century and thinking beyond how black makes me look thinner.  After diving into color and pattern in my Baltimore life, going back to New York City edged me toward, as Ilene B. would say, "...black is always chic--and makes shopping choices much easier."  Third stage retirement requires shifting...more to follow.

I'm not in Manhattan any more. 

And now I have knit chickens...

A few weeks ago, I went back to Close Knit, a favorite yarn shop here.  Last winter I bought Noro yarn and pattern there to make this vest;  finished when we returned to New York.  One of my more successful yarn projects.  It  helped that there was an already-knit version I could try on  to check out the fit. 

Knitting chickens, representations of them not the actual bird, has moved  along my plan to knit kids' toys.   First,  a yellow Polka-Dot Chicken from Susan B. Anderson's "Itty-Bitty Nursery."  I was going to give this to Zoe but decided to keep it.

I rationalized that her baby sister might tear it  and get into this bag of  beads used to weight the bottom.  Zoe shares my fondness for chickens,  chases  uncaged ones resident in the nearby schoolyard. Hope  they  make it through the winter.

Because she's partial to dots, I added them to another  Susan B. Anderson pattern for a striped chicken.  And produced this larger hen for her to take home.  On visits with us, she plays with the smaller one. Clara is the name she gave to  both.  Sounds  old-fashioned from a modern little girl.

 
Sent off this sweater for Roxie's Purple Bear that I made in August, just before we left NYC. I've started another animal for her,  a Hippo from Susan B. Anderson's new book, itty-bitty toys.  Did Susan and I meet at Knitty City?  I have a signed copy of the other Itty-Bitty. She is a very inventive designer who blogs here.

Feeling quite righteous because I'm only using yarn from my stash for these projects.   Found more funky chick patterns at Ravelry--that comes after the Hippo and another vest for myself, this time with Ron's yarn.

Recalling my hen obsession while she was in Paris, Maxine Levinson at Knitty City sent me a photo she snapped of a poulet store.  I lost it and effort to retrieve it via Google led to a blog called Paris Breakfasts.  Discovered many sides of  chicken enthusiasm among the French.  Something little red hens everywhere are trying to tell us?

Starting to use her as my avatar.  Please note the beaded necklace.

Posting less than I'd like because we continue to have a busy time in Portland, O, with taking classes, finding intriguing lectures.  This week the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard came through to promote his book, "Good without God: what a billion nonreligious people do believe."    Saw Philip Glass' new opera,"Orphee" and liked the music.   A group  sat in the lobby doing live blogging.

More  boxes await attention.   Though I feel frustrated about my ability to influence national politics, there are local issues to work on.  Oregon, like California, has votes often on initiatives outside regular elections.

The outcome of Initiatives 66 and 67  will have profound effect on funding for schools and social services.  "YES" is the word for the  January 28 election. 

"The Way We Get By," a movie for all of us--seniors & others

Tonight on the PBS program Point of View, I'll be watching again a beautifully conceived movie we saw last July before we left New York.  With a low-key title, "The Way We Get By", is one you will want to see no matter your attitude toward U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Is it anti-war?  Not exactly.  Pro-war?  No.

It is about women and men like us:  older citizens, looking for a way to make a difference, some hoping to relieve their loneliness as spouses and friends are gone.  There had been little publicity on the film when we saw a notice about it last July.  And I was not quite sure what to expect reading it was a documentary about a group of seniors in Bangor, Maine, who meet soldiers both leaving for and returning from war.

It's this airport where most soldiers leave the U.S. and the Maine Troop Greeters have welcomed home or said goodbye to one million of them!  I spoke with Gita Pullapilly, the film's producer, and asked if Grandmothers Against the War had been contacted for support.  She'd tried but had not heard back.  

But my effort to contact my friend in the group,  Joan Wile, did not get a response either.  Too bad because the story is not a pro-war or anti-war one.  The three "Greeters" focused on make that clear:  they wanted to do something for these soldiers to let them know we are aware of them, care about them.  My argument with "Grandmothers" always was that we of all people needed to find ways to do more than demonstrate; we could give time to families directly affected by the wars.

We even had a chance to meet the director (son of one of the Greeters) who has just married the producer (it's all on the PBS website.  We got an update and chance to talk with another featured Greeter  who had successfully recovered from heart surgery.  It was all very personal--and political--in the best sort of way.

If you do not have a chance to see it tonight, "The Way We Get By" is traveling around the country and may show near you.  Their dedication moved me so much as a pacifist who has looked for a personal way to express gratitude to women and men in the military even as I oppose the idea of war.

There's also a DVD out now that could be passed around among friends who are eager to see often-unseen older folks as caring actors in the public space.

Why Healthcare Reform Could Fail, or Please, don't stand next to me in the checkout line!

You are lying in a critical care bed in upstate New York.  A nurse approaches.  Has she washed her hands?  Maybe.  Has she had an H1N1 flu shot.  No!  How safe are you feeling?  If I were still living in NYC, this would be my newest concern.  Back in NYC, a large number of healthcare workers are refusing these shots because required to do so.  Oh, it would be okay if they could be in charge of the decision?

"We don't feel the government should have the right to force us to put any substance -- whether or not the government feels it's safe -- into our body," said Laura Ally, a critical-care nurse at St. Peter's Hospital in Albany. New York is the first state to mandate flu shots for healthcare workers.  According to this news report, a group of them will rally for their questionable cause  at the state capitol.  Makes me wonder how long before the U.S., led by folks such as these, will rid itself of a central government.

Ever since our daughter and son-in-law had their first child in Portland, Oregon, one fact worried me more than others.   Many parents here are opposed to vaccination for their children...read this scary story from last Fall.   The elementary school our 7 year old  attends has one of the highest rates of children whose families have opted out of innoculations for their kids.  Wondering if these same folks as as committed to the idea of reproductive choice for women as they are to making my grandchildren's surroundings unsafe.

We had a new sort of experience in getting our own yearly flu shots this weekend.  Three pharmacies in town had advertised FREE shots.  We'd missed the September dates at Wahlgreen's (where it was not clear whether we'd have to pay $25) and Rite-Aid.  At Safeway, we got an appointment for the next day, used Medicare.  If we had any doubts before, we now know that reform of the healthcare system could fail because the money does not follow our having a more rational system. And, reason two, there are a remarkable number of uneducated people standing in the checkout line. Powerful combo.

Mandatory-Healthcare-Factoid:  "Pilgrims who travel to Mecca this Fall Get Oral Vaccine," whether they like it or not,  as reported in Tuesday, September 29, "Science" section of the New York Times.  [sorry, could not find link]

Elderblogging 2.0 Begins in PDX Retirement Community

Ten days into our altered lifestyle in the northwest.  Besides the physical part of getting settled, accepting that we really did not reduce our possessions enough, there's much to experience--in addition to our family.  Last week we went to  orientation for SSI, Senior Studies Initiative,  sponsored by the local community college.  We'd enjoyed a couple of their "Current Events" meetings last winter on our "deciding" visit.   There are six sites around town, only one close by. 

It took place in Lake Oswego, very leafy with big houses; I wondered how people get there without a car.  Intrigued that one of the groups has a presentation scheduled on Emma Goldman.  Looking forward to that.  Today, after a trip to an ENT doctor (nose-bleeding is my dramatic response to the move), I mentioned to Ron that our time so far has felt very suburban.  Must get out of the car soon, take mass transit buses and light rail which are very available from our place.

Saturday we stopped by the Belmont Street Fair, an annual explosion of  hippie-dom plus eviro and neighborhood consciousness.  Not the only one, of course; the city is filled this time of year with celebration, fruit festivals.  Young people come to several parts of Portland for the lifestyle of music and tatoos, live alongside young families who sort of like that atmosphere.  This is the world we know from visiting our daughter in a nearby neighborhood. 

Yesterday I went to the Terwilliger Users Group (TUG to insiders) and was amazed by how many people were there.  Must have been forty, men and women.  A woman gave a talk about Facebook which I was pleased to hear.  Each of our children, different as they are from one another, is now on it.  When I had dinner in New York before we left with Lisa Daehlin, the soprano/knitter, she told me I ought to consider it for the Condom Amulet project.  It's thanks to her that there's a group for it on Ravelry but Facebook does have some perks not available there. 

The staff tech person (how cool is that?) for Terwilliger Plaza had mentioned there were a couple of other folks with blogs living here, so I asked if the internal website might list them.  It's going to happen.  This is very different from New York City where I never met another blogger near my advanced age.

Tonight another Plaza activity, "Victory for Woman Suffrage in Oregon," a talk with great slides by Dr. Kimberly Jensen of Western Oregon University.  I have been too east-coast-centric about women's studies; was surprised by many western states voted to give women the vote ahead of the opposite coast.  Portland was a leader in moving the Oregon legistlature to do in 1912--on the sixth try and pioneered less ladylike approaches with mass advertising and public displays.  In  her recent book, Minerva, Mobilizing Women in the First World War,  Jensen has written about Dr. Esther Lovejoy, a Portland physician and local leader in women's rights, who was an Army doctor. 

For the coming 2012 centennial of woman suffrage in Oregon, here's a link to an active committee gathering ideas and material--particularly interested in finding photos and letters from the period. 

Zoe, our granddaughter, on a brief visit to our apartment, announced in her four-year-old way (birthday party last Saturday), "What a mess!"  One day we hope to present a better model to our descendants. If we can only figure out where to hang all the pictures, stow the books.

"Grandma, How many boxes left?"

"Quite a few," his grandmother answers.  And does not tell him that it may be some time before every one is emptied.  Tony Patterson, our mover, who did a great job, said there were 140 boxes.  And then there was the furniture--and the car.

Some of the resident chickens are settled and enjoy their view.  That's Zoe, standing rather than sitting, in the first day of nursery school.  Zach on his way to Tae-Kwan-Do class.

 

We are very happy to be here in Portland, Oregon, where people seem less stressed.  Okay, it's an illusion but that's a relief some times too.  So many friends and acquaintances were puzzled that we'd choose to leave the Big Apple.

Our last day in the City, AM, the free newspaper handed out at subway stops, ran a front cover to remind us of the enormity of our decision.  But this works for us--a smaller, gentler place: second stage retirement.