Saturday, August 7, 2021

AGAIN with the Pond's cold cream saga

 Apologies to those who took the trouble to comment over the last two years (!). Just looked at them now. But thank you. 

My Pond's cold cream saga

Sunday, February 25, 2018

Again with all the page views! (It's the Pond's article, I know)

Wow, friends, thanks again for all those page views which are still huge for me. And comments! Four, dating from as long ago as last May! I am sorry I have neglected them.

I now use just a bit of fresh lemon juice and a bit of olive oil, mixed in the palm of my hand, to cleanse my skin at night. I towel it off with a wet cloth.

Amazing and humbling that this is the most successful thing I have ever written. My gentleman friend points out: "People can relate to it ...."



The backyard of the house where I grew up with Pond's cold cream

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Wow, people, thanks for all the page views (which are huge for me)

Updated July, 2016. And come visit me at Pluot, where I have decided to do my part in re-booting Western civilization from the ground up. 



Well, who knew that I get 1,100 people coming here every month? Perhaps it's all just search engine "dings" -- does that still happen? -- or perhaps it's people who come for ten seconds and leave because they're disappointed. I used to have a terrible "bounce rate" when I kept track of such things.

Anyway I return too, just now, because I noticed another comment on my Pond's cold cream saga and I had to take care of it. Then I took a look around, noticed my page views, and thought I should give everyone a wave hello, and maybe alert you to my movements. 



I've finished my novel/memoir, after three years of work (plus my day job). I'm rather proud of it, even beyond the fact that it's my second. (You have access to Pearls and Roses, which I uploaded here after its I think fortieth rejection. Do all those rejections mean my writing stinks? One thinks not.)

Oddly enough I did have one person, a sales rep at my job where I am a wine buyer, very excited to read this, which is why after I printed it out, I brought it to the local FedEx office along with some pretty arts-and-crafts papers to serve as the cover, and had it bound for $5.72. Considering the price of paper and ink, the book you see pictured above cost about $30 to produce; if I wanted to make a respectable retail profit of 30% I should have charged my one reader/friend exactly $42.99 for it. But, she was so very insistent and I was so flattered that I gave just this one away. Besides, at least now there is another copy in the world, in case God forbid there is a flood (I don't say fire) in my house.


So that, dear ones, is where I have been and what I have been doing for a good part of my time, while I relinquished this blog and decided to concentrate all my writing at the food-wine-and-life blog At First Glass, which then crashed in January 2014 when I could not renew my domain name through Google. I think the problem was it required a smart phone and an app to renew, and I don't have either. So you can still find me at Pluot, rebooted and still eating, drinking, and living. Since I have finished my second book, above -- it's called Now Comes the Petitioner: the Story of an Internet Divorce -- I have confessed to my readers there that they must endure a bit more relaxed, unpolished stuff for a while, while I just sort of write what I feel like without all sorts of proofing and correcting. So I suppose I must warn you the same. Expect and pardon, please, the tag "unpolished."

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

In case you're wondering --

-- where I am, chances are it's here. Do drop by,  and have a pisco sour maybe.



Monday, October 24, 2011

The last rose of summer, really


I bought the rose bush at a grocery store one spring, perhaps seven or eight years ago. I planted it and then it bloomed once, also in a far away October. Perhaps this new bloom is a good sign. The colors of pale rich yellow and palest pink are gorgeous; the scent, a bit like lemon pie and a bit like lemon air freshener, is also very good. Happy autumn.


Sunday, October 9, 2011

Fall








Sunday, September 25, 2011

... from whose bourn

"I asked if I might go out for a breath of fresh air. The doctors answered 'Yes, just close by, for half an hour.' "

So Queen Victoria, at the bedside of her adored husband, in December 1861. He was dying. She needed a respite from it all.

Why is it, given the collective human experience of death, that the individual human brain is not yet "hard wired" to understand it? "None of this makes sense to me," the grieving say when it is all over, or shortly before it's all over. "Everyone else is enjoying their lives, and he is dying."

And yet, on all our own happy days when we were enjoying our lives too, someone was dying.

At best I suppose it's human societies which have managed to hard-wire themselves into understanding it, which is why religions and civilizations have rituals to ease the dead into the ground and the mourning through the necessary time. But the human being, alone, is still at a loss. We suffer physically, from a wound like an amputation. Even if we weren't constantly and effusively friendly with the person who died, even if it was someone we saw twice a year, still this was a fellow traveler, perhaps born before me and therefore a part of life since before time began. After the amputation you can only look at the stump in shock, bind it up or do what you can to help people suffering worse bind theirs, and wait to get used to it. While thinking, this was someone who lived before me -- before time. How can time die?

Perhaps the worst of it is just fear. We can't help but think ahead. Here death has happened to someone else in the herd, but surely it can't happen to me. Not to me, the very special Ivan Ilych who, in Tolstoy's story, "had a striped leather ball as a child." Think of all the people I was born before, all the people to whom I am prehistory, I am time. How can I die?

And it can't happen to me like this -- physical pain, helplessness, anger, drugs, muddle-headedness, starvation, ravaged body, near-ravaged personality. The disbelieving struggle for last breaths, the terrified begging of family for help when there is none to give and even panic is immaterial. This body got diseased, randomly. I wonder if, on the first day, the diagnosis makes everything look different, even to the angle of the sun in the sky on a beautiful summer morning, even to the surreal look of other, healthy people out walking their dogs and conversing easily ... this body is finished. You must learn, now, what we witnesses will follow you into learning. But not yet.

It's our witnessing and surviving of it which seems an added cruelty to the dying, and which gives an added sickly prick of fear and guilt to the survivors. Every single mourner still eats and drinks afterward. Maybe not as much, but the food still goes in and digestion still works. Every mourner, if he was a caregiver at the end, needs "breaks," Queen Victoria style, from the watching and the waiting. If I were the dying one, I think I would resent my loved ones going off and needing breaks. Really? But you're going to live, tomorrow. How's that for a nice break? I wonder if, when it's our turn and everything is reduced to one hospital bed in one room and a last few minutes, we'll see them gathered as though at the end of a tunnel, a hollow place far away where everyone is still in the pink of health and frankly looking forward to being able to consult their own needs soon And when it is all over they still laugh and tells stories, in between bouts of crying and silence.

Scar tissue forms. Society or church ease us through the rituals that human beings in the aggregate have learned bring comfort, even though human beings as individuals don't understand this death. (Although, really, modern funeral rituals are getting very pathetic. So many people are basically non-religious that even "services" run under the auspices of a big, popular, catch-all evangelical denomination are little more than ad hoc family reunions in which it so happens everybody is wearing black and crying. There is no liturgy. A family spokesman gives a speech about the deceased, and humor is required. The deceased's favorite music is piped in. It's downright tacky, and there is no hint of awe at this person's "entering into eternity." That one phrase from Reform Jewish funeral services has always appealed to me. It may sound overly grand, but it focuses the mind. It seems to reassure us: this, very minor, person has gone where you all, very minor people, are going, and where all other people -- and aren't they all very minor, in the end? -- have gone and will go. So be still.)

Then one day when we scarcely notice the scar tissue anymore, when we feel pretty good and are at peace with the universe, maybe after we have been through this a number of times and think we know death, -- barring accidents, I suppose we do suddenly find our old striped leather ball.

*Queen Victoria, A Personal History, by Christopher Hibbert (2000), p. 280.