Catalog Finds

The old becomes new:  Now you can buy a "retro" handset ($39) to plug into your iPhone.  (I think this is to aid in multi-tasking.)  And the iPhone itself can look like a little handbag with a "knuckle duster case" ($58).

                Is it 1969?   "Adorn Your Hair with Bohemian Flair" for $28-38.

Getting to Know the Other Side

Several weeks ago, I saw a segment on the PBS News Hour about the Vatican deploring the lack of strict orthodoxy among American nuns.  One of the panelists was a board member of Christendom College, which I'd never heard of.  I googled it and found that it's a small college in Virginia with standards  foreign to those of us who went to colleges unaffiliated with a religion. A strict dress code, no drinking, no fraternizing between the sexes, no dancing close, a faculty who must sign a loyalty pledge to Church law.

Who knew?   I have several friends who are "cradle Catholics," born into the faith, some educated in Church schools and colleges, but as far as I know, they're all over the map in their views on contraception, abortion, women serving as priests,  and gay marriage.  They seem a pretty easy-going lot: they drink alcohol, wear whatever they want, and the women don't cover their heads outside a church.   I don't know what they use for birth control and wouldn't dream of asking, but none has more than three children.

More googling, and I discovered an online community of young Catholic women who embrace strict Catholic law, and some of them write blogs. Now I read three of them regularly.

Reader, I'm torn.  These are introspective people, intelligent and sometimes funny; all are converts to Catholicism.  I'm a liberal, agnostic Democrat, and they're conservative, religious Republicans, but now that I know about their pets and children and recipes, I've grown to like one of them and to empathize with two of them.   I'm also agog at how much trouble they go to in order to adhere to their faith.  It's no small commitment.

And it would all be okay, except occasionally--more often with one of them--politics comes up.  Specifically, their positions on gay marriage, contraception, abortion, and Obamacare, and they lose me.  I squint and their faces disappear, and they become The Other Side, the group we can't reason with, the people who want to push their views on everyone else, many of which are unkind.   I really wish we didn't have this fundamental disagreement, but we do.

Two Encounters Around Food

1. 

At the Food Pantry yesterday:  Three young men came in, perhaps in their twenties, and approached the check-in table.

"Can we get some food?" the first one  asked, tentatively.  "We're homelesss.  We're living in a van."

"Sure," I said.  People are supposed to live in Berkeley or Albany to get food at the Pantry, but if they're homeless, they're homeless, and they still have to eat. 

We set up all three young men with clients cards and gave each  two bags of food.

"Oh, thank you!" they said.  "We were driving around wondering if it was okay to steal food because we were so hungry, and we passed this place.  God was looking after us."

After they left, my sidekick at the client table, Pat, who was raised a Catholic, said, "Stealing food is illegal,  but it's not a sin."


2.

I went to Berkeley Bowl West today, the enormous supermarket down near the 880 freeway.  As usual, it was packed with people, and it was a chore manuevering a shopping cart around.

I came to an intersection where three of us were head-on, nothing moving, and I quickly pulled around an older man, in-his-way-out-of-his-way, to get things moving.  As I passed him, he said, "You're welcome."

I turned around and stuck out my tongue at his back.  For quite a while.  If they have cameras in Berkeley Bowl and someone were watching, he must have wondered what that woman was doing.

God Save the Queen and Her Tea Towels

From the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

 I don't know what I'm going to do with them, but I buy tea towels compulsively in museum gift shops when we're in England.  Most are linen or cotton/linen,  stiff and easy-to-wrinkle, but they're a relatively cheap way to bring fabric home.  (Liberty prints cost a fortune, and most of the other fabric I've seen I can buy here.)   Someone in my quilt group suggested I use them on quilt backs.  This is but a sampling of the ones in my stash.




Detail of a tea towel from Kew Gardens



From Downe House, Darwin's home

From Sissinghurst Castle

Every National Trust property seems to sell them



The British Museum

A William Morris print from the Victoria and Albert Museum

Mom Jeans

Am I the only person in the world who didn't know about this concept?  I came across the term in a novel and went straight out and polled my friends.  Yes,  they'd heard about it, and what planet was I on?

Oprah helped me out.  She has a online article that describes all the characteristics of Mom Jeans so you can decide if you're wearing them and then do something about it.  I'm not sure what.

Note the "heart-shaped butt"

A high waist is the diagnostic of Mom Jeans.  It accentuates the "flat curvature of 40+ buttocks, resulting in the characteristic upside-down heart-shaped butt."  Note  the  baggy thighs tapering to a narrow ankle,  plus the tucked-in shirt  Add a thin belt to this get-up, and you're in Mom Jean Land, for sure.

Definitely Mom Jeans:  The Ice Cream Cone

But be careful if  you try to escape Mom Jeans, because there are all kinds of pitfalls.   If  you wear boot cut jeans, especially if you're under 5'4", you can end up with thighs hugged too snugly.  And, sadly, stretch denim can be no-no, because it can give you "dimples below the tush."  (But it's so comfortable!)   Distressed denim can highlight problems like thighs, butt, and hips.  (What's left?  Ankles?)

The Dimpled Tush that can result from stretch denim

And, however obvious this solution to Mom Jeans, do not rush out and buy jeans with a low-cut waist because that could result in a "muffin top" spillage over the top. (Shoot me!)

I ran all this by my sister at lunch yesterday.  She's a designer and always looks sleek and pulled together.  She wears boot cut jeans, but she's quite tall, so that's okay.  Her jeans come from The Gap, FYI.  She says that jeans are good for only one wearing because they stretch out and become too baggy in the butt.  You have to spray the butt with water and throw the jeans in the dryer to get another day's wear out of them.  Unless you want, as Oprah's expert puts it, "your backside sagging like a day-old diaper." 

A friend who works with a lot of young women thinks it's hilarious that I didn't know about Mom Jeans.

"We're old," she said.  "So what?"

How about the brand, "Not Your Daughter's Jeans?"  I said.  I have several pairs of those.  And I never tuck in my tops.

She shook her head.

Everyone Has to Figure It Out on Their Own

This pertains to marriage. 

We had lunch the other day with a former student of Jerry's and his wife.  They had an announcement to make:  They're going to have a baby!  Congratulations!  They've bought a house!  More congratulations! 

"The house has four bedrooms," they told us.  "And we each have a study.  We thought about the two of you."

As though we're a  Marriage Model.  Isn't that flattering?  I thought back to the last time we saw them, how they stayed until 2 am asking us about our marriage, how we make things work.  They seemed hungry for information.  How do we deal with Jerry's frequent field trips?  How do we make sure we each have alone time?  The list went on.

When Jerry and I were working out a lot of this, I remember looking around for a couple we could use as a model.  No go.  We didn't know any couples who had a marriage that looked like the right model for us.   I remember wailing to my therapist about this. 

"You have to figure it out for yourselves," he said.   "Do what's right for you."

Like taking two cars on vacation, having two studys (not unusual at all now, but it seemed to be then, especially when you sacrifice a guest room to achieve it, and it's the wife's), accepting time apart as a good thing.

But now, I think our usefulness as a model has pretty much ended for Dan and Michelle.  We chose not to have a child.  I can tell them that sabbaticals can be wretched for the accompanying spouse (Dan's a professor), that it's important for each person to have a separate source of money (Michelle's a teacher), that you don't have to wait around on the trail while the field biologist catches moths. 

But I can't advise on adding children to the mix. I can say only that you can have a fine, enduring marriage without them, and people seem to have  happy marriages with them.  Good luck with all that, which is pretty much what my therapist said to me.  Get to work.

Where's My Pie?

Q.  Does it get any better than this:  Finishing up the last of your birthday pie, cut into tiny wedges so it'll last a week, while reading the sports page before breakfast? 

A.  No, but I wish my wife hadn't made up this t-shirt, though I do wear it as a jammie top.