That's some good runnin'

Running Past Midnight:
A Woman's Ultra-marathon Adventure
by Molly Sheridan

Could be subtitled, "What to do with the Second Half of My Life?"  I liked the beginning best--she's 48, facing empty nest syndrome, and a younger friend asks her to do a marathon. She starts off training, almost immediately gets a stress factor, and is told by a young, know-it-all doctor that she shouldn't be running. No questions. No discussion. Immobilize the food for six months and never try to run again.

It turns out she's not the kind of person to listen to bad advice, as you already know since it says right on the cover that she becomes an ultra-marathoner.  Did she spend the next seven years proving the doctor was wrong, or was she simply trying to answer her own question--how far can I run?

At the time of writing of the book, the question doesn't appear to have been answered. I like that--and maybe, there is no answer. Maybe a better question would be, "How far do I want to run?" and it appears that for Ms. Sheridan, the answer is, "as far as someone can plan a race for."

The writing is often so matter-of-fact that it makes running 100 miles seem as do-able as driving to work on a crowded Monday morning. (And as pleasant)  And reading about the times when she had to stop--or should I say pause and try again next time--gave me a new sense of determination to not give up myself even though the heat of Texas summer is beating me down. I've been doing shorter and shorter runs at slower and slower times. But that's not the end! Ms. Sheridan might make a reasoned decision to stop, knowing that pushing on with an injury is just going to result in a longer healing time before she can race again.  But...stopping is not the same as quitting.  The battle is lost--the race goes on.

What's she racing against? Mortality? Immortality? Just pure pig-headed stubbornness? I don't know, but I hope she figures it out and writes another book.

State Of the Garden Report, Why Ain't it Fall Yet?

 All I have to report on is turnips, growing like weeds. Some people think they are weeds.   I was thinking something dug up a bunch of my broccoli, but it looks more like something was digging in the perimeter (where the wood chips are) and accidentally buried the poor little dears. When I started to replant them, I scratched the surface and started finding the baby sprouts under two to four inches of soft soil. I unearthed as many as I could and replanted nearby in case they don't make it. Probably an opossum--I've seen the damage an armadillo can do and this is nothing compared to that.

Some people recommend a motion-activated sprinkler system to scare off nocturnal varmints. Sounds like an idea..but what happens if you forget to turn it off before you head out to garden?

The Evil God of Texas Weather appears to have nixed most all of my chance of rain for the week. He might permit the temperature to fall below 80 for a couple of days, but by next week we're back up again, near 90.  Doom and gloom.

On this dismal realization, I skipped further work and cooked some freezer fillers instead:

















Trofie a la Pesto (okay, I had to use rotini) and Lentil Curry with Collards.

Another great YA from Matthew Quick

Every Exquisite Thing
by Matthew Quick

Quote:

But his writing that novel led to lives being changed...and Booker being happy in love now with Sandra Tagget which he never could  have foreseen when he dreamed up Wrigley's world. And so maybe it isn't the motivating factors that matter so much as simply participating...thrusting your best true authentic self into the universe with wild abandon.

You have to read it to see what led up to this insight.  And other insights, which I'm deliberately not quoting. I'll just say it's the kind of book for teenagers--or for anyone-- that I wish I could write.

And I wish I could force a few of my young friends to read.

Short and slightly stupid sorry

Everything Leads to You
by Nina LaCour
 
Surprisingly thoughtful. Unsurprisingly sweet. I enjoyed it, but kind of wish I hadn't wasted my time on it. Weird, right?

It's about the intersections of lives; about lust versus love; friendship of the best sort; and the bitter misunderstandings that occur when people stop talking to each other.

Highly recommended as an antidote to romance novels...but...I don't read romance novels much anymore and never really did.  This is more like...romance with brain engaged and (mostly) in control. 

I've got it!  As much as I liked all the characters, I didn't truly feel the thing--the mysterious fascination with the object of desire that I needed to feel to truly participate. I was a spectator and a spectator I remained.  Stupid me.

NO State of the Garden Report because September stinks

Sorry, but it's still in the 90s. I did finally discover a crop of radishes struggling out of the ground and mixed among them, a tiny sprig of carrot or two. And I finally saw one--exactly one--sprig of lettuce coming up. I should mark that one and save the seed from it.

With that in mind, I'll instead review a book about seed saving and much more.




The Third Plate

Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

Wow. Chef with a conscience. Does he overstate the importance of Master Chefs' ability to influence the direction of everyday eating?  Maybe, but he's onto something, too. When The Restaurant Scene turns its focus to a food, then everyone has to have it--from Ruths Chris to Golden Corral. And in the case of bluefin tuna, prosciutto, or even the kindly avocado, environmental destruction follows.

His journey in search of really sustainable agriculture and really tasty eats takes him all over. It's a delicious ride. You get to visit a fish farming operation off the coast of Spain; you meet the geese of Eduardo Sousa in Extremadura; you travel with wheat and corn over the ages and the continents. And best of all--you get to make up your own mind. No preaching. Well, yes, preaching, but no absolutes. There are many roads that lead to heaven...and on right through it. He's looking to the future--of food!

Points: where is this fixation on 'heirloom fruits and vegetables' leading us?  An heirloom variety is one that is uniquely suited to perform well and taste great in a particular time and place. Which isn't now and isn't here.  To have good tasting food, are we limited to living in the past?  My answer is easy--the Brandywine tomato plant I grew produced a great tasting fruit. I enjoyed it very much. Note my adjectives--'a' and 'it'. Wish there'd been a second one.

But we are not stuck in the past--we can go on producing great tasting, productive regional varieties of tomatoes in modern days, if we just choose to try our hands at selected the best seed and passing it around.  And the same goes for other crops--but we've got a difficult row to hoe.  Big Ag has the market cornered.

Here's a take on GMOs you probably never considered. One of the first successful uses of genetic modification was to put a gene in corn that let it withstand the herbicide roundup. Farmers could go on spraying roundup right on the corn, all summer long. That right there is enough to creep me out. But there's more--GMO seeds can be patented. What does that do to the traditions of farmers who want to save the 'best seeds' for replanting or developing new varieties?  Why do farmers have to give up their birthright--to save seeds, try experiments, and improve the crop? We've been doing it for 8000 years--let's not give it up without a fight!

Too much work but I envy his spinach

The Winter Harvest Handbook:

Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

by Eliot Coleman

Way too technical for me, but required reading for any small farmer even if he doesn't plan to build moveable greenhouses.  (I'd love one!)  It's a textbook of greenhouse farming.  But it had a bit of information for non-greenhouse, non-winter producers too.

A very small chapter at the end speaks less of the how-to of organic farming and more of the why-do. And it reminds us of this:

The reason for this still very active attempt to villainize organic farming is that our success scares the hell out of the other side. Just like the fear of Nature that the merchandisers and scientists have worked so hard to create in farmers in order to make purchased chemical products and reductionist science seem indispensable, so has our success with organic farming created in the scientists and merchandisers a terrible fear--a fear of their own redundancy; a fear that all farmers will realize other solutions are possible; a fear that agriculture will learn the truth. Organic farmers have succeeded in producing a bounty of food through the simple means of working in harmony with natural processes, without any help from the scientists and the merchandisers.

Sorry, that's a horrid quote. His writing style is much better in other parts of the book.  But it's a reminder of a couple of obvious facts we tend to forget:

Human beings have been farming and keeping themselves fed for about 10,000 years.

For 9950 years of that time, he didn't have chemical fertilizers. Or pesticides. Or herbicides.

Farmers have been saving their own seed and improving crop varieties themselves, very successfully, without scientists.

And finally, beware when the person selling you something tells you that you have to buy his product because "if you don't, you'll fail."  If you don't buy his product, exactly who is it who'll be failing?

Long time on the to-read list and worth it!

Lab Girl
by Hope Jahren


Weird and wild biography...with trees.  Plants of all sorts, really, and a couple of crazy goof-ball scientists who can't sit back and contemplate nature without digging, stirring, cutting and centrifuging every thing in sight. You got to love 'em.

Mixed in with their adventures in science is some real science, often chapter for chapter. She'll discourse on the structure and utility of wood for instance, then switch to the laying on of rings of her life in the lab.  A discourse on plant sex and the rarity at which a grain of pollen lands on a pistil and becomes a new life, leads beautifully into a chance encounter with a man at an outdoor barbeque.  But none of this is forced--it's effortless and beautiful. Even the really scary parts are told without apology or hyperbole and only after you step away do you realize how close disaster really loomed.

Let me just sum up--there's a reason this book was so in demand at the library.  It's good.

State of the Garden Report, sagging September

Depressing despite the fact I've got Brassicas coming out my rear end and there's a new swatch of shallots rising.  The four tomato plants are blooming, even though they're tiny.  But...the beets all vanished into the ground. Not a sign of a radish, carrot, lettuce or spinach. Why Would I be surprised?

It won't be the first time I've lost a crop. And yet...can't I even grow radishes?  Radishes, chapter one of Gardening for Dummies?



Nope, and it's not even my fault. It's the stupid weather. I forgot to take a soil temperature last weekend, but with highs over 90 and lows in the seventies, the temperature is probably jsut too darn warm for them to germinate. I can only hope they didn't start to germinate and then dry up and wither away...like the beets.

The pumpkins are doing okay...I hope.










Harvest time for horseradish!  Now...what to make of it...?

Germany's baby boomer generation

Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America
by Ursula Hegi

Let me start with a rather long quote from the introduction.

Born in 1946, I grew up surrounded by evidence of war--bombed out buildings, fatherless children, men who had legs or arms missing--yet when I tried to ask questions, my parents and teachers only gave me reluctant and evasive answers about the war. Never about the Holocaust, "We suffered, too," they would say. It is an incomplete lens, but it was held up to many of our generation as the only lens to see through. if our parents had spoken to us about their responsibility for their actions or lack of action during the war, if they had grieved for the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and political prisoners who were murdered, and if then, in addition to all this, they had told us, "We suffered, too," their victimhood would have become part of the total lens.

Taken by itself, it is flawed. Incomplete. A lie.

What they tried to create for their children was eine heile Welt--an intact world. What was their motivation? guilt? Denial? Justification? The desire to protect the next generation? Perhaps all of these. But their silence added to the horrors of the Holocaust.

After a thoughtful and thought-provoking introduction, she goes on to interview fifteen other children of her generation who--like her--emigrated to America after the war.  Some had childhood memories of the war; some did not--but all were haunted by it, in visible and invisible ways. And all shared the loneliness that seeps out from silence.

It was brave of her to disturb the ghosts, but I'd expect nothing less from the author of Stones From the River. Not everyone she interviewed was admirable or  likeable or even slightly interesting, be we have something to learn from them all.

This dude is a great storyteller!

Boy 21
by Matthew Quick



 While I'm waiting for Rainbow Rowell to come out with another knock-me-down YA masterpiece, I'll content myself with reading everything ever written by Matthew Quick.  I loved Sorta Like A Rock Star and so I went looking for Every Exquisite Thing but it appeared to have been checked out and instead I found this.

I can't explain why I became so involved in this tale of a boy who plays basketball because, he imagines, after the death of his mother, his Dad told him to go outside and shoot baskets.  And he just never stopped.

Now he's the point guard on the high school basketball team and he keeps out of trouble, but there are things under the surface, scary things, not to be spoken about. The Irish gangs and the black ones stay always present in the background, but he stays safe and protected, mysteriously, by his girlfriend's brother, Rod--the most unpredictable and violent Irishman ever to live in Bemmont.

Then the coach asks him to befriend a transfer student, Boy 21, a former basketball star who has dropped out of life after the death of his parents.  And by then you're (if you're me) sucked in and can't put it down until the end.

State of the Garden Report, September is not fall

Oh, look. Clearly someone planted way too many turnip seeds.





And someone is going to be suffering--having to murder three-quarters of the younglings.  Why didn't I check the planting distance, halve it, and plant single seeds in a diamond pattern, like:

     o        o         o       o
          o         o        o       o
  
Then at least when thinning time came, I could sacrifice every other plant and have a nice mess of greens.  My official garden stick says 4-inch spacing. Seems a little close.

On the other hand, it's clearly too hot and dry for the beets I was cooing over last week. I've covered the bed with a board for the hot part of the day and will do so again tomorrow. After tomorrow it's supposed to drop a few degrees, from 92F to 82F (33C to 28C), so I'll stop. Can't leave 'em in the dark forever.

I ordered shallots this spring but they arrived way too late to plant. So I saved them in the pantry but that probably was a bad choice--too warm and dry.  Only two survived and they're very, very happy to finally be in the ground. Or so they told me.

Autobiography + imagination = fiction?

Allegra Maud Goldman
by Edith Konecky

It's kind of a cool thing to turn your life story into a novel. If I did it, I'd be a bookworm who magically transforms into a track star at age sixteen, then hires onto a rainforest expedition and discovers a new species of black jaguars, before moving to Taos, New Mexico where I make a living as a backpacking writer. Or maybe a Rockette!

Of course that would read like the nonsense it is--and this book isn't. It's probably more real than reality, because a writer who sticks with only the remembered facts will never tell the whole story. Ms. Konecky may have made up the funny story of her discovery of "sitting" and how it creates a new body part, "the lap."  But who cares? It's funny and it highlights the audacity of the girl who'd do such a thing.

I didn't get all that, at first. I approached this book thinking it was simply a humorous autobiography, and that was a shallow, simple thing to do! I got what I deserved. For me, it wasn't funny enough or earth-shattering enough, and I missed out on the richness of the interplay of imagination with reality. I raced through and didn't 'get' half of what it had to offer.  Only after reading the afterword, a very learned exposition of how it represented a near-perfect example of the Bildungsroman, did I get the point of it all--it's not comedy or tragedy, it's the transformation of a child into a human being. Incidentally, it had a lot to say about the middle-class lifestyle of the 1930s and women's search for personal worth in a time when girls prepared for marriage, period.

A lot to get out of a short book. or maybe I should say, a lot to put into. I will read her later work, A Place at the Table, and see where she went from there.