Our Garden Plot in Lodz
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Krogering on Doctor Days
October opens with two Doctor Days (heart, eyes). At the
same time daughter Barb is gearing up to check on our Medigap and prescription
insurance status. Love that name: Medigap. As for prescriptions, our cardiologist’s
staff asked that we bring our actual medications and vitamins to the office
(suspecting, perhaps, that I can’t spell levothyroxine). Two Kroger shopping
bags were needed. That’s for B’s Meds. My own (not needed in October yet) would
only require one, but, alas, represent about three times more money to buy. I
might add that my own inventory of our meds is quite meticulous; call it a
Nogap list with every microgram and milliliter (of eye drops) neatly captured.
When Dr. K’s staff saw my list, they no longer wished to see my bags. So I
trailed B to her various exams dragging my weary Kroger bags along until we
were at last dismissed for another six months. I kept the bags kind of hidden
behind my legs lest other patients wondered why this old man needs to carry his
groceries to Cardiology…. April 2019 thus will open with another Doctor Day.
That phrase always with leading caps. As one lady said to me, referring to her
parents, “If they didn’t have Doctor Days they’d have no social life at all.”
Today it’s eyes. So, if the crick don’t rise, we’ll see you.
Saturday, September 29, 2018
In Praise of Peanuts
Not a year passes in our lives when peanuts (and its most
exalted form, peanut butter) is not highly praised in one blog or another. At
the start of Our Garden Plot in Lodz (and
what that means will eventually be told), the subject, therefore, must be
touched at the beginning. And that’s because we usually start the day with, you
guessed it, breakfast. Talk then often turns to the delight of our spread, and
one thing leads to another. An old, old blog of mine, now gone dormant and inaccessible,
had roughly the same content as this post. It has been updated. It began as
follows:
One night my father brought home a
five-pound can of something. He said he didn’t know what it was, but we should
try it. Mother opened the can. The contents were a light shade of oily brown.
She took a spoon, took some, and tried it. “Ummmm,” she said, approvingly. She
gave each of us a spoonful too. In moments we all had spoons and we were eating
this strange stuff, right from the can. In a single session that night, we
emptied that huge container down to its very bottom—and then scraped out the
remains.
We had just encountered one of the
great foods of America. Peanut butter. The stuff was a great hit because we
were always starved for oils and protein then. Needless to say, I voted for
Jimmy Carter when he ran for president—remembering that memorable night. [From Majd Amerikába, a family memoir]
The scene just described took place around about 1947. My
family was in Germany, in a small town called Tirschenreuth. Patton’s Army had
occupied this region; it had become the American Zone and thus came to be
exposed to the radiant light of the distant U.S. economy. My father, a soldier,
had lost his left arm fighting the Russians as part of the Hungarian Army;
after his recovery he had been assigned to the Hungarian Military Academy as a
professor. That Academy had moved west as the Russian forces advanced into
Hungary, and there in Tirschenreuth, this unarmed but still military unit surrendered
to General Patton’s soldiers. The event—I mean the epiphany of peanut butter—took
place two years after the war ended for us. My father endeavored then to support
us all by trading on the Black Market, and he had just scored a five-pound can.
The family’s relationship to peanut butter, which is on the level of a kind of
cult, endures strong and loyal to this day, some seventy-one years later.
Brigitte is a latecomer in that it took her ten years longer to escape East
Germany and thus come into the Zone of Heavenly Oils. Her reaction to the oily
brown stuff, however, was exactly the same as ours.
According to an old edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, the peanut is a legume, thus the fruit of a seed or pod-bearing plant. Peas and
beans are classified the same way; so are clover, alfalfa, and soybeans; horses
and cattle therefore also have some chance to feel true happiness. The plant
gathers sunlight in a bushy sort of way above the ground. The peanut plant’s
flowers sprout on its lowest branches from slender stems; as they wilt the
stems droop; drooping, they stiffen; their stem-tips harden into so-called
pegs. When these pegs touch the dirt, they begin to dig down into the soil and,
buried there, finally, they transform themselves into peanut pods. The
illustration inserted here is courtesy of Mother Agriculture also known as the
USDA. Georgia dominates peanut growing; its farmers grow more than half of all the
peanuts sold. Other blessed states are Alabama, North Carolina, Texas, and
Virginia (in order of importance). We were privileged to live in Virginia close
to the living peanut plant itself.
The peanut (Arachis hypogaea)
seems to be a plant that evolved on the west coast of Latin America. The oldest
remains found date it back 7600 years at minimum. Old pods, indicating human cultivation,
have been found in archeological sites in Peru. By the time the Spanish arrived
in America, the plant had also long been cultivated in that thin strip called
Mesoamerica—which connects North and South (source).
Old, yes. Forever young? Absolutely. And the peanut, in addition, has also
covered the world. It now grows in most subtropical locations. The largest
producer worldwide is—China.
PeanutButterLovers.com informs me that peanut butter in the
modern sense came into being in 1890 when a physician in St. Louis encouraged a
food producer, George A. Bayle Jr., to make and sell ground peanut-paste. The
physician, whose name is lost to history but who is certainly well-known in Heaven,
had supposedly tested the product by grinding peanuts experimentally and tasted
the resulting product by taking a spoonful. He probably said: “Ummmm!” He
intended to produce a nutritious food for people with poor teeth—and this was a
real winner. Kelloggs obtained the first patent for a “process of preparing nut
meal” in 1895. The rest, as they say, is history.
This morning we got to the bottom of a jar of our favorite
brand, Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter. It takes us a mere two days to finish a
jar, and the final act is to scrape the last bit of tiny product from the
glass. Brigitte likes to do that with a spoon, and the activity produces a kind
of clicking sound. This morning that reminded me of 1947 when I first heard
that sound, although then the clicking came from metal hitting metal. And the
memory inspired me to write this. One cannot praise peanuts, and peanut butter,
frequently and ardently enough.
While on the subject of praise more generally, we never fail
to praise that admirable if humble peanut grower, Jimmy Carter, whose labors as
a peanut farmer had raised him to the highest honor most people can achieve.
Being a President of the United States might be viewed as a small if also
important extra. And around here we think he also deserved the title!
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Into Fall
The image is the last of some ten or more Monarchs we helped rear this Summer. With the last gone, Fall has come.
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