Adventures in Guy-land

It all started with a broken rivet for the strap on my Crocs.

Apparently, Croc used to mail out replacement rivets for free, but not any more. Maybe I’d just have to glue the strap in place. But then I found this nice guy on YouTube.

He said I just had “to go down to my home improvement center and buy a bag of … Chicago bolts.” I asked Tim (the holder of countless little plastic boxes of nuts and bolts and screws) if he had Chicago bolts. He looked it up on Google and said, “Oh, sex bolts.” Well, I guess so. One end does screw into the other end. No, he didn’t have them.

So off I went to Home Depot. Where I confronted the hardware aisle with its zillion little bags and drawers of nuts and bolts and screws (Oh, my!). [Aside: when Eagle Hardware first came to Anchorage, Tim walked in, spotted the hardware zone, and dubbed the place “Doodad Heaven.”] I had no idea where to begin searching this Doodad Heaven.

One guy looked like he knew his nuts and bolts and screws. I asked, and he pointed me to some drawers. When that proved fruitless, he recommended Fire and Fastener. Another guy, down the aisle, called out, “Yeah, Fire and Fastener.” So did a third, a Home Depot employee. I didn’t even understand what they were saying: Did I have to fire something? Did he say First or Near? They were in the hardware aisle; they mumbled.

Finally, they clarified. Fire and Fastener was a store on International Airport Road. I’d never heard of it. They named stores it was near, but I’d never heard of them either. So off I went to … Guy-land!

Guy-land – that stretch of International Airport Road – is full of stores where most women never cross their threshold. (Of course, that’s where The Bush Company is.) I had to stop in at Young’s Gear Driveshaft Specialists (past Motion Industries and Alaska Bearing) to ask where Fire and Fastener was. Entering a Guy-land business is like entering a magical, foreign world.

Last year, I’d needed a replacement washer for my backpack. At a Guy-land little shop, the guy at the counter found one, took off my bent one, struggled to get the new one on, and said, “No charge.” This is what happens in Guy-land. Guy-land is a world of solutions! There are doodads to solve every problem and guys who know their doodads.

John in Fire and Fastener was no different. He pointed me to the exact little plastic bins with Chicago bolts (one for the screw and one for the home, the “male” and “female”): #128 and #134 (in case your Crocs have a broken rivet, too). He got a screwdriver and helped me screw it in. It was a little wobbly.

Randy, behind the counter, said, “Washer, John,” and John ran in the back room to come back with an OSP. It fit the Croc indent perfectly. They were very proud of themselves. Randy said, “Y’know, we call this a sex bolt.” “I know,” I said. “My husband taught me that.”

“How much?” I asked. “No charge,” they said. How does a place like that stay in business? These guys gave me personalized attention for a long time. John even took me on a tour of their Guy-land wonders. There was a whole wall of carabiners and springs and pulleys, spools of wires of all different colors. Multicolored plastic tubes of all sizes.

I was gushing about some of my favorite Guy-land stores – Alaska Rubber is a total treat, especially their remnants – and I wanted to mention the store that saved my backpack, but I couldn’t remember its name. I could describe the layout perfectly. I searched the Yellow Pages, went in and out of stores that might be it, but no luck. Finally, I checked my diary. Last year, on June 1, I got my washer at … Fire and Fastener.

I would worry – really worry – about my memory, but I think it was the magic of Guy-land. When you enter an alternate reality, you don’t come all the way back.

A Food Love Story

Our kitchens are filled with stories, but some stories lurk in one special dish. It’s the dish with a whole history behind it, a history you can’t separate from preparing, tasting, eating that dish. So let me tell you about noodle kugel.

Noodle kugel is a traditional Jewish side dish. When my mother first made it, Mott’s had come out with a variety of applesauces they called Fruit Treats. So we had Mott’s Chunky Apple and Raspberry Fruit Treats, Mott’s Chunky Apple and Apricot Fruit Treats – in jars, like applesauce. They were delicious; I don’t know why Mott’s discontinued them.

My mother’s recipe calls for “1 jar Mott’s Applesauce with apricots (Fruit Treats),” but that’s impossible now, so I’ve always had to buy a can of apricots, dice them, and add them.

My mother made hers in a 9x13" aluminum pan. It was so heavy with ingredients, it was hard to lift in and out of the oven. I have that pan now. I look at the pan, even when it has lasagna in it, and I think “noodle kugel.”

My mother called it noodle pudding. Maybe it was the name on the recipe when she received it; maybe it was her generation’s way of Americanizing their food. I call it kugel … because I entered it in the San Francisco Kugel Cook-off.

It was San Francisco’s inclusive way of trying to include everyone in their urban version of a state fair. There were maybe 50 entries: 25 older Jewish women, 24 gay guys, and me. The winner was the lone potato kugel. I guess after tasting 49 noodle kugels, the judges were relieved to encounter a potato one.

It was at that cook-off that I encountered my first traditional noodle kugel, which is very cheesy, with lots of dairy. My mother’s is full of fruit: apples, apricots, raisins. I had no idea her kugel was so revolutionary! Her kugel became her go-to side dish, the surest crowd-pleaser.

My sister lives near Amherst, Massachusetts, and we’ve visited the Yiddish Book Center there. I became a member and, in 2013, heard they were asking for recipes for a national contest. I submitted my mother’s noodle kugel recipe, and it was selected as a finalist. (They renamed it noodle kugl, which goes to show how languages are changed as they’re assimilated, so I guess that’s the “original” Yiddish version in English characters.)

I’ve written here about my mother’s and my prickly relationship, but over the course of our lives together, there are a handful of things I did for her outside my “shitty daughter” box. Entering her kugel recipe is one of those things. When I think back about all the things I didn’t do for her, I try to remember her kugel moment.

The way it worked, people had to go online and vote on the finalist recipe to win. I went into action: I contacted everyone I’d ever known for years, I enlisted my siblings, I was a “Vote Tibby” machine. Friends solicited votes from friends; my sister got the Berlin Women’s Philharmonic Orchestra to vote. The Daily News even printed my request. Facebook was a sharing frenzy. Votes for Tibby’s kugl poured in.

Winners were to be announced at the Yiddish Book Center on October 20, 2013. Tim and I were to be back East, so we drove my mother up to Massachusetts for all of us to be at the awards ceremony.

Alas, the kugl came in second to Esther’s Matzo Balls.

My mother received applause and a mug, and we took her photo. She was really happy. Look at that smile!

Every now and then, when I’d visit her, I’d remind her of her award-winning noodle pudding and dig the mug out of the cabinet. She didn’t remember winning it, but it made her happy. When she moved, I wanted the mug, but I couldn’t find it.

Yesterday, I made my mother’s noodle kugel for the first time since she’d died. I boiled the noodles, diced my apricots, beat my eggs. As usual, I cut the sugar in half, added only six tablespoons butter. I put it in the oven.

Then I looked over and saw the applesauce sitting on the counter.

I’m in my Third Third. Things like this happen. I knew what to do. I dumped the kugel back in the mixing bowl, added the applesauce, and put it back in the oven. My book club loved it.

Driver Ed: Third Third Style

Driver Ed in our First Third: harrowing films of terrible car accidents, screeching brakes, bodies burnt to crisps.

Driver Ed in our Third Third: harrowing statistics like, “Seniors aged 65 and over are more than twice as likely as younger drivers to be killed when involved in a crash;” that we need 20 times more light to see at night at age 40 than at age 20; that deaths in crashes start increasing around ages 60-64.

I decided to click on all those AARP emails about saving 30% for a limited time only – with a promo code! – on the Smart Driver™ online course so I’d get an insurance discount. It looked easy enough: there were six units, and it would take about four hours. I could do it on my own schedule.

The man and the woman instructors said this was all about change: we and our bodies are changing, our cars are changing, and road conditions are changing. It became clear that I wasn’t the only one in my Third Third: my 2001 Subaru was in its Third Third. It doesn’t have half the gizmos new cars have. Gizmos may make driving safer, but gizmos apparently also add to the confusion.

Right off, the novelty impressed me. The instructors switched from video to PowerPoint-looking things, to little interactive games. I had to click on the little clouds to see how many deaths per 1,000 crashes occur at each age.

Right away, we hit my personal fear factor: vision. Older drivers have trouble with glare, with switching from looking out the windshield to looking at the dashboard, to seeing contrast. I already know dusk is the roughest time for me driving. In a car, I’ve learned it’s hard to switch from the road to the cheat sheet with my directions written on it.

I’ve written about my “Agony at the Eye Doctor,” but this course put eye doctor agony in my car. They described a vision test I’d never even had: contrast sensitivity. I’d better tell my eye doctor about that. I have a new thing to worry about.

But vision wasn’t enough: we had to move on to the big fear factor: brain health. As we age, we experience changes in “memory, processing speed, attention, and brain regulation skills – overall executive function” – Oh, no! She named the nightmares! If driving is a complex balancing act, “the idea that our mind isn’t working as well as it used to can be frightening.” You think?

Okay, a bit of First Third explanation: As a teenager, the week before my road test for a driver’s license, I was out practicing with my mother. At the top of a hill, an inattentive driver was on the wrong side of the road and rammed into me head-on. In a big old Buick, the engine sat in the front seat with us, and my face went into the steering wheel.

I decided I wasn’t going to drive. Ever. Cars were tons of weaponry on the road, and “other guys” were everywhere.

This continued for a couple years until my parents were tired of chauffeuring me everywhere. So I learned to drive. Unwillingly. Hence, a happy career in public transit and a love affair with buses and street cars.

Living in Anchorage, having a child, having to be places – driving is what I do now. It’s what my mother did, too, which worried her kids a lot. The course talks about that, about how to have The Conversation with a person who shouldn’t be driving.

Mostly, the course upped my attention, always a good thing. Meanwhile, I got to click on icons, click on highway signs, and click on talk bubbles. I got to move the car into the right garage. I wouldn’t call it a video game, but I did win dollars off on my car insurance.

The Humor Self-Test

I really love teaching my Alaska Literacy Program class, but I had a special treat this last semester: the unit on Humor. First, we had to work on our vocabulary. Imagine being new to English and encountering these expressions. It makes you realize how many land mines a new language presents:

• It went over like a lead balloon
• I don’t get it.
• That’s too much.
• That went over my head.

Our book took us through a Humor Self-Test of funny pictures. Or not-funny, if you didn’t get it. Or not-funny if it was just stupid. We had to rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being very funny.

Quiet Insook rated everything a 5. As we went through each picture, and as Insook rated it a 5 yet again, we all found that hilarious. We’d wait for Insook’s vote and then laugh all over again.

Which was not as raucous as our laughter club. We’re supposed to improve our health and wellbeing by laughing for no reason. So we chuckled, looked at each other, and laughed some more. Soon we were helpless with laughter, sweating from laughter, tears streaming down our faces. Lori, the Literacy Program’s program director, came in because, as she said, her walls were shaking. We laughed harder. (Supposedly, all that laughter lost us between 10 and 40 calories.)

Everyone had to tell a joke in English to the rest of the class. Just imagine trying to tell a joke in another language! How would I even tell a knock-knock joke??? (I stuck with bringing in the peanut brittle can that explodes with snakes when you open it.)

Anne from Germany told this one: ‘Two toothpicks fight their troublesome way through the forest, taking many hours. Suddenly, they are passed by a porcupine. So one toothpick tells the other, “If I had known there was a bus route on our way, I would have waited.”’

We had to take some time to process mentally. Anne said, “Originally, the joke was about a hedgehog, but I thought maybe everyone would know porcupine better.” But that was only the beginning of our cultural adjustments. Some of us were still working on toothpicks, on waiting for buses, on forest. There is a lot of cultural translation that has to happen when you hear a joke. Moments later, we got it!

Rosario from Mexico told hers: ‘I gave my mother-in-law a present for Christmas, a cemetery plot. The next Christmas, she said, “Why haven’t you given me a present for Christmas?” I said, “Well, you haven’t used the one I gave you last year!”’

Some of us laughed, but Insook of South Korea was horrified: if a joke like that were told of a Korean mother-in-law, it would be scandalous. It would be a terrible, terrible insult. Definitely not a 5.

Meanwhile, Insook’s co-worker told her a blonde joke. In a room full of Asians and Latinos, the blonde joke doesn’t even compute.

Our workbook and CD had a few examples of practical jokes. We had to learn vocabulary like:

• be the butt of a joke
• cross the line
• take a joke

“You’re invited to a friend’s costume party. When you arrive, everyone else is nicely dressed in business clothes, and you’re dressed in a chicken costume.” How do you rate that joke? It’s a 0 if it’s you, but if it’s someone else, we admitted, we’d go home and tell our families about this hilarious practical joke. It’s all a matter of perspective.

The toughest vocabulary to explain was “politically correct.” In a workbook scenario, someone told an offensive joke about an ethnic group. When the object of the joke was insulted, the joke teller accused him of being too politically correct.

So how do you explain to immigrants the recent cultural phenomenon of “politically correct”? How someone’s experience of hurt and insult is turned around to being their problem? That rudeness gets a free pass in the guise of opposing “political correctness”?

It’s all a matter of perspective, and every day, I appreciate the opportunity to see the world from many different directions.

The Acquisition Exception

The rule in this Third Third household – this household committed to decluttering – is No New Acquisition Unless Something Goes Out. Nothing In unless Something Out. This applies to the upcoming holidays, too.

Mostly, the rule was created to apply to pottery. Pottery is so beautiful and so irresistible, but pottery impacts kitchen cabinet space. It demands limits.

Sometimes the rule is really easy, like with clothes. Mostly, clothes don’t enter my closet until something is hopelessly worn out or out of date, so that’s not really an issue. Art supplies was a tough one, but since I seem to have less and less time for art-play as opposed to art-production (which I guess is a whole story there), I don’t need to be surrounded by art supplies I’m not using. They haunt me.

And containers are tough, too. It’s hard for me to turn down a good box. Recently, I recycled a perfectly wonderful reams-of-paper box with a lid, and it nearly killed me. Then, at a meeting, someone randomly mentioned they were moving and needed boxes, and I was unable to help (which, of course, is one of the prime reasons for acquisition to begin with: the lure of eventual helpfulness).

So what’s the Acquisition Exception? Rocks.

Rocks like you walk along the beach and there’s a perfectly round, smooth, beach rock. Do you just leave it there? Or rocks like you’re at the Kennecott Mines historic site and the ground is littered with rocks of bright turquoise-green. Or you’re in the Badlands of South Dakota and the red earth is so astounding in color, how can you not bring home a sample?

I’m not talking about the big boulders from the backyard that I get to leave out at the curb with a big sign saying, “Free.” And I admit, my disposal-to-acquisition ratio gave me lots of leeway after our house was robbed and they took my decorative boxes filled with … rocks.

I am talking about the twelve rocks that came home with me from the beach in Homer last weekend.

It always starts with perfectly smooth rocks that just feel good in my hand.

But this time, I also found a rectangular rock. I noticed it because it was smooth but had sharp edges, rare in a beach rock. It looked like a rectangle of a flag, so I had an idea. I would paint it to look like the Alaska flag, and when I visited my parents’ grave in New York, I would leave it on the headstone. My bit of Alaska paying respect.

Once the rock-painting idea was planted in my brain, I was reminded of the latest art challenge of my Bricolage group: playing cards. Those challenges mean “do whatever you want having something to do with playing cards.” Amazingly, rocks turned up on the beach in the shape of playing cards! After the first one, I admit I was scouring the beach for playing-card-shaped rocks (which are very hard to come by and require great stretches of the imagination to resemble playing cards). I’m not sure how I’ll paint them. Will their kings and queens become Fred, Barney, Wilma, and Betty?

I’ve seen quilts with rocks embedded in them that were gorgeous, and when I discovered Syrian artist Nizar Ali Badr, who makes whole art of differently-shaped rocks, I was enthralled. I can’t do justice to his works, but here’s a sample and there’s more about him here.

Nuts! I should have looked at his work again before we left for Homer. I’d have spent the whole time combing the beach for … More Rocks!

The Cure for Indoor Torture

I hate sweating indoors. I hate the humid, steaming cloud that develops around my face as I sweat indoors. No, I detest sweating indoors. I ABHOR sweating indoors.

But I’m kind of stuck with it. Ever since the knee injury, I haven’t been able to run. I can’t run until I develop really good supporting muscles around my knee, and even then, on the advice of my doctor, the pounding of running is not really good for my joints.

So I swam. But since this is a Third Third story, soon my shoulder started hurting. I took to hiking (with trekking poles to reduce pressure on my knee), but I can only manage hiking one mountain a week (if that). There isn’t enough snow for cross-country skiing yet, so flab grew, pounds appeared, and pants and bras got tighter. And, as we all know, life expectancy diminished and odds of dementia increased. Meanwhile, worrying about all that increased my cortisol levels. Soon I’d be a goner. A depressed goner.

There was no way around it: I had to go sweat in the athletic club.

I could give the elliptical machine a try. It resembled running in an odd, loping, incongruous sort of way, and it wouldn’t pound my knees. Plus it would do my arms.

I picked a machine, checked the TV screens in front of it. My choices were football, NASCAR races, and more football. I put the little foamy covers on the earpieces of the headset and tried to turn on the channel and volume. It didn’t work. I peeled the foamy covers off and moved to another machine, where I put the little foamy covers on, and that didn’t work, either. Not to mention I had to stare at the guys around me to see how the headset is supposed to sit on my head. Upside down?

“You have to pedal to turn the sound on,” one guy said.

Okay. While I was trying to figure out my “options” (weight and age? What kind of options are those?), the machine told me to “Pedal faster.” So I pedaled while I fiddled with dials. I’d aim for 30 minutes of NASCAR.

29:20

29:03

I tried playing games with myself: Don’t look at the time remaining until the next commercial.

27:58 Does that count as “making it to 27” or is it really still mostly 28?

27:26 Oh, this is excruciating! My eyes wandered to every other television in the room. By the time I got back to my TV, the cars were still going round and round. There was a moment of excitement because a piece of lint got stuck in front of a brake air vent or something and somehow the pit crew cleared it while the car was still racing around.

26:01 Wow, that piece of lint was worth a minute and a half of distraction!

Eventually the steam started coming off my body. I was breathing sweaty air! I was breathing everyone else’s sweaty air! I had to think about something else – NASCAR had to get more interesting – or I was going to have a panic attack from insufficient fresh air.

Eventually – because time moves on, even on an elliptical, even when it’s torture – I got to 0 minutes remaining. And then, I actually went back another day. It happened to be a weekday at 3 pm.

Jeopardy was on! I watched and answered (or rather asked the questions), and when Alex Trebek took a break, I looked at my remaining time: 15 minutes! Time had flown! It was miraculous! I knew the words were from Australia’s national anthem, that Cervantes had written Don Quixote, and that antidote and anecdote were often mixed up.

I still sweated and breathed sweaty air, but I didn’t notice.

Now I even go a little earlier to make sure I get the foamy earpiece covers on in time. Tim asked if I go to the gym to watch Jeopardy. No, I go to the gym to exercise … but I’m only happy when Jeopardy is on. I once was stuck with a CSI or an NCIS or an SUV or whatever, but it didn’t make time fly as much as Jeopardy. Jeopardy exercises my brain, too!

My whole life, I always equated watching daytime TV with sickness or depression or degeneracy. With being a slug. Now, in my Third Third, daytime TV is making me fit. Ha!

The Quest for New-ness #4

The quest for New Things is always a win – for variety, for newness – but the exact result of the quest sometimes yields a few duds. Recently, I’ve scored two clear wins, but the jury is still out on the dud.

They all came from classes at Anchorage Community House, my new go-to place of learning and doing New Things. The other things I’ve made there have been wood projects, but the class description for Indigo Dyeing said, “Create beautiful indigo creations using the shibori dyeing technique.”

In class, we took our fabric and folded it, tied it, clothes-pinned it. Basically, we made a tight little wad so that when it sat in the indigo dye bath, we’d leave the marks of where dye absorbed and where it didn’t. Yes – shades of tie-dying! – that’s shibori.

This was a clear success. I think I’ll cut my bluish indigo-ish fabric into squares and make a quilt, but that’s a project for another day … or year.

While we were busy dyeing indigo, Meg told us of another Community House offering: Bundle Dyed Scarves. What I got out of this one was that we’d roll flowers and vegetables up in cloth and make patterns. This sounded sufficiently goofy and fun and useful – right up my alley.

Yup, we rolled rose petals and leaves and eucalyptus and flowers and bugs in silk. (The bugs are from cochineal insects which produce the crimson color. I first met them when visiting weavers in Peru.) Then we wound the silk around tin cans or sticks and tied it on really, really tightly. Then we stuck the bundle in boiling cabbage water.

Finally, our dye bath was over, and this one, too, was a great success. An artistic, silk, loop scarf will challenge my usual schtunk attire, but it’s soft and pretty … and can always make a nice gift.

So now we get to my last New Thing class:

“Learn to make bags out of plastic grocery bags. These bags are EXTRA sturdy and hold lots of weight. It’s easy. Just bring a scissors, a crochet hook the size of your pinky, and patience.”

What really amazed me was that everyone in the class brought their own Bags of Bags. We all have Bags of Bags … along with Boxes of Boxes and Containers of Containers. Even using cloth shopping bags, plastic bags accumulate. We were supposed to slice our plastic bags into strips, loop them together, and make “plarn,” plastic yarn. This class was a decluttering/recycling opportunity!

My only experience with crocheting was a Brownie project when I was little. I would ride my bike to Mrs. Goodhartz’s house for help crocheting Pierre the Poodle. Every trip, Mrs. Goodhartz would say, “My, my, these stitches are so very tight.” They were SO TIGHT they were impenetrable. If Pierre had ever been finished, he would have been airtight.

But this time, I was armed with a crochet hook the size of my thumb!

A crochet hook the size of one’s thumb is no protection against tight stitches. My thumb nail hurts from trying to pull stitches off the crochet hook. When I come around a row, things are so tight and jam-packed that it’s hard to tell what exactly qualifies as a stitch. Peggy, who took the class with me, said I must be adding stitches: instead of going up, my shopping bag is going out. I am making a plastic rug.

Mimi, who also took the class, said this sort of project would drive her mother crazy. Her mother doesn’t get quilting (“Why cut fabric up only to sew it together?”) so the idea of slicing plastic bags in order to crochet them together to make another plastic bag would strike her as ludicrous. I’m starting to agree.

I had to take a break for my thumb nail, cuticle, and spirit to recover, but then I cut my thumb slicing an onion. After bleeding on my plastic bag, things have ground to a halt.

In my Third Third, I get to abandon projects that aggravate more than they please. Maybe I’ll recycle my crocheted plastic and call it a draw. Then I’ll sit and re-admire my indigo-dyed fabric and flower-dyed silk.