Ranting in Moscow

I have been blessed with the gift of perfect selective memory.  I can remember always being a perfect child, never having made any mistakes in my life and always having made the right decisions.  It is this gift that allows me to rant, mostly to myself, but sometimes to others, about the stupidity of today’s youths. On the one hand, I really don’t care if they kill themselves ‘Planking’, or die from various cancers by smoking hookahs, but on a more personal level, these are the people who should be paying taxes to support me in my old age and I can’t afford to have this revenue stream diminished.  This whole hookah thing is very strange to me and has been since I first read Alice In Wonderland and couldn’t understand what a caterpillar was doing smoking.  We have seen lots of hookah bars around Moscow and other spots in Europe but the idea of passing around the mouthpiece and comingling bodily fluids with strangers is almost as foreign to me as smoking the darn thing.

Anyway, the idea of ranting to the wind reminded me of a distant relative, Charlie Kean, who lived with his wife Lulu on a small farm in Westport Connecticut. In the early 1950’s there were a lot of small farms in Westport, which is now one of the most expensive places to purchase homes.  In fact, Paul Newman purchased his house only a mile from Charlie’s farm.  This farm was just large enough to sustain Charlie and Lulu.  She would put up fruits and vegetables and store them on rickety old shelves in their dirt floor basement. I still have wonderful memories of going down those stairs and having my nose assaulted with the rich peaty smell of dirt, mingled with the sweet aroma of bread and butter pickles.

Charlie took care of some livestock, which I think were mostly chickens and ducks. He had what seemed to me to be the largest grinding stone I had ever seen. He would sit there and pedal away while sharpening his tools and even his pitchfork.  In addition to using the pitchfork to turn hay, he used it to spear pike and pickerel, which lazed about in the little brook that ran through the property.

My sister and I would visit and stay with them on hot summer days and Lulu would give us each a saltshaker and tell us to go out and catch some birds.  She had us convinced that all we had to do was sprinkle some salt on birds’ tails and then they couldn’t fly and we could pick them up and bring them back to the house as pets. We would run and run and try to sneak up and then run some more until we retreated to the well where we would drink the cold water out of a tin cup that was tied to the well pump handle with bailing twine.   I digress!

Charlie was the first person I ever knew that ranted and he would rant about anything.  Sitting in his chair in the morning drinking his coffee out of the saucer, he would complain about politics, weather, the darn radio, stinking commies, and a host of other topics, most of which I didn’t understand.  What I did understand however was when he would raise his pitchfork to the skies cursing the confound aeroplanes that would be the curse of man.  At that point I knew I wanted to learn to fly.

I had thought we were going to go out for dinner last night, but one look at Cindy when she got home convinced me that it would be good to just stay home.   I made a nice fluffy sour cream omelette with herbs de Provence and two cheeses.  I served them on beds of spinach with some pan-fried potatoes, onions and garlic. It all went very well with a nice Badger Creek Chardonnay/Semillon from Australia.  I didn’t know there were Badgers in Australia but it probably sounds better than Wombat Creek.

Best to all, Cindy and Wm

From CC:  Must find out how I looked when I got home last night!!!  I figured I was as adorable as ever but apparently not.