Monthly Archives: February 2014

Style, Stubble, and Scruffy Chic

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

I thought that look went out with the last reruns of “Miami Vice.” Or maybe it did, and it’s just come back around again.

In either case, it was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. I’m talking about the fashion in ads for men’s clothing to show models all dressed up in their nice suits, with three days’ worth of stubble on their faces. They look as if they interrupted a back-country fishing trip for the photo shoot, hurrying back to town in such a rush that they didn’t take time to shave.

Does anyone in the real world actually think this “stubbly chic” is attractive? Are there women out there who daydream about snuggling up to guys with faces that feel like a cross between a juvenile porcupine and a piece of 60-grit sandpaper?

Most of these scruffy-faced models are chisel-jawed guys in their 20’s. A few, maybe in their 30’s, seem to be trying to look a little older, going for the “CEO’s are real men, too” look. And even some of the guys modeling clothes for teens show up proudly in their chin whiskers. Never mind that they don’t look old enough to shave.

Thankfully, there’s one demographic that doesn’t seem to have succumbed to this look: models over 50. (Yes, there are a few, and no, not all of them are advertising Viagra.) Maybe even fashion photographers have to admit that it doesn’t work to show a guy of a certain age with gray stubble sprouting across his not-so-chiseled jaw. No matter how expensively he may be dressed, he’s going to look like he just spent the night sleeping behind a dumpster.

Taking this look of fashionable scruffiness to its logical conclusion, what might be next? Just think of the possibilities. Slender young female swimsuit models with hairy legs and underarms like King Kong. Dimpled toddlers in cute little outfits, with pureed peas smeared on their rosy little cheeks. Grade-schoolers with Kool-Aid mustaches. Cosmetics models whose close-up shots reveal not only flawless skin, but also bits of broccoli stuck between their teeth.

I’m all for truth in advertising, but this might be taking “reality” a bit too far. Especially when most real guys seem to hold to the quaint custom of shaving every morning before they head off to work.

There is hope, I suppose, that the stubble-and-a-suit look will eventually run its course. I did see one photo in this week’s newspaper inserts of a manly young guy with a clean-shaven chin. It was an ad for jackets, in the Cabela’s flyer. He was fishing.

Categories: Fashion | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

A Tale of Two Cacti

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

It’s a classic tale: the poor, abandoned orphan who perseveres, eventually overcoming hardship and heartache to become successful, happy, and universally admired. Charles Dickens might have written it. Oh, wait, Charles Dickens did write it. Several times, in fact.

But this particular story has unfolded right here in my very own home. Here is the uplifting (I think) tale of the Christmas cactus and the Thanksgiving cactus.

The Christmas cactus, a valued member of the family, can trace its ancestry back some 40 years to my grandmother’s plant, and back another 30 or 40 years to her cousin Minnie’s plant.

The Thanksgiving cactus was a gift to my daughter several years ago from someone who turned out to be a false friend. My daughter didn’t want the reminder of an unpleasant experience, so she left the cactus at my house.

I didn’t exactly welcome it with enthusiasm, but I took it in. I watered it. I kept it in the south window with the other plants. But I never talked to it, admired it, or even bothered to transplant it out of its original cheap plastic pot. It was just there, dutifully cared for but never loved. Sort of a step-cactus. A second-best cactus.

In response to this neglect, it did its best to thrive. It worked hard, blooming faithfully every year—even when my heirloom Christmas cactus did not. This outshining of my favorite, as Dickens could have predicted, did not make me love it. Over time, though, its quiet, uncomplaining dependability did generate a certain grudging respect and acceptance.

Last fall, I decided it was time to cut back the original plant. I snipped off several cuttings and plunked them into some water to take root—which, of course, they promptly did. Eventually I planted them in a new pot. Meanwhile, I kept watering the original plant, not wanting to throw it out until the new one was established.

Toward the end of November, I noticed buds on both plants. Obviously, the new one was thriving. But I certainly couldn’t dump out the old one while it was blooming. Even in Dickens’s time, condemned female criminals who were pregnant were reprieved long enough to bear their children.

So I waited and watered. All three cacti bloomed beautifully throughout the Christmas season, in an abundance and harmony that would have made Dickens proud.

We were out of town for much of January, and by the time we got home all the lovely pink-orange blossoms had dried up. Still, I didn’t quite get around to throwing out the original orphan plant.

And now, both Thanksgiving cacti are covered with an unheard-of second round of delicate pink buds. I don’t want two of them. But I can’t condemn a blooming cactus to the compost pile. They’ve done it again. When my back is turned, I swear I can hear them snickering.

Does anybody out there want a Thanksgiving cactus? Please, please, let me do the “far, far better thing” and give you one. Charles Dickens and I would both be grateful.

Categories: Odds and Ends | Tags: , , | 3 Comments

“Nobody But a Logger Stirs His Coffee With His Thumb”

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

Rocking a baby to sleep is one of life’s lovely little pleasures. Well, at least that’s true as long as said baby, not particularly interested in going to sleep, isn’t screaming its darling little head off.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the case the other morning with my one-year-old granddaughter. She was just a bit reluctant to settle down for her nap, so I sat down in the rocker and sang to her. For whatever reason, when I sing to little ones they seem to slip right into dreamland. Given my singing voice, my theory is that they do it in sheer self-defense. Never mind; if it works, it works.

In this case, it only took two times through “The Frozen Logger,” before she was sound asleep. I just sat for a little while, soaking in the pleasure of holding her and watching her beautiful little face as she slept.

During this meditative interlude, the song kept going around and around in my mind. “The Frozen Logger,” is a folk song by James Stevens that I learned from a recording by The Weavers. It has several qualities that make it a good lullaby. It’s a fun little story song, set to a waltz, so the words are easy to remember. It doesn’t have any inconvenient low notes or annoying high notes. And, most important, it has a lot of verses and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.

The longer I sat, though, the more I started to wonder about the song. Chiefly, whether it was really an appropriate one for a conscientious grandma to use as a lullaby. After all, it’s about a guy so tough he “stirs his coffee with his thumb.” Not only that, “if you’d pour whiskey on it, he would eat a bale of hay.”

Then I remembered how that classic lullaby, “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” ends. “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.” Given the potential trauma to an infant psyche from this happy thought, I decided not to worry about mere bare-digit coffee stirring.

Then I got distracted by another thought. Suppose you have a cup of steaming hot coffee, fresh from the pot. Or you’ve just poured boiling water over a tea bag. There’s no way you would stick your thumb in that cup.

Yet some people have no problem whatsoever in drinking coffee while it’s still steaming. Or in sipping tea that’s been cooled from the boiling point by only a tiny splash of milk.

I’m one of those people. This is why I rarely order coffee in restaurants. It isn’t hot enough. So I gulp it quickly before it cools, and then the waitress comes by and fills it up again, and I have to drink that while it’s hot. And before I’ve finished my omelet I’ve had six cups, and I’m so full of caffeine that my hands shake for the rest of the morning, and if I tried to send a text, LOL would probably come out KIK.

What’s the explanation for that? Are our tongues—sensitive organs so capable of detecting subtle tastes that they can tell the difference between two brands of chocolate—really that tough? More to the point, are they really that much tougher than our thumbs? After all, thumbs, besides being one of the things making us human, are calloused, hard-working digits.

Maybe—to save others the trouble of pointing it out—I should just admit the most likely truth. Apparently, some of us exercise our tongues more than we do our thumbs.

Categories: Family, Food and Drink | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

Fertilizing the Family Tree

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

When my younger stepdaughter and my daughter were both in third grade, they had a class assignment to draw family trees. My stepdaughter’s tree was a small one, including only her mother, her father, her sister, and her brother. My daughter’s tree was more like a fat Christmas spruce with an over-abundance of ornaments. She included her father, me, her brother, her stepdad, her stepsisters and stepbrother, their stepbrothers and stepsister on their mother’s side, our cat, and her stepsister’s stepdad’s dog.

Deciding who is entitled to perch on a branch of your family tree isn’t always a simple thing. In our family, now that those earnest third-graders and their siblings are adults with kids of their own, it hasn’t become any simpler. We just keep adding inlaws, grandkids, cousins, and significant others. (Does anybody have “insignificant others,” do you suppose? I hope not.) Enough of these extended family members are step-whomevers so that most of the time it’s easier to drop the “step” part and just think of them as what they are: family.

And it doesn’t stop there. My partner’s mother, for instance, who died recently at age 96, had only a small family of her own. But in the last years of her life, the definition of “family” in her life changed. A woman who originally helped her with house cleaning and errands, then took on more and more care of her as her health declined, eventually became a close and loving adopted daughter. She didn’t come alone, either. She brought her children and grandchildren, and all of them blessed a rather solitary woman’s house and life with people, activity, and lots of love. If that doesn’t qualify as “family,” I don’t know what does. Branches are branches, even when they have been grafted onto the family tree.

All those branches, of course, have to be supported by roots. To some extent, we define our families by where we came from. In my case, one grandmother immigrated from Germany and the other’s parents were both born in Norway. My grandfathers, whose ancestors came to this country much earlier, aren’t quite as easy to categorize.

But we’re about to find out more. We’re participating in the National Geographic Genographic Project. By testing DNA samples, it can tell us more about where our ancestors came from, where in the world they went across the generations, and what racial mix we are. It can even reveal whether we have Neanderthal ancestry. Who wouldn’t want to know that?

It will take a while to get the results, but there’s one thing I already know. This knowledge is going to expand the roots that support our family trees. A good thing, too. At the rate we keep adding branches, we need the broadest root system we can find. Neanderthals and all.

Categories: Family | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

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