Author Archives: Kathleen Fox

One of the things travel offers is the opportunity to observe nature. It’s especially enjoyable to see the various types of wildlife in their natural habitat. Take the grackles we saw not far from Santa Fe. Their natural habitat, apparently, is a paved parking lot.

We had stopped at a large tourist store/travel stop along Interstate 40. As we walked from our car to the building, we noticed several birds on the ground in the parking lot. Grackles are medium-sized birds, larger than robins but smaller than the crows they somewhat resemble. These weren’t exactly the grandest of grackles, being somewhat anxious-looking and a bit bedraggled about the tail feathers, possibly from close encounters with car doors. Still, they skipped busily back and forth among the vehicles as if they had some reason for being there.

When we came out of the store and headed back to the car, we discovered what that reason was. One of the grackles was hopping along the front of a small car, its neck stretched tall and its eyes on the bumper. Every few steps it would jump straight up and grab one of the bug bodies squashed onto the bumper. It was enjoying the afternoon bug buffet, an ample and presumably appetizing spread of ready-mashed assorted insects.

We watched the bird for a while as it pecked industriously back and forth along the bumper. If visitors stayed in the store long enough, browsing through the moccasins, straw hats, plastic cacti, tee-shirts, and other souvenirs of New Mexico, they would have clean cars by the time they came out.

At least some visitors would. Our vehicle, an SUV designed for rough terrain, was unfortunately too tall to be a good candidate for grackle grooming. We might have to wait till the birds evolve, as they surely will over time, into a new sub-species—the parking lot grackle. These will no doubt have longer legs and longer necks to allow them to reach the really juicy morsels higher up. With any luck, they’ll also have improved peripheral vision to help them watch for closing car doors.

The other morning about 9:00, my doorbell rang. On the front step stood one of my friends, along with her dog. Both of them looked shaken. She asked, “Can we come in? There’s a mountain lion right up there in the middle of the road.”

She had parked her car at the main street about half a mile away in order to walk her dog in our neighborhood. It’s a quiet, pleasant place for walking, an area of meandering dead-end streets, with widely-spaced houses interspersed with clusters of trees and brushy gullies. Even though it’s inside the city limits, the place has an edge-of-town feel to it. We regularly see deer and wild turkeys.

We’ve also assumed for some time now that mountain lions occasionally stroll through. But those mountain lions were hypothetical. This one was real. There’s a big difference.

Admittedly, my first reaction to her news was a flicker of disappointment. I go for walks in this neighborhood all the time. How come I’ve never gotten to see a mountain lion? That response was soon overshadowed by unease. What was a full-grown mountain lion doing out and about in the middle of a bright, sunny morning?

This cat had been standing in the street maybe 100 yards from the end of our driveway. It was watching several turkeys in a nearby yard, no doubt contemplating a late breakfast. When my friend waved her arms and shouted, the lion moved off to the edge of the road and sat down in the grass. The dog, meanwhile—an arthritic, 15-year-old dog—was barking and straining at the leash, trying to pull free so she could take off and chase the big kitty. My friend wisely decided instead to detour into my driveway.

We called the Department of Game, Fish, and Parks. By the time a couple of guys got to the house about 15 minutes later, the lion had gone on its way, but at least its presence was duly and officially noted.

Now, on my daily walks, I keep feeling uneasy prickles between my shoulder blades. I can’t help wondering if I’m being eyed by a 150-pound cat who is trying to decide whether I look like breakfast or should be saved for lunch. I certainly don’t want to give up walking. It’s a form of meditation for me as well as exercise. Still, knowing there’s a critter out there who might see me as its next entrée tends to detract from the meditative process.

Maybe the answer is to get a dog. True, there aren’t many dogs big enough or tough enough to take on a mountain lion. That doesn’t really matter. The dog wouldn’t have to be big, or fierce, or brave. It would just have to be slow. I wouldn’t have to worry about outrunning a mountain lion, after all, as long as I knew I could outrun the dog.

I almost got to go buy school supplies this year. A recent family visit was originally going to coincide with a school-supply shopping trip for the grandkids. But then the family schedule changed, so they went and bought everything the day before I arrived. Bummer.

It’s not that I like shopping. I hate shopping. It’s just that I love school supplies. Nothing says, “fresh start” quite like a pile of crisp new notebooks, a pack of pens with the caps still on, a set of unopened markers, and a brand new three-ring binder—the fancy one that comes complete with dividers and a pencil case and that closes with a zipper. Best of all, though, is the delightful promise of a whole box of new crayons or colored pencils, all those untouched points lined up neatly in their precise, color-sorted rows.

When my kids were young, school shopping was often frustrating. Some years it was a struggle to squeeze the extra money out of the budget for the basics and maybe a few extras like a new backpack or a nicer binder. The kids would want the more expensive folders with pictures on them, the brand-name markers, and the fancy gel pens, while both my budget and my inherent thrift would argue for the plain, the generic, and the least expensive.

By the time the budget had grown, so had the kids. I remember my disappointment the year the youngest had, at least for school purposes, grown too old for crayons.

I was shocked to learn this year that, in the cities where two of my kids live, the grade school kids don’t get to have their own school supplies. Oh, the families still buy them individually, following the school’s lists down to the exact colors of the folders and the prescribed brand of tissues. But on the first day of school, everything is dumped into one giant pool, turned over to the teachers to be doled out as needed.

On a strictly practical level, I can see the logic of this. It has to be easier for the teachers to control a central supply closet rather than cope with, “I forgot my pencils,” and, “my mom didn’t buy the right notebooks,” and maybe even, “Ashley has the good kind of markers and she won’t let me use them.”

Perhaps this communal approach is also seen as more “fair” to the kids whose families can’t afford the good markers or who neglect to buy what the kids need. Although, in my town, that need is met quite nicely by a local credit union’s annual school supply drive. It’s a perfect blend of charity and nostalgia for those of us whose kids are grown but who still get a kick out of buying notebook paper.

There’s something missing when your school supplies come out of the central supply closet. I sympathize with all those kindergarteners and first-graders. They’re missing out on the proprietary satisfaction of knowing that the first scarlet stroke on paper from that pristine red crayon or marker is going to be their own.

Last week my nephew accused his mother of felonious behavior: “She broke into Donna’s house to leave zucchini!”

Her response was immediate and indignant. “I didn’t break in! The door was unlocked.”

She didn’t even bother to deny that she had left the zucchini. After all, she had been merely following the zucchini-grower’s unwritten rule for getting rid of surplus: in August, any unlocked door is fair game. She knew no jury of her peers—namely, vegetable gardeners in the throes of zucchini harvest—would ever convict her. Instead, they’d probably ask her for Donna’s address. They would be eager to make the acquaintance of anyone too naïve to lock her door as protection against random acts of zucchini-dropping.

I, on the other hand, as a tomatoes-only gardener, was not only willing but eager to take some extra produce off my sister’s hands. I came home from a family visit with a box of cucumbers, two heads of cabbage, a bag of fresh green beans, and six zucchini. I appreciated it all, even the zucchini, though I was a bit daunted by the four that were bigger than baseball bats.

The problem with zucchini is figuring out how to use it. Zucchini is a vegetable, more specifically a squash. Therefore, by definition, it must be good for you. The dilemma is not whether one should eat it, but how.

Since zucchini has virtually no flavor, and since its texture evokes an art gum eraser more than a vegetable, it doesn’t add a lot of pizzazz to salads. Frying it works reasonably well, as long as you understand that the zucchini itself is not the point, but merely an excuse to add plenty of butter and seasoning. Sneaking it into casseroles is a possibility, as long as you don’t try to serve it to eagle-eyed small children who will spend their dinner hour poking through the entree to separate out small bits of anything suspiciously vegetable.

My purpose in bringing home the huge zucchini, though, was to grate and freeze it to use in zucchini bread and muffins. It’s a great way to eat something deliciously full of fat and sugar, while pretending that it’s good for you. This year I’ve discovered something even better—my son-in-law’s recipe for zucchini chocolate cake. Moist, rich chocolate cake with vegetables in it? Sounds like health food to me.

For years (at least until I learned about the chocolate cake) I’ve wondered why anyone grows zucchini. One reason might be that it’s so prolific and easy to produce. It’s like my father’s memory of the food when he was in Navy boot camp: it wasn’t very good, but there always was plenty of it.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to suspect a different reason. Maybe people don’t grow zucchini for its nutritional value, but for its entertainment value. Even those who eat zucchini laugh about it. Even its name is funny. It’s the squash that gets no respect. You just have to appreciate a vegetable that provides such good material for so many bad jokes.

It’s summer—the time for county fairs, midways, and carnivals. As I kid, I always went for the tamer rides on the midway. Not for me the stomach-churning contraptions with names like “The Screaming Sidewinder” that hurl you through the air, fling you upside-down and inside-out, and finally spit you out with your knees wobbling and your face an interesting shade of green. No, the carousel and the Ferris wheel were about as adventurous as I ever cared to get.

My late husband, however, was much more of a risk-taker. No boring old Ferris wheels for him. He was a roller coaster kind of guy. Once we visited a resort in Nevada that had a roller coaster. This was no carnival roller-coaster wannabe to be hauled around on the back of a truck and set up in half an hour at the local fairgrounds. It was the real thing, installed around and above the hotel. It climbed almost straight up till it was higher than the building, then dropped straight down—and after that it got nasty.

Wayne, of course, wanted to go on this ride. And he wanted to share the experience with me. I told him thanks but no thanks, I didn’t like roller coasters.

“Have you ever ridden on one?” he asked.

Well, no, not really. Not actually. Never, in fact.

“So how do you know you don’t like them if you’ve never been on one?”

Well, I just knew, okay? At the same time, I pride myself on being a logical and fair-minded person, so I had to admit the validity of his argument.

Once I had gone that far, there was no way out. Which is why, a few minutes later, I found myself standing beside him in line, a ticket clutched in my sweaty fist. The name of the ride was printed on the ticket: “The Desperado.” It was not reassuring.

For once I didn’t mind standing in line, but unfortunately our turn came all too soon. We joined the rush of enthusiastic teenagers and small children and climbed into a car. Two slender preteen girls just ahead of us said that they had been on the roller coaster dozens of times over the past two days. “It’s a blast!”

The safety bar that snapped across my lap was so tight I was sure it would leave bruises. There wasn’t time to ask the attendant to loosen it before we took off. After the first few seconds, I was glad there hadn’t been. The car climbed slowly, ratcheting up the first steep grade. I knew we were going to drop abruptly sooner or later, so I hung on tightly, trying to prepare myself.

It didn’t do any good. Suddenly we were plummeting straight down, and it felt as if my head were going to fly off. I had been worried about getting sick to my stomach. Not a problem. I was too terrified to even remember I had a stomach. We screamed along the track at an angle that tipped us sideways, we whipped around sharp curves, we rippled up and down steep little backbreaking hills. We didn’t go upside-down. If I hadn’t been so scared, I might have been grateful for at least that one small concession.

At first Wayne kept telling me, “Relax! Just relax!” He finally must have decided that particular piece of advice was pointless, because he switched to, “Breathe! Just breathe!”

Meanwhile, the two girls in front of us were screaming and waving their arms in the air and having a wonderful time. They kept glancing back, though, obviously getting a bit worried about me. Finally, after the longest two and a half minutes of my life, one of them shouted, “It’s okay; it’s almost over.”

Mercifully, it was. We slowed down, went through a short tunnel, and rumbled to a stop. The attendant released the safety bar, and I pried my stiff fingers from around it, leaving fingernail marks in the steel.

I managed to climb out of the car and walk away on legs that just barely held me up. My neck hurt, my knees were shaking, and I felt a strong urge to sit down in the nearest dark corner and cry.

Wayne grinned heartlessly at me. “Well, you made it,” he said. “Are you glad you went?”

“I knew I didn’t like roller coasters,” I said.

“But how can you be so sure?” he argued. “You’ve only ridden once. You can’t decide for sure till you’ve been on at least a couple of rides.”

Oh, yes I could. I had.

If you see me at the fair this year, you may recognize me. I’ll be the one waiting in line for the merry-go-round.