Or, you know, my bandwidth. The RLA and I have been having excruciatingly slow download times at the Casita de Zapatos, and when researched, turns out to be poachers on our unlocked wi-fi network. This blows for me, because I hate passwords that are impossible to remember. But there it is. Intruders in the virtual house.

I spent a part of last night with the Number Three Surrogate Daughter. She turned 21 last week. She is emancipated and finally able to control her own choices. She is finishing her undergrad and wanting to get her Master’s? Her Doctorate? In psych. By joining the Navy as an officer/doctor. The Military will pay for the degree in exchange for six years of her life.

I love her dearly and want to be proud that she is capable of considering this choice. But I am afraid that I have become an old woman, set in her ways, and those ways were forged in the 60s. I was too young to have participated in the televised youth movement; I watched it on tv from my living room in a tiny, coastal sub-tropical town, so far removed and yet so far ahead of that movement that I can never vote Republican, nor embrace the concept of the military. I knew the last draftees and the first young men to die (in droves) of AIDS.

I know that this is my problem, and I have no right to try and pass them on to her. She’ll just be one of that tiny minority of good people who enlist for the more noble reasons. And I can be proud of that.

Part the first: this is an experiment to see how the iPad works as a mobile blogging device. If it works well then the chance exists that I’ll be able to do better with poor old Girlyshoes than once a month.

Part the second is a meditation on rock and roll. I had a conversation with someone from work the other day and she commented on my relationship with music, or at least with rock lyrics. She said that I quote them and read them like poetry, while admitting that they are poetry. I went home and thought about it for a while. Not poetry, scripture.

I often see people on the train reading dog-eared bibles, sprinkled through with underlines, highlighted passages and post-it notes. While this does not reflect well on me, I find myself mystified by this behavior. Having read the old testament, there is very little I would read over and over. And once you’ve grasped the concept of do unto others, or thou shall not, really, how many more times does one need to read it? But then I had an epiphany: scripture is scripture and it is a comfort and an affirmation. Those folks I see are doing no more than I am when I listen to “Badlands” for the hundredth or more time. For them, the words are, you know, something about the meek or whatever. For me, and other disciples of the Church of Rock and Roll, it’s the more immediate satisfaction of “I want to spit in the face of these badlands, let the broken hearts stand as the price you gotta pay.”

So last weekend, I spent a few hours at the laptop and created a short form proselytization for my co-worker. I had to include some variations, sort of like multiple translations of King James… Because there is the studio version of “Rosalita”, and then there are many, many, many versions of it live. She needs to hear the words, hence studio, but she also needed to feel the energy of the live version. With the intro of the band, during the heyday of the song, when it was the centerpiece of a concert? (Which is, by the way, what was playing when I saw the lights swinging from the rafters at Madison Square Garden, from the rhythmic stamping of feet of a full house.) Or without the intro, but with the happy shrieks of the crowd when they recognize the opening riff and it’s a rare treat during the encores?

Then there is the flip side of affirmation, those songs I go back to when I am so depressed that even killing myself would require more effort than I can manage. Those are the Leonard Cohen dirges, and Dylan’s “Desolation Row”. For the record, when I was a senior in college, “Desolation Row” was in constant rotation on my turntable. My shades were kept closed and the AC down low. My house plants never grew better.

I’m back on the Gulf coast, the part of it that is still pristine and unaffected by the colossal cluster fuck that is the Deepwater Horizon spill. The sunsets are gorgeous. The sand is powdery and white. The herons wander right up to you on the beach to see if you might possibly have a little fish or two. This place is bliss. The only complaint I have, such as it is, is that the wi-fi in the timeshare is the extreme opposite of robust, and the only place I have a chance of connecting is on the balcony overlooking the beach. Tough. Except that in the course of typing this entry, the connection has dropped three times.

Over in Ravelry the other day, someone started a thread about food memories. Here are mine…

One of my earliest memories at all is sitting in my high chair, and my mother (who was left handed) feeding me. I didn’t like the direction the food came from, and took the spoon from her hand, dumped the food out, refilled the spoon and announced “SELF”. The number of jokes in my family about how the twig is bent, yadda yadda yadda….

I remember being about 5, and my mother took me to see my Grandma D* in the big house on the river. She had made potato pierogi, and Mom was going to pick some up for us. She asked me to come in, but I didn’t want to get out of the car (tiny town in 1959, it’s ok to leave a child in an open car on the street). So she came back out and stuck this pasty, white thing through the window and said, “Try this” and before I could clamp my mouth shut or turn away, I had had my first taste of Grandma D*’s legendary pierogi. Mummy had to go back and get more. I still wish I could duplicate her recipe.

My father could only make one dish: fried kippers and onions. He’d make them on Sunday mornings for us. My mother found the smell repellent and would gag, but my brother and I adored them. Stinky, salty fish and almost burnt onions. Served for breakfast with garlic toast. When he was dying, he still insisted on making them for us when I would go to visit him. Only Star ever loved them like I did, and she’s Swedish.

My Grandma K* made rice pudding. Not all soft, and fluffy, but baked in a casserole, with a sort of layer of custard on top, and cinnamon, lemon zest and raisins all baked in. That I can duplicate.

And of course, the raspberries. My K* grandparents had a summer home in Newport, RI, and the whole length of their back yard had a double row of raspberry canes. We’d go out first thing in the morning, and pick all the ripe ones, and still have enough for Grandma to make jam. Then we’d go out in the late afternoon, and eat all the ones that had ripened during the heat of the day. Also in Newport, Grandpa would take my brother and me for a walk in the morning before the fog/mist burned off. We’d pick wild mushrooms, and Grandma would fry them up in butter for breakfast.

Other memories: the old Korean gentleman who had an Asian vegetable farm in the glades and would come to the store with a box of samples for my family. Yard long beans, and cukes and chinese cabbage. My uncle, who was a produce shipper would come from the glades with sugar cane. We could just strip off the outer peel and chew the canes. Sitting in my Grandpa A*’s lap in his packing house, watching the oranges get packed into crates. My father cutting a cone-shaped plug out of the stem end of the orange, so I could suck the juice. Picking Surinam cherries off the hedges and eating them. Climbing in the mulberry tree, and picking enough that I could eat them to my fill and still have enough for Mummy to make a pie. Daddy opening coconuts with a machete. Sitting double, bareback on the SisterGirlFriendGirl’s horse, so we could reach the REALLY big kumquats on the tree in her front yard.

There was an A&W drive-in in my hometown (the only fast food shop in the whole town, BTW) and it was always a huge treat to go there and get a baby burger. They had momma burgers, daddy burgers and baby burgers. And waitresses who’d hang a tray on the car window.

Learning to swim at the pool at the Anchorage Hotel, and the coke machine (cost a dime and you could watch the bottle roll down the ramp) had banana soda. Bright yellow, tasted like banana popsicles only carbonated. I LOVED it. Haven’t seen it in 45 years, but recently someone brought in soda from Haiti and it was that: banana soda.

Every year, when my grandparents returned from RI, they would drive home with bushels of apples from their backyard trees. And jars and jars of Grandma’s raspberry jam.

Driving up to RI, we stopped for lunch on the first day at Cape Canaveral, at a pavillion on the St. John’s River. We’d have hard boiled eggs, and my mother would have put salt into a little twist of waxed paper for us to put on the eggs.

Then, later, when we drove through Georgia, we would buy fresh peaches from the side of the road. They had the thickest velvet on their skins. You had to rub it off on a napkin to be able to eat them.

My dad showing me how to pull a heart of palm from a young palmetto and eating it. Then trimming a bigger frond to a point to stick hotdogs on and roast over the camp fire.

Eating the following fresh from the tree: loquats, kumquats, mangos, oranges, calamondins, mulberries, lychees, avocados. Eating fresh smoked king fish.

The day I learned “tongue” at the deli was exactly what it sounded like, and it wasn’t Yiddish for something else.

And buying fresh garden peas, and sitting on the floor in front of the tv shelling them into a colander. And eating them by the handful, raw.

Going to the cranberry bogs in Massachusetts. AND OMG!!! the pecan rolls at the Stuckey’s on the highway.

How about you? What are your early food memories?

Listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage, sequestered in my studio, pounding out code. Today’s to do list: create a contact page on Mild Burning Symptoms, tweak the item code so that once sold, the item either disappears or has SOLD appended to the item name, tweak the additional photos code so that it displays correctly, bake a peach cobbler, visit Mummy. There are at least a dozen other items on the to do list, but they won’t get done.

One more cup of coffee, and then I am chaining myself to the laptop.