I guess that it isn't this way anymore, what with telecommunications deregulation, and unlimited long distance on any number of carriers, but in my youth, and, I suspect, for many, many others, Sunday mornings were when you made/received long-distance phone calls.
Sunday mornings were when you talked to distant family members. My parents called me on Sunday mornings (and morning is a very relative term) all four years I was in college. When I moved to New York City, to New Mexico, to anywhere other than their home, Sunday mornings were for family phone calls.

When I settled in Miami, and I was my own person, I called them on Sunday mornings.

This is the hardest part of being a fatherless child, this emptiness when there is no phone call on Sunday morning. My mother can't use the phone anymore; she lost that ability a couple of years ago. There was a certain black humor to it at first, hearing my father tell her that of course she couldn't hear me since she was trying to talk into the remote control.

That passed fairly soon. Now she lives down the street, and doesn't know me at all. She is losing her verbal skills at an alarming rate. Would it be any less poignant had she not been a 40-year volunteer at the library, an avid reader, a woman who daily did the crossword puzzles in ink? Now she can't process the words. Sometimes she even is aware that they have left.

But I was thinking about telephone calls. The RLA lost his parents many years before I did. We have few surviving aunts and uncles. How can you call one of them out of the blue, and ask them to speak, so you can have a conversation by proxie with someone who's gone?

I miss my father. It is Superbowl Sunday, and Daddy would have been watching. My nephew would have gotten a call this morning from Daddy, and they would have talked about Dan Marino's entry into the Hall of Fame. They would have trash talked a while about the Patriots. When it was my turn for the Sunday morning call, Daddy and I would have talked about what I was cooking for my party. He would have asked about my friends; which of them would be coming over, and what would Star be bringing.

He and I would have discussed Dan, too. My brother missed out on the sports junkie gene, but he is my mother's child: a man of words. We are all book collectors, fearsome readers and ruthless Scrabble players. That was my mother's legacy to us.

Sunday mornings without telephone calls. This is when I feel the loss most keenly.

I have an interview tonight at the local book store. I'm so excited at the prospect of working at something that won't drain me emotionally and creatively, and since it's dealing with the great unwashed, will also give me fodder for this blog mill.
The Noble Dog Nails is doing well, and for MJ, who asked, Thor looks just fine. He's a handsome golden with a thick, thick coat. Poor Nails couldn't get through the fur to do any damage.

Our old vet used to say that Jack Russells are suicidal. Just clueless as to size. Nails thinks he's really Godzilla, in a very tiny dog suit.

I was sitting in the living room, just about to launch into a bout of sock knitting, when I heard the shouts from outside.

"GET YOUR DOG"
I then heard a neighbor screaming at the RLA to come get the Noble Dog Nails. This neighbor owns (or lives with, depending on your thoughts about companion animals vs. pets) TNDN's arch-enemy, his mortal nemesis, the Evil Golden Retriever Thor.

Let me say right now that Thor is a lovely dog, with a handsome face and a beautiful thick coat. I like Goldens in general, and except for the fact that he hates my dog, I like Thor in particular.

Tonight, as the RLA took the trash to the street, our neighbor was walking Thor and his other dog. TNDN was loose in our fenced yard. He saw Thor coming and began barking and racing along the fence.

And then he found that the RLA hadn't yet locked the gate. That little 15-pound Jack Russell bulled open a driveway gate in a chain-link fence and went to attack Thor. Except Thor, who nates Nails as much as Nails hates him, was faster and bigger.

The RLA managed to pull Nails out of Thor's jaws, just as I was pounding out the front door in my bunny slippers. We got him inside, checked him out, and we took him to the doggy ER.

Many several puncture wounds and a scratched cornea later, this is what the Noble Dog Nails looks like.





For the record? The Noble Dog Nails was asking for a rematch.

A fact that everybody in the known universe seemed to know except me and the people who printed my calendar, where today has printed on it "Superbowl Sunday." This calendar has all kinds of holidays printed on it, and I am now wondering if any others of them are wrong.
So here I am planning a party and making menus and pestering the RLA to let me buy a widescreen, big screen, HDTV to watch the big game... a game where I am forced to admit I haven't a clue who's playing, but you need all that for the commercials.

It's next week. Next week. February. Since when does football season run all the way up to spring training?

Oh well, it just gives me that much more time to work on my menus.

I'm planning on making orange marmalade sometime this week, since the sour orange tree in the front yard has outdone itself with fruit this year, and I can only marinade so much chicken, and even my housekeeper is giving me the fish eye when I ask if she'd like any more sour oranges.

Either the meds are working, the weather is conducive to creativity, I've turned a corner on my depression, or my naturally ebulient personality has finally quit hibernating.

For whatever reason, this week I have been bursting with energy and creativity.
Yes! It's true. I've been cooking up a storm, and just for the RLA and myself. It started with chocolate chip cookies to take to the (spit, spit) art show, continued on to yellow pepper soup (from the Silver Palate Cookbook, the one book that all cooks should have in the kitchen, in my not so humble opinion) accompanied by two loaves of Irish Soda Bread, and on to a delicious concoction of marinated chicken breasts last night.

The chicken dish is one of my own inventions, and I never make it the same way twice. Yesterday I marinated the chicken for a couple of hours in a mixture of fresh sour orange juice, chopped garlic, some of the mystery spice from Israel, olive oil and thyme.

The mystery spice from Israel is just that. I have no idea what is in it, exactly. One of my friends who was living in Jerusalem used to bring it to me when she visited the states. She'd buy it in a street market, and had no idea what it was, either. I've since found it in a Middle Eastern market locally, but they can't tell me the ingredients, either, and I found it by look and smell.

I'm pretty sure it includes cardomom. Maybe a little cinnamon and dried ginger. Maybe not. It's savory, and goes well in anything, especially brewed with coffee. I get this little frission like I'm drinking spice coffee from Dune. But that's just me.

Anyway, back to the chicken. I sauted onions and garlic in olive oil and butter. Added the chicken breasts and browned them. Added the marinade (I know, bad cook) and water to cover. Then added a little saffron and a little chicken stock granules. Covered and simmered until tender. Halfway through I added a handful of green olives. Served it up over a big heap of brown rice.

In addition to the cooking, I have finished a quilt for the RLA, and am finishing up another that's been in process for half a year.

I have two commissions in the pipeline for tallitsim.

I think, and it couldn't have happened any sooner, that I'm over the hump and into a new cycle of creativity.

Yippee.

The RLA did a street show this past weekend. It wasn't on a street, though, it was in a garden. Specifically, Pinecrest Gardens, or, as it was formerly known, Parrot Jungle. The parrots are gone, as are the flamingos and cockatiels, but the giant feral iguanas are thriving. It is mating season for iguanas, because they were turning bright orange. Nothing like a six-foot long bright orange lizard to make your day. No, I do not have photos. Please.
The RLA sold three pieces of work, to R&MJ, which we could have done without the additional cost of a booth fee. The hottest seller at this show was Cuban art. Each artist was more Cubanisimo than the next. We were between a woman who painted very vividly colored canvases of Cuban coffee makers and conga drums, and a man who painted Cuban markets and cigar-rollers' houses.

Mostly they weren't selling their original paintings, though, they were selling prints of their paintings. Not just any prints, mind you, they were selling Giclees. I kept hearing the patter, as one or the other explained to their buyers that Giclees are like modern lithographs, or serigraphs.

For the sake of clarity, I'd like to give you dictionary definitions of those three terms.

Serigraph: Silk-screening, which is also referred to as serigraphy or screen printing, is a centuries-old process that originated in China, It is, in essence, a refined version of a hand stenciled process. The image is divided, as it were, by a color, with a screen corresponding to each shade of ink that will appear on the final surface-paper, canvas, fabric, etc. The ink is applied to a screen, transferring to the paper only through the porous segments. A separate screen must be created for each color. On average, it takes between 80 to 100 screens to create a serigraph. The elements are hand-drawn onto mylar and photographically exposed onto each screen. Inks are matched to the hues of the original and custom mixed. Each edition takes approximately eight weeks to complete: four to five people handle the several stages of the process, and 80 to 90 percent of the production time is devoted to making color separations and the screens.

Lithograph: The process of printing from a small stone or metal plate on which the image to be printed is ink-receptive and the blank area is ink repellent. The artist, or other print maker under the artist's supervision, then covers the plate with a sheet of paper and runs both through a press under light pressure. The resultant "original print" is of considerably greater intrinsic worth than the commercially reproduced poster which is mechanically printed on an offset press. Color Lithography or Chromolithography is the process of using several stones or plates (usually one for each color). The result is a color lithograph, which differs from a print which is hand-colored after printing.

Giclee: A computerized reproduction technique in which prints are created using a very high quality inkjet printer. The word Giclee itself is French, and means spurt or squirt, however the spray is more like a mist, each droplet being the size of a red blood cell. The inks come in various grades of water-based dyes. It is very important to use UV glass with these prints, because being printed with dyes, which historically are not very colorfast, they can fade quickly.

Do you see the difference? Lithography and Serigraphy are both hands-on, labor-intensive techniques requiring time and skill. Giclees are INK JET PRINTS people. INK JET PRINTS!! Like, from that $99 Epson printer on your desk. And most of these guys don't even use archival inks or paper, which means that that reproduction you just shelled out $250 for is going to degrade and fade.

Unlike, say, the $90 original, hand-drawn, ink on paper that the RLA did and had framed in a museum-quality frame which you did NOT buy.

I started getting a little snippy about it by the afternoon of day two, telling prospective buyers that everything in the booth was an original, never reproduced, no Giclees, and once it was bought, it was the only one of its kind, period.

Nobody got it.

There was one guy who came in to the booth, and just raved about the RLA's work. He spent a lot of time looking. Then he went next door and bought a painting of a conga and another of a cup of Cuban coffee.