A Crunchy Halloween

In honor of post-Halloween week, the only holiday with dual A.D.A. sponsorship (American Dental Association, American Diabetes Association), I share the following Trailer Park Tale.

Halloween.  A simple costume, a large bag, a trip around the neighborhood in the dark with hordes of other kids, then back home with my sugary loot spread around me to be sorted into three piles: good stuff (Butterfingers), decent stuff (Necco Wafers), and “Anyone want this before I throw it away?” stuff (Black Licorice).  

While adults labored long over fitting lesson plans and parent-teacher conferences into a school calendar, we kids focused on the holidays.  After Columbus Day, the next important date on our childhood calendar was Halloween.  School wasn’t closed for Halloween, but it was a big day.  Everyone would be talking about their costumes and, more importantly, the expected candy haul.  The ride to school the next morning was filled with buzzing chatter about the ghoulish night, in between bites of candy that we weren’t technically supposed to be eating on the bus.

Maybe there were commercially sold costumes 45-50 years ago.  I just don’t remember seeing any.  My own, self-assembled favorites: Pirate - which consisted of a black construction paper eye patch, a bandana tied over my head ‘pirate style’, and a cutlass cut out of the side of a cardboard box.  Cowboy - hat, boots, cap gun; Soldier — helmet, ammo belt with canteen, and some kind of stick that served as my gun.  That violent boy still lurks, well, somewhere.

Simply the best candy bar ever.

Then as now, some folks did not contribute to this annual sponging of candy off of your neighbors.  They kept their lights out or just refused to answer the door.  It was proper etiquette to let other ‘trick-or-treaters’ know about the good spots and the bad spots.  As in, “Go to the trailer 3 spaces down — they give big handfuls.”  Or, “skip the next trailer, nobody is home.”

One year, my siblings and I were near the end of our trek through the rows of aluminum homes.  We decided to stop at a trailer everyone else was passing by.  Just in case, you know, we might get lucky.  The trailer was small.  There was no jack-o-lantern to welcome wandering candy collectors.  A dim light glowed through the front curtains.  We could hear the faint noise of television dialogue.  Our bags were well-stocked, so we had nothing to lose.  One of my older sisters was bold enough to knock on the door.  We waited.  My brother and I were stationed in front since we were the smallest.  Finally, the door squeezed open a bit.  A lean, older man with a shock of wild white hair looked out at us through wire-rimmed glasses.  We automatically burst out with ‘trick-or-treat!’.  He seemed surprised.  Peering at us closely in the dim light, he mumbled, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t plan for this.”

We looked at each other, then back at him, not quite sure what to say.  As we turned to go, he said, “Hold on.  Lemme see what I have around here.”

Will do in a pinch.  If there are no Butterfingers.

He disappeared inside and for a few seconds we heard the banging of cupboard doors and drawers.  Then he was back at the door with a package of Jiffy Pop popcorn, the kind in the ‘ready to pop’ disposable tin pan with the wire handle.  Long before microwave ovens were invented, creative food marketers found ways to make fresh popcorn just a little more convenient.  In its hey-day, Jiffy Pop was the quickest way to convert uncooked popcorn kernels into a mound of hot, salty crunchiness.  No messy pan to clean up.  You just pulled the package out of the cupboard, heated it up on the stove, then tossed the disposable pan in the trash afterwards.  If you liked popcorn and didn’t like the mess, it was an undeniably great innovation.  

We all said ‘Thanks’ to our benefactor, then scurried home.  Rather than go through our candy inventory, the first thing we did was show Mom our Jiffy Pop.  A rare treat.  We popped it right then.

I acquired an astounding variety of candy most years, and that year was no exception.  Neccos, Smarties, Big Hunk, Hershey’s Crunch, some hard candy, some Bazooka bubble gum.  A heaping mound of sweets.  I would be feasting for days.  Mom didn’t even bother to give us guidelines for how much to eat.  It was a once a year event.  Yet, all the candy from that year and every other year never seemed as special as that pan of Jiffy Pop popcorn. 

Salty, buttery, crunchy, hot, fast.

Fitting seasonal Jiffy Pop advertisement

Monopoly, Munchies and Mayhem

Ah, summer.  When I was 9 or 10, summer was a time of simple pleasures which didn't get complicated until a few years later.  School was out, daylight hours seemed unending, and I could spend the night at a friend’s house.  During the school year, sleepovers weren’t possible.  There was homework and chores and ‘school the next day’ and Saturday baths for Sunday church.  Adult reasoning never resonated with me.  It just translated into ‘NO’.  Homework more important than a sleepover?  Really?  

So, while we contented ourselves with scattered Saturday or Sunday afternoon visits during the school year, as June approached, my friends and I would start scheming.  Most of my sleepover time was spent at best buddy Darwin’s house.  There were two events we spent weeks planning:  The annual church trip to Disneyland in February and sleepovers at his house in the summer.  He spent the night at my house a few times, too.  But I remember best a Friday night at his house.

The key ingredients to our sleepover festivities were food and games.  The 1960’s were a golden era of board games and snacks, before television swallowed up family game time and health cultists labeled ‘junk food’ as the great evil of the 20th century.  Darwin and I had solemnly committed to not only convincing our parents that a rare reprieve from eating what was good for us would do no lasting harm, but getting them to fund our feast as well.

Mom dropped me off early that Friday evening.  Sometime after dinner we headed out to our enclave.  Darwin’s dad had set up their massive family tent in the front yard for us to camp out in, probably to keep the noise out of the house.  For us, it meant more floor space than Darwin’s laundry closet bedroom and independence.  After we pooled our resources, the menu looked something like this:

Taco Flavor Doritos

Cinnamon Pop Tarts

Hires Root Beer

Pringles potato chips.

Chips Ahoy cookies

Nesbitt’s Orange Soda

We had two simple objectives for an enjoyable evening: to consume all of our treats before morning and to play games until sunup.  Some of our choices for games were Aggravation, Sorry, Life and Monopoly.  We may have played some of the other games, but Monopoly was our perennial favorite and a sleepover meant enough time to enjoy it fully.

With only two people playing Monopoly, it can take many hours to play out to the bitter end where one person finally runs out of money.  There are a number of strategies for prolonging the agony: mortgaging property to pay debt; selling properties to pay debt; swapping properties to pay debt; staying in jail to avoid landing on another high-rent property.  

Sort of like the real world.

As the night wore on, the combination of sugar, starch, artificial colors and sleep deprivation began to have their effect.  Everything became funny.  Who won or lost the game didn’t matter as much as making it last as long as possible.  We could have easily passed for intoxicated.  Which we were, on life.  We were doing what we wanted for as long as we wanted and no-one was telling us to stop or be quiet or trying to take our hoard of treats away.  Every hour we would switch to a new entrée - a bag of chips, another package of Pop Tarts, some cookies.  

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, before dawn but well after midnight, the last dollar was drained out of one of our Monopoly accounts.  There was no way to pay the rent — no loans, no property, nothing.  All was gone.  Impulsively, one of us threw some Monopoly money in the air.  Then, the two of us just went berserk.  The player tokens, chance cards, houses and hotels, the rest of the money went flying into the air and all over the tent.  We laughed hysterically as we continued to fling stuff everywhere.  For a few minutes, the inside of the tent resembled a well-shaken snow globe.  Eventually, our hilarity subsided enough so we could begin the recovery effort.

We spent a good half hour scrounging around the tent on our Monopoly search and rescue.  To our sleep-deprived brains, even cleaning up our own mess was fun.  We crawled over un-used sleeping bags, scrounged through empty snack food containers to re-assemble the game.  Finally, we went outside the tent as the sky grew lighter in the east.  We felt triumphant.  We had conquered sleep.  There was nothing left to do but roll up sleeping bags and pack the remains of our stuff back into the house.  We managed to find a few more Monopoly pieces as we emptied the tent.

We crept through the solemn quiet of the house.  Darwin’s stuff went back into his room, mine into a tidy stack in the living room.  To our delight, we were perched happily on the living room couch when Darwin’s mom came out to fix breakfast.  

“Are you boys hungry?”

I looked at Darwin and he at me.  We both groaned and shook our heads.  The exotic binge of the past several hours churned heavily in our guts.  So, we sat on the couch while the rest of the family ate breakfast.  Saturday morning cartoons played hypnotically on the flickering black and white screen of the television.  

And that is where they found us after breakfast: half leaning against each other, heads flung back, mouths hanging open, eyes sealed shut, snoring deeply, the contented victims of our marathon junk food Monopoly fest.

MONOPOLY: Source of my first and best lessons in economics and finance.

Two For One Cuts Both Ways

I will not be late, I will not be late, I will not be...

Riding the train to work is the next best thing to working from home.  Both options are far superior to driving myself to work. A key difference between commuting by train and not commuting at all is that trains run on time regardless of how prompt I am.  If I am five minutes behind schedule logging in to my PC from home, no big.  If I am five minutes late to the train station, well, catch the next train, buddy.  For those of you who are always on time for everything, please move along as you may not understand the rest of what I am revealing here.

I intensely dislike just standing, Standing, STANDING at the platform waiting for the Coaster.  Consequently, I afflict my dear wife by cutting it a ‘bit too fine’ every morning that she drops me off.  I have found that telling her I’m in no hurry to get to work rarely helps.  This has been going on for years, commencing precisely the next day after I determined it took exactly 7 minutes and 47 seconds to drive from our house to the Coaster Station under optimal conditions.  Allowing an extra 53 seconds for non-cooperative traffic lights, I am typically seated in the car in our garage just under 9 minutes before the train is scheduled to arrive at the station four miles away.

True confession, in the decade I have been riding, I have missed the train a time or two.  But I have redeemed uncountable hours over that same span, surely enough to take a vacation.  Which is a great idea now that summer is upon us.

One morning this past week, the traffic lights were in a foul mood.  We were late.  I hopped out of the car as the whistle drifted down the tracks and the crossing signals began to clang.  I dashed for the ticket machine and frantically went through the “push-any-button, push-round-trip-button, push-destination-button, push-ticket-type, push-payment-type, jam-in-the-credit-card, push-‘No I Do Not Want A Receipt’-button” ritual while the train screeched to a stop behind me.  

Then, like a Las Vegas jackpot, the machine spit out not one, but two tickets.  Without taking time to look, I grabbed both tickets and, with a mighty leap, cleared the nearest train doors as they were closing, yanked my backpack through what was at that moment a 2-inch opening.  O.K.,  I made that last part up.

Catching my breath, I waved at my lovely taxi driver as the train pulled out, then looked to see that I had one regular ticket and one ‘senior’ ticket.  My first thought was that North County Transit District was giving me a preview of the new, lower rates I would soon enjoy when I turned 55.  But then, I realized I had purchased two tickets for the one of me riding the train.  One ride for the price of two.  I must have hit an extra button in my panic to get on the train.  For a miser such as I, that was a painful thought.

Notice, there are TWO.
Admit it.  You want one.

This little scenario came to mind two days later when I met a friend at Starbucks for breakfast.  I ordered my Venti Caramel Macchiato with a classic Sausage & Cheddar Breakfast Sandwich.  We were finished eating and well into solving the world’s problems (as manly men always do at breakfast), when one of the staff said, “sausage cheddar sandwich for Val” and plop a bagged item down on the counter.  My friend and I looked at each other.  Could there be two Val’s at Starbucks that morning who both shared an affection for the Starbucks version of an Egg McMuffin?  We thought not, but I waited a bit just to be sure.  Five minutes later, it was clear that I was the intended recipient of a second sandwich.  

Reluctantly, I went up to the counter and let the barista know that I had, indeed, already eaten my breakfast and that this was a duplicate.  As Starbucks had no use for it, they generously bestowed the second sandwich on me, which I later consumed at lunch.  In this instance, I experienced a true, two-for-the-price-of-one deal.  For a miser such as I, that was a happy event.

Later, I pondered what grander meaning this odd coincidence might have for my miserly self, other than to be less concerned with a few dollars here or there.  What occurred to me is that people make mistakes.  At home, at work, out on the town.  Sometimes I do, sometimes someone else does.  And if I can learn to be gracious about the little mistakes (mine or someone else’s), then perhaps I will be more gracious with the bigger ones.

Thankful for… a Doughnut?

Modern Manna for the famished office worker

It is another New Year and I am recycling my annual commitment to be more thankful for my blessings large or small and to be less disgruntled with, for example, government shutdowns that disrupt family vacations.  (O.K., letting go of that…)

Last Friday, I neglected to set my alarm, so I woke up 20 minutes later than my highly-regimented morning dictates.  Friday is a running day, so I had to weigh the option of cutting my run short versus skipping breakfast, neither of which were very appealing.  But, life is about choices, as I so often remind my children to their deep gratitude.  I chose to run.  In the back of my mind, a faint hope flickered that maybe someone would bring food into the office.  This happens quite often in the December holiday season, but almost never in the post-Christmas reality-check month of January.  So, perhaps it was less a hope than wishful thinking, or even a faintly desperate prayer.

To compensate for missing breakfast, I tossed an extra apple in my backpack on the way out the door.  Still, by midmorning my apple was gone, my ritual 10 o'clock banana was gone, and my stomach was growling.  At precisely my moment of fainting hunger (play dramatic music here), one of my coworkers came around with a nearly empty box of doughnuts.  Apparently someone from the department next to our I.T. group had brought some in for their peeps and there were a few extra.

There are a lot of bad things you can say about the nutritional benefits of doughnuts.  But, to a man fainting with hunger, it was like manna in the wilderness (a wafer that tasted like honey, Exodus 16:31).  That lovely, puffy, round yeast donut sprinkled lightly with cinnamon sugar tasted marvelous, eased my gnawing hunger, and got me through until lunchtime.  So, on the list of things I am thankful for in 2014, I am putting one, fresh cinnamon sugar doughnut.

No Vacation Is Complete Without...

In spite of the government's worst efforts, we had (as mentioned) a lovely time on our vacation.  After many years of family road trips, several recurring features have become a predictable part of our vacations.  Here is the 2013 edition of that broad rhetorical question "Would it be a vacation without..."  (and the implied answer is "Absolutely not!").

... ice cream almost every day?  (Thank you Reimers and The Forks).
... a movie almost every night? (Why else would there be a DVD player in our room?)
... a hike that is just a bit too long, for somebody, well almost everybody, except Dad?  (Nelder Grove and Lewis Creek Trail.  Which is why we have ice cream).
... a museum docent who is absolutely thrilled to discover someone willing to listen? (Thank you to the  enthusiastic hosts at California State Mining and Mineral Museum and Mariposa Museum).
... at least one restaurant that becomes a new family favorite?  (Thank you DiCicco's).
... a few hours at the local bookstore?  (Thank you Branches Books.)

Coconut Cult

It started out simply enough.  A handful of unsweetened, shredded coconut tossed by my wife into her morning smoothy.  It had to be healthier than the sweetened coconut from the bakery section of Albertson's.  Besides, other than an occasional sip, I didn't drink her smoothies.

How did I live without it?

But, soon I noticed other things.  How coconut would crop up in conversation.  The remarks about how robust indigenous peoples of coconut-laden Pacific islands were, their ageless skin and longevity and low cholesterol levels.  Little brown bags of coconut sugar appeared, nudging out the C&H sugar I had grown up with until it vanished from our kitchen cupboard.  I knew we were committed when I was given the task of storing 5-gallon tubs of coconut oil in the garage.  Olive oil and butter, which had supplanted Crisco and margarine in the murky past, now found themselves usurped by this new sovereign of saturated fats.  

All positive symptoms of health and well-being were attributed to this influx of coconut in its various forms.  Any deficiencies in health, quite naturally, were rooted in a lack of coconut intake.  Anointing with oil, with its ancient history of medicinal and spiritual powers, was revived as a lost art.

Soon, our home was a depot supplying jars of oil to other believers.  Clandestine meetings to transfer the goods became common.  We were part of an intricate network of coconut consumers with our own special language and group norms.  New recipes and home remedies were a constant source of delight.  We pitied the un-initiated while simultaneously seeking to bring them into the fold.

The sign that we were members of the coconut elite was the introduction of coconut flour.  No longer satisfied with freshly ground wheat flour, we had to use coconut flour. Not really flour at all, coconut flour is the meat of the coconut smashed beyond recognition.  In this pulverized state it can be used as a replacement for flour.  In theory.  

Gathered at the Mighty Coconut Shrine

I began to feel I was missing something.  That perhaps our club was a little too exclusive and demanding.  Yet, how could I deny the truth?  My doubts were always countered by reams of facts, cross-referenced and hyper-linked, presented by experts in authoritative books and professional web sites.  My good cholesterol was up, the bad was down.  Over time, the temptation of banished foods dwindled.

Just when my conversion seemed complete, someone had the courage to call a spade a spade.  Or, more accurately, to call a coconut a nut.  An out-of-town friend made a few astute observations about the ritualistic behaviors of our 'coconut cult'.  After recovering from the shock of his apparent heresy, I timidly admitted my doubts.   In spite of surviving most of my 53 years without relying on the miracle nut, I had fallen prey to orthorexia!  And so, the scales fell from my eyes.  I have now entered weekly reparative therapy at In-N-Out Burger.  Freedom never tasted so good.