I\u2019ve mentioned before that there were seven kids in our family, and we all ate breakfast and dinner together, three kids to a side around a gray Formica and chrome table. (It was the Fifties after all, and the plastic covering the kitchen chairs featured the same pattern as the Formica tabletop.) With our parents at either end, the three boys sat on a bench on one side, with their backs facing the kitchen windows. The three girls sat on the other. The baby, our youngest sister, was in a wooden homemade high chair next to our mother and, at breakfast time, the toaster!<\/p>\n
Evie Busk\u2019s rules for eating were simple: Eat a little bit of everything and everything on your plate! Oh, and no dessert unless those plates were clean. The \u201clittle bit of everything\u201d affected different people in different ways and did not apply to our dad who was excused for the \u201ceverything rule\u201d because he refused to eat tomatoes no matter what. Our parents made it clear that our family didn\u2019t function as a democracy. Parental units were definitely in charge!<\/p>\n
But back to that \u201clittle bit\u201d bit. For me the dreaded vegetable was parsnips. To my way of thinking, they\u2019re bitter and worse than useless. In the mid-Nineties, Bill and I traveled through the Midwest. On a stop in Milbank, South Dakota, I was both surprised and disappointed when my mashed potatoes came complete with hunks of parsnips lurking inside.<\/p>\n
For my younger brother, Jim, the bane of his existence was green peas. As the middle one of the boys, he was always seated in the middle of the boys\u2019 bench. One night at dinner, he began to heave. \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter?\u201d my father asked. \u201cHave you got a pea in your mouth?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d Jim managed, \u201ctwo!\u201d What followed was an eruption that is still memorable to the two boys seated on either side of him.<\/p>\n
After cleaning our plates, then came dessert. My mother often made puddings\u2014chocolate, butterscotch, and Tapioca– which she served in her best dishes\u2014the blue bubble glassware that had come to the folks as wedding presents from their 1936 wedding. I personally despised the butterscotch variety, but the \u201ceverything on your plate\u201d rule applied to dessert as well.<\/p>\n
And now, all of my mother\u2019s family dining rules apply in my writing career just as much as they did back in the family kitchen on Yuma Trail in Bisbee. <\/p>\n
In writing, I have to deal with \u201ca little bit of everything.\u201d That means replying to interview requests and responding to emails\u2014including the countless daily requests offering to put advertising on my website and Facebook page. Those receive a standard reply: REMOVE ME FROM YOUR LIST! If I\u2019m working on one book, I\u2019m not allowed to wander off thinking about the next one until I clean my plate of the current one. And only after finishing a manuscript completely am I allowed dessert. Those vary. Sometimes they\u2019re small things like having a long-delayed mani-pedi.<\/p>\n
This past weekend I finished work on the next Joanna book, Missing and Endangered. I put in some very long hours, missing my 10,000-step goal two days in a row. In other words, I spent several days with my nose to the grindstone and shoulder to the wheel. It\u2019s hardly surprising then, that on Monday morning of this week, I woke up with the sniffles.<\/p>\n
The whole time I was on the banana peel and working like crazy, I had my eye on the dessert that was coming my way when I finished the manuscript\u2014attending the Tucson Festival of Books and, two weeks later, embarking on a Disney Wonder cruise.<\/p>\n
When my sniffles appeared on Monday morning, it was possible that they were caused by pollen-related allergies. My understanding is that the pollen count in the area is off the charts right now, but you\u2019d never know it by watching the local news which is one-hundred percent Coronavirus one-hundred percent of the time.<\/p>\n
I worked my way down the list. Allergies? Possibly. A spring time cold? If I\u2019m going to have a cold, that\u2019s usually when I get one. The flu? Maybe. Coronavirus? Maybe, too, but since Bill and I had barely ventured out of the house for the past couple of weeks, that seemed unlikely. Still, since we live in Bellevue, next door to Kirkland, aka Coronavirus Central, I didn\u2019t want to risk going to TFOB and playing Typhoid Mary to bunches of unsuspecting fans.<\/p>\n
So on Monday morning, I crafted a note to the festival expressing my regrets and saying I wouldn\u2019t be attending. I received a note by return mail from Bill Viner saying that later in the day they would be sending out a press release saying the festival had been canceled entirely. Later that same day, we received an email saying that the Centers for Disease Control were recommending that people our ages, which is to say North of seventy, should NOT embark on cruises. So Disney Wonder is currently off the list as well.<\/p>\n
Now we\u2019re at home with our dogs, enjoying an unexpectedly travel-free moment in our lives. Once I finish writing this blog, I\u2019ll get up off my chair and go get the rest of my steps, and while I\u2019m at it, I\u2019ll be wondering what the hell I\u2019m going to write next. Because now it\u2019s Ali\u2019s turn, and I need another plate to clean.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m pretty sure dessert will be out there somewhere.<\/p>\n
PS WASH YOUR HANDS! The flu is still out there, and it generally kills 20,000 people a year. You don\u2019t want to be one of them, and neither do I! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve mentioned before that there were seven kids in our family, and we all ate breakfast and dinner together, three kids to a side around a gray Formica and chrome table. (It was the Fifties after all, and the plastic covering the kitchen chairs featured the same pattern as the Formica tabletop.) With our parents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,5,133,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-family","category-health","category-traveling"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-wx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2018,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions\/2018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}