I grew up with these salt and pepper shakers and I grew up knowing they were called “Shmoos.” I had a complete lack of curiosity as to why we called them that. It was as solid a piece of information in my mind as anything else that I was given a name for.
Adulthood came along and I left the Shmoos behind and entered into a Shmoo-less world. If the topic ever came up, nobody had ever heard of a Shmoo. Have you?
Nevertheless I had a great deal of affection for these little salt and pepper shaker Shmoos and would occasionally look for their kin in antique stores. Nada.
My mom just moved into a much smaller space, so my siblings and I went through all her stuff. You know the drill: claim, donate or throw away. I sent my sister’s boyfriend into the kitchen and said “We won’t want to keep any of that stuff – just pack it all up to donate.” If the Schmoos could have let out a squeal of alarm at this disregard, I’m sure they would have. Fortunately, my brother overheard this, went and opened a random cabinet and said, “Are you sure you don’t want any of this? What about the Shmoos?”
I’m sorry, dear Shmoos, that I forgot about you in these intervening years. You are now mine.
For those of you with a lively sense of curiosity, a Shmoo (I learned) was a cartoon character. Here’s a quote from our good friend, Internet: “The shmoo is a fictional cartoon creature created by Al Capp; the character first appeared in the comic strip Li’l Abner on August 31, 1948. The popular character has gone on to influence pop culture, language, geopolitics, human history, and even science.”
Well, if it’s so popular, how come nobody seems to have heard of it? I’d be interested to know how this humble, rotund creature influenced geopolitics, human history and even science – seems like a pretty bold claim to me.
(Continuing notes from our camping and hiking trip in June.)
Our last stop for the day was Lake Bronson State Park, where we’d camp for the night. We were trying out a new screen tent that promised quick and easy set up. It mostly lived up to its promise.
Our campsite was right by the lake, but with plenty of shade, a perfect set up and there were no bugs. I kept seeing groups of pelicans on the other side of the lake, but they refused to come any closer for better photos. I settled for some nice reflection photos instead.
We also had a resident chipmunk that Kris nicknamed “Chippy.” Chippy was evidently used to getting handouts because he had no hesitations about coming over to us with an expectant air.
“Please, sir, I want some more.”
We had a late supper of cheeseburgers and chips with a dessert of dark chocolate Oreos. Has anyone noticed that the cookie aisle is exploding with new Oreo options? Goodness gracious! Pretty soon the Oreo contingent will be swaggering around the cookie aisle like bullies and shoving all the 98-pound weakling cookies out of their way.
Way up north the sun doesn’t set until after 9:30 p.m., a good signal for bedtime. We compared notes when we woke up the next morning around 6:00 a.m. Both of us slept really well (I have to give ibuprofen some credit for that) and were ready to tackle the 3.4 mile hike while it was still cool. We ended up hitting trail by 7:00. It was 63 degrees, just right for hiking. I doused myself with some Picaridin – you never know when you might get ambushed by mosquitos, but we hadn’t really seen any so far.
It was a lovely, fresh morning. The red-winged blackbirds were singing their “Oka-LEE” song as if to cheer us along the way. The wide trail beckoned us forward and I could almost hear Cat Stevens singing:
Morning has broken like the first morning Blackbird has spoken like the first bird Praise for the singing, praise for the morning Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
We kept up a good clip, but also stopped fairly often to identify and photograph some of the flowers and plants we were seeing: false indigo, mugwort sagebrush, spreading dog bane (AKA Indian hemp or bitterroot), and the beautiful pink prairie rose. After identifying that last one, my husband said, “You are my Prairie Rose,” to which there was no other reply for me but to say, “You are my False Indigo.” I didn’t have a lot to choose from. He took that in stride and responded that he was my False Inigo. “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die.” That Inigo. If you aren’t familiar with that quote…no, that’s no possible. EVERYBODY knows Inigo Montoya.
Prairie RoseFalse IndigoMugwort Sagebrush
We saw Lake Bronson on a regular basis as we walked. Kris had read the park information and told me that Lake Bronson actually used to be a river. The world is filled with marvels, isn’t it? Here was a river minding its own business when somebody dammed it up (a WPA project during the Great Depression) and Lake Bronson emerged. This might not be an origin story that merits being turned into a movie, but it’s not too shabby either.
Let’s take a pause while I quiz my fellow Minnesotans about something very important, something you should have learned in fourth grade. Class, who can tell me what Minnesota’s state flower is? You there, in the back with your hand up, go ahead. That’s right, the Showy Lady’s Slipper! I’ve known this as every good Minnesotan should, but have never actually come across one in the wild…until this hike. There were clusters of these beautiful wild orchids along one section of the path. Most of them were past their prime, but a few late bloomers proudly showed off their showy beauty. Happy sigh.
Showy Lady’s Slipper
There was a nice bench by the shore at some point and as we approached, a heron took off. I managed to get a blurry photo of it winging away. You take what you can get.
We went through a corridor of something I suspected was sumac and since I was reaching that part of the hike during which I no longer want to stop for fear of losing important last-gasp momentum, I tossed off a comment to Kris behind me to see if he could identify it for sure. “It’s smooth sumac!” he responded after taking a photo and checking on Picture This. We love using the Picture This app – it has really brought our hiking to a whole new level.
In fact, after Kris caught up, he stopped me, insisting that I look at something we’d been walking on that he finally decided to identify. “It’s called ‘pussy-toes plantain,’” he informed me delightedly. Well! That calls for celebration, doesn’t it? We found it to be such an entertaining name, that every time we saw a bunch, one of us would crow, “Pussy toes!” just for the sheer pleasure of being able to say it again. This is an unqualified success in the realm of plant naming.
Say it with me: “Pussy Toe!”
Nearing the end of the hike, we came across a small twig suspended invisibly in mid-air, a photo-worthy sight. We couldn’t see the spider web filament, but Kris deduced that a spider nearby was seeing how close we were to it, saying to itself “Fresh meat! Really big prey this time!”
So, although the Eeyore in me had been very uncertain about how all this hiking was going to go, I think the hiking pole helped, as well as the ibuprofen-induced good sleep of the night before. All systems are go for the next four hikes!
After the hike we stayed at Lake Bronson for awhile, ate a leisurely breakfast and enjoyed the great outdoors. Experiences like that are why we really enjoy camping.
Knee Score: 3 out of 10. Long hike, but fairly level, with one major dip down and back up.
A side note: at one point I saw a mosquito come near my arm, but instead of landing and helping itself to my delicious blood, it flew away. Captain Picaridin, I salute thee!
I’ll probably have my False Indigo delete this in the morning for his Prairie Rose.
After months of delay, I finally painted the tiles in our kitchen. Thanks to my daughter, Ruth, for helping me pick a color scheme, and to my friend Teresa for giving me her expertise on how I needed to do the job.
If that looks to you like an awkward angle for painting, you’re right. My neck was killing me!
I learned as I went along, so the last tiles look a lot better than the first ones. Had I been thinking strategically about this, I would have started over behind all the coffee pots where the tiles won’t be seen. But I wasn’t, so I didn’t. This is also why I don’t play chess.
So happy to be done with that project!
I’ll probably delete this in the morning unless my neck is still stiff.
If you want to start at the beginning of this series, here you go: Adventures Part 1
How do you feel about evangelism, i.e. sharing the gospel? Before my conversion, I resented Christians who wanted to “push” their views on me. As an unbeliever on whom the Holy Spirit was beginning to work, my response was to push Him away. I didn’t want to hear about sin. I didn’t want to hear about Jesus and His death on the cross. Once, when someone on campus handed me a gospel tract, I went to the nearest trash basket and threw it away in front of the person who gave it to me. Take that! I wanted Christians and their Christ just to leave me alone. But they didn’t, and He didn’t, thanks be to God.
Now that I was on the other side of the fence, I was filled with a zeal to pass on this glorious good news. I realized it wasn’t about getting brownie points with God, it wasn’t about some sort of legalistic list of good works that I could check off. It was about sharing life-giving and life-saving news. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Well, most of us, actually. It’s decidedly intimidating to approach people who might be like I was, with “LEAVE ME ALONE” written all over their faces, body language and in their speech. What we think of as “good news” isn’t often interpreted as such right out of the gate. And people don’t like the feeling that they’re just a project for you, which is the way it can often come across. But sometimes, God has worked ahead of the encounter in such a way as to present you with someone who is primed and ready to hear it.
I found out that the Evangelical Free church to which I was going had an active Evangelism Explosion (EE) program and decided to investigate. EE was started in 1962 by D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. When I became a Christian in 1983, the program was still fairly young and was often very effective. I told the pastor of our church, Pastor Erickson, that I would like to take the EE classes that he taught and signed up with a couple others.
Yes, I still have the original book that I got for the class.
I found out early on that being a part of the class meant not only learning the materials, but also going on visits with members of the EE team. These visits were generated by pew cards that visitors filled out. When I first visited the church as a non-believer, my friend Tamie warned me not to turn in a card unless I wanted a visit from one of these teams. Do you think that was wrong of her to give me that warning? I assure you it was not. I was not the kind of person who would have responded positively to a visit; in fact I would have turned them away at the door and then fumed about their duplicity in getting my contact information through the innocent pew card.
But now here I was, ready to become a member of one of these teams. I don’t remember much about the classes, but the main gist was that we were taught to ask the two classic EE diagnostic questions:
1. Have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you can say you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven?
2. Suppose that you were to die today and stand before God and he were to say to you, “Why should I let you into my heaven?” what would you say?
The point of these questions was to ascertain the spiritual state of a person, as much as one person can do that without knowing the other person’s heart. An uncertain answer to the first question might indicate someone who knew the gospel, but had no assurance, who needed to hear the good news of 1 John 5:11-13: “And the witness is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God in order that you may know that you have eternal life.” Your goal in that case was to encourage and strengthen that person in their faith with scriptures, to help them understand that they could have scriptural confidence not only in their eternal destiny, but also in their day to day living by faith in Christ.
The second question was meant to ferret out those who were putting trust in their good works. Someone might answer, “Well, I think I have done more good things than bad things,” Or “I’ve always been a good person, so that’s got to count for something.” We would then take that person through some Bible verses that helped people to see that no one is good enough to get into heaven without being covered by Christ’s life, death and resurrection on their behalf. Salvation is through Christ alone, by faith alone, by grace alone. So we learned a whole method and approach using the Bible to lead a person to faith in Christ and if a person was open, we’d pray with them. That was the theory anyway.
I enjoyed the classes, but going on the visits made me extremely uncomfortable. We were only supposed to be observing at that point, but I lived in fear that I might be called upon to actually say something. The final exam for the EE class was to be the lead person on an EE visit. Horrors! I don’t remember how I did it, but somehow I convinced Pastor Erickson that I didn’t have time for that (I think I was still in the midst of the dietetic internship). He said that EE made provision for that circumstance and would allow me to go through the presentation with a friend and just record it and send it in. What a relief!
I asked my friend Mary Ann to be my guinea pig for this experiment. She agreed to do it and I came over with my tape recorder. We failed to take into account that we might both get the giggles, which made getting a clean recording extremely difficult. I’d turn on the recorder and we’d start in and get derailed almost instantly with uncontrollable laughter. There was a lot of stopping, rewinding, recording over the bad parts, and starting again. Somehow, we sobered up enough to splice together a fairly cohesive conversation between us and I sent off the tape to the EE headquarters.
Mary Ann and me – I might have been the chief giggling culprit. Sobered up a bit.
I passed the final exam (amazingly) but never went on a bona fide EE visit after that. It just wasn’t for me, or at least that’s how I justified my reluctance then.
That was a time during our culture in which most people had at least been raised in the church and had a somewhat nascent trust in the Bible, even if they didn’t understand it and know it well. Christians and Christianity were still largely seen in a positive light by many people. This was the reason that EE was as successful as it was in those days. It would never work now – we live in a culture that has become Biblically illiterate (even among Christians, sadly), and which views Christians and Christianity in a very negative light. In the late 1990’s Evangelism Explosion re-evaluated its approach, which had become less effective, and decided to revamp their methods to focus on relationship building and discipling new believers. But in its heyday, EE was used in over 20,000 churches, and over 7.25 million people claimed to have to come to Christ through its use. I look back with a little regret that I didn’t muster up the courage to try this at least once with the EE teams at our church.
I’ll probably giggle about this and delete it in the morning.
Old Mill State Park was about an hour’s drive from Red River SRA. I employed the time usefully by trying to get caught up on the many newspapers I haven’t been reading at home. I brought eight of them with me: four down, four to go.
Our favorite state park sign so far!
This park was quite a contrast from the previous one. It was in a much more remote area and we didn’t see another human being the whole time we were on the hike. It was still pretty hot by the time we started out, but this hike would be shorter: 1.4 miles. Should be a piece of cake, right?
The trail was a nice wide mown grass trail, the first part of which was in the shade with a little breeze occasionally wafting by. We saw a sign early on warning of poison ivy. I’m wickedly allergic to the stuff and in spite of seeing photos of it many times, I can never really remember what it looks like. “Leaves of three, let them be,” is completely unhelpful. The last time poison ivy and I met, my face got so swollen, I could have given young children nightmares. I stuck to the middle of the path.
The trail was called “Agassiz Self-Guided Trail” and there were plaques along the way giving interesting information about the area and what we might expect to see. This was all quite lovely – I stopped at each one to read it…until the path came out into the sun.
After that, it was every man to himself. I left Kris way behind me as I hurried through this part which felt hotter than H-E-Double Toothpicks. I didn’t so much as glance at the informative placards as I went by. As for the fauna and flora, it all starts looking the same after awhile. I stopped a couple times to take photos, but in general, my eye was on the prize: re-entry into a shaded area.
I saw one up ahead – yay! It wasn’t so much of a cruel mirage as it was an illusion. When we got up to a fork in the road, I looked wistfully at the path on the right which led into the shade, but our path was to the left, a continuing walk through the furnace.
Well by now, you should know that I have a dramatic streak. It wasn’t all that bad, and shortly after that fateful fork in the road, our faithful blue steed appeared ahead of us, calling out, “Come, enter my home. I have air conditioning!”
Old Mill park is so named because it is “the original site of a water-powered mill built by the Larson family in 1886, as well as a settler’s cabin.” Sadly, you you cannot look forward to seeing photos of these historic sites because although Kris suggested we could drive over to see the buildings, I was really exhausted after two hikes in the hot sun, and certain this would involve more walking, I nixed it. Every party needs a pooper…
Nice park, but kind of tough in the heat of the day. If you are less wimpy than I, (and you most likely are), you’ll enjoy it. As for me, my hip was decidedly unhappy and I wondered if I’d be able to do the remaining 5 hikes.
Knee score: 2 out of 10. Mostly level path.
I’ll prolly delete this in the heat o’ the day tomorrow.
We’re entering the final lap of this long race to finish hiking at all of Minnesota’s State Parks (and some of the recreation areas). This week we have a particularly ambitious hiking schedule – seven parks and seven hikes in four days, camping at 3 different parks as we go. These parks are the farthest away from where we live, so it would be nice to get them all done in one fell swoop (or swell foop, whatever your preference is). The only complicating factor is my left hip. Yes, after all these years of talking about my knees, my hip has made a late entry into the game. I’m pretty determined to finish up the parks and Kris has spoken of doing whatever he needs to do to make it happen. I would accept no less than this:
Our first park was the Red River State Recreation Area, right smack dab in the middle of Grand Forks, Minnesota (“Forx” on one sign that we saw – very hip and cool). Out of all the state hikes we’ve done, this one was the most like a city park. And indeed, it only came into being after the floods of 1997 that devastated the area. After a large scale clean up, structures and homes were removed from the land and after some general tidying up, what was left was the 1,200-acre greenway now known as the Red River SRA.
As we walked along the wide, paved path, we saw many bicyclists, joggers and walkers. It was a very hot day, 84 degrees when we started out around 2:10 p.m. to do the 2.2 mile hike. Let’s play a fun game of good news/bad news first.
Good news: It’s finally time for my trekking poles to start earning their keep – they will no doubt be important to keeping stress from my hip as I walk.
Bad news: In spite of the fact that we both checked to make sure the poles got packed, they were, in fact, not in the car. What we had both mistaken as the bag of hiking poles was a camera tripod in a very similar bag. Sheesh!
Good news: I came equipped with some new and powerful mosquito repellent. It’s called Picaridin and some of you will understand the joke when I say we call it Captain Picaridin. For those of you who don’t, I’ll tell you later.
Bad news: We didn’t see a single mosquito the entire hike, so Captain Picaridin was never put to the test. Oh wait, a minute. That’s GOOD NEWS!
Off we went. Naturally, I had my camera, so I captured some bird’s foot trefoil, a summery, buttery yellow beauty. Kris says it’s called that because the seeds look like bird’s feet.
There were encouraging signs along the way. Probably needed these at the end of the hike instead of the beginning, but the message is a welcome one no matter when it comes.
Due to all the trees, we didn’t see much of the Red River, although we walked alongside it for much of the first half of the hike. At one point, it came into view so we can attest to the fact that it was there.
The milkweed is in flower now. This is a fairly nice phase of the milkweed life cycle before the whole thing takes on the aspect of a fright wig. I looked for monarch caterpillars munching their way along the leaves, but didn’t see any.
The cottonwood was piling nicely up in drifts along the path, as well.
My favorite trees were clustering around here and there. Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile should know what that tree is, but for the rest of you, it’s the quaking aspen, AKA poplar tree. As an aside, I think giving it two names is excessive and confusing. Why?
Didn’t get a photo of the aspen trees, so you can look at this instead.
We moved along fairly quickly. When the paved path ran out, we had a short time of walking on the grass, and then we went into a nice cool tunnel under the road. Ahh…the shade felt so good.
For the FIRST TIME EVER, the ending of the hike came earlier than I expected. Hallelujah!
Me with the cowboy that’s loved me so true (see below)
Before we leave here, however, let’s pay homage to the old song, Red River Valley:
From this valley they say you are leaving We shall miss your bright eyes and sweet smile For you take with you all of the sunshine That has brightened our pathway a while.
Come and sit by my side if you love me, Do not hasten to bid me adieu. Just remember the Red River Valley And the cowboy that’s loved you so true.
P.S. In the sweet providence of God, the park was practically next door to a Cabela’s where we went afterward and purchased a single hiking pole for me to use.
Knee Score: 2-3. Fairly level with one short hill with 5% incline.
I’ll probably use a hiking pole to delete this in the morning.
I’ve been writing book reviews on Goodreads for a number of years now. I started writing them to help me remember the content of the books. Have you ever had the experience of starting a book and realizing partway through that it’s eerily familiar? And then you realize…oh, I’m pretty sure I’ve read this before. That’s happened to me a few times, so that’s when I started doing book reviews. In fact, they’re not always “reviews” in the strictest sense of the word, like someone who is assessing the writer’s style and the book content. Most of the time I just write my impressions of the book and even plot summaries if I feel so moved.
So, all of that is just a wordy way of introduction to the fact that I’m going to start sharing some of these book reviews on my blog. I’d love to know if you’ve read the same book and what you thought. Or if you read my review and decided to read the book. Here’s the first one!
Eric Lomax, who just died in 2012, survived enormously cruel torture at the hands of the Japanese as a POW during World War II. His story is eloquently told in this book, written over 50 years after the war. His love and passion for trains is interwoven throughout the book and in his own words, “The passion for trains and railways is, I have been told, incurable. I have also learned that there is no cure for torture. These two afflictions have been intimately linked in the course of my life, and yet through some chance combination of luck and grace I have survived them both. But it took me nearly fifty years to surmount the consequences of torture.” It is not surprising that he found it difficult to talk of his experiences, nor is it surprising that he struggled with anger and seething hatred, particularly for one Japanese man, the interpreter during the interrogations. What is surprising is what happened when he came across, by curious coincidence (I prefer to think of it as Providence) an article written by this very man, reflecting on his own struggles to overcome the effects of the war. Neither the tormented nor the tormentor are immune from the effects of cruelty. The subtitle of the book is “A True Story of War, Remembrance, and Forgiveness.” I will not soon forget the horrors of cruelty told here; however, I will remember even longer the transcendent grace of forgiveness demonstrated in this man’s life and story. (Review written by Lynniebee in 2013, book published in 1996)
I came across a great quote today by John Cheever:
“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss – you can’t do it alone.”
That’s how I feel. Writing needs a reader and I need you. Thanks for following me and for the conversations we have through your comments.
I went out to throw some compost on our compost heap and jumped back with a scream when I saw the little raccoon sitting there eating our scraps. I guess he wasn’t too happy about the meeting either, for he hissed at me.
We’d seen some of these little guys a couple weeks ago, a set of five kits that had been nesting in our neighbor’s tree. The mother abruptly abandoned the whole lot of them and they wandered around looking both cute and vicious. Raccoons can do that.
Some years ago a duck had been nesting behind one of our neighbors’ shrubs and they had gotten a little pool all ready for when the ducklings hatched. You can probably guess how raccoons enter into this horror story. They got some tasty duck eggs out of the deal, but all the rest of us were very disappointed.
The raccoon is still in our compost heap, staring balefully at me.
In the words of Gollum, I say this to the masked marauder: “Leave. Now. And never come back!” I think if the raccoon could talk, it would say the same thing to me. I’m not going to argue with a raccoon.
Lynniebeemuseoday 