Warming Up - Exercise 4

Dare to Dream

You may already know that I grew up in Minnesota.  And for all 21 years that I first spent there, I dreamed of getting out.  Why, you may ask?  Because frankly, I considered life in Minnesota to be, well, boring.

I finally did leave Minnesota.  In December 1969, within days of graduating from one of the three colleges in my hometown, I made it to California because my dreams were . . . out there.  I just couldn’t imagine my dreams coming true in Minnesota.  But then one day in 1976, I met up with a surprise.

That year, on a trip to visit my parents, the three of us went to see my grandmother who still lived in the same town where she had raised my mother, two uncles and two aunts, my mother's siblings.  On the way out of town, my father asked if I wanted to stop by the shipyard.  Now my grandmother lived 21 miles from the Red River of the North, and Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, but there is no body of water anywhere near Hawley, Minnesota, big enough to accommodate a vessel large enough to be called a ship.  So my response was a surprised, “Shipyard!  What shipyard?”

My dad drove down Hawley’s main street and pulled up in front of a building that I recognized, except for the sign above the door.  I knew this building – it was the potato warehouse where my grandfather worked when I was a kid.  But the sign above the door, in the shape of a Viking ship, announced, “Hawley Shipyard.”  And that’s what was being built inside the building.  My eighth grade science teacher, Robert Asp, and my dad’s 12^th grade basketball coach, Willard Pierce, were inside that building adding planks that formed the frame of a replica of a Viking ship.

Building that ship was Robert Asp’s dream, a dream that began in 1971, just months after I left Minnesota for my dream.  That summer, Robert fell from a ladder and had to spend most of the summer recuperating.  During that time, his brother Bjarne took Norwegian language classes at a local college.  And together with Robert’s reading about Norwegian Viking ships, the dream began.

By 1974, Robert had located a source for timber.  He thought he would need 15 oak trees – eventually he needed more than 100.  By 1974, he had found a place to build the ship, the abandoned potato warehouse that the city of Hawley agreed to rent to him for $10 a year, with the proviso that he would demolish the building when he was finished.

By 1980, the Viking ship replica, christened Hjemkomst, Norwegian for Homecoming, was completed, the front wall of the warehouse had been removed so the ship could be extracted, and the ship reached Lake Superior, just outside Duluth, Minnesota.  Robert was able to sail on his ship that summer.  But he had been diagnosed with leukemia back in 1974, just as the construction began in earnest, and in December of 1980, he died.  His brother Bjarne also died before Robert completed the Hjemkomst.  The task was left to his children to complete the dream – to sail the Hjemkomst from Minnesota to Norway.

In 1982, four of his children, plus friends and a Norwegian sailor and square-rigged long boat captain, sailed the more than 6000 miles from Duluth, through the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence Seaway, and across the Atlantic Ocean, to Bergen, Norway.  After a year of storage in Oslo, the Hjemkomst returned to Minnesota where it now resides as the centerpiece of the Hjemkomst Heritage Center in Moorhead, Minnesota, my home town.

I left Minnesota in the last days of 1969 in search of my dream.  Just a few months later, Robert Asp began work on his dream.  Within a dozen years, his dream transformed not just one, but two towns in Minnesota – my mother’s home town of Hawley, Minnesota, which had adopted the Hawley Shipyard, and my hometown, Moorhead, Minnesota.  Robert Asp’s dream made me realize that being a descendant of Norwegian immigrants isn’t necessarily something to run away from – it might just be a reason for celebration.

Warming Up - Exercise 3

To Sandy, From Henry

About his paintings, Norman Rockwell said, "The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be." 

I selected this quotation because I grew up in Norman Rockwell’s small town America, where celebrating Christmas was never sordid or ugly. This is a Christmas story, but its lessons could come from any holiday in any place or time.  To begin, here’s an outline of a typical Christmas from my childhood:

By Christmas Eve, the pile of presents under the tree had grown beyond the tree’s circumference.  In the late afternoon, we would have a light meal, to tide us over until later.  After that meal, we six kids were allowed to pick out one present each to open. With that done, we would pack ourselves into the car for the drive to Grandma and Grandpa’s house where all the aunts, uncles, and cousins would meet up.  Grandpa and Grandma had 36 grandchildren so the house was well filled by the time we all arrived.

Once there, we’d eat the real evening meal.  

In no time, the suspense had grown nearly as high as the pile of presents under Grandpa and Grandma’s tree. But we had to wait until Santa arrived to hand out the presents.  Santa was usually Uncle Marvin, dressed in a remarkably awful Santa suit that didn’t fool any of us.  We made a game of seeing who would first notice that Marvin was no longer in the room.  His absence meant Santa would arrive soon.  Once Santa arrived, there was great jostling to see whose present would be passed out first. 

Once the presents were opened, we spent an appropriate amount of time playing with the toys before we all headed home late in the evening.

At home, my brothers, sister and I got to open the rest of the presents under the tree.  In the morning, there would be more presents, this time from Santa.  That was our ritual, our celebration of Christmas as a nuclear – and extended – family. 

But when I turned 12, the routine changed slightly.  Grandpa and Grandma started spending the winters in Arizona.  With Grandpa and Grandma no longer in town for Christmas, Mom and her siblings rotated hosting the family on Christmas Eve.  That’s how we ended up one year for my special Christmas at Uncle Marvin’s house.

Uncle Marvin lived on the farm that had been home for Mom and her siblings while they grew up.  That house had more memories for their generation than the house in town that we cousins thought of as Grandma’s.  So it was appropriate that a special gift was waiting there that year.

When my family arrived at Uncle Marvin’s house, nearly all the cousins who were old enough to walk and talk ran out to the car with one question – “Who is Henry?”  And they were all asking me that question.  But I had no idea what they were talking about.

They nearly dragged me into the house and up to the tree to point to the envelope laying on one of the boughs.  “To Sandy, from Henry” was written on the envelope. I had NO IDEA who Henry was.

For the first time ever, there wasn’t any competition about which present should be handed out first.  Everyone wanted to know what was in the envelope from Henry.  When Santa handed me the envelope, every eye followed his hand.  I opened the envelope; I pulled out a locket on a chain.  And nothing else.  I still didn’t know who Henry was. 

Then I heard my mother laugh.  She turned and pointed at her baby sister, LaVerne, and explained to those few who didn’t already know that Henry had been her boyfriend before she met my father.  Henry had given her the locket for Christmas.  When Mom met Dad, she gave the locket to LaVerne.  LaVerne kept it until Mom’s oldest daughter – that’s me – turned 13.  And LaVerne decided it was time for the locket to be passed on - from Henry, to Sandy.

When I got married, I gave the locket to my sister, Joan.  And I never gave it another thought, until Joan and I found it in my mother’s jewelry box after she died.  As Joan and I stared at it in the box, we realized immediately that we needed to pass it on - again.

You see, even though Mom married Dad and not Henry, Henry had become part of our family.  Henry’s daughter, Kathy, married Mom’s nephew, David, making Henry my cousin’s father-in-law.  And Dad’s best friend, Norman, had a sister who was Henry’s wife, making Norman Kathy’s uncle.  A few weeks later, when Kathy and David invited Dad and Norman for dinner, the two of them delivered the locket to Kathy, to return it to the family.

LaVerne, Mom, and Henry died within four months of one another.  But every Christmas, they are with me in the story of the envelope labeled, “To Sandy, from Henry.”

Since I opened with a quotation, let me also close with one, from Clara Ortega, that sums up my special family Christmas.

“To the outside world we all grow old. But not to brothers and sisters. We know each other as we always were. We know each other's hearts. We share private family jokes. We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys. We live outside the touch of time.”

May all your holidays be blessed with rich family traditions at all holidays.

Warming Up - Exercise 2

Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Cooking I Learned in Moldova

or

Please Forgive Me, Mrs. Farden

Please forgive me, Mrs. Farden.  I suppose those of you reading this don’t know Mrs. Farden.  To clarify, Mrs. Farden was my home economics teacher in 8^th grade.  I learned a great deal from her about cooking.  But I learned the most important lessons years later – in Moldova.  In fact, Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Cooking I Learned in Moldova.

I suppose many of you reading this don't know where Moldova is either.  A lot of people think I made up the place when I have told stories of my experiences there. But I actually lived in Moldova twice.  The first time was from 1977 to 1978 when I taught English at the University in Iasi, Romania.  Iasi is the capital of the Romanian province of Moldova.  The second time was from 1992 to 1994 when I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Chisinau, Moldova.  Both Moldovas are small little places that don’t get much attention.  Nor, for that matter, much food.

During my first Moldovan experience, I learned to cook when there was almost no food – or at least little variety.

During my second Moldovan experience, I learned to cook without a kitchen.

The first lesson I learned is that the Department of Agriculture food pyramid isn’t the only one.  The Moldovan food pyramid consists of white vegetables, green vegetables, yellow vegetables, poultry, and sour cream.

The second lesson:  vegetables that fit into more than one of the food pyramid categories are better.  Cabbage, for example, is both a white vegetable and a green vegetable.  In fact, I think the term “food pyramid” comes from the 20-foot high pyramids of cabbage I saw outside the village produce markets as I drove around the country.

So just how did I learn to cook in Moldova?  First, I checked out all the markets to figure out what always seemed to be available:  chicken was one of them.  Then I checked out the poultry section of Joy of Cooking in search of recipes that called for as many of those items as possible.  And when I ran out of those, I started making a list of substitutions.  I evaluated each item in the recipe to determine what it contributed to the final product:  flavor, texture, bulk, color, thickening or even if the item was optional.  Then I figured out what substitutions were available.  

How did this work?  Let’s try a recipe:  Coq au vin.

Ingredient	Contribution	Substitutions
Chicken	bulk and flavor	No problem – chicken
onions	texture and flavor	cabbage
mushrooms	texture and flavor	optional
garlic	flavor	onions
bay leaves	flavor	basil
thyme	flavor	basil
red wine	flavor and thinning agent	No problem – red wine or beer or water

butter	flavor	oil
oil	flavor	butter
flour	thickening agent	bread crumbs or sour cream
salt and pepper	flavor	optional

   

Get the picture?  Beef stroganoff became chicken stroganoff served over sauteed slices of cabbage.  Lasagna became chicken chunks in tomato sauce layered over slices of cabbage.  Salad?  Coleslaw, of course!  

But the real challenge waited for me until I was assigned to the country of Moldova in 1992 where I lived in an apartment that was huge by Moldovan standards – a large living room, separate dining room, a bedroom, entry way, bathroom and guest bathroom.  But no kitchen.  I couldn’t let this stop me.  After all, with occasional support flights from Frankfurt, I didn’t have to do without food this time – just without a kitchen.

While it may be distasteful to some, the only available room to turn into a kitchen was the bathroom.  We modified a Walmart build-it-yourself bookshelf to fit over the bidet to serve as our cupboard.  A card table was the counter for the microwave oven, an electric wok and a sandwich maker to complete our kitchen.

The wok was the centerpiece of the kitchen.  In it I cooked roasts, vegetables, rice and pasta.  And I served meals to as many as a dozen hungry construction workers by this means.  For dessert:  fresh bread spread with jam sprinkled with nuts, toasted in the sandwich maker became faux turnovers.  I could even make a decent cake in the microwave oven.

When my husband and I left Moldova, we thought we had left the need to improvise in the kitchen behind as well.  But global climate change events have made me recall all the lessons I learned in Moldova.  The images of thousands of people stranded in Louisiana and Mississippi and New York after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, with little more than their ingenuity to solve problems brought the image of my Moldovan kitchen to mind.  And when we remodeled our kitchen, I put my Moldovan lessons into practice again.

Warming Up - Exercise 1

I plan to start my 365 Project next month, but I will do some warming up between now and then. That means I will pick out some pieces I wrote before and do something to update them for this blog. To get used to the idea of sharing my thoughts with others. The one below is the first speech I gave at Toastmasters, the Ice Breaker. The objective of the Ice Breaker speech is to introduce the speaker to the audience. It is an element of genius in the Toastmasters program because no one but the speaker is an expert on the subject. And that by itself removes some of the nervousness that new speakers feel.

My name is Sandra, and I am an INFJ.  While that may sound like an opening line for a 12-step program, I am actually quite proud of being an INFJ.  Are there any other INFJs in the room?

Is there anyone here who hasn’t completed at least one of the Foreign Service Institute's Leadership and Management Training Continuum courses?  That's where I learned about the matrix of 16 Myers Briggs Personality Types.

In my case, the first indicator, “I” for introversion, represents the source and direction of my energy:  I get my energy from my internal world.  When stress hits me, I retreat to a quiet place with a good book.  I find myself carried away in the worlds created by authors such as Iris Murdoch, Thornton Wilder, and Saul Bellow.  I am there with the protagonists as they face challenges and resolve them.  In doing so, I practice facing my own challenges, turning them into opportunities instead of problems.

The second indicator, “N” for intuition, represents how I know what to believe when facing the stream of information coming at me.  Unlike intuition’s counterpart, sensing, I don’t need tangible proof from the outside world to know what to believe.  My world is full of “facts” that cannot be seen, tasted, heard, touched, or smelled.  ESP is real.  Communication happens without telephone wires or radio waves or satellite signals. 

The third indicator, “F” for feeling, represents how I process the information in order to make decisions.  I make decisions based on emotion, not logic, or “thinking” in the MBTI vocabulary.  This is the indicator that has made me a believer in the MBTI matrix.  This is the indicator that has been the most difficult for me to accept.  The only unacceptable grade I can remember getting in school was an “N” (for “Needs Improvement”) for “Exercises self-control.”  Expressing emotion was not positively reinforced during my childhood.

So I spent many years suppressing that third indicator, feeling.  I used my childhood strategies for overcoming emotion – applying logic to every problem – to give the T of “thinking” in the MBTI world a boost.  But in spite of my protestations in the past, I admit that I have always looked for “signs” that my choices were right.  That’s not logic; that’s emotion.

And finally, the fourth indicator, “J” judging, represents how I use the information I receive.  I organize my life events and act strictly according to my plans.  I’m willing to adjust my plans when necessary, but I’m more likely to find ways to fit alternatives within my plans than to seek new alternatives or to improvise once I have begun as would someone with judging’s counterpart, “perceiving” indicator.  Once I find a car I want, I stop looking.  I don’t regret learning later that I could have gotten a better deal.

So what’s the bottom line?  How does the alphabet soup of MBTI attributes contribute to my self-portrait? 

First, being an INFJ puts me into a very exclusive group.  Just 1 to 2 percent of the world’s population fall into this group.  But what a group!  Other INFJs include former President Jimmy Carter, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mohandes Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt; and just to ensure there is a little levity as well, Billy Crystal and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau are also INFJs. 

Can you see why I am proud to be among such company?  We are “counselor idealists;” we hold deep convictions about the weightier matters of life, becoming activists for a cause, not for personal glory or political power.

Here’s what’s in it for me:  I like the company I am in.  And knowing that I am one of a very small group makes it easier to accept that I might be misunderstood by – or misunderstand – those around me.

What’s in it for you?  I hope that by sharing what I have learned about myself, I have provided you with a tool to understanding me, especially when I passionately leap into a discussion about my latest cause, my latest dream, my latest plan.  And I hope that along the way I’ll be able to sign many of you up as co-activists.

Topics

The list below includes topics to spark my thinking on those days when I find it difficult to get started.

Wael Ghonim's transformation from personal introvert to revolutionary

Scrubbing floors in kindergarten

Growing up on Dudrey Court

Mr. Saitsky's house

The Barbados version of English

My first love - Japan

Squeezing toothpaste tubes from the middle

Biorythms in Tehran

Black sweaters in the bazaar

Rob's ability to run into people from his past just about anywhere in the world

Kendall Myers

Merry Christmas from Henry
Waiting for Santa Claus
Saving up for Disneyland

Twin brothers when I was 10

Writing letters to Lois

Fishing with Dad

Basketball games with Dad

Baseball games with Dad

My first solo sewing project

Rowing across the lake to the island with Wayne

Lincoln Jones

Death of an American overseas

Iranian visa applicant who had been my student

Iranian visa applicant whose translator told us he didn't know his daughter has died

Iranian visa applicant who came back again because he knew I would listen to him

German visa applicant who told me lies have short legs

Making a difference in the restaurants in Chisinau

The ambassador's car is missing

Ben lost his leg

A Romanian funeral in Iasi

Photographs in the park in Iasi

Spielen wir! He said.

I love four-year-olds

Lessons from my baby brother

The Weiss brothers

Can you help us? They asked.

Nasser's spirit

The Odd Couple

The lady in Berkeley who wanted a baby

The man in Berkeley who borrowed the carpet

The sailor/ex Peace Corps Volunteer in San Francisco

Hit in the head with a baseball bat

The practice date

Forever second

They call me Mr. Tibbs

County Road 26

Riding to Buffalo State Park

Riding to Barnesville

Tall, cool, and full of alcohol

Are you still thinking about THAT?

Shiraz

Festival of Nations

Thinking is just talking inside your head

if you could go back to your past and change one thing, what would it be?

The 365 Project

Coming soon. . .

I have heard it often. I believe it. But I just haven't had the discipline to do it. That changes now. Today. Or maybe at the start of next month, so it will be easier to make sure I don't skip, err miss, a day.

I am going to write something - at least 500 words - every day for the next 365 days. I will post what I write and invite anyone who reads what I write to tell me what you think.

Starting January 1, 2013.