POSTING #109

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Stories from the Stash

Pat, an avid quilter, has a large stockpile of pieces of fabric left over from previous creations that she calls her 'stash'. She dips into the stash whenever she needs a bit of material of a particular colour, shape or size for a new quilt.

My 'blogger stash' is not as large---or as well organized as Pat's---but there are many stories that I have stored away that are not major enough to warrant a separate posting but are too good to throw away.

Here are a few stories from my stash.

A View of Global Warming from Emporia

While we were marooned in Emporia, Virginia, on our way home from Florida, I met a man in his 70s who had been born in the Emporia area, moved to the north for a successful professional career and then returned to his birthplace for retirement.

He seemed an engaging, well-informed fellow and we had a very pleasant give-and-take conversation about a variety of things.

Until we hit the weather!

I had mentioned that we were in a holding pattern in Emporia waiting for a series of snow storms to pass through further north.

He leaned forward in a way that suggested he was about to proclaim on a subject very close to his heart.

And proclaim he did.

On global warming.

He said he accepted that the earth was warming. "Thermometers don't lie", was how he put it.

But he didn't believe that the warming of the earth was caused by people.

"You can't blame it on the internal combustion engine and coal-fired electrical generating plants."

For millions of years, he argued, the earth had gone through cycles of warming and cooling. Glaciers had grown and shrunk, and, in response, ocean levels had fallen and risen.

His clinching argument was Greenland. According to him, it had been given that name by earlier inhabitants because it was covered with lush, verdant forests. It had gone through a cold period and was now on its way back to its former green glory.

The mention of Greenland rang a tiny bell in my head, a feeling that I had heard something about how that island received its name that didn't fit with his interpretation, but I couldn't pull the thought out.

The fellow carried on,

"The people of Norfolk", pointing east to the Atlantic coast, "will have to move to higher ground. That's the way it has always been."

I was surprised that a well-informed person would reject the views of scads of climate scientists, and also surprised at what seemed to me to be a pretty callous attitude toward the fate of coastal people.

His rant carried on until I found an excuse to leave.

That night I did some computer searches and found what had been bothering me about the Greenland argument. No one really knows how Greenland got its name but there are some theories. One is that Eric the Red, after murdering someone, was banished from Iceland to the cold, forbidding island in the north. Lonely, he decided that he could perhaps entice people to join him if he gave the place an attractive name. Ergo, 'Greenland'.

Another theory is that 'Greenland' is a mistranslation of 'Gruntland', which apparently means 'ground land'.

However it got its name, there is no evidence that an early group of humans named it Greenland because they enjoyed its idyllic green countryside.

And yet, of course, that hasn't stopped lobbyists for the oil, gas and coal industries from using the name 'Greenland' as an argument to prevent any reduction in the use of their products.

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The next day we drove to Norfolk to see this city of 250,000 people that, according to my informant, was going to be flooded---and if you believed him there was nothing that anyone could do to prevent it.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, we visited Norfolk's large and marvellous Chrysler Museum of Art. It is only a stone's throw from the sea and presumably will be one of the first structures to be inundated.

The officials won't be able to move the massive stone building but one can only hope that they can remove the more than 30,000 paintings, sculptures and other works of art before the sea rushes in.

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For a time I assumed that my informant's rant was the result perhaps of a fight with his wife, or cold coffee and burnt toast at breakfast---that it was just a temporary fit of pique that he would disown when he had calmed down.

But then I read an article in the New York Times that started off "For nearly a year, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, Virginia's crusading Republican attorney general, has waged a one-man war on the theory of man-made global warming."

The state's Attorney General!

The article went on to say that energy lobbyists and Tea Party stalwarts, like Mr. Cuccinelli, are arguing that the science that supports man-made global warming is "unreliable, unverifiable and doctored".

As Jon Stewart might say, 'Well that settles it then, doesn't it!'

A Gutsy Old Lady

On a visit to a Bob Evans restaurant somewhere in Florida---I won't be more precise for reasons that will become clear later---I ordered one of my favourite lunch items, the fruit plate. It always comes heaped with a rich variety of ripe and delicious fruit.

"Is that the one with yoghurt?, the server asked.

I explained that it used to be possible to get it with cottage cheese instead of yoghurt but that Bob Evans, without consulting me, had dropped the cottage cheese option. I would therefore settle for fruit with yoghurt.

"If you want, you can have it with cottage cheese---we have it.", the server said.

"How come you have cottage cheese when the other Bob Evans restaurants don't?"

She smiled and told this story.

One of their customers, an elderly lady, had been coming in every day for years and she always ordered the same thing---the fruit plate with cottage cheese.

A new menu came down from head office that deleted the cottage cheese option, the fruit plate would be accompanied only by yoghurt.

When a server broke the news to her, the old lady blinked, frowned, thought for a moment, and appeared to be about to protest. Then her chin went out defiantly and she said, "Well, in that case, I'll bring my own cottage cheese tomorrow."

When the server reported this to her manager, he mulled it over for a time, doing, I imagine, a quick calculus of how much trouble he might get into with head office if he changed the menu versus the cost of alienating a regular customer not to mention the risk of health and liability problems if customers started supplementing dishes with their own food.

He had his staff buy some cottage cheese.

And that's how I got cottage cheese with my fruit plate.

If any of Bob Evan's suits read this blog, I hope they will not try to find the insubordinate manager---good luck, anyway, there are a lot of Bob Evans restaurants in Florida---but instead they will listen to the people and reinstall cottage cheese as an option.

Another Gutsy Old Lady

There was an elderly widow in a town near Grimsby who had decided that the time had come to sell the large, old brick house in which she and her now-deceased husband had raised their children.

The real estate agent she called pointed to some sagging floors and recommended that she have a contractor jack up beams in the basement and install some steel posts. It would not cost much and would greatly increase the selling price of the house.

A contractor we know sent one of his foremen to have a look at the job and prepare an estimate. The foreman, a young man, came back and reported that they couldn't do the job. To get at the sagging beams they would have to remove asbestos coverings on some pipes and heating ducts.

The foreman said he didn't want to get asbestos fibres in his lungs. The woman would have to hire a licensed firm to remove the asbestos before they could do the job.

When our contractor friend broke the news to the woman, she asked, "How much will it cost?".

The contractor explained that trained workers in special clothes and wearing masks would have to block off the basement with plastic sheeting, install fans to create negative air pressure so the fibres wouldn't escape, and on and on. He thought that the cost would likely be in the $6,000-$8,000 range.

The woman laughed.

"Look, I'm 82, I'm not going to live forever. Get me lots of bags, I'll do it myself."

I don't know what happened---sometimes it's better not to know---but I assume she went ahead with her plan.

Now, I know that asbestos is a dangerous product (we spent a good bit of money having it removed from one of the old houses we owned) so I can't condone what the old lady presumably did.

But I think one has to admire her spunkiness.

"Papaya with what?"

During my consulting assignment in Malaysia in 1992,  Pat ordered a serving of papaya for dessert at the very fine hotel where we were staying.

"Could I have a scoop of vanilla ice cream with the papaya?", Pat asked the server, a friendly young Malaysian woman who had often waited on us.

"Oh, you can't have papaya with ice cream", the server replied scrunching up her nose as though Pat had ordered, say, sardines with chocolate sauce.

"But they're really good together", Pat said.

They stared at each for a few moments.

"Well", the server offered, "I can bring you the plate with the papaya and a bowl of ice cream".

Pat thought that was a great idea.

"And," the server said before heading for the kitchen, "I'm going to come back and watch you eat it".

A few minutes later the server came back with the papaya on a plate and the ice cream in a bowl---and with three other servers tagging along.

The four women watched as Pat put the ice cream on the papaya and proceeded to enjoy them. The servers covered their mouths in horror.

Pat wanted to say that papaya with ice cream was no stranger than fish head soup, a Malaysian delicacy.

But she refrained, and just enjoyed her dessert.

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See you on April 10th for Posting #110 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.