Celebrating Spring in Pennsylvania

This past weekend, we celebrated the birthdays of daughters Gina and Amy as well as Mother's Day.

Julie and I thought a Teppanyaki Grill experience at Shogun 3 would be a tasty way to celebrate on Saturday evening.

After all, Gina, Laszlo and Emma eat sushi every Wednesday, and granddaughter Emma loves all Japanese culture so much that she has been learning to speak and write Japanese, not to mention her appreciation of anime books and videos.

There are plenty of vegetables and low carb options, and avoiding gluten is pretty easy in a Japanese restaurant.

When in high school, Amy liked visiting a Japanese shopping center by bus and also had dinner at Benihana a few times. Her husband Lukas also seems to like sushi and the grilled dishes.

The chef put on an amusing show, including juggling the cutlery and a couple of flaming displays like an onion reconfigured as a volcano with a oil fire erupting out the top.

All of the food was delicious, beginning with the appetizers.  Tempura vegetables and shrimp were fried just right, a crispy preview of Julie's tempura chicken meal.  There were several sushi plates ordered, including Patrick Rolls which I tried and thought tasted fantastic.  Let's just say no sushi was leftover.

The Teppanyaki-grilled food was also a hit.  I would definitely order the shrimp again, and those who ordered scallops or steak and tuna also seemed happy eaters.

Before the meal, we found out it was BYOB, so I ran over to the nearby Acme Grocery Store, where I was surprised to learn that no Japanese beers were available, so I bought Pennsylvania's own Yuengling Light Beer.

Gina has envisioned a meal with vegetables of the wrong colors which came to fruition at lunch earlier in the day.

There was multi-colored cauliflower, carrots, tomatoes and tortilla chips.

The menu also included gnocchi with multi-colored sauces and meatballs made of either chicken (more pale than the norm) or Beyond Meat (needless to say non-meatballs).

There was also "pasta" made out of zucchini.

It was another great feast!

Earlier in the week, Julie and I went over to join Gina, Laszlo and Emma for Gina's actual birthday.

Laszlo and Emma made a delicious gluten-free brownie cake and put number candles on top which Emma lit to commemorate the occasion.

Emma doesn't like being photographed these days, but she is a good photographer.

Skipping back a few weeks, Gina hosted Easter dinner with a meal centered by delicious ham and asparagus.  Julie made fantastic potatoes au gratin.  Amy and Lukas were otherwise engaged, but the rest of us from the latter celebratory meals ate well that day too.

Gina asked us to bring two colors of Peeps, which we used for Jousting.  Basically, we put a toothpick in yellow and pink Peeps and then microwaved them to see which one would win by piercing the other Peep...and hopefully not exploding all over the inside of the microwave.

Not exactly the Super Bowl, but it was fun.

We also dyed Easter eggs in more vibrant colors than ever by dipping them in the solution and then going for a walk while they soaked.

Emma found the rest of us to be quite immature.

We haven't just been feasting in Pennsylvania.

Our granddaughter Emma has gotten back into ice skating lessons, and she glides as gracefully as a swan, impressing us with her twirls, jumps and other moves on ice.  She continues to advance rapidly, and skating has become her new passion.  When Amy visited, she ice-skated with Emma on Sunday afternoon.  Amy had already worked out with Gina and Laszlo, attended church with Lukas, Julie and me, and a hiked Haverford College Nature Trail with Lukas, Laszlo, Julie and me.

 
Beyond that, we have been doing a lot of hiking, returning to paths we've tread before, but with each passing season, and indeed from day to day, the scenery changes.

We've watched the transition from winter into spring in what feels like time-lapse photography over the course of a month.

Yesterday on our way to WalMart, we returned to Ridley Creek State Park's Orange Trail, where we have had a few prior adventures.   April showers brought lush foliage to the forefront, plus singing birds combined with the river's soft rapids for the soundtrack on a lovely hike.

Other long walks take us through our neighborhood, where we've been treated to gorgeous flowering trees and bushes, scampering bunnies, squirrels and of course song birds, all of which are also found in our own yard.  I still enjoy afternoons and evenings playing my guitar and singing old songs on our back deck.

I took SEPTA Rail into downtown Philadelphia one evening to substitute for a Bridge-group regular who was traveling in Egypt at one of Gina's weekly games.  It wasn't my best showing.  I think I've become too accustomed to playing online, where the computer sorts cards, but the ladies were certainly pleasant company.

Most evenings, Julie and I like to stay home, make one of our favorite meals and watch our usual TV shows.  I will mention as a significant TV milestone that Tucker Carlson, a personality we have watched a few times each week for years, was recently taken off the air in the wake of a lawsuit settlement by Fox News on a seemingly unrelated issue.

In other TV news, we've watched a few good movies, including a new romantic comedy, I Want You Back, which we watched with Gina a week and a half ago, and with both Gina and Amy we watched Sweet Home Alabama, the old Reese Witherspoon romcom, Gina's go-to relaxing airplane movie.  I thought I'd seen previously but never had.  We all enjoyed it.

Julie and I also watched a couple of overseas spy movies, Unlocked and Safe House, which are the kind of action movies that pull us in.

I also recently read the two latest Steve Berry novels, which were not his best work.

In my Wondrium classes, I have been learning about The Symphonies of Beethoven, when I don't slip off into my afternoon nap.

Life is good!

Ridley Creek Orange Trail April 19

Ridley Creek Orange Trail May 8

Benjamin Franklin's 13 Virtues: Cleanliness (Christmas In San Diego)

"Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation."

--- Ben Franklin on Cleanliness

Other than point out that in Benjamin Franklin's time they spelled clothes differently, his description of Cleanliness seems very straightforward.

Certainly, Mom and Dad instilled this virtue within my sister and me through example.  Mom took a bath upon rising, and Dad shaved and then showered every morning.  After breakfast, they brushed their teeth, combed hair and put on clean clothes.

Darlene and I were expected to follow suit, though bathing was a nighttime rather than morning activity in our early years.  Of course, we all brushed our teeth before bed.

Mom did laundry regularly, so there were always clean clothes hanging in the closets or folded neatly in drawers from which daily wear was selected.

As a hairdresser, Dad didn't wear suits on a daily basis, but his suits and French-cuffed dress shirts were dry-cleaned to be ready when needed.  He looked very dapper for making Amway presentations to his downline network working weekend evenings.

Mom always wore attractive, fashionable clothes with accessories like scarves and jewelry, which I guess isn't exactly cleanliness but always made me proud when she would work at the school library or act as the "room mother" for my class.  I remember a little girl in my second grade class saying, "Your mother is so beautiful."  Now to a great extent that was Mom's loving smile and beaming countenance, but her well-pressed, immaculately clean clothing played into that.

What is not so obvious to those of us living in a time of hot and cold running water from bathroom taps, modern washers and dryers in our own homes, modern plumbing and sewage systems, regular garbage collection and modest energy prices to make it all accessible to the average American in the late 20th through early 21st Century is that it wasn't always this way.

Going back just as far as my parents' childhood, none of these items could be taken for granted.  Wealthy people like Mark Twain might have had access to early versions of modern amenities in the late 1800's, but my mother was born in a house without indoor plumbing.  Baths took place in a wash tub on the back porch, filled with water hand-pumped from a well and heated on a wood-burning stove.  That same wash tub was used by Grandmother to do laundry on the farm where work clothes got quite soiled with dirt and sweat.

Despite those hindrances, Mom's family was always neat, clean and tidy when not working in the fields, and even there at least early in the morning.

Back in Ben Franklin's time, bathing weekly would have been excessive for a pioneer living on the frontier.  If you're as old as me, you remember cowboys going into bath houses after a long dusty ride to get cleaned up, or perhaps Jim Backus as anold prospector in a Gilligan's Island fantasy, "I haven't had a bath in fifty years!"  Everyone within sniffing range replied, "I know."

I doubt Benjamin Franklin bathed only once every thirteen weeks, but perhaps as someone with many diverse projects and hobbies, he required an occasional reminder to tidy up.  He certainly couldn't run a successful print shop without keeping it regularly cleaned.  As mentioned before, individual letters needed to be placed back in the proper section, presumably clean and ready for re-use, or be "out of sorts."  Orderliness is a form of cleanliness.  Just ask a mom who sees toys strewn all over her son's floor.

In 1778, Franklin's contemporary John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, said in a sermon, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness."  Maybe so, but cleanliness also has compound positive impacts on our wellness.  The recent commands to wash hands every time we step outside of our homes may be overdone in this Covid-age, but most of us understand that washing hands before meals and washing our dinnerware rather than leaving it out for bugs and vermin to feed on just makes sense for good health.

It should be obvious --- but I will point out for those who don't appreciate what it is to be a member of Western Civilization --- that much of the world does not have this same access to modern technology, clean water and affordable power, so the challenges of cleanliness with naturally accruing health benefits attributed to living in a sanitary environment are considerably greater.  Lugging clay jugs to a distant water source and returning with considerably heavier filled jugs.  Boiling it over fire to purify it of naturally-occuring bacteria, but only after making a fire with dung as the fuel.  It's not the glamorous world some back-to-nature types seem to believe.

In any case, I managed to stretch this obvious topic of Cleanliness into a page of copy to accompany photos of our wonderful Christmas at the very clean home of my sister, brother-in-law and nephew.  Darlene made three huge dinners while we were staying with her, including a perfect Christmas dinner, with all the dirty pots, pans and dishes that entails, but after the meal, soon everything was neat and tidy again.

Allow me to share a few details of that Christmas dinner, which was truly exceptional.  To accompany the succulunt ham, Darlene made special sweet potatoes lended with bananas, oranges and spices, then topped with Alabama pecan pieces.  That was the best ham side dish ever.  King's Hawaiian rolls, scalloped potatoes, delicious salad with some kind of spicy dressing, asparagus and other items made it quite a feast.

For dessert, we each received a little "Glückschwein," a Marzipan Pig that is considered good luck for the New Year and may be the start of a new tradition for us.  Marzipan tastes a lot like almond cookies we used to get along with a fortune cookie at Lichee, a Chinese restaurant in Westminster where our childhood family would get quite dressed up, with Dad in a suit and Mom dressed to the nines, for an occasional Sunday family meal.

Darlene also made a Tres Leches cake, which only Billy, her hairdresser friend who joined us for the meal, was ready to eat immediately following the huge meal.  

Billy has joined us for family gatherings in the past.  He's a nice man who has no surviving family members.  As someone who worked years as a hairdresser herself, Darlene has a special place in her heart for people in that profession like Billy.  To some extent, he reminds me of Lowry, who worked at our dad's hair salon in Belmont Shores and painted the neo-Impressionist "Shady Brook," which hangs at the end of our hallway in our Redondo condo.

In this era where Billy's way to earn his livelihood in a salon has been jerked away by bureaucrats whose own lifestyles and incomes proceed unabated, his presence was a poignant reminder for Darlene and me of how this California shutdown of businesses would have crushed our own happy family had such Draconian responses to a virus occurred when we were children dependent on Dad's hair salon for our idyllic life in Westminster.  One year like this could have destroyed our family life for a decade.

As it is, our family certainly has come through this pandemic only slightly inconvenienced and in terms of flexible work schedules better off, but many small businesses have been destroyed.  We are grateful to have been spared, but none of us should forget that when politicians say sacrifices must be made, they rarely do anything themselves other than take a bow for making "brave decisions," totally oblivious to the devastation they cause by overreacting with measures that may have no more effectiveness than a pagan sacrificing a virgin to appease a volcano.

In another industry close to my heart, cruising and travel, Cleanliness has always been a key foundation of operations at all times.  In this Covid-era, cruise lines have stepped up to increase sanitation efforts, so cruising is now safer than ever.

As someone who made several transatlantic voyages himself and loved technology,  Benjamin Franklin would love modern cruise ships.

It's truly amazing how far sea travel has advanced from Franklin's time, much less since European explorers like Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed small, primative ships dependent on winds to distant shores, including San Diego, where Julie and I enjoyed a stroll through Cabrillo National Monument one morning in Point Loma.

More to the point, Benjamin Franklin would be amazed by sanitation technology utilized by cruise lines in response to the Covid pandemic.  It takes Cleanliness a quantum leap higher.