The Tale of the Talinum

Here is Mr. Jack Daniel presiding over a rock filled with fossils and my Talinum parviflorum. Plant, rock, and swizzle stick are all foundlings. Mr. Daniel was rescued from the mud at the Steeplechase course three days after the 2009 Iroquois Steeplechase. I don't remember where I found the fossils, but I found them in the eighties. The Talinum, the prairie fameflower, was a volunteer I found last summer in a most unusual place. It is not blooming yet, since it was almost murdered by a cutworm, but I have hopes that it and its ten seedlings will flower this summer.

Here is its story-


Years ago , in the side yard of my old house, I planted a rock garden. Smaller plants, and rarer, I placed in containers. I wanted to grow the Limestone Fameflower-Talinum calcaricum- which grows in Middle Tennessee's cedar glades, but I could not buy the plant anywhere. I settled for the Prairie Fameflower, and for several years it prospered and seeded everywhere. I even gave some plants to the people at Moore and Moore Garden Center here in Nashville. But time and shade, and crowding out and neglect overcame my rock garden, and when I left the house,and my friends and neighbors rescued what was left, there were no more fameflowers.

I moved a few of my plants to containers at my apartment. Some of my old plastic self-watering pots I brought along too. One had a split in it, but I kept it in the bed of my truck because it had a gravel and soil mix I thought I might use. The summer grew hot, and I procrastinated . I kept meaning to save the soil and toss the pot, but it was the summer of my Annus Horriblis, and I had no energy to do it. Every work day the pot rode downtown and spent the night in a parking lot. Every time I drove the wind whipped at the few tough weeds still alive in it. Then one morning I walked out to get in the truck ,and saw a purple flower in the pot among the fried weeds. I had my talinum back, and who knew how long its seed had waited. I moved the pot to my foyer garden where the fameflower bloomed till fall. And then- I could not find it. Lost again I thought. Until it came back this spring. The day after I found it,it disappeared.Then I saw its bulbous stem with the green needle leaves lifeless on the soil beneath it. I blamed the chipmunks at first, but then realized that this was the work of a cutworm. I rescued it, and gave it its own pot and put it on the top tier of a plant stand. Unless cutworms can fly it is safe. I found its offspring in the split pot and moved them to high ground too. Under the watchful eye of Mr. Jack Daniel.

Click on the photo to enlarge.

The Annals of Nursing- Part Four. Consequences and Changes.

This photo is of the old Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital on Maynard Street in Hanover New Hampshire. It is no longer there. The hospital- now Dartmouth-Hitchcock- moved to Lebanon, New Hampshire.

This post is the fourth installment in my memoir about "nurses training" in a diploma school of nursing circa 1969. It begins with my return to school after cutting classes to go to a peace march in Washington.


Part Four


When I returned from my outlaw weekend at the November 1969 Mobilization in Washington, I went back to classes on Monday as though nothing had happened. And for a while, it appeared that nothing had. My school was silent. My instructors were silent. They were waiting.

Dr Sandra Mackay was a senior year instructor with a doctorate in nursing from Cornell. She was an imposing woman, and ever the champion, mentor, and friend of the students. I can still see her,always in a dress covered by a white lab coat, always in black heels, waving her arms as she talked, pushing her blond pageboy away from her face. She was loud. She was opinionated. And she had connections. Her husband was the handsome Dr Donald Mackay, an oncologist at the hospital. If the School of Nursing wanted me out, they would have to go around Dr Mackay, for she was on my side. Dr Mackay liked the brighter, more spirited girls. She counted me as one of their number.

The woman the school sent on that mission was Genevieve Clark, an LPN turned RN who was my freshman clinical instructor. When I walked into her office for my review, days before Christmas break, I saw I had not walked into an evaluation. I was there for The Talk.

Mrs. Clark did not ask me if I was sure I wanted to be a nurse. She told me that she, and the school ,did not think I was nurse material. She was going to fail me in clinical, for I had committed sins. Two of them. I had taken a woman's blood pressure,and the woman complained I had pumped up the blood pressure cuff too high and hurt her. Secondly, I had not been able to find a patient's hairbrush. It was in the far corner of her bedside drawer. A real nurse, lectured Mrs. Clark, would have been more resourceful and aggressive. A real nurse would have wanted to find that brush, and would have searched that drawer till she found it.

This was ludicrous. It was weak, and I knew it. Could Dr Mackay save me? I was not sure. I had to save myself. I went on the offensive.

I told Mrs. Clark that I wanted to be a nurse more than anything in the world. To prove it, and to get more experience I would go to Dora Jean Johnson's office and offer to work as a nurse's aide every day of my vacation. And I would work for nothing. I do not remember that Mrs. Clark had anything to say. I left her office and went to Mrs. Johnson, and when I left her office, I was saved. Dora Jean Johnson, the hospital's Director of Nursing- fat, pink and grandmotherly- was now on my side too.

I did work everyday. I worked the old West Wing, an open pavilion ward with a unused fireplace in the center, and bed after bed lined up along the walls with the only privacy a curtain. The only time I ran into trouble was with the West Wing's head nurse, who may or may not have been in league with Mrs. Clark. A staff nurse asked me to run and get some oxygen tubing. It was a mistake to ask the head nurse where to find it. This giant woman, six feet tall, a lesbian whose lover was head nurse of the Dermatology floor, picked me up by my collar, dragged me down the hall, opened the door to the supply closet and shoved me in to where the tubing was. After that, I was careful who I asked. I became a model nurse's aide. I worked where they sent me, and I did not complain. They even sent me to The ICU one night to help a young RN who had four patients. She was a lovely girl, who was happy to teach. She showed me how to irrigate a G-tube, and when I did it bright red blood came back, for the patient was bleeding from an ulcer. Here it was! Excitement and incident. I was seduced. I was going to be an ICU nurse when I graduated.

Christmas break ended. The School, impressed by my sacrifice, let me stay. I never heard another negative word. But there were many changes happening at the school at that time,and a student who cut classes to march on Washington was not so shocking anymore. Not when the School's new Director was a nun who had renounced her vows and fled the convent. The School had hired a woman who hated rules, and we had plenty of rules for her to hate. Having liberated herself, she decided to liberate us. No more permission slips, no more parietals, no more enforced bed-times. Soon we were out late and wandering all over Hanover at will. If we could find someone to buy it for us ,we drank Gin Fizzes and Boone's Farm low wines as we gathered in the lounges we called the "smokers" to hang out. It was 1970, but at the School the Sixties were triumphant.

Thus concludes Part four. Part Five will cover the rest of my freshman year, and the summer before I became a junior.

Urbanscape- Courtyard on Hayes Street.

Rain and Reflection

We in Nashville are under a Tornado Watch until this evening. A cool front is going through. When I left work this morning the sky was getting dark, and the 37,000 people down on Broadway did not care. There they were - streaming up to Centennial Park for the start of the Music City Marathon. Then they came back, running down the middle of the road . This was hard on everyone trying to get to work in the Downtown Hospital Hive, and our day people were late. My co-workers were contemptuous of the marathon mob. The people I work with never run anywhere, and they smoke more than they walk.

I had to take Charlotte Pike home, past the Goodwill and the $12.00 tire stores and the street corners where homeless guys sell the Homeless Newspaper. Past old defeated men , bearded, with backpacks and worn guitar cases- all holding cardboard signs begging people to give them a ride somewhere. I saw the wild and weedy pink primrose growing along the chain link fences guarding abandoned lots.

At White Bridge Road I turned east, headed back to the Money Side of Town. Had I turned west on Briley Parkway, driven under Interstate 40 out to Centennial Boulevard I would have run out of road and into the Cumberland River, but not before passing some of this City's most dismal destinations- the Motor Vehicle inspection Station, the Drivers' License Testing endless line, a mini-mart that is the last civilization before The Charles Bass Correctional Complex for Men , and lastly, the Big House. The Riverbend Maximum Security Prison. The ladies live just across the Cumberland at the Tennessee Prison For Women.

All day rains in this city are rare, except when a front stalls. Then we have 4 day rains and flood watches and flood warnings. Last year my suburb put in tornado sirens. Bellevue is hilly though, and tornadoes prefer to run around downtown where it is flat. Out here they just bounce off the tops of hills.

So here I sit, trapped inside with the hounds. "Tosca" is playing on my tinny little radio, courtesy of NPR, which for this afternoon has preempted its usual All Jabber All the Time programming for opera.

I am trying to decide, while waiting for Tosca to throw herself off a building in the last act, what book to read next. I finished Nan Fairbrother's "Men and Gardens" last night. I started a New York Times bestselling novel I bought at Kroger, but after 50 pages I was tired of "wistfully" and "hopefully", and all the other dead adverbs and adjectives. I decided the book was "banaliful", a word I made up.

What to read next? "Imperial Life in The Emerald City"? Do I want to read about all those Bush Brownies doing a heck of a job in Iraq? Or perhaps Moss Hart's autobiography "Act One", the story of his life in theater.

I will decide later. Tosca is singing. The music sounds ominous. And now the audience is applauding.

Two heartening sights

I drove over to the park this afternoon and saw two very good things happening. Stone masons were working on the pillar and wall on the south side of Old Hickory Boulevard where it divides Edwin Warner Park from Percy Warner Park. The stone walls at both parks were the work of the WPA, which put men to work during the Depression. Many of those walls are crumbling and need attention. Maybe they will now get it.

The other good thing was the fleet of white buses from the Harpeth Hall School I saw parked at the Nature Center. Any field trip that gets little girls away from their myriad screens and out of themselves is a good thing. Perhaps one of these girls will be another Rachel Carson or a female Edward O. Wilson. Sometimes all it takes is a spark-

My Gazpacho

This is a recipe for my sister and for friends and for all others with no time. I made this in under 10 minutes. Most recipes for Gazpacho call for peeled and seeded tomatoes. I ignored this advice. After all, I eat the whole tomato all the time.

Gazpacho is a classic Spanish cold vegetable soup.( I have seen it described as a "liquid salad".)It is cooling and spicy- a good lunch to be eaten al fresco on a warm Tennessee spring day.It requires:

3 tomatoes. I like the ones that are sold as a family group of four still attached to their vines.

1/2 of an Armenian or hothouse cucumber, unpeeled, or 2 or three little conventional cucumbers, peeled.

2 slices of a good white bread, with crusts removed.

Sea salt to taste.

2 large garlic cloves, put through a garlic press.

2 tablespoons olive oil

1-2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar


Cut the tomatoes into quarters, after cutting away the stem end.Put the tomatoes in the food processor, along with the cucumber, which you have cut into several pieces. Add the garlic, and the red wine vinegar. Cut up the bread slices into cubes or tear it with your hands. Add it to the food processor. Pulse everything until it looks like the liquid salad it is meant to be. Now add the sea salt to your taste, and even a bit more vinegar, if you like. It is ready for lunch now. This yields 2 or 3 servings.

Some Gazpacho recipes call for adding a green bell pepper. I will add one when I have one. The other variation I want to try comes from "The South America Table" by Maria Baez Kijac. A Spanish chef in Madrid gave her his secret- he added a roasted red pepper to his Gazpacho. I will mention that Kijac adds water to her recipe. To make it soupier I suppose. I believe that this dish may have a hundred variations, and they are probably all good.

Goodbye Cable

My black cable converter box is sitting in the foyer, ready to go back to Comcast. The last bill did it- $165.00 . If I save that every month I can afford a trip to the Pirate's Cove Cottages in Cedar Key. I can walk into town and buy a muffin and smell the oyster mud and watch the roseate spoonbills on the mudflats near the bridge. I can walk out toward the airstrip and meet ladies who live on the canal and offer me cuttings of plants I admire. I can drive out to Robinson's and buy shrimp. I can go to the Shellmounds and see the Zebra Longtail butterfly and the lobelias on the road verge. And Reelfoot- I could go there too, and walk the levees and see the Mississippi Kites and the otters and abandoned old roses that still bloom along the bar ditches.

I will miss HBO. I will miss Bill Maher. But not as much as I miss Fairhope Alabama, and Cedar Key, Florida. Reelfoot Lake, and drives down the Natchez Trace to Vicksburg and Natchez.

Cutting cable was a good decision.