"All the World's a Stage". Facebook and the Detritus of Drama.

People live now who think their lives deserve to be broadcast daily to anyone riding a mouse around the World Wide Web. That their readers might be DEA agents, background checkers, prospective employers, current employers, police detectives, ex-wives, wronged wives , girlfriends, co-workers, the Department of Homeland Security, and serial killers does not seem to occur to them. Like stained underwear on a clothes line, their embarrassments are out in the world for all to see. Their privacy, one of life's true Good Things, is gone. Squandered and abused. These people would rather be a character than possess character. No more is a veil drawn, no more is there the dignity of reticence.

What is more banal than an office affair? Its only originality the new ways it can make the innocent suffer. It is always the same story. Yet since Hell has no fury, the disdained wife now seeks a Cyber Jury and her husband's name, his girl friend's name, rocket at light speed out over the planet where every "friend" they claim can weigh in in Facebook's on-line Colosseum.

No drama too trivial.No incident too small. No lapse in judgement forgotten. Who needs the priest behind a screen when one can seek absolution and understanding from dozens of strangers?

Time for a Cyber Stoning! Off with his Reputation! Thumbs up and let her live! Thumbs down ,and let him die.

Oh- the things one overhears standing in line or sitting in the break room. There is only one decent reply to all of this.

"Silencio!"

The Annals of Nursing- Senior Year. A Prologue.

I read an article on line today that reports that a recent Gallup Poll of the public found nurses the most trusted professionals, and ten points ahead of doctors!

This is good news, if it is accurate, and nurses are in need of good news. For I, and every nurse my age that I know, are close to despair about the future of our profession. Across the country employers, stung by falling and failing government money, are declaring war on nurses' salaries and benefits. Nurses in California are striking hospitals that are threatening to eliminate paid sick leave and to take away the shift differentials that mitigate the miseries of working nights and weekends and holidays. Employers have grown bold, seeing the numbers of unemployed new graduate nurses, and they are not afraid to demand give backs from people they feel should be happy they have a job at all- I can remember one of my former nurse managers telling me that "hospitals can't afford us any more".

And soon, the situation will get worse. Hospitals stand to lose up to thirty percent of government reimbursement if the patients in those hospitals are not" satisfied" with their care. And they will lose even more if discharged patients end up coming right back to the hospital.

Not every patient can be satisfied. Not every patient can be fixed.

In some hospitals nurses must now wear phones so patients can call them directly. What happens when the nurse cannot answer the phone because she is doing a dressing change or giving insulin or talking to another one of her patients? The patient, or their family, is not satisfied. They call the supervisor to complain.

People with heart failure go home from the hospital, but cannot afford the medicine they need to keep them out of the hospital. Back in they will come, and the hospital and the people that work there will take the blame.

Discouraged, and without one idea how to fix this predicament, I look back now to 1971, and to what must have been a golden age for hospitals and health care. An age when squads of diploma nursing students staffed their hospitals for free. And who worked for $3.00 an hour when they became RNs. Who worked three out of four weekends and ten eight hour night shifts in a row. New nurses who needed no expensive orientation to wards they knew intimately. Nurses who had time to give patients back rubs because those nurses did not have to spend hours bar coding each medicine they gave and filling out eight pages of "documentation" on every patient they cared for. Nor had we yet entered the heart of The Tube Age, when nurses became jailers whose mantra was "Thou shall not pull out thy tubes." And oh how many tubes would be in our future, and they would get more care than the patients they were inserted in-

So let us return now to the antique days of September 1971. And I will leave you with the first sentence of the final chapter of my story of the old Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital School of Nursing.


In the fall of 1971 I entered my third and final year of nursing school-


To be continued.

Maple Hominy Custard

The American Heritage Cookbook has a recipe for an antique Yankee dessert called "Indian Pudding". It is yellow cornmeal flavored with molasses ,and without frills. I remember eating it once, but who fed it to me and where, I cannot remember. I have never made it myself, for it did not taste as good to me as it must have tasted to snowbound settlers of early New England who lived on farms along the Connecticut River ,and who kept forts such as the Old Fort Number 4 in Charlestown, New Hampshire to protect themselves from the Abnaki Indians. It is a" make do" recipe of pragmatic Yankee housewives.


Never the less, seeing the recipe set me to inventing the other afternoon. Why not, I thought, use hominy instead of cornmeal? Why not use a sweet flavoring more elegant and precious than plain molasses? Why not use maple syrup, the best sweet the North Country can provide-

I do not know how to make molasses. Nor could I refine sugar. But I do know how to make maple syrup, and I made several pints of it for my family in the winter of my twelfth year. My father had moved us to an old farmhouse in North Charlestown, New Hampshire. It had been our summer house, but my restless father had made it our all year home. It had a barn that had stanchions for a handful of cows, and a tiny patch of pasturage behind the house. The rest of our land was steep, wooded hillsides with granite cliffs that dropped to the Little Sugar River. There were no dairy cows anymore, but if there had been a market for porcupines, we would have been rich for they tunneled into our rocks to make their dens.


We had eight old maple trees along the Unity Road on the hill behind our house. I pounded in three taps to a tree and hung my sap buckets. Cold March nights and warmer days made the sap run, and every evening after I came home from school, I collected my sap and pored it into a big rectangular metal pan I heated over an open fire I kept down near the back side of our barn. I remember sitting there watching the distant red sunset across the Connecticut River and over the hills of Vermont. Gallons of sap boiled away to make a few cups of maple syrup. If we had fresh, clean snow we would toss the syrup on it where it congealed to "Sugar on Snow". Sometimes I finished the reduced sap on the stove in the house, and one night I boiled it too hard and ruined a batch-

But I digress, and need to get back to my recipe. I decided to make an egg custard with hominy and maple syrup. I wanted it to be simple and good and requiring nothing more than home made whipped cream on top- and someone happy to eat it.

It turned out well, and I plan on taking it to our Christmas night potluck at work.


Maple Hominy Custard.


29 oz white hominy, drained very well.

3/4 cup maple syrup

3 eggs

1/2 cup heavy cream

1/4 stick butter, melted.

Ground cardamon

Ground cinnamon


Puree the hominy in a food processor. Add the cream, the butter, and the maple syrup and mix well. Add the eggs and process for a minute or two. Pour the mixture into a nine inch tart or pie pan. Sprinkle on some ground cinnamon and ground cardamon. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes. Top with whipped cream. This should serve six or more after a winter weekend or holiday dinner.

Curried Sweet Potatoes with Coconut and Honey

I cooked this last evening with Japanese sweet potatoes I bought at K&S world Market. I could have as easily used regular sweet potatoes. I glazed them with a mixture of honey, ghee (Feel free to use butter instead), and red curry paste. Then, before wrapping them in foil and baking them at 350 degrees for an hour, I sprinkled a few teaspoons of very finely shredded coconut over them.
Very tasty. This makes enough for four.


3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and diced

1-2 teaspoons red curry paste, depending how spicy you want the glaze.

1/3 cup honey

1/3 -1/2 stick of butter or four or five tablespoons of ghee.

A couple tablespoons of finely shredded coconut.

Salt, to taste.

Melt the honey, the butter, and the curry paste in the microwave. Put the sweet potatoes in a bowl and pour the glaze over them. Toss well to coat. Sprinkle a little salt over them, and then the coconut. Bake in a baking dish with the potatoes sealed in foil.


What would go with this? Ham? Pork loin? Roast Chicken, or turkey? I think any one of them-

From the American Heritage Cookbook

Here are a sample of some of the illustrations in the American Heritage Cookbook I bought yesterday at McKay. Americana at its best-

* A note on the first picture and the quote "what angels eat." Mark Twain said this. He was talking about watermelon.

A Lucky Day at McKay's Books

Today, at McKay's Used Books ,I found a collectible copy of the Bible of Puerto Rican cooking. It is "Puerto Rican Cookery" by Carmen Aboy Valldejui, published in 1977. I paid $4.00 for it. I also found "Cross Creek Kitchens", a cookbook written by Sally Morrison, a park ranger and once curator of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings home in Cross Creek ,Florida. I paid $3.00 for it.

Bargains both, and just the sort of vintage cookery books I look for at McKay's. Books from old libraries, old estates- books sold for a fraction of their worth. Of course one can find plenty of Emeril and Jamie Oliver and Paula Deen at McKay's but I will leave those to others. Give me the "America Heritage Cookbook" in its two volumes. One devoted to an illustrated history of American foodways, the other filled with recipes and menus. It was published in 1964. I paid three dollars for the set this morning.

Three dollars. Happy the city that has a McKay's!



* For those unfamiliar with McKay's- it is a book store where people bring their unwanted or superfluous books for sale or trade. McKay's has no idea what books it has ,or where they are shelved. Luck plays a big part in shopping there.

Luck was with me today.

My Side Of the Mountain- Today's Old Movie Mention

I regret that movies such as "My Side of the Mountain" never show on cable. I would have loved to have watched it last evening. Alas, to see it I would have had to re-join Netflix- something I am not about to do.

It is the story of a brave and adventurous Canadian boy named Sam, who, like his hero Henry David Thoreau, goes to live in the woods. Sam travels to the Laurentian Mountains, tames a raccoon and a falcon, and makes camp inside an old, hollow tree. He plans to live there undisturbed, entertained by his animal friends and his algae experiments. Yet because he is a young boy alone, the world still keeps track of him in the persons of a local lady librarian and an itinerant song writer played by Theodore Bikel.

These days, boys like as Sam would be punished, drugged, labelled, or locked away for pursuing adventures. Their spirit and imagination would be thwarted. No longer are boys allowed to be boys. (Or girls allowed to be tomboys either).

Amazon sells this DVD. I am certain Netflix would mail it to you as well. A fine movie for the intelligent child who is not yet spoiled or jaded.