Tall Bellflower- Campanula Americana

This is the Tall Bellflower, a biennial that grows on the wood edges and blooms at a time when there are few other wildflowers to see in my part of Nashville. I used to have this at my old house. It grew en masse under a peach tree in my border. But after a few weeks it withered and died ,as all biennials do, leaving a bare patch in the shade. I loved it though. I thought of it as a southern substitute for delphinium, a plant I never wasted my time trying to grow. I did grow annual larkspur, another delphinium substitute, but it bloomed early, and was gone by June.

I did see a Pacific Hybrid Delphinium in this city once. I went on a garden tour with the Perennial Plant Society. We visited a garden in Belle Meade. Its owner was a Nashville heiress, who sent her gardener out to answer our questions. The delphinium was in a pot, and I would wager it came out of a cool greenhouse for the day to remind those of us less fortunate that there are still things that only old money can buy. But the plant was a prop. A ringer, if you will. Brought in to meet White Flower Farm standards of garden excellence. After all, that Connecticut gardening institution and style arbiter declares in its catalogue that "Delphiniums are outstanding elements of every well-bred garden". Too bad for us Southerners. We vulgarians must make do with crinums and crepe myrtles and the Tall Bellflower. Poor us.

Seen at Edwin Warner Park this morning.

This is too common a scene at the Warner Parks these days, but fortunately the Park people are clearing the roads. The 18 inches of rain we received during the Great Flood of May 2 caused landslides everwhere. Officially these park roads are closed, but unofficially people are ignoring the signs and barricades, since the trees and the soil have been cleared. One interesting thing I saw at the landslide was all the Poke seedlings growing in the disturbed,newly sunny ground that was once forest. I have read that Pokeweed seeds are able to lie dormant for decades waiting for the landslide or tornado that will level the trees and bring back the sun.

We might as well be dead!

I just discovered AOL Radio on my computer, and I have been listening to their Salsa, Jazz, and Cuban music. This morning when I turned it on, AOL popped up and asked if I would take a survey. I usually say "no". But today I thought "Why Not?"

Where, they asked,do I live? Why the US, of course. Home of Super Consumers.

Was I Male or Female? Female. And everyone knows how much women love shopping-

How old was I? 60. A boomer.

I advanced to the next screen.

Which never came.

"We are sorry" said AOL, "But the information you have provided is not what we are looking for in this survey".

Well, it could not have been the United States part. Or the female part.

60. Ah yes. In the demographics of marketers, all I was good for was denture cream. Or a pre-ordered casket.

Everyone knows old people don't buy things. They are too busy golfing at Hilton Head, or driving 200 thousand dollar Winnebagos that get 2 miles to the gallon. Everyone knows old people are afraid of computers and don't know how to get on the Internet. It is marvelous that I am typing this at all-

Perhaps I should start looking at saving money for cremation. Think of that, AOL. You could add a Funeral Music Channel to get us seniors in the mood. After all, your market research proves we might as well be dead!

Fruit Salad with Thai Basil

I composed this salad last night. I needed a dish to go with Black Bean Soup and my version of Chicken with Sofrito Sauce. It requires:


1 apricot, diced

1 small tomato, diced.

1 mango, diced

1/2 cup diced pineapple

1 navel orange, cut into rounds, rind trimmed away ,then diced.

6-8 leaves of Thai basil, chopped.

Sea salt- a sprinkling.


Combine the fruit in a glass bowl, and toss with the basil leaves.Sprinkle with salt.

Now- make a dressing.

Combine 2 tbs of olive oil, 2 teaspoons of Natural organic sugar, 1 heaping tbs of

guava jelly, 2 tbs lemon juice, and a teaspoon of chipotle/mango/pomegranate sauce.

You can substitute a few drops of plain chipotle hot sauce for the mango sauce. I

used Fischer and Wieser Chipotle and mango sauce, but I am not sure how widely

available it is.


Toss the dressing with the salad and serve.

Some Good Summer Reading

I do not know what books are bestsellers this week, but I can assure you that few of them will be as entertaining as these. New is not always best, and older is not always out of date.

Ross Thomas has been out of print, and that is criminal. He is a mystery writer's writer, praised by the likes of Donald Westlake, Robert Parker, and Elmore Leonard. "The Fools in Town are on Our Side" is my favorite of his books, though "Out on The Rim" is almost as good. "Fools" features two characters named Lucifer Dye and Homer Necessary, who become involved in a plot to take over and corrupt a Southern coastal city somewhere between Mobile and Galveston. Read it.

The next two books I recommend are for those of you who wish you were spending your summer in Tuscany or Umbria. After reading "Summer's Lease" and "After Hannibal" you will be glad you stayed home. In John Mortimer's novel, an English couple, the wife's father, and their children lease a villa in Tuscany that seems to have been handpicked just for them, though the wife soon suspects this was for sinister motives. This was made into a mini-series and was shown on Masterpiece Theatre a few years ago. "After Hannibal", by Barry Unsworth, is an antidote to the Frances Mayes School of Italian Pastoral. Here the natives are not gracious and welcoming,and in order not to spoil it for you I will say no more.

I admit to never having read any of James Michener's thousand page door stopper novels, but his "Tales of the South Pacific" will live forever. It is so good that I will read it again this summer, perhaps for the 10th time. Rogers and Hammerstein turned it into the musical "South Pacific".

Lastly, with the 95 cent McKay price tag still on it, is "Iberia", Michener's tribute to Spain. I am reading it now, and though it was written in the sixties it does not feel dated. Spanish history will not change. Spanish character may be immutable. Michener visited Spain for the first time when he shipped out on a freighter that would bring oranges from Valencia to make marmalade in Dundee. This is a marvellous book.

Found at McKay Used Books

I admit to being a culinary dilettante. Like Auntie Mame ,I flit from enthusiasm to enthusiasm- Cuban cooking, Latin American food, the cuisines of the Caribbean- Not to mention the food and interior design of Mexico. I found these books the other evening at McKay. "Casa Mexicana", published in the eighties, cost me 2 dollars. It features Frida Kahlo's house as well as the artist Jose' Luis Cueves's home. So colorful and exuberant. Qualities needed in hot climates where tasteful mauves and pinks and whites fade to insignificance.

"Carribean Cooking for Pleasure" is vintage. It was published in 1970. The Sugar Reef Cookbook was published in 1989, and as anyone can see from the cover, at the end of the Big Hair era (on both men and women!).

The one disappointment of my trip to McKay was walking away from "Savannah Cooking". They wanted 17.50 for it. I try never to pay more than six dollars. On the other hand, and having nothing to do with cooking, I did find "Ladies of the Grand Tour" by Brian Dolan, a book about adventurous Englishwomen out to see the Continent and the world. Since I am going nowhere other than to work and back this summer, I think I will go with them. Auntie Mame would.

The Annals of Nursing- Part 5. The year turns.

And so the year turned, and it was 1970. We had survived and made it to the second half of our freshman year. Our upper class men assured us we were almost home free. If one was still there after the holidays, it was because our instructors and the school wanted us to be. We might still wash out, but if we did it was because we did it to ourselves. A girl might decide she would rather be married and pregnant than go on to be a nurse. Other girls might find themselves in what used to be called "trouble", though this was not as common as it was before the Dartmouth Infirmary doctors started handing out birth control pills. It did happen to one pretty brunette named Sidney, whose boyfriend admired her too much. Sidney was lucky. Her parents had money. They sent her to Puerto Rico on "vacation".

We, of course, had split into groups, or cliques, as most young women do. There was the vivacious, blond group, led by a doctor's daughter named Margie. This crowd made the rounds on Fraternity Row, though I never heard they were invited to Winter Carnival, the Holy Grail of Dartmouth social events. Cute could not compete with the Seven Sisters. The Margie group spent sunny spring days inviting a tan out on the flat, pebbled roof of Billings Lee. Linda, not a blond, but a Margie-girl anyway, toasted herself to a shade of Hawaiian loveliness, though I imagine she might have regretted it in later years.

My friends and I were the short, smart group. We were on the plain side of pretty- all brown-haired. Most with glasses.There was Mary-Ellen Bean, who came from Burlington because all the diploma schools in Vermont had closed. She had straight hair to the waist, and an affect somewhere between deadpan and Buster Keaton. My other best friend was Christine Kelsey. I was going to describe her as having a smile like the Cheshire Cat, but that was not so. Christine was the Cheshire Cat. Her father sent her to school so she would take care of him when he was old. I hear she fled this fate, and ended up somewhere in the South. Christine's favorite phrase was "sick', and she used it a hundred ways. "Sick!" she would say if something amused her. "Sick" was her comment on the ridiculous and the absurd. I have never met anyone who could give one word so many meanings.

Pam, another of our group, was indispensable to us. She had a car.A Plymouth Duster that carried us down to the Dairy Queen in Lebanon. Margie may have been cute and popular, but she did not have a car.

Beano,Christine, Pam, and I were regulars at a coffee house on the main road into town just east of the Ledyard Bridge.We talked and ate triscuits and drank cocoa, and met a few Dartmouth boys. Once I had a date with a boy named Roger Rockbound, who was a member of the Young Republicans. It did not go well, for I was on my way to becoming a verbal Bomb Thrower who spent her off hours reading Ramparts magazine. Maybe we were all cliches in those days.

Weekday evenings we spent up on the wards reading our patients'charts and writing care plans. Freshman year was devoted to adult medical-surgical nursing. The specialties- Pediatrics, Obstetrics, OR Nursing, Psych- awaited us in our Junior year.

Along with Med-Surg and Fundamentals came Diet Science, or Nutrition. Miss Carolyn Sherman taught it. Like Dr. Sandra McKay, Miss Sherman was a hand and arm waver. She was never without a cigarette. She was a stout, ugly woman with a pock marked face, a bulbous nose, and an inexhaustible supply of purple polka dot dresses.. She always stood behind a lectern. I do not know that she ever knew my name, or recognized me in the crowd. Perhaps because I hated her class. It bored me, and I made it through with a "C". Ironic then, that two years later she was to become the greatest and most influential teacher I had ever had. But that is a story for later.

I continued babysitting and working as a nurses's aide on my off hours. I also started ward-clerking and working as an aide at Dick Hall's House, the Dartmouth Infirmary. On Saturday nights ,another aide and I would go to the Mary Hitchcock ER to bring back stretcher loads of drunk Dartmouth boys. I remember one night when a bat got in and terrorized the halls. I remember elegant, sad old Dr Chambers dying of a brain tumor in an out of the way private room. There were stories that John
Wayne had been at the Infirmary incognito as he was treated for cancer. I never saw
him. And how could John Wayne ever have been incognito? Probably just a story.

One of the unpleasantnesses of the year was how often some of us were sick. I had a staph bronchitis, otitis media, strep throat, and legions of viruses. The Infirmary treated some of these, but not all. " I am not going to give you antibiotics", said one wise old doctor, "You need to build up your resistance". He was right, and
I did.


I can still remember the smell of staph and a smell I always associated with cancer. I smelled it on the old West Wing women's ward and on the East Wing Men's ward. There were so many patients with mouth cancers and esophageal cancers. Yet I was tough. It did not bother me. I was a nurse.

Since this is a coming of age story, I should add some tales of my baby sitting , for my evenings in the homes of doctors and professors were windows to other worlds.I met my first Southerner. She was Mary Lyons, the wife of a professor. I watched over her son Charlie. Mary Lyons hired me evening after evening, for I read to Charley- "The night Max wore his wolf suit" delighted him. I met the lovely and sad Patricia Gill, who owned a house in the pines and a free-standing glass octagonal music room of great beauty.It had a piano, and it was silent, for Mrs. Gill's husband, Dr Milton Gill,a professor of Music, had died not long before along with 31 other people when their plane hit a mountain before final approach to the Lebanon Airport.There was Dr Eric Ellington, the Chief Neurosurgical resident. He , his wife and six children lived in the cheap, cramped ,subsidized housing Dartmouth provided north of town. Everyone called it "Ticky-Tacky North". I babysat his children when he took his wife to see "2001". A few years later I saw his obituary in the Dartmouth Alumni magazine. He committed suicide. I remember that I was not surprised. I also sat for a black female professor- a rarity at Dartmouth. And for people I do not remember but whose record player and Modern Jazz Quartet albums I will never forget.

May came. The seniors graduated. My friends planned their going home for the summer. I did not plan. I would spend my summer in Hanover, at Billings Lee. Hanover was now my home. I did not want to leave it. I hated Claremont, the town my parents lived in. I had no high school friends to be sentimental about. I had work in the hospital and at Dick Hall's house. I was content.

In one of our last class lectures of the year, Mrs Smith, my instructor ,said something I remembered about the nature of nursing. I liked it so well I wrote it on an index card ,and taped it on my little desk so I could read it when I needed inspiration.

"In nursing", she said, "There are no patient needs that cannot be identified and met". To this day I do not know who was more credulous. Mrs. Smith, or I. By the end of my junior year the card was gone, for by then I knew better.


This ends the memoir of my freshman year at the Mary Hitchcock School of Nursing. The next installment will cover some events of the summer, and the coming of my junior year.