People and Houses

When David started volunteering with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity it became apparent to him that there was a disconnect between the labor, a group of retirees who found joy in being helpful, and the members of the board, people still in the workforce who were either too busy to do a proper job or not interested enough to take volunteer work seriously. For instance, when a home was nearing completion, and the crew was ready to look to the next project, it was dismaying to find that no preparation had been made. With a half-dozen future homeowners approved and on the waiting list, work came to a halt simply because no property had been selected and no permits sought. Among the ranks, grumbling ensued.

So David started attending the board meetings to see what was going on and if there was a way to move things along. What he discovered was an hour dedicated to personal discussion and a hurried fifteen minutes spent on Habitat business. Tasks like loan approvals, background checks, and property assessments were assigned; but at the next meeting it turned out that no one had done what they’d promised to do—and they weren’t even embarrassed to admit it. In our home invectives were flung—inept inefficient blatherers!

So here David is, a few years later, the new president of the Habitat board. To hear him tell it, he inherited a financial fiasco. For instance, in a couple of cases, homeowners were expected to make regular payments, but no account had been set up for them to pay into. Months went by and the homeowners, with no place to send their payments, simply never paid; and, coming to expect that payments would never be required, they spent their money elsewhere. So David, flummoxed and indignant, is now forced to be the bad guy, informing these people that not only can they not live in their homes for free, but they’re going to have to come up with the payments they should’ve been making all along.

Today he tells me that he needs to go see what’s going on at an old Habitat house in Kingsland. Interested, I invite myself along.

The situation, as he explains it, is this: The house is fourteen years old. Initially, regular payments were made, but they stopped seven years ago, with ten thousand of the debt still outstanding.

The house has no number and it looks more like a cabin than a house. Nevertheless, our phones tell us we’ve arrived. The neighborhood is made up of a combination of very old squatty ranch homes and newly built small, inexpensive homes. The habitat house looks like what it is—a twelve-hundred square foot rectangle plopped amongst trees and never maintained. Built sideways on a pleasantly shaded lot, there’re two doors and it’s impossible to tell which one is the front. On one side, in a driveway of hard dirt, there are two rundown trucks that aren’t going anywhere, and one old SUV that looks like it might still serve its purpose. Beyond them is a storage shed so old and splintery that it’s literally coming apart at the seams. The door on the opposite side of the house opens to a wooded area and is made prominent by a broad inviting porch. Old fashioned coolers hang from several windows. 

Being me, I want the human side of the story. Are the original owners still living here? If not, who is? Why did the payments stop? Any children in the original household would be grown by now; but, evidenced by bikes and toys, there are obviously children in residence.

In this part of the world, where meth labs are common and not every house has a refrigerator but you can bet they’ve got a gun, approaching someone’s property where you’re not known and haven’t been invited is risky—but David is brave. I stay in the car while he walks around the house taking pictures.

“Get one of that big truck!” I hiss from the window. He complies.

Eventually he makes his way to a door (front or back?) and knocks. Waits, knock again. I can feel someone inside, stealthily peering out, aware that a stranger knocking can only mean one thing—someone wants money.

David gives up and we drive away.

“What’re you going to do?” I ask.

“We can foreclose, or we can pay them to get out.”

“You can’t pay them after they’ve lived here for free for ten years.”

I’m indignant. Getting paid for not paying your debt is a ridiculous proposition.

“If we foreclose it goes to the bank. If the bank sells it, we’ll get the ten thousand owed, and the bank keeps the rest. But if Habitat pays them a few thousand to get out, we can go in and fix the place up, then sell it to someone who’ll pay for it and take care of it.”

“Even with remodeling, it wouldn’t be nearly as nice as the Habitat houses yall’re building now. Who wants a house without central air?”

“No one I know.”

“What’re you going to do? Who decides?”

“I’ll present it to the board. Ultimately, they’ll do what I recommend.”

“And what’ll that be?”

He sighs. Habitat is a topsy-turvy quagmire.

The hard dirt where the trucks are parked.

This is where they store their junk.

Trees, and the porch isn’t awful.

Carwash User Manual

I like to think I’ve mastered the credit card/reading machine interaction. At the grocery store the payment gizmo tells me when to remove my credit card. Likewise, with the ATM. While every machine’s different, most make the instructions clear—leave it in for fifteen seconds to be read, or dip it with a quick in-and-out motion. In department stores there are many questions to be answered before I can grab my card and my purchase and move on—paper receipt? Zip code? Email address? Donate?

I run into trouble at the carwash. Driving up to the payment stand, I lower my window. Unable to reach, I lift myself a bit and lean out, an awkward position to maintain, but it happens every time I do any sort of drive thru.

The how-to illustration next to the slot shows the card with the strip at the top and facing left. I do what the picture tells me, but the response is “Unable to read card.” I try again. No joy. The card worked fine ten minutes ago at the dry cleaners. I try three more times before turning my attention to the written instructions. It turns out that the picture and the words don’t say the same thing. The strip is supposed to be facing right.

I turn the card and try again, but still the recording says, “Unable to read card.” The programmed woman’s voice is judging me. She’s impatient because I’m forcing her to repeat herself. And she’s condescending because I’m so inept. The card not working when it was facing the wrong way made sense. But it should work now. I’m obviously missing something.

In the neighboring lane, other cars zip on through; and I don’t like that other people know how to get this payment stand to cooperate and I don’t. Three idling cars hover in my rearview mirror. One of them issues an emphatic HONK! Exasperated and losing all confidence in myself, I push the “help” button. The recorded message becomes sympathetic, assuring me that someone will be out shortly to help.

Two minutes later a teenage guy with hair sprouting from beneath a cap lumbers out. He’s very polite, offering a pleasant greeting and asking what the problem is.

“It’s not accepting my card,” I tell him.

The screen is divided into three sections, the top advertising discounts, the middle inviting me to buy a membership—and this gives me pause. A membership to a carwash is something that, until this moment, I was unaware existed. It seems to come with a fob that has a barcode for fast entry, which would surely be of use to me right now; but I’m so flustered by the difficulty I’m having in simply achieving this one little thing that the thought of collaborating in a club-joining venture with this limited automaton is daunting.  

The lower third of the screen shows only the brand name of the car wash. My helper pokes this section and it comes to life, showing a menu of the types and prices.

How was I supposed to know to push there first? There’s no indication that it’s a place that’ll react—no Select Here, or Press Here.

“What kind of wash d’ya want?” he asks.

“Whitewater.”

He pokes my selection and the screen changes again, telling me to insert my card. He holds out his hand for my card, pushes it in, pulls it out, and hands it back.

So, two things I did wrong. I was supposed to select first, which I didn’t know to do because it was less than obvious; and I was supposed to dip, not insert and wait—information which was also held back.

“The instructions on this thing aren’t clear,” I complain.

“They’re all different,” he tells me. “Have a great day.”

Confounded, mourning my incompetence, he shakes his head sadly as he walks away.

The arm lifts and I go through.

As the outside of my car is getting the dirt blasted from it by powerful jets of soapy water, and gigantic spongy tentacles swish heavily on the windows, it occurs to me that this carwash is part of a chain. And that, as such, the same lack of precise instructions is mounted on the payment kiosks of every one of the chain’s carwashes in every town in Texas.

Across the state people with literal minds are reaching from their windows and shoving credit cards into slots facing the wrong direction. Stymied by a lack of directives, they’re holding up carwash lines. And they’re feeling stupid. Not just feeling stupid, but being made to feel stupid. Is this a deliberate scheme meant to sow self-doubt? Is this a black-hearted machination geared toward making, not just me, but all of us, feel lesser, hesitant, off balance? I think so, Cricket, I think so.

My car, clean; but was it worth the price?

THE BEST CAKE

The other day at Mahjong one of the other women mentioned that her cousin had sent her their grandmother’s recipes. They’d been written on index cards and stored in an appropriately-sized filing box; and seeing that old-fashioned set-up again caused her to fondly remember her grandmother and her grandmother’s cooking.

October is the month of my mother’s birth, so I’ve been a bit nostalgic myself lately, recalling my mother and how she could be goofy and wise at the same time. She, too, had a recipe box with index cards. She put one recipe in it—her fruit cocktail cake—then it got pushed to the back of the cabinet, not to be seen again until she moved from the house years later. She did the same thing with my older sister’s baby book—got as far as the first tooth, then dropped it. And where was the record of my first tooth? Who cares? Obviously, the teeth came in—no need to mark every occasion. Starting a project and stopping was my mother’s habit, which I’ve been known to do also. No need to let life pass you by because you’re chronicling something that’s not terribly significant.

However, my Mahjong friend’s talk of recipes called to mind the only recipe of my mother’s that I have—her fruit cocktail cake. She was kind enough to write it out for me when I left home. Though we always called it “her” cake, I believe she found it in Good Housekeeping or Redbook in the early sixties. I make it occasionally and everybody gives oohs and aahs. It truly is a delicious cake.

Years ago—I believe we were living in The Hague—I took the cake to a potluck and, as expected, everybody raved. When one of the women asked for the recipe, I gave her a decisive “no.” I didn’t think I’d said anything wrong—I mean, she asked, and it was my right to refuse—but the look on her face told me otherwise. Oh dear, I’d been harsh. I softened it with this explanation:

“I’m a lackluster cook and this cake is the only halfway decent thing I have in my repertoire to bring to these group luncheons. How about I give you the recipe when we leave for our next posting?”

The part about being a lackluster cook is true. The part where I would give her the recipe before we moved away was not. After all, who’s to say we wouldn’t travel in the same circle again? Expats tend to flock to the same locations. Many times I said good-bye to a friend, only to run into her in the grocery store in another town, in another country a few months later.

As far as the recipe goes, the copy I have was scripted from memory in my mother’s hand forty years ago. The bit of paper it’s written on is now yellow and dirty from use, and the ink is faded, but I take comfort in seeing her writing. Also, like her, it’s a happy mess—out of order and incomplete. The first instruction in any baking recipe is to give the temperature and to preheat the oven, right? But if you follow the timeline in her instructions, she doesn’t mention preheating until after the ingredients have been blended and are ready to go in the oven. It’s like, “Oh, by the way, you should’ve preheated the oven.”

Also, an omission in the list of ingredients is half a cup of nuts and half a cup of brown sugar, to be sprinkled on top before baking. So when you get to that step, it’s a surprise. “Hm. I see I should’ve bought pecans and brown sugar at the store.”

And her “beat good” makes me laugh every time. Grammar, Mother! For the sauce she’s written “canned milk” without specifying evaporated or condensed (it’s evaporated); and it’s been years since I’ve heard the word “oleo,” which is now called margarine. I use butter.

Back then there was no need to identify what sort of fruit cocktail because there was 0nly one kind. But these days the grocery shelves boast a choice of sugar free, light, and organic. If you’re making this cake, go straight for the original heavy syrup which, to my dismay, is difficult to find because it’s hidden on the bottom shelf in the furthest section, as though the store is ashamed to stock such an unwholesome product. Processed fruit in overly sweet treacle may not be the healthiest choice, but in this instance it’s what’s called for.

Another rather important requirement not given in the recipe is that the cake should sit in the refrigerator, soaking in its rich sauce of sugar, butter, and evaporated milk for at least a day before consumption. Two days is better.

Then go ahead. Have a piece. But only the one. It’s best to make it for a large group so it’ll all be eaten, because you don’t want it sitting around your house calling your name.

Here it is, a little piece of my history.

This is one of The Waterfront Grill’s specialty Halloween drinks. I hate it when I spend fifteen dollars for a cocktail and it turns out to be too yucky to drink.

Six Months of Reading

Every once in a while I tell about the books I’ve recently read. Some are current; others are ones I’ve been lucky enough to find through browsing; and one I purchased because of the hype. Here goes:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. With an Irish Christmas as the background, a man hauls coal in the early dark hours to a convent that’s also a school and a girls’ home. In the coal storage bin, he discovers a young girl shivering, and he suspects that she’s been there all night. Though he was born of an unwed mother during a time when this circumstance carried condemnation, he and his mother were always treated with kindness, and recognizing this, he has a grateful heart. This is a story of how, in the face of his town’s corrupt conspiracy, he makes things right. It was uplifting and compelling, and I enjoyed it so much that I next read her novella, Foster. Also worth reading.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry. The author is a major award winner in the UK, but this is the first of his books I’ve read. His prose is delicate and lyrical; and the way he strings words together is so beautiful that I got teary-eyed as soon as I started reading. What a gift he has. Set in Ireland, Old God’s Time is about a retired detective, highly respected, who, for many years, held tightly to a dark secret. As he sinks into dementia, lies and truths overlap and haunt. It’s not a merry book, but it is a profound one, and it’ll stay with you. And more good news—he’s quite prolific, so there are many more of his books out there for me to pick up.

The Maid by Nita Prose. Oh what a joy this was to read! The main character is a young woman, Molly, whose life consists only of her job as a hotel maid, and her apartment. Because she’s quiet and is careful to draw no notice, people forget her presence—and that’s how she knows things. The sardonic monologue running through her head, her finicky cleanliness, and her strict adherence to her schedule, combine to form a delightful character. While on one level it’s a mystery involving violence, drug-dealing, and other chicanery, it’s mostly about Molly being Molly. If there’s sequel, I’ll be there.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks. When a book wants to teach me about history, I usually yawn and walk away. Except when the author’s Geraldine Brooks, who’s masterful in her historic niche. This intriguing and deeply researched novel has it all—slavery into freedom, art history and skeletal rearticulation, romance, and a passion for digging up long-ago truths. The past and present are elegantly intertwined; though I’ll mention that one of the story strands culminates in a predictable and contrived way, which was disappointing, but not so disappointing that I wouldn’t recommend the read. If you’ve not inhaled a Geraldine Brooks novel, I suggest you pick one up. I also recommend March.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I came across this at Mahjong where, for a reason that eludes me, there are old books stacked on a table. I usually prefer fiction, but I do think that Gladwell shines an interesting light on whatever subject he decides to take on. Blink studies our decision making processes. When making choices, some people lean heavily on intuition, some on training, and others on logic. Based on experimental research, he examines these three aspects and how they come into play as we make decisions in our daily lives. I found it fascinating. My husband didn’t. So, subjective.

The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman. Hoffman’s books are always enjoyable and always skillfully crafted. I’ve been a fan for a long time. But be aware, she does have a fantastical streak that might be off-putting for some—for example: strange relationships are formed when cats walk backwards, or: if a spider crawls on your toe someone will give you a chicken. This is a prequel to Practical Magic, her first and most famous witch book. In The Rules of Magic, three witch siblings, born under a curse, must live without falling in love because their lovers will die. Oh, dear, how will they get around this?

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. This was recommended to me so many times, and so highly acclaimed, that I thought surely I would enjoy it. But nope. I only managed to get through twelve percent before I threw in the towel. In those thirty or so pages, the author had dropped in so many names, occupations, relationships, backstories, and standings in the community that I was completely overwhelmed. How disappointing. But hey, I have no doubt that it’s every bit as outstanding as the critics say. I almost always prefer the book to the movie, but this time I’ll let someone smarter than I decipher it, and then I’ll enjoy their interpretation on the big screen.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. This is a modern retelling of Dickinson’s David Copperfield. It’s one of the best reads I’ve come across in years. Seeing an awful world through guileless eyes, witnessing the transformation of innocence to cynicism, cynicism to hope, and hope to triumph—these are the themes of the story. The ingredients of the tale are ignorance, cruelty, poverty, dishonesty, despair, drug use—pretty much a stew of everything malicious you can find to chuck into the pot. While this is obviously not a description to attract readers, the narrator, a growing-up boy, is darkly humorous, quite lovable, and someone you’ll want to root for. Demon Copperhead is a prime example of how fiction helps humans find their humanity.

My Kindle’s is on the mantle. Why? How’d it get there? I have no idea.