Category Archives: Stories and Writing

Candy Hearts and Conversation Sweets

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Valentine’s Day is nearly here. Shelves in stores are crowded with red and pink containers. Much of the space is taken up by chocolate in heart-shaped boxes, but there are also a lot of bags of what is basically heart-shaped sugar. The most Valentine’s-y of these are the candy hearts.
Candy hearts are so appealing that you can find them depicted on fabrics, wrapping paper, and cards. I guess Hershey’s kisses show up once in a while, but candy hearts are a much more popular Valentine’s Day icon.
What’s so appealing about them? I think it’s the messages. Without messages, candy hearts would be just another heart-shaped candy that isn’t chocolate. Boring.
But what is it about the messages that makes candy hearts fun? After all, they aren’t exactly poetry. Mostly candy hearts offer a random assortment of sentimental cliches and catch-phrases, nothing particularly interesting or original.
I think what makes them fun is the very fact that you get such an assortment. You can pick through the hearts till you find just the right message to hand to a particular person. It might be a compliment: “Shining Star”, “You Are Nice”, or “Dear One”. It might be a request: “Be My Friend”, “Let’s Talk”, “Dance With Me.” It might even be a question: “Will You Marry Me?”
Alternatively, you can draw one at random and be surprised. It’s a bit like a fortune cookie.
It occurs to me that, like many other things, candy hearts lend themselves to stories. What if someone pulled a candy heart out of a jar, just for a quick mouthful of sugar, and discovered that it said something really unexpected?
 “You are being watched.”
 Or: “She’s lying.”
Or: “Look up.”
In fact, candy hearts (or something like them) do show up in stories. In Mary Poppins Comes Back by P. L. Travers, Mary takes the children to a very odd store where she asks for “an ounce of Conversations.”
“‘Are those the Conversations?’ asked Jane, pointing to the Jar. ‘They look more like sweets.’

‘So they are, Miss! They’re Conversation Sweets,’ said Uncle Dodger, dusting the jar with his apron.”
Jane gets “a flat star-shaped sweet rather like a peppermint” with the words “You’re My Fancy.” Michael pulls out a shell-shaped one with “I Love You. Do You Love Me?” The twins, John and Barbara, are given “Deedle deedle dumpling” and “Shining-bright and airy”, but Mary Poppins’s sweet is shaped like a half-moon and reads, “Ten o’clock to-night.”
Naturally, Mary Poppins explains nothing, and equally naturally, strange things happen that night at ten o’clock.
The tales of Raggedy Ann also involve a candy heart, if I remember correctly. A disaster leads to Raggedy Ann being restuffed, and the woman repairing her puts in a candy heart that says “I love you.” Later, Raggedy Ann falls in some water, and she tells her friends that since the candy has melted, the “I love you” is now spread throughout her insides.*
But enough about stories. Setting aside the content of the messages for the moment, how well do candy hearts succeed at being Valentine decorations? The colors are fine and so is the shape, but I have mixed feelings about the way they are printed. I like the large ones from Brach’s because they have longer messages, but the words look like they came from a bad dot-matrix printer. On the positive side, I suspect whatever technique they are now using allows them to vary the messages more, which is all to the good. Maybe the quality of the print will improve over the coming years. The Sweetheart brand small hearts have a long way to go—they are often barely readable.
And how well do candy hearts succeed at being candy—that is, how do they taste? I bought the small Sweethearts because Sweethearts are made by the New England Confectionery Company, which makes NECCO wafers. I like NECCO wafers, and the hearts looked as though they were made of the same stuff, so I expected them to taste the same.
When I tasted the various colors, though, I wondered if they’d changed the flavors of their hearts. I don’t remember green being green-apple flavored, and the blue… did they even have blue hearts earlier? A quick check on-line shows that the flavors changed some years ago, which makes me wonder when I last bought Sweethearts. (They contain gelatin, so maybe not since my daughter went vegetarian?)
Since I don’t like the flavors very much, and certainly don’t need the extra sugar, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to skip the candy altogether and substitute colorful paper hearts or wooden hearts with messages on the reverse. (I’m sure these must exist.) But then what does your friend or sweetie do when you hand them a suitably-messaged heart? Keep it forever? Smile appreciation and then toss it in the trash? (Or back in the bowl, if it’s a wooden heart?) There’s something to be said for being able to pop the message in one’s mouth after reading it.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Till next post.
* Build-a-Bear uses a non-edible version of this trick.

The Idea of Soup

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It’s cold outside and there’s a thin layer of snow on the ground. January. My mind is filled with The Idea of Soup.
Really, I should say it is filled with My Idea of Soup. Yours may be quite different. My Idea of Soup tends to be filled with chunks of vegetables, possibly also with beef but not chicken, and garnished with chopped parsley. I don’t think I ever actually garnish soup with chopped parsley—I rarely remember to add parsley at all. But in My Idea of Soup, there is fresh green parsley.
My Idea of Soup. Where did it come from? I can think of several sources.
One is my favorite jigsaw puzzle, “Cubbyhole Cottage.” I was six or seven years old when I received it—my younger brother got a 60 piece puzzle with a jet plane on it. We used to have competitions to see who could put their puzzle together faster.
Cubbyhole Cottage jigsaw puzzle by Springbok
Cubbyhole Cottage, by Springbok
I liked to imagine myself as one of the people living in this old-fashioned house. Most often, I imagined myself as the girl in the purple dress and cap—the one stirring the soup. She seemed like the most important person in the house, as she was making the meal. The others were tidying, or setting the table, or watering the flowers, or just playing. Not nearly as important. Also, I liked the girl’s ruffle-edged apron.
Close-up of kitchen in Cubbyhole Cottage jigsaw puzzle
The hearth is the center of the home, even if not quite the center of the puzzle.
Another source for My Idea of Soup is a story by Margaret Wise Brown, “Mister Dog”, in a book of bedtime stories from long ago. The illustrations are by Garth Williams, one of my favorite illustrators.
The story is about Crispin’s Crispian, a dog who belongs to himself. One day, after various adventures,  he meets a boy who belongs to himself and invites the boy to come live with him. They stop by the butcher shop on the way home, and the dog buys a bone while the boy gets a lamb chop and “a bright green vegetable.” The dog makes soup and gives some to the boy, who contributes some of his bright green vegetable to the soup.
Page from Mister Dog, showing boy and dog with soup and green vegetable
See the bright green vegetable in the soup? Also, I love the cuckoo clock.
And now you know why My Idea of Soup is garnished with fresh parsley.
Finally, there is the old story of Stone Soup. There’s something appealing about all those people contributing a bit of this or that to the pot, and ending up with a tasty, nourishing soup “from a stone!” I love that idea.
Alas, in practice I’ve found that adding random vegetables to my soup tends to work about as well as mixing a lot of random paints together. The result is muddy and not particularly appealing. Even when I try to stick close to basics, the results are variable. However, the following ingredients generally work for a “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” soup (except that as I said earlier, I tend to forget the parsley.)
·         Some chopped onion, usually sauteed in a bit of oil first
·         Bite-size stew meat, dusted in flour and browned a bit before adding liquid (now cooked on the side so the rest of the soup can be vegetarian—but add some broth to the meat to take advantage of the browned bits on the pan)
·         Canned diced tomatoes with liquid
·         Carrots, diced or bite-size as you wish
·         Water as needed
·         Potatoes, in bite-size pieces
·         Salt and pepper
·         Sage, rosemary, and thyme
·         Parsley, either dried with the rest of the seasoning, or fresh and added at the end
Sometimes I add a bay leaf or a splash of soy sauce. Sometimes, if it doesn’t need to be vegetarian, I add a dash of Worcestershire sauce. I’ve tried adding mushrooms, but results vary. Sometimes I add some broth along with the water, but I don’t like the way a lot of vegetable broths taste and I’m not sure whether they help the soup or not. Basically, I keep messing with it, but I haven’t been keeping accurate records so I don’t have a good sense of what’s working.
So I guess that’s what I should do, to fulfill My Idea of Soup. I should keep records the next time I make some vegetable (and beef) soup. Maybe I’ll even make some tonight. After all, it’s freezing outside and my husband has a cold.
Coziness and caring. Isn’t that what soup is all about?

So Many Books, So Little Attention

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“You mustn’t want to do everything at once. In a day a man can eat only three bowls of rice; he can’t eat ten or more days worth of rice at one sitting. In a day you can read only so much, and your efforts have a limit as well. You mustn’t want to do everything at once.”
(p. 133, Chu Hsi: Learning to Be a Sage, trans. Daniel K. Gardner)
My reading habits are going downhill. I’ve been reading the same book, Flavor: the Science of Our Most Neglected Sense, for well over a week now. It’s a good book—every time I pick it up again, I enjoy it. So why haven’t I finished it yet?
I’ve had time to read. In fact, it seems like I’ve done plenty of reading recently. I’ve been looking at everything from the newspaper to the latest e-newsletter from our public waste facility. Yet I remember very little of it.
In part, the problem is information over-availability. When I was a child and we were overseas, the reading options were mostly limited to the books we had on hand and a small school library. My mom ordered books by mail and we visited bookstores during visits back to the States, but still, it was possible for me to finish reading my new books and not yet have anything else to read. Fortunately, I was happy re-reading my favorites over and over. I got to know them very well.
Now I have too much to read. If you are a reader and you have only a few books to read, then you spend more time on those books. On the other hand, if you are constantly running into text of one sort or another, then you may end up spreading your time thinly over your various reading options.
Then again, you may not. When I was in graduate school, I read philosophy papers and books. If they were part of a class or relevant to my interests, I read them over and over. It wasn’t from lack of other reading material. There were libraries, bookstores, and my own overfilled bookshelves. But I had reason to read them carefully—to pick out the argument, to consider the objections raised and the replies—so I could come up with my own response.
I’m not in graduate school now, nor am I working in philosophy. I am not compelled to read thoroughly and with attention to detail. Nor am I faced with limited reading options that result in my re-reading anything that seems interesting. Instead, I have piles of books I haven’t read yet, magazines, newspapers (a new one every day!), and of course, the internet.
There’s a lot one could say about reading and the internet, but what matters here is the quantity of written material out there. It varies enormously in quality and subject matter. The only way to know if an article is worth my time is to skim over it.* The same is true of newspapers and magazines, though the quality is a bit more predictable.
So I find myself spending a lot of time skimming over articles rather than actually reading them. In fact, I spend so much time doing this that it is starting to become a habit. I pick up a magazine and skim through it, wondering if there is anything really interesting, and then find myself skimming through an article that does look interesting.
Wait! If the article is interesting, why am I glancing through it rapidly, skipping bunches of paragraphs here and there, checking to see where the article is headed… instead of settling down and actually reading it?
Sometimes I tell myself that right now I am just checking for interesting articles. I will read them later at some more leisurely time. But the amount of time I spend at this half-hearted sort-of-reading could be much better spent actually reading. And when I apply this sort of half-hearted-reading to the newspaper, I end up wasting quite a lot of time.
What is the solution to my increasingly bad reading habits? Is there a New Year’s Resolution that will help me get more out of my reading time?
Here’s one possible resolution, though I don’t know if I could actually carry it off. When I catch myself skimming, I should stop and ask if I have a good reason for skimming. If I don’t, then I should decide—do I want to read this, right now, or do I not? If not, move on to something else.
Sometimes there are good reasons for skimming. If I am looking for a particular bit of information, especially on the internet, then skimming is pretty much required. If I am trying to decide whether to buy or check out a book, I need to glance through it, which is a bit like skimming (but only a bit.)
On the other hand, there is no point in skimming through a book I’ve already bought and intend to read. And yes, I have found myself doing this, even with eminently readable books. All I can conclude is that my mind is restless and I need to focus more. “Read the book, or do not. There is no skim.”
The tricky situation is when I don’t know whether an article is really one I want to read. Unfortunately, the newspaper is full of articles like that, so I can waste a lot of time skimming. How can I choose more quickly? Decide based on the headline only? The first two paragraphs? Make a list of subjects to read about and ignore everything else?
Suppose I catch myself skimming and decide that yes, I do want to read this article. How do I switch gears from skimming to actually reading? Take notes, maybe? That would force me to focus on what the article actually says, and might help me remember some details. On the other hand, it might be more work than I’m prepared to put in.
It will be interesting to see whether I actually do manage to improve my reading habits over the next year.
“In reading, you must keep your mind glued to the text. Only when every sentence and every character falls into place have you done a good job of thinking through the work. In general, the student should collect his mind so that it’s completely tranquil and pure and in its normal activity and tranquility doesn’t run wild or become confused. Only then will he understand the text in all of its detail. Reading like this, he’ll understand the essentials.”
(p. 145, Chu Hsi: Learning to Be a Sage)
Till next post.
*Actually, there are some short cuts. Slide-show style? Almost certainly not worth the time.