Starving the Old Year Feeding the New
There are several New Year’s menus that I can remember distinctly. My mother Sybil Miner Beck always served pork and sauerkraut for New Years’ Eve. She told us that it’s an old German tradition to eat pork and sauerkraut to ensure good luck and to welcome in the New Year. The type of pork wasn’t always traditional, but with Mom it was a pork roast. At other New Year’s meals I’ve eaten sausage, kielbasa, or even hot dogs.
My wife Cindy Morrison Beck and I often shared meals with Cindy’s best friend, Deborah Detar and her husband Bill. We sometimes spent New Year’s Eve at each other’s homes to celebrate. Cindy’s menus were more “traditionally” flavored foods, while Debbie always added sugar to all of hers. Her sauerkraut was brown, heavily flavored with brown sugar and her mashed potatoes were one teaspoonful shy of being candy. Even the sour cream dips she made for veggies and chips was more like dips served with fruit. Her kids carry on that sweet tradition.
Sometimes Cindy’s parents Bud and Retha Morrison would share homemade sauerkraut with us. It was a veritable feast with freshly its canned flavor. This year I helped make sauerkraut and can hardly wait to share the flavor with my kids.
Another menu that remains firmly established in my memory bank is the meal my dad and grandparents Ray and Rebecca Miner made for New Year’s Day. Dad would buy several cans of oysters, the tiny round soup crackers, and vanilla ice cream. My grandparents had a farm and provided the milk, cream, and freshly churned butter to make the oyster stew. Gram always baked an apple pie or two. While we waited for the oysters to stew, we would play games like dominoes, Pachisi, or Uncle Ted’s favorite Sorry on the dining room table.
Gram’s house soon filled with savory steam from the stew simmering on her wood fired, kitchen cook-stove. It merged with the spicy aroma of the pies still in the oven. Hungry eyes of the older members huddled around the dining room table would occasionally stray into the kitchen “wondering if the soup was ready yet?”
Finally Gram would put the games away. She’d set the table with shallow bowls. Dad would carry the stew pot to the table; steam often obscuring sight through his glasses. The rich broth was ladled into the bowls and cellophane package of crackers passed from hand to hands until everyone had some. Soup spoons clicked as we slurped the broth. The flavor was remarkable. The meal ended with slices of still warm pie and melting ice cream. It’s still a deliciously full memory.

 Needs
We all have needs. Our needs appear at different times, in different situations, and for different people. Sometimes we have needs that are an absolute necessity and sometimes our needs are little more than our wishes or desires. Some needs are us wanting to lose weight or finding some free time or even finding something to do in your free time. Just like clothing, needs come in all shapes and sizes. Some needs are universal, like oxygen, water, food, and shelter and are essential for us to survive.
Sometimes the needs are to finish chores around the house, vacuuming, laundry, dusting, doing dishes, or cooking meals and if we’re not careful, those chores can accumulate and cause a backlog to the point that they overwhelm us. The very same thing may happen when things need repaired or fixing. Sometimes when we don’t have the knowledge of how to make the repairs or we don’t have the cash to hire someone to keep up with those repairs, the chores become major problems.
It may seem strange, but I don’t like to talk on the telephone, especially much of my job as a nursing supervisor was using the telephone. Telephone chores included confirming surgeries, giving instructions to patients, or searching for personnel to cover shifts. I don’t know if my fellow workers noticed, but if I could, I would often make rounds to the different areas of the hospital when a telephone call would suffice. It may have been weird, but I had the need to see someone’s face when I talked to them. It was much easier for me to see if what I was saying was being understood. The biggest insult was when the “need” for my assistance as nursing supervisor was changed from an over-head paging system to a pocket-carried voice-pager, then to a cell phone. With the over-head and the voice pager, I could delay answering if I was in the middle of something, but with the cell phone, I wasn’t allowed to use the restroom in peace.
You can ask my kids, when I came home from an especially stressful day, I would allow our home phone to ring until someone else answered it, even if it was right beside me. I’d been drained of my phone tolerance. Need I say more?

 Keep Christmas Merry
The Christmas season is often filled with the rush of buying gifts, wrapping presents, and with many other tasks like writing greeting cards, baking cookies, or creating an extravagant meal. These are the temporal things that will keep us busy, consume our time, and possibly frustrate us. When we gather at Christmas it’s a blur of activities that are over and done within a matter of a few hours. Then what? As we sit among crumpled colored paper and discarded boxes, we sigh and often feel let down, depressed and deflated. We may think, “Is that all there is?” Is this what the Christmas season is all about…or is there more?
Celebrating Christmas isn’t about a lighted and decorated tree in the center of the living room or is it about the stockings hanging on the mantle of the fireplace. It’s not about Santa, the elf on the shelf, or the sleigh and reindeer. The Grinch came close to finding the true meaning of Christmas, yet missed it by a mile. He recognized that Christmas was so much more than food, frivolity, and favors, but didn’t look far enough for the reason. Perhaps the celebrants of Whoville didn’t know the real reason either.
No one mentioned the birth of the Christ child and no mention of the baby Jesus. There was no mention of angels announcing the virgin’s conception of the prophesied Messiah. There was no mention of the shepherds being directed to seek this special child that was swaddled and lying in a manger. There was no mention of the heavenly omen of the star that guided the magi to Bethlehem to seek this newborn King of kings.
The television renditions of Christmas have purposefully removed and avoided any mention of the Christ child’s birth, yet they often invoke His holy title in each Christmas story that they create. They use only His title without sharing anything else about this Holy Child who is God and yet willingly took on the form of a human. God loves us so much that He sent His only begotten Son to endure and understand the trials and temptations of mankind and yet Jesus remained sinless. He came to suffer and to die; carrying all of our sins to the cross at Calvary so mankind might be redeemed from sin’s curse and to provide a way to heaven and to dwell there eternally. This was the ultimate Christmas gift. This is reason for the joy of the season. Jesus birth is the true blessing of Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all of my readers and thank you for your supportive comments.

Basement Blues
I’ve been working off and on working in my basement to clean and rid it of accumulated items from the past twenty years or so. Things that weren’t worn enough to toss have now been tossed. Things that haven’t been used, tossed. Things that have been stored for others, I gave options and some of those got tossed. There were plastic shopping bags of newspapers. I imagine nearly twenty in all and most of them were incinerated. This was written in 2018 and the hoarding has resumed.
I burned a coffee table and two end tables that had become scarred and wobbly. Some small scraps of wood joined the pile and helped to bring on the global warming that scientists have lied about. An old plastic cooler minus its lid sent a smoke signal to be saved, so I tossed on two foam rubber pillows from an old couch, but to no avail. They ascended into the heavens on dark billows. In their place is a patio table and a dining table with chairs.
Old pieces of warped plywood became part of the funeral pyre, as did some magazines, a few rags, and other odds and ends. My daughter, Anna and her boyfriend, James, said that they got a call from NASA saying they could see my signal. It was bright that evening they commented, but I thought it was more like the rubbish heap outside of Jerusalem, called Gahanna; the place of eternal fire.
I certainly made a blaze that I fed over several days as I uncovered more and more things that had lost their usefulness. I have saved boxes on shelves. You never know when a solid cardboard box will come in handy.
The original reason for ridding the basement of unnecessary things, and believe me there is still a lot left, was that my basement was a wet basement. A slow trickle of water would slide across one side of the basement and sometimes cover the floor when it  rained. I decided that I wanted to keep it dry and have a usable basement.
I hired a well known company to come in on a contingency plan. If an opening came up, they would give me a week’s notice to get everything away from the walls, so the workers can open a channel on the inside floor to arrange all seepage into a sump area and be pumped outside. The remedy worked. I now have a dry basement and that is why the accumulation of items has returned and hoarding now has returned. Who can throw away a good box? I need to start the de-cluttering again.

 Coincidences Sometimes Confuse Me
Coincidences… why do they happen? Sometimes the randomness of them confuses me. The coincidence is an unexpected collision of two or more instances happening at once. The happenstances may have some relation to each other, but others seem to defy logic. Recently I received a pecan fruit cake from the Collin Street Bakery from Corsicana, Texas. I found it in my mailbox. This company makes excellent fruit cakes. They aren’t the bourbon drenched wheels that your Aunt Sarah baked and passed out as Christmas gifts; the heavy super-dense cake that became an heirloom and was passed down to some other unsuspecting relatives years later with it still in pristine condition. Their cakes are 29 % pecans, delicious, and totally flavorful. So now that I’ve given my blessing on that product, I’ll proceed to the coincidence.
I was surprised to see a pecan fruit cake from Collin Street Bakery in my mailbox. I panicked because I thought that I’d sent the fruitcake to my friends in New Mexico. Finding the box with the label from Collins Street Bakery inside, I thought to myself, “Did I make a mistake and send a fruitcake to myself and not to New Mexico? I thought I gave the receptionist at the bakery the correct address to deliver the fruitcake to my friends.” But with the recent “slipped cog” incident, I thought perhaps I was standing on shaky ground.
So as soon as I came into the house, I reached for the phone and dialed the bakery. I began to talk with a lovely lady having a sweet southern accent. She looked up the information from my order from the 8th of December. I read the address and information from the packaging label of the fruitcake box to her. I reviewed the label. It read, “Mr. Tom Beck” and my address. The lady shared with me that the fruitcake I’d ordered had been sent out and delivered to San Jon, New Mexico on the seventeenth of December.
Looking more closely at the label on the packaging I saw a note printed on the corner that address label, “We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.”
It was for me. My friends had also sent a fruitcake to me. For me to receive a fruitcake from the very same company was certainly serendipitous event It was definitely a pleasant coincidence. I hadn’t slipped another cog. Now I just have to remember to send my friends a thank you note.

Feast Days
It’s begun. The Christmastime of overeating has started. Not that I’ve been a glutton, but I have eaten more than I usually do. Friday evening Mt. Zion Community Church held their Christmas potluck gathering and meal. The tables were festively set and the gym was pressed into service. About fifty-five people attended. Three tables were filled with a variety of foods with one table reserved for beverages and one for desserts. The tables were heavily laden with meats, vegetables, stews and pasta dishes. I wasn’t able to take the smallest of spoonfuls to sample each dish, so I limited what I sampled. I chose selectively from the dessert table. After we’d eaten, there was a game and a skit as entertainment.
Saturday afternoon was the annual Christmas banquet for the Chestnut Ridge Historical Society members. We usually held the meal in the evening about six o’clock, but because most of our members are senior citizens, we began to celebrate earlier at one o’clock in the afternoon. Driving at night has become a problem for us older drivers, especially since the introduction of those new blinding blue-white headlights. Oncoming cars can see farther in the darkness, but they too often cause temporary blindness in the older driver’s vision. The last two years we’ve held it in the Cook Township building, the former elementary school building.
The dining area was beautifully decorated by several ladies of the Society. They had the affair catered with very tasty selection of meats, potatoes, and vegetables. Tickets were sold to bid on donated baskets for the “white elephant” sale. The display of items covered three tables ranging from an oil painting, electronic wares, baskets of car care, and baskets of food items. There was a wreath covered in lottery tickets.
I left early because my oldest granddaughter Celine held her eighteenth birthday party and I certainly wanted to be there. She’s become a beautiful young lady. The party was on the far side of Uniontown and would take nearly an hour for me to get there. It was a nice party and of course I had to have a slice of cake and a small scoop of ice cream.
I lingered and had to drive home in the dark facing the onslaught of headlights and the dreaded blue-white headlights. Only one stretch was a bit difficult when there were six cars, one after another with those blinding beams. I did make it home safe and sound, overfed and ready for bed.

 Having Another Slipped Cog
Although the gears in my brain usually mesh quite well even after the head injury in February 2015, once in a awhile something happens to cause my mind to jump the track. This aberration was the first time in my fifty plus years of owning and driving a vehicle.
As I was driving back from my volunteer work at the Chestnut Ridge Historical Society Wednesday, I noticed that the inspection sticker for my car had run out at the end of November. What upset me was that I kept telling myself that I needed to get my car inspected before the end of the month, but somehow my thought process shifted the date to the end of December and not November. The realization suddenly hit me, my car was out of inspection and I was driving illegally.
As soon as I arrived home, I called my mechanic and he said that he would squeeze me in on Thursday since my car’s inspection was outdated. I am now legal and passed inspection. Several days ago I purchased new tires for my car and had the front end aligned. About a month ago, my mechanic replaced the rotors and pads for my brakes. I knew my car would pass inspection. The only thing it might have needed was if a light bulb had burned out. Thankfully all my lights and signals functioned properly. I fished out the proof of insurance and the registration for my car. I was ready and I got my new sticker. I’m legal again.
What now worries me more happened later in the day. I answered my home phone. It was my mechanic. He was missing the paperwork for another customer. He was inquiring whether he’d given the missing papers to me with my paperwork. I tossed the plastic sleeve with my papers into my console without checking them. I had a similar plastic pouch. When he asked, I checked and I had someone else’s papers tucked in the sleeve with mine. My mechanic was very much relieved when I found and returned the papers to him.
Now I am beginning to be worried that cog-slipping may be catching. I hope that it doesn’t turn into another pandemic. If it does start a pandemic, the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization will require people to don tinfoil caps to prevent the spread of the invasive slipped-cog disease. They may even try to force inoculations that cause sterilization of men, abortions in women, and other health problems without actually curing the “disease.”