Pepe’s Adoption Day Party

You all know about the famous Pepe Z.; right?  My gender-identify-confused, has-to-stay-on-Prozac pussycat?  Well, about a month ago, some of my friends and I had a little adoption day party for him.  Yep, the first anniversary of Pepe’s adoption and after a year of living together, both he and I are still alive.  What better reason for a party?

Oh, yeah, and to celebrate the fact that I wasn’t a goner by then.  Because who would want to adopt this cat were I to get planted?  He’s not that cute and he has to have Prozac every day.  But, hey, he’s my big, fat kitty and I kinda like him and wanted to celebrate.

So a party we had!  It was a pitch-in lunch with the only stipulation being that it had to be something related to Pepe the cat.  Oh, my friends, what creativity we had!  Kathi made tuna casserole and served it in cat food cans….thoroughly washed cat food cans, I can assure you.

Jonnie brought cat-shredded cat slaw.  Sherry had some salmon dip.  Sher did the shrimp cocktails.  I had made some banana nut bread (because Pepe is both bananas AND nuts), and also ordered in some “pepe”roni pizza.

My good friend Phyllis went all out and ordered a cake from one of our great local bakeries “Rochatas” in Joco.  Even Pepe was enamored of that!

And, yes, he IS licking the frosting.  And, yes, animal lovers, he is still alive to tell the tale.

That fabulous looking plate of deliciousness at the top?  That’s a 7-layer dip that my friend Nancy made in Pepe’s honor!!  (And she even brought a large one for the rest of us!)

Frankly, the one thing that I’m most interested in and to which I suspect I will never get an answer, is what the cake decorators at Rochatas thought of the request for a topping that looks like a cat/squirrel/skunk mixture!

Been Missing Me????

I am so sorry that I haven’t written previously.  I’m not dead!  And that’s the really good news; right?  (Although there’s nothing wrong with that….being dead, I mean!)

I just haven’t had much to say or report.  I finally got the pathology report back on my lymph nodes (well, I hope they are mine), and things are looking great!   I’m hoping to finally see the medical oncologist on 1 April to confirm what is going to happen next….that is, radiology, chemo, nothing, or both.  Me?  I’m hoping nothing, of course!

I’ve already seen a couple of doctors and they say that, based on the pathology reports, I can probably get away with nothing more for the time being.  (Once again, thank you, Virgin of Guadalupe!)

I’m really not a particularly vain person.  Lord knows, I don’t have much to be vain about.  But I’ve always been kind of proud of my boobs and my hair and suddenly they both got threatened.  Way to strike down my vanities, God!  But I may get to hang on to my hair, as I have to my boobs (so to speak….although for several weeks after the surgery, when travelling over our cobblestone streets, I literally had to hang onto my boobs, as well).  But things are looking up, folks!

Dealing with IMSS (the Mexican equivalent of Medicare) has been horrendous in some senses  and fabulous in some others.  My friend Phyllis, who has lived hereabouts for 40 years and who is absolutely fluent in Spanish, initially figured I was just not up to the task of dealing with them because of my lack of Spanish.   Ja ja ja!  I think she’s learned her lesson about that!  It’s not so much the lack of Spanish (although that’s a consideration), it’s dealing with the bureaucracy which is the same in ANY language.

She’s been with me numerous times, and it’s just as frustrating for her as it is for me.  The know-it-all clerks (who really don’t seem to know anything for the most part) don’t do anything to help us (and by us, I mean patients).  Once I finally get to a doctor, things are great.  They’re very caring and take all the time I need to explain what’s happening.  But, geez, those gatekeepers!

I’ve been a gatekeeper in my life.   I was a legal secretary for many years.  So I know that  you try to keep the “crazies” away from your boss at any cost.  But, damn, I was never like these gatekeepers are.  I tried to be empathetic and do what I could for them.  These people don’t even listen to what you are saying.

At one point, I went to pick up the results of a blood test I had had earlier in the day and without even listening to me, the clerk just looked at my blond hair and white skin and hollered out that I couldn’t speak Spanish and that we needed a translator.  Now, mind you, my Spanish is not good, but it was certainly up to saying “Necesito mi resultados de sangre de esta manana.”

Okay, okay, it’s not perfect, but a clerk who gives out results for blood tests should have understood that; right?  (And please feel free to correct me if I am wrong about that.)

When Phyllis showed up beside me, the clerk totally ignored what Phyllis was saying (in fluent Spanish) and was still hollering for a translator.  Finally, the doctor, whom I assume the clerk was yelling for, showed up and Phyllis started talking to him.  The doctor got this “WTF?” look on his face and told the clerk “You know, she speaks Spanish.”

And only then did the clerk turn around to actually look at us and listen to what we had to say.  And only then did I get the results of my blood test which were there all along.

So next time you have to deal with somebody who looks different than you, I wish you would actually listen to them and try to understand them before hollering, “We need a translator!”  Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t.

And if you’re thinking about moving to Mexico, do yourself and your neighbors a favor and learn to speak Spanish!  It will serve you well.  Thanks to all who have been on my side throughout this.

So how am I doing?

I got an email from a friend here in Jocotepec a few days ago saying that fascinating as the whole IMSS thing might be to him, he felt that I needed to write about what’s happened to me since the surgery on 29 January (which I obviously lived through).  So, Larry, this one is for you!

I wound up having a lumpectomy in both breasts.  In immediate tests (i.e. while I was still on the operating table, drugged out of my mind), the right breast came out clean, which we all kind of expected.  The left breast definitely had a cancerous tumor, which the surgeon removed, along with surrounding tissue and several lymph nodes under my left arm.  The pathology report on the lymph nodes was scheduled to be ready within a couple of weeks following surgery.

As far as the two breasts, much less dire than predicted by the radiologist and my private doctor!  I’m still not sure if it was good or bad that they opted to tell me the worst.  I was totally freaked out for the six weeks between diagnosis and surgery, which was bad.  But I was so relieved to find that I still had both breasts after surgery (albeit not looking the same as before).  And that was a good feeling (mentally….not physically).

But as of today, I still have a hole in my left breast about the diameter of a pencil.  So that’s a concern to me, although my surgeon and my ex-nurse friend Sher (having just seen it for the first time today) both tell me that it’s fairly common and that I’m just a slow healer.  (Can’t imagine why!  Although aside from being a delicate flower, I AM a bit older and…shock, horror….have not lived the most healthy lifestyle for, oh, EVER.)

Had to go back to the hospital in Tlajomulco last week and today to get the “hole” looked at and treated.  I was supposed to pick up the pathology reports on everything today, but the pathology doctors reported that they never received the lymph node samples….which is the one report that I really, really need so that the medical oncologist can decide what’s next.  (Sigh.)

I must admit that I had horrible visions of Dr. Berumen, my surgeon, having to cut MORE out of me for testing but somehow, miraculously (thank the Virgin of Guadalupe!), they found the missing bits and said that the report would be ready on Monday.  Yeah, okay.  I’m a bit suspicious of that time frame, but, what the heck, I’ll go back up on Monday and get copies of the report and schedule appointments with the medical oncologist and the oncology surgeon for, hopefully, next Wednesday.

Depending on what the pathology report on the lymph nodes say, the doctors will determine what’s next….radiation, chemo, both, or nothing.

In another good news report, my adopted cat, Pepe Zorillo, will be celebrating his one-year adoption this Sunday and seven of my friends are coming over to join in the festivities.  We’ll play some games for a couple of hours and then feast on cat-centric food dishes for lunch.  Personally, I’m very excited to see what kind of desserts and side dishes my friends can come up with that have to do with cats!!!

More later, my friends!

IMSS Hospital in Tlajomulco….It DOES Exist

In the last episode of “As the barb Turns,” we found ourselves with blood test results in hand and a wish in our hearts that I would finally get to the Emerald City….or, in this case, the fabled IMSS hospital in Tlajomulco, Jalisco, Mexico.  Oh, sure, lots of us had heard about it, but I only knew personally of one person who had actually visited the place.  This because the hospital is fairly new (having only opened in October of 2011) and also because you can see that getting a referral to the place is inordinately difficult.

But it is the hospital to which patients from Jocotepec are referred, so I hoped to see it myself within a very short period of time….ideally having traveled through some poppy fields to get there and getting loaded on the way.  All I needed were the ruby slippers!  So on the morning of Friday, 7 December 2012, I returned bright and early to the IMSS clinic in Joco with my paperwork to try to get this party started.

While I was not the first person to have arrived at the Joco clinic, I was the first person that Dr. Meanie waved into his office.  I’m sure I’ll never know why.  Perhaps just so he could take the tiniest edge off his basically nasty disposition by again snapping out questions and then sneering at my answers in Spanish.  (As an optimist, I need to believe that somewhere under that vile veneer was, at least once upon a time, the heart of a healer.)

Surely he remembered me from the day before.  I mean, there aren’t that many gringos in Jocotepec and there certainly aren’t that many that go to the IMSS clinic here.  At least not that many with long, blond hair and breast cancer.  But it was as if he had never seen me before.  The questions on Friday were exactly the same as they had been on Thursday.  How old are you?  How much do you weigh?  How tall are you?  Do you have high blood pressure?

And, you know what?  The answers were exactly the same as the day before.  It was, as Yogi Berra once said, deja vu all over again, except that Friday morning I was doling out not only my mammogram and ultrasound film and the radiologist’s report, but my blood work results as well.  But this day, miracle of miracles, he actually LOOKED at them.  Didn’t study them.  Didn’t spend much time with them at all, but he actually did type things into the computer with much under-his-breath muttering and then send me scurrying up to the front of the clinic where medicines are dispersed to pick up the printout of what he had typed in.

When I returned to his office with the paperwork, he scribbled his name on it, stamped it, and told me to go back up to the pharmacy window to get the referral to Tlajomulco set up.  OMG!  It was really happening!  I was finally going to get to see an oncologist at the hospital.  Surgery couldn’t be more than a few days away.  I didn’t even need to unpack my suitcase.  I was on my way to Oz.

Well, sort of.  When I got back up to the pharmacy window to talk to Jorge and have him set up the appointment with the oncologist, Jorge said it would take some time and that I should return about 1pm that afternoon to pick up my official referral paperwork.

Okay, fine.  That’s fine.  Just a few more hours.  Or not.

When I returned at 1pm, I had to wait for 30 minutes or so to pick up the paperwork.  I was told to report to the emergency room at the hospital in Tlajomulco on Monday, 10 December, at 8am.  Holy cow, that meant I had to leave Joco by 6:30am to get there in time.  My night vision, as far as driving goes, disappeared years ago, but it was just barely light at 6:30am and I know the first part of the road pretty well, so I figured it was okay.

Besides, like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” I had companions to accompany me.  In this case, it was Jonnie who yet again volunteered to go with me to the hospital.  Aside from being such a good friend, Jonnie was also a nurse in the U.S. and her Spanish is better than mine and she has the patience of a saint, so who better to accompany me?

At 6:30am on Monday, she turned up on my doorstep, bright and cheerful and ready to go.  A quick stop at our local equivalent of a 7-11 for a large coffee for her and off we went with the great instructions provided by my friend Mike, the only person that I knew who had ever been to the hospital in Tlajomulco.  Over the weekend, he had emailed me detailed directions and even included some photos.  Mike said that the hospital really was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but that his directions and mileages were spot-on so we should find it easily.  (And if you live in Mexico, you’ll appreciate this:  his directions were pretty much based on how many Pemex (gas) stations you passed.)

And we would have easily found it if I hadn’t been half out of my mind with fear and excitement.  That’s my only excuse for totally missing the turn into Tlajomulco centro that would put us on the road to the hospital.  Jonnie kept trying to tell me that I’d missed a turn somewhere, but I was deaf to her pleas to just turn around and go back and try to find it.  But, folks, I was in that poppy field on the way to Oz.  I’m still not sure what brought me to my senses and made me listen to her finally.  But thankfully, I did.

And shortly before 8am, we saw it in the distance.  There it was.  Perched on the top of a hill.  A very large building with the sun shining directly on it.  The home of the great and powerful wizard who would take this tumor out of me and send me home, healthy again.

So I parked the truck and off Jonnie and I went on the yellow brick road that would lead me to health.  It was 8am.  We were there on time, even with my insistence on going the wrong way, and within a couple of hours, I’d be hospitalized and be being taken care of!

Or so we thought at the time.  Many, many hours later, still in the hospital, waiting to see the oncology surgeon, neither of us was so sure.  But, like Dorothy and Toto, we met some great folks that day and I’ll tell you all about them in my next post.

She’s sucking out my blood!

Having been told by Dr. (Oh let’s call him) Meanie at the Jocotepec IMSS clinic that he would not/could not even refer me to the IMSS hospital where I could get my surgery done for breast cancer without a blood test, I felt that I needed to get one done right away.

Now this may not seem like a big deal to the rest of you so-called grownups, but I am absolutely terrified of needles and getting one shoved into a vein for an IV or a blood test has, in the past, scared me more than surgery.  Crazy, I know, but true.  So you can tell that I was desperate to get this tumor out of me by the fact that I agreed to go immediately to one of the many local little laboratories here and get the blood work done.

You might think that they could/would do that at the IMSS clinic here in Joco, but apparently not.  Clinics here in Mexico, at least around Jocotepec, are not the same as they are in the United States.  There are lots of things they just don’t do.  The IMSS clinic here in Joco seems primarily to exist to get you referred to the IMSS hospital in Tlajomulco, dispense medicine with a prescription, and maybe change dressings on wounds.

If you want laboratory work done in Joco, then you need to visit (and pay for) one of the many store-front labs that exist in town.  And that’s what I opted to do.  I figured that if I could get the blood work done and the results back by Friday (the day after I first visited Dr. Meanie), then I could get a referral to the hospital a lot faster.

So off Jonnie and I went to find a lab to do the CBC (the complete blood work up thing, you know).  And our criteria?  Well, okay, MY criteria?  A parking space near the lab and a tech who looked like she would be very, very gentle.  (I wanted a “she” because it has been my experience that women are much more understanding about the whole freaking out over needles things than guys, who have a tendency … albeit subtle … to imply that you just need to suck it up, baby….play through the pain.  Just my experience, you understand.  I cast no aspersions on any male blood-drawing lab techs.)

I’d never actually noticed how many of these little labs there are in Jocotepec!  It’s amazing how many more things you see when you’re actually looking for them, on purpose or unconsciously!  I know that seems obvious, but what I mean is that until I was pregnant, I never noticed pregnant women.  Or until I bought a white Nissan pickup, I never noticed how many of them there are on the road.  You know what I’m talking about….I know you do.

Because unfortunately I could not actually see into the labs to see if a woman was working there, I settled for reducing my choice of labs to “where can we park right in front?”.  Hey, it’s just as good a way as any to choose; right?  Oh, sure, maybe if I’d had a few days, I could have emailed some friends or posted the question on a local webboard, but I wanted this blood test done NOW.  So no time for that.

Jonnie drove a couple of blocks and I saw a lab sign with a parking place right across the street.  ”That’s it!,” I hollered.  ”That’s the one!”  And since no parallel parking was involved, Jonnie agreed.  (Neither Jonnie nor I are particular aficionados of parallel parking, so this was important.)  Jonnie got us parked and into the lab we went to find, lo and behold, a friendly, gentle-looking young woman who could suck out some of my blood.  Whoohoo!  Two for two!

In my Spanglish, I explained to her what I needed and that I needed the results back as soon as possible.  By this time, it was about 11am on Thursday and I really, really wanted the results back in time to see Dr. Meanie again on Friday morning.  ”Si, si,” she replied.  ”I can take the blood now and have the results back to you by 3:30 this afternoon.”  (Except, you know, she said all that in Spanish….which, because I was no longer totally freaked out, I understood.)

The cost (500 pesos, as I recall) was much more than I expected, but I was willing to pay it because it would save me having to drive up to the IMSS hospital in Tlajomulco (wherever the hell that was), wait forever (like I actually knew what that meant then!), and get the results back some day way in the future.  So, as tight-fisted as I am, I agreed.  (Now I don’t know what such tests cost in the U.S. or Canada, but looking back on it, I’m guessing that paying about $42US for a CBC with same day results report really isn’t that much.)

But you know the absolutely best thing of all?  Even better than getting it done so rapidly?  The lab tech didn’t even hurt me!!!  Of course, I never look when the needle is about to go in, but in this case, I didn’t even feel it when it did.  She took two or three vials of blood (however many they take) and I didn’t even know she had the needle in, much less that she was snapping on new tubes!  That in itself was worth the 42 bucks, my friends!!!  And my friend Jonnie will vouch for me….not a scream was heard from me, not even an “OMG!”, and Jonnie was sitting only five feet away!

So the blood was sucked out, the tests had begun, and I hadn’t even had to leave Joco yet.  But all that was soon to change.  However, on this Thursday, when I returned to the lab at 3pm, I only had to wait about 10 minutes and the clerk handed me my full report which showed that everything was pretty much normal.  (Semi-interesting aside, high LDL cholesterol levels here in Mexico are different than they are in the U.S.  Too high is anything over 240, not anything over 200 as I recall it being up there.)

So I had jumped my first hurdle and was, I figured, ready to be sent to the IMSS hospital for my surgery.  I was so naive that day in early December that I actually thought the doctor at the IMSS clinic in Joco would send me immediately to the IMSS hospital to have my operation once he had my blood work report in hand.  Heck, I thought that Thursday morning that he’d send me up THAT day and so I really hadn’t brought any money with me.

I had a packed suitcase in Jonnie’s trunk, but very little in the way of cash since I wouldn’t need it while in the hospital.  Jonnie actually had to pay for the blood test and I had to repay her when we got back to my house after the blood test.  At this point, I made Radar O’Reilly look like a total sophisticate with street cred as regards IMSS!

Next time on “As the barb Turns,” you’ll hear about my first visit to the IMSS hospital in Tlajomulco.  And, oh, what a day it was!!

The Battle with the Bureaucracy Begins

American economist Thomas Sowell once wrote “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”

Yeah, boy howdy, was he ever right!  You’ve dealt with them yourself and you know what he’s talking about.  Now imagine trying to deal with them in a language which you speak very poorly.

You’d think that after living in Mexico for five years, I’d have quite a few Spanish words in my vocabulary.  And really, I do.  Unfortunately almost all of them deal with food, directions, and hygiene issues.  In other words, I can ask about good places and things to eat, how to get there, and where to find the bathroom in any home or public facility.  Oh, and most of the time, I can figure out how much something costs.  But after that, it’s all pretty much downhill for me.

So you can imagine my horror at not only being told that I had a more than 95% chance of cancer in my left breast, but that I was going to have to deal with the huge bureaucracy that is IMSS (kind of the Mexican equivalent of Medicare).  Neither of the two private doctors I had seen, Dra. Claudia nor Dr. Banuelos, have any connection with IMSS, so I was on my own.

The only thing that Dra. Claudia could do was call a friend of hers who works in an administrative position at our local IMSS clinic and ask him to help me get in to see the doctor there as soon as possible.  And so he did.  I talked to Jorge on the afternoon of 5 December, immediately after leaving Dra. Claudia’s office and he told me to return a little before 8AM the next morning and he’d get me in to see the doctor, who, Jorge said, spoke “a little” English.

My friend Jonnie and I arrived bright and early at the clinic and got in to see the doctor (yes, “the” doctor….the only one there that we ever saw working there) after a wait of only an hour or so.  Not bad!  Maybe this is all gonna work out okay, I thought.

Well, not for the first time in my life, I thought wrong.  Totally ignoring the mammogram pictures, ultrasound film, and radiologist’s report that I was literally waving in his face, the doctor only wanted to know how old I am, how much I weigh, how tall I am, and whether I have high blood pressure.  I could answer the first question with authority, having had my 65th birthday just a few weeks before.  As to weight and height, I just had to guess because, of course, I needed to give the information in kilos and meters.  And although there was one of those doctors’ weighing and measuring scales right behind me, he never stirred from behind his desk.

So, as I say, I guessed.  I know that 100 kilos is 220 pounds and I figured I was in the 200 pound region (not having weighed myself since I moved here five years ago), so I just said “100 kilos.”  Seemed a little high, but I was too flustered to do even the very simple math in my head to figure out what 200 pounds would be.  As to height, I know I’m about 5’6″, and I know that two meters is about 6′, so I guessed again and said something like “1.7 meters.”  Close enough.  And, “si,” I responded, I had high blood pressure.

During all this, the doctor had pretty much refused to make eye contact with me or with the large, bright red and white envelope with all my information inside.  He just barked out questions and sighed heavily in disgust when I had to pause in order to think of the Spanish response.  But finally he asked me a REAL medical question….although not quite the one I was expecting; you know, something like “What’s your illness?” or “What can I do for you today?”.

No, folks, what he asked me was “So, you want medicine for your blood pressure?”.  WTF!  It was like asking a guy standing there with his bloody arm stump from an industrial accident if he wanted a bandage for the shaving cut on his chin!  The point, Doctor, you are missing it!!

No, Doctor, I responded, what I want is whatever I need from you to get up to the IMSS Hospital in Guadalajara to see an oncologist. “Well,” he said, “there’s not a point in the world of sending you up there without blood tests.  I’d be in all kinds of trouble if I did that!  That’s the procedure.  Blood tests and then maybe I give you a reference to a specialist up there at our new hospital in Tlajomulco.”

So there it was, folks, the first “that’s the procedure” message.  The first of many, many, many more to come.   And that’s how my battle with the bureaucrats began.  I was just too naive to pick up on it right then.  The opening shot had been fired and yet I thought it was just a pesky bee buzzing past my ear.  But, as I mentioned, I have thought wrongly before, and, yeah, boy howdy, I sure did it again!

What’s going to follow in the next few posts are the low- and highlights of my journey from the Jocotepec IMSS clinic through my surgery some seven-and-a-half weeks later.  It’s a story that I’m sure many of you can relate to personally, and a how-not-to guide for other gringos in Mexico who rely on IMSS for major medical issues.

There are some heroes and wonderful people involved….but this first doctor is not one of  them.

Stay tuned!

Where HAVE you been???

So, did you miss me?  I mean, like even realize that I have not posted anything for a long time?

My co-authors, Michael and Karen, have done a great job giving you some excellent things to read.  And, heck, they didn’t even know what was going on with me.  Thanks, guys!

Well, here’s the short of it.  You can bet that the long of it will be coming!

On 5 December 2012, I found out I very likely had cancer in my left breast.  On 30 November, I had had mammograms and an ultrasound, and my BIRAD score (probability of cancer) came back as a 5.  That means, in radiological terms, more than a 95% chance that the lesion/lump is malignant and that steps need to be taken with haste.  The ultrasound and films also showed something suspicious in my right breast (BIRAD score 4).

Now hastily is not the way things happen down here in Mexico a lot of times, particularly when your only insurance is IMSS (the Mexican-government subsidized insurance plan).  First of all, IMSS is a bureaucracy and we pretty much all know how speedily bureaucrats handle things.  And, second, IMSS is pretty much overwhelmed in terms of demand for services.

While my private doctor in Joco, Dra. Claudia, and the radiologist in Guadalajara, Dr. Banuelos, both said I needed the areas biopsied immediately, likely followed by a mastectomy of the left breast, their definition of immediately and that of IMSS varied considerably.   Dra. Claudia and Dr. Banuelos meant within a week.  IMSS apparently meant some time within the next year or so.

On 6 December 2012, I started my IMSS journey.  And after many, many, many visits to the IMSS hospital in Tlajomulco (about a 70-minute one-way drive from here) and tests done both here in Jocotepec and in Chapala, I had my biopsies and surgery done on 29 January 2013.  Seemed like forever to me, but others who have dealt with IMSS are pretty much in agreement that it was done with amazing rapidity.

I just did not feel like blogging about what was going on at the time and, in fact, I didn’t even tell most of my friends.  But now I’m ready to tell you some of my adventures along the way.

For the record, I DID have breast cancer, but I still have both boobs, although I’m short some lymph nodes on the left side.  And I’m waiting to hear what the next step is (i.e. radiation, chemo, both, or nothing).

So that’s where I’ve been!  Sure is nice to be back!

Neon, Nectar, and a Guitar-Pickin’ Knight

This past Friday night, at the invitation of our No-Blood-Kin Cuzzin Al Cooper, we headed south to Red Lodge, Mt to spend an evening listening to this guitar-pickin’ knight – the revered Reverend Al – perform at Snow Creek Saloon.

Now I’ve gotta admit that we’re not much for bar-hoppin’, but we love our Cuzzin Al (a Missippi boy who now calls Wyoming home), and love to listen to him sing and play.  We’ve been following his musical career since he had a band (Out of the Chute) in college.  Post-college, Al was accepted into the Montana State Highway Patrol program, and was the first – and only – patrolman to sing at the organization’s graduation.  He also sang one of his own songs at his wedding and spent some time singing and pitching his songs in Nashville.  He writes incredible songs, and is an outstanding singer and guitar player.   And an all-around nice and funny guy on top of all that.  So, of course, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to get to hear him play and sing (and btw, he just keeps getting better and  better).

The Snow Creek has lots of neon, which we admired:

And a lovely long bar, cozy tables, a wood stove, and a great tin ceiling:

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Before the music started, we ordered some of the local nectar – Bent Nail IPA -hand-crafted less than a mile away at Red Lodge Ales.

And then our good cuzzin started playing and singin’ and the whole atmosphere changed.   Dressed in faded jeans and a striped cotton shirt, a dimpled cowboy hat, and  a little beard stubble, Al ran the gamut of musical songs and styles –  from Loudon Waintwright III to James Earl Keene, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, Charlie Daniels, Meat Loaf, and Kenny Chesney.  He sang the classic “Up Against the Wall You Redneck Mother,”  the “Oreo Cookie Blues,” “I’d Lie to You for Your Love (and that’s the truth),”and introduced me to the politically incorrect (but very funny) song by Hayes Carll called “She Left Me for Jesus.”    And, of course, he sang the consummate country western song that included all of that genre’s icons:  Moms, trains, getting drunk, prison, and pick-up trucks.  It all put me in mind of Bob Dylan’s interview years ago where he said that “”anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It always amazes me that there’s not a culture in the world that doesn’t incorporate music into  its rituals, its celebration, and everyday life.  Our magnetism to music almost seems to be in our DNA – and acts, too, as a collective and communal force that binds us together.  This was true Friday night, as  - between lots of laughter and the clink of glasses and long-necks – we all found our smiling selves tappin’ our feet and dancin’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another thing that music does – which I noticed with Al while he was playing, myself, and everyone listening and dancing – is to cause a Zen-like focus, illuminating the shimmering present moment.

I’ve never asked him, but Cuzzin Al is so good at everything he does musically that he puts me in mind a little of what Ray Charles said:  ”I was born with music inside me.  Music was one of my parts.  Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart.  Like my blood.  It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene.  It was a necessity for me – like food or water.”   And, as mentioned above, music and other forms of art were also absolute necessities to all cultures.  It’s just that some of us play and sing and create it, and others of us get to enjoy all that creation.  We were honored to enjoy the evening and to be anointed in the present moments of Al’s talents and creations.

Check out some of Cuzzin Al’s original songs on his website.   (I’m pretty darn partial to “Playground,” so don’t miss listening to that one.)

 

On a Roll ……… or how Making Some Dough Can, Sometimes, Change A Life

I’ve always been intrigued by bread.  To me, it’s total alchemy – to take the simplest and plainest of ingredients (flour, water, salt, and yeast), mix ‘em all together, and come up with something that’s so totally morphed and changed from those original components as to make them unrecognizable.  It’s almost like  …. magic.  And, besides that magic and alchemy, there’s probably not a better smell in the world than fresh-from-the-oven bread.  On top of all that – it tastes good!  Not to mention that it’s often quite beautiful:

Bread also has a fine symbolic history.   We talk about our livelihood, sometimes, as our “bread and butter.”  We call it the “staff of life,” we “cast our bread upon the waters” in an effort to help someone else, and, the communal sharing of a meal with others is often referred to as “breaking bread.”   Our most famous prayer asks to “give us this day our daily bread.”

Here is J.H. Macadam, from A Collection of Proverbs on Bread and Baking (It’s a book written in 1924 and has 160 pages worth of worldwide sayings about bread.  You can find the whole book here), exalting about the substance:

“Bread is one of man‘s greatest discoveries. It is his basic food. But bread is not only food. It is one of the most omnipresent symbols in the ethnology, cultures, and religions of the world.  Bread is the symbol of hope, of honest toil, and of general wealth and well-being. Rituals involving bread follow man through life, from his birth to his death. It is mentioned not only in many toasts, sayings, games and oaths but also in curses and imprecations.”

But, in my awe, admiration, and love of bread, I’ve digressed.  I’m not here to tell you about bread, in general, but to tell you, specifically, about Ivy’s Butterhorn Rolls.

We found the recipe for Ivy’s Butterhorn Rolls in an issue of Gourmet many many years ago (mid-80′s maybe?  Neither of us can remember.)   The magazine published readers’ favorite recipes, and Ivy Slack, of Burlington, Vermont, had written in with hers:

I was intrigued by the fact that she’d made 90 dozen rolls!  Holy Moly – that’s over a thousand rolls!  So, of course, I was inspired to make them that Thanksgiving.  They were awesomely good (and pretty) and made great itty-bitty sandwiches with leftovers.

Ever since then, we’ve made Ivy’s Butterhorn rolls for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other special occasions (we did make 10 dozen once for a friend’s wedding, but couldn’t imagine making 90 dozen.  Kudos to Ms. Ivy!).

This past year, as I was making rolls for Thanksgiving and happily into kneading the dough (I do change her recipe a little in that I like the whole present-moment kneading process, so don’t use the mixer to work the dough), I had a thought – I should try to find Ivy Slack and thank her for her recipe and tell her how much it’s meant to us over the years.

So, I Googled “Ivy Slack” + “Burlington, VT” and, sadly, found her obituary.   Ivy had died last spring, at age 104.  But I was happy to discover that she was well-known in her community as the “roll lady” and had even made her famous butterhorn rolls for the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid.

But, I took one more step, and Googled her daughter, who was mentioned in the obituary.  I found an address, sent a letter explaining everything above, and my gratitude for her mother’s rolls.  A few days before Christmas I received a wonderful email from Ivy’s daughter, Caroline, who was just finishing her batch of 14 dozen rolls for the holiday, and who appreciated knowing that we, too, were enjoying Ivy’s rolls.

Ivy’s obituary also mentions that she was ”an inspiration to all who knew her.”  Certainly she’d inspired me with the gift of this recipe for many, many years, And I’d never even met her!  So that made me think that maybe the gift of just being – and sharing – our best selves ripples out into the world much further than any of us can imagine.   And what’s a better thing to share than “our daily bread!”  Thanks, Ivy!

I will end with sharing another use for large pieces of less-than-perfect fluffy white bread.  Have some fun by borrowing a cat (if you don’t have one handy) and creating your own In-Bread Cat:

Christmas Stroll

About 22 miles to the south of us, nestled up against the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains, is the town of Red Lodge, our county seat.  The town was established in 1884 and before that had a long history of serving as a meeting place for the Crow (Apsa’alooka) Nation.  In 1897 the Sundance Kid robbed the local bank and the real life character John “Liver Eating” Johnston  (renamed Jeremiah Johnson in the 1972 movie starring Robert Redford)  served as constable of the town. This post, though, is not about the history of the town.

Main street of town, looking south.

This is about the Christmas Stroll. Every year, during the first weekend of December, the town closes off the main street at night and it becomes a pedestrian mall, complete with fire pits for roasting marshmallows and s’mores.  All the stores are open and most provide snacks and drinks.

The Pollard Hotel

Lobby of Pollard Hotel

The Pollard Hotel was originally constructed in 1893 and restored in 1996.  When phone service came to the town, the original number assigned to the hotel was “1″ and today it is “0001″.  Buffalo Bill Cody was a frequent guest, as was Calamity Jane.

Bridge Creek restaurant and the Roman Theater.

The Roman Theater was constructed in 1917 as a cinema and has the distinct honor of being the longest continually operating cinema still being used in the entire state.

Warming up!

Egg nog, Shmegg nog, I need a beer. Great Place!

Sisters on the Fly

The above restored RV belongs to one of the members of “Sisters on the Fly“.  A group of women whose passions are fly fishing, restoring RVs, and getting together to have fun.

Outside dining at the Carbon County Steakhouse.

Street decoration.

Just having fun.

View of main street looking north.

This old Chevy gets hauled out every year.  Probably one of the most photographed things in town that weekend, except for.

Restored Yellowstone National Park tour bus.

These buses operated in the park from the mid 1930′s through the 1960′s.  They are being restored and at least 8 are no operating in Yellowstone.

Maybe next year, there will be snow, snow, snow, snow, snow!!!!!!  It’s always more fun in the snow.