Monthly Archives: February 2011

Stewing Away on the Back Burner

Emotions, People, Rant, , , , ,

I know I should let it go. There’s nothing to be gained except a small satisfaction for me and perhaps my brother. My mom wants to just forget about it.

But I don’t want to let it go. I want an apology. A real apology, not an offhanded remark about “getting off on the wrong feet”.

And then there is the fact that perhaps there is nothing to apologize for. That we were hyper-sensitive and that any rational person would have let it slide. Perhaps we should have not gone to the funeral home the day Dad died, but waited until the next day. But we were ready for it to be over. We’d already spent 4 and a half days knowing that this was how it would probably turn out.

Here’s what happened. (I know I’ve mentioned this on Facebook and have told many friends about it — so feel free to ignore this post if you already are sick of hearing me talk about it).

In a nutshell, we believe that the young man who helped us plan my father’s funeral was rude to us in the initial moments of the planning process. I called him on it and he changed his attitude. Perhaps that is all that needed to be done. However this was not someone selling us a wrench at Ace Hardware. This was someone who was supposed to help us deal with the grief of losing a loved-one.

I stewed about this for about a month, then wrote a letter to the director (who was out of town when we used the services of his funeral home). I’ll post the letter (names removed) after the break.

When another month passed and I’d not heard back from the funeral home director, I sent him an email. I never got a response to the email.

I sort of figured that if he got the letter and the email and didn’t respond, it was not worth dealing with anymore. I’d gotten it off my chest and that is all that mattered. I nearly forgot about it until my mom callled me a few days ago and said that the funeral home director left a message on her answering machine. I asked her what he said and she said he wanted her to call him back but she was reluctant to do so. She thought she’d ramble on and make no sense. I said I’d send her a copy of the letter I’d sent him and then she’d know what was in it.

That evening I accessed Mom’s voice-mail account — we had it set up for that when she was here and I was curious to know what he said). Here is, verbatim, what the funeral director said:

Yes, [Mom’s Name],  this is [funeral home director’s name] of [name of funeral home]. I’ve been meaning to get ahold of you but I’ve…I’ve…it’s just been on my back burner and I really wanted to talk to you regarding a letter that Dona had sent me regarding the funeral services for your husband. I just wanted to kinda touch base with you and I had a couple of questions for you. So if you could, at your convenience, give me a call back [phone number] I’d appreciate it and I’d like to speak to you. Thank you.

The next evening I called my mom to see if she’d called the funeral home back. She hadn’t and pretty much said she didn’t want to and didn’t know what the big deal was. Maybe the person who helped us was young and inexperienced. She said it was part of the past and didn’t want to deal with it any more.

I can completely understand her point. After all, I was already done with it before she called to say they had called. But now I’m upset again. Upset that it took him 70 days to call. Just another, in my opinion, insult to us.

I may call him myself to tell him that Mom’s done with it and doesn’t want to reopen old wounds. I may tell him that I’m disappointed that it took so long for him to contact us. I may write a review on Yelp. Or I may just sweep it under the carpet and move on.

There are not too many other options for funeral homes in my home town. This family owns the two main ones and as Pastor Keith said on Facebook the other day, they’re the “biggest game in town”. I don’t know what we’ll do when we need funeral home services again — many many years from now of course.

Letter I wrote after the break.

Continue reading Stewing Away on the Back Burner →

Vegetarianism Ramblings

Food
I've Had Vegetarians in my Past
Stolen from Brian Andreas' StoryPeople site. I can post this since I was one of those vegetarians in my past. And because vegetarians are not in my past anyway and if they were I'd be very unhappy.

In or around 1976, I attended a family picnic in which a whole pig was roasted. I stopped eating meat that day and declared myself a vegetarian. When I told my mother she said she wasn’t going to cook any differently so I’d better learn to cook. I took that as a challenge, purchased two books about vegetarianism: Diet for a Small Planet and Recipes for a Small Planet. I read all about why vegetarianism was a better option for the Earth than diets that included meat. The book told me that it took much more land to grow food for someone who ate steaks than for those who ate vegetables. It also told me some things that later were proved incorrect, like having to eat complimentary proteins at one sitting. This was later changed to eating complimentary proteins over the course of one day.

I also learned that there were different types of vegetarianism. Since I chose to still eat dairy and eggs I was what was called an ovo-lacto vegetarian. I made sure to make that distinction when I spoke to others especially other vegetarians (although in the late 1970’s they were hard to find), not wanting to have people think I was being a hypocrite — that I knew my place.

I don’t think I was too obnoxious as a vegetarian that time, but I probably was to some people. I do remember a Thanksgiving where my Aunt Leila and I got into a shouting match in which she asked if I thought I was too good to eat the food on the table. We didn’t speak again until she was dying of lung cancer.

I began to eat meat again as a testament that I was a different person after a 3-month stay in England and after breaking up with my fiancé. It was on a British Airways flight from London. The meal was beef tips. It was probably awful (1979’s British airplane food) but I ate it and ate meat for the next few years afterwards.

The second time I quit eating meat was when my boyfriend (now husband) and I lived in Pittsburgh. I don’t recall the reason or length of time I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian this time, but it was a while. Now that I think about it, I think it was until our honeymoon in Europe. I figured it would be hard to be a vegetarian on a budget whirlwind tour of Europe.

The third, and final, time I quit eating meat was at an event on the National Mall in Washington DC. I came across a PETA tent and stopped to look at the displays. That night I announced to my husband I was done eating meat. By this time I’d acquired several books, in addition to the Diet for a Small Planet books. I had a copy of Lauren’s Kitchen and at least one of the Moosewood cookbooks, so I had a lot to choose from. This time I was a little more obnoxious about my diet. I remember telling a workmate that I was a vegetarian so many times that she finally told me to shut up about it.

At some point, however I decided to start eating fish again. Then I even added poultry to my diet (even though the PETA display involved chickens). At this point I knew I was not a vegetarian any longer, but a person who didn’t eat red meat. I’d gone from someone who altered my diet because of my concern for animals to one who was more concerned about my health and red meat was linked to colon cancer and possibly connective tissue disease. When I discovered I was pregnant with my first child I gave up the red meat restriction, claiming I was concerned that I wouldn’t get enough nutrition to the baby without meat.

These days it is so much easier to be a vegetarian or vegan or ovo-lacto vegetarian or even pescatarian. More people believe in it. More restaurants cater to it. More friends and family members are willing to alter menus for their vegetarian friends.

Except if you turn to the Internet, which I did the other day to get ready for a gathering for which I’d be serving appetizers, dinner and desert to a group of friends, three of which are some degree of vegetarian. I knew I’d make two cottage/shepherd’s pies: One was a lentil shepherd’s pie and one would contain beef.  I also knew I’d serve various cheeses from England for appetizers and  a trifle for dessert.

I always use Jello in my trifles butI didn’t want to serve it to vegetarians so looked for recipes for vegetarian trifles. I learned that unless one uses artificial sweeteners they cannot make even an ovo-lacto vegetarian trifle. It seems that most white sugar is filtered through bone charcoal. I didn’t tell my guests about the sugar thing — and served it without Jello.

So, what was the point of this post? Not much. Just some things I’ve been thinking about lately.

Tea for two. Or three. Or four.

Food,
tea for two

I’ve written before about my tea stash. I may have also mentioned my teapot collection. I like tea. I like tea but I rarely drink it. I was thinking about this fact the other day and wondered why that was and came to the conclusion that, to me, drinking tea is not a solitary undertaking. I like to drink tea with others.

See, I don’t necessarily use tea to wake up. I drink coffee in the morning — and often do it alone since I’m not all that social in the morning. When I drink tea it is usually in the afternoon or evening.

When I’d spend time in England we’d always have a cup of tea and cookies before bedtime. To this day, thinking about those moments in front of the gas stove, drinking PG Tips and eating digestive biscuits makes me feel all warm and cozy inside.

When Clare was in middle school and high school we’d often sit down to a cup of tea when she got home from school, before she began her homework. It was a great time for her to decompress from her day at school and for me to catch up on what was happening in her life. I looked forward to those few minutes we shared over a cup of tea.

Andrew didn’t join us in our tea drinking until after he’d been to Ireland twice in the same year. He went with his rugby team during spring break and then again that summer with us. We all got into the habit of having a cup of tea together in the evenings after dinner and carried it home for a few months. Even today, if I ask Andrew if he’d like a cup of tea he’ll often say yes.

So, I rarely drink tea anymore. Not because I don’t like it, but because I see no reason for it if I cannot make a social ritual out of it. Dean doesn’t like drinking caffeine after noon and doesn’t particularly like herb tea. He sometimes joins me in a cup of tea, but I suspect he only does it because he knows how much I like to drink tea with others.

Last night, as the Steelers lost the Superbowl, my friend Maria asked me if I’d like a cup of tea to warm me up. I did and together we drank cups of green tea and it was good.