Before the Cranky Girls reached the farm on this trip, they ate supper with US and AG at the Chinese buffet. Meta Cranky’s fortune cookie read: “You will visit exotic lands.” I can’t make this stuff up.

Re-entry at CG’s Farm always involves a shakedown, and this trip is no exception. The water system required tinkering, and happily the service person arrived this afternoon. Until then, the water pressure was iffy enough that Cranky #2 would make excited announcements when water was forthcoming: “The water’s coming out in the bathtub AND the sink!” In urban lands, people see faucets and make wild assumptions about the availability of water. CGs know better. Check your filters, your bladder pressures, your resin beds (Yay UM for putting those new points in the well house!), but the gods will laugh if you start assuming you can fill the bathtub while you run the washing machine.

The washer, aging but functional, is another sore point. Judging when to pull the plug on this washer is a bit like diagnosing when to move a beloved aging parent to an Alzheimer’s unit. Just when I’ve concluded that I’ll have to bail the water from the tub and drag my sodden laundry out to the clothesline in 39 degree weather, Washer With Dementia remembers how to spin dry. You can hear it mutter, “I don’t want to be a burden. I used to have a warranty from Sears.” Yes, sweetie, but we think you may be ready for specialized care.

MC’s full-blown visit to Appliance Hell was brought on by her misreading of the settings on her otherwise friendly refrigerator. The freezer settings read something like “Colder” and “Warmer.” For absolute truth and accuracy, however, the settings should be labeled “your ice cubes will clump together” and “your freezer items will be covered in black mold.” Upon arrival, MC discovered the latter. Luckily, she gave up being squeamish for Lent, so leaky chuck roast package affected her only slightly. She predicts that the coyotes will be waddling around holding their bellies after eating the repast of Freezer Thaw that she laid out for them by the creek.

Cranky #1 is the most ticklish part of the shakedown, since we can never predict when her allergies will kick in. The cool, damp weather means that farmers are beginning to burn off their dry winter grasses. Some smoke, somewhere, has Cranky #1’s number, and she’s been reaching for her inhaler. Not the terrific purple steroid inhaler she scored last spring break. Just the plain Jane inhaler that lets you breathe all you want if you don’t get too greedy. One of the wonders of farm life, however, is that resources rarely go to waste, and that includes expensive pharmacuticals. Meta Cranky once got a viewing of a closet holding the meds of a family friend who recently died of cancer. A veritable pharmacy of anti-nausea prescriptions, neatly stored away in case someone might need them. Cranky #1 will get her very own meds tomorrow, but a purple inhaler has been located whose previous owner has joined the Choir Invisible.

MC is confident that her oldest, smartest brother will tell her the whole story on this crumpled Dempster windmill, which she suspects he photographed while trolling for parts. Crumpled windmills may look like they’re begging to be be carted off and turned into a Chinese automobile, but do not be deceived. Collect enough rusty windmill parts and eventually you’ll have enough to put your windmill back together. MC feels a metaphor coming on, but she suspects that Clever Readers saw it already. Let’s just say that, appearances to the contrary, MC is getting in touch with her inner engineer. CG Farm only looks like mere anarchy. We’ve got it. Really.
–MCG

Tomorrow morning, the Cranky Girls will take off their city-girl hats and put on their farm-girl ones. Changing venues has a time-warp element at times, since the CGs stay in a house furnished by a person who graduated from high school in 1938. We have brought some modern touches, such as wiring without frayed insulation, but we’d like to think that these changes are in keeping with sensibility of Meta Cranky’s mother. Kap would have been pleased to serve Norm Abrams a piece of her pie, but, for reasons of economy and aesthetics, she wouldn’t have let the This Old House guy touch her knob-and-tube wiring or her ’70s Formica kitchen counter.

The Crankies’ home place is a venue where, as in Faulkner, the past is not only not dead, it’s not even past. In preparation for another exercise in time-travel, Meta Cranky would like to consider some vintage elements of style and engineering that perhaps work better–or at least look better–than their modern-day equivalents.

MC’s auntie’s piano teacher and her students are pictured above. MC has been to her share of piano recitals over the last few years, and children have become more casual and squirmy than the ones pictured here. Is it the ladies’ hats that give this group its air of confidence and savoir faire? The groovy bamboo frame around the picture certainly adds a jaunty touch. You might be able to take this picture with your iPhone and send it to a gazillion of your Facebook friends, but would it be as charming without the bamboo frame? MC thinks not.

Here’s another one that kills in the style department. The exposed stairs from the tarmac to the airplane. Would Dad’s Cousin Margaret have had a lovely honeymoon if she boarded her United flight on a Jetway? Undoubtedly. But would she have looked as good or made such a dramatic entrance? Not even close.

Extra points for the shawl collar, and for marrying Lan, who did very well for himself in the Southern California car-storage business.

Next: No thinking person would trade a keyboard for a fountain pen. MC has done a few transcriptions of 19th century documents, and the act made her want to impale herself on her British Museum library card. But think of how your handwriting looks on the average sticky note, then look at the back of this photograph:

Readers, are we weeping in shame over our undistinguished penmanship? Hazel had an 8th grade education (OK, there was that incomplete post-grad nurse’s training) but her handwriting kicks your doors in.

And finally. MC has always admired this picture of her granddad, which has many stylistic fillips to recommend it.
Students of vintage automobiles, like MC’s brothers, would provide the years and models of the vehicle with the googley headlights and the truck with the roundy window. For MC, however, the What-Have-They-Got-That-I-Ain’t-Got elements are fenders and running boards. Watch and learn: fenders and running boards turn your vehicle into a conversation pit. True, they don’t have cup holders, but could you look this good in a recliner or a lawn chair? Maybe, if you adjust your hat, tie, and cigar just so. On second thought, nah. Are you listening, GM? I’m giving you free advice here: the American public might buy more American cars if the product made drivers look like Grownups with Brains, not like teenagers with 12-packs in the trunk.

Excuse me while I go pack my spectator pumps.
–MC

Twenty-four hours after seeing these pictures, Meta Cranky thinks she can write about them in language fit for a family blog. The trees that the Crankies coaxed through a summer-long drought have been abused by Bambi and the rest of his sorry extended family. This one might be the Princeton Elm that Jamie got at the fancy native tree nursery in Clinton:

Uncle M sent more evidence, but I can’t post another one. They’re like tree snuff pictures.

We screwed up. We trusted them. They’re have those big eyes and tails that bounce on their asses when they jump. Their babies are all spotted and Disney-licious, and we really didn’t need all those peas they ate on the hill summer before last.

Those days are so over. The Crankies are unleashing Shiva, the God of Death. They will be asking Cousin Tom if he would like to come over to hunt. Here’s a tasty idea: Venison Chops with Blackberry Compote. Yum. Can’t wait.

When MC thinks about Cousin Tom’s love of hunting, she harkens back to Vera Carp, the gun-shop owner in the play Greater Tuna whose motto is, “If we can’t kill it, it’s immortal.” Tom’s welding shop serves as a deer check-in station and during hunting season, the place looks like a white-tailed apocalypse. That’s the feel MC would like to have at Cranky Girls’ Farm this fall: Apocalypse Now for Bambi.

Hmm. This one sounds hearty and satifying: Venison Chili with Snowcap Beans. Just what I’d like to tuck into after bringing down my 10-point buck and his extended family. Au revoir, les enfants! Looking toward the high holidays, would Medallions of Venison with Port and Cranberries be too fussy? We think not.

The deer are in league with another thuggy vandal species: their friends the armadillos. Here, they’ve comprehensively churned the area around the compost pile:

The phrase “fine armadillo dining” might seem like a contradiction in terms to some, but consider that Anthony Bourdain made a television career out of eating dishes like unwashed warthog rectum in Namibia and sheep testicles in Morocco. Anyone for Cajun Armadillo in Mustard Sauce?

It’s not as if the two-legged carnivores should have to be eating all this deer flesh. In the recent past, MC has seen a coyote and a bobcat within shouting distance of the front porch. And then last summer, a Yorkshire visitor sighted a cat-like animal with a very long tail by our bridge. We’re thinking mountain lion. These animals are predators, right? So WTF? I’m thinking that maybe, for Mrs. Bobcat, Cranky Girls’ Farm is like the buffet at Golden Corral, with its overwhelming display of questionable food choices. The coyotes are trying, but there’s only so much venison they can fit on their plates.

So where do I get my membership for the Powder and String Club?
–MCG

Writer Calvin Trillin describes raising his daughters in Greenwich Village according to his Midwest values and folkways. The family’s narrative, he said, was that “despite all evidence to the contrary, you’re being raised in Kansas City.” After Texas secedes from the Union under the encouragement of Gov. Perry, Crankies #1 and #2 can seek dual citizenship in the Republic of Texas and the remaining upper 49 since, despite all evidence, they’re really farm girls who just happen to be enrolled in the Austin Independent School District.

Cranky #2 has her bag packed for spring break and is counting on her fingers and toes the number of calves she will see at the farm. These Angus calves obligingly are born in January and February so they will reach peak cuteness just at spring break. Midwinter birthdays mean that some babies are born when the thermometer registers 9 degrees Fahrenheit. This lovely girl, nearly a year old now, was found on a hay pile doing quite nicely despite the arctic conditions. On that cold day, Uncle M didn’t have his breed registry book handy to record her official number, so her ear tag is more personal than most: Brr.

Smaller crankies will check on the girls they know: friendly Brr, zaftig Brutus, and alarmingly aggressive Pet, who behaves like a 1500-pound lap dog. The girls will meet the newest babies in the nursery, sit on laps to steer the pickups, and merrily offer alfalfa cubes to cows with slobbery black tongues.

Multicultural crankies #1 and #2 can operate comfortably in both the land of bale stabbers and the land where a choreographer stages a dance for trash trucks. In three more days, we’ll pick up our cultural exchange where we left off.
–MCG

The Times reports that baby-boomers are changing the complexion of health clubs. An aging demographic means that exercise facilities are now gearing their offerings toward people who don’t want to break hips when they step off the curb, rather than people who take steroids to get disturbingly plump pectorals. Meta Cranky went to the Y after reading this report and what she saw there was chilling. What she did not see in the mid-morning slot were the boring wage-earners who are dutifully socking away money for MC’s Social Security account. What she did see in the Y coffee room were geezers sitting beside their electric scooters, reading their Wall Street Journals, and picking out ear wax out with their pinkies, just as MC’s dad once did. These are now her people.

It wasn’t always so. When MC joined her first health club in Fort Worth, she danced rhythmically next to Miss Texas. She doesn’t remember Ms. T’s name because this particular beauty queen did not become the Phyllis George of the ’80s. Nevertheless, she wore spandex and leg warmers and was adorably anorexic.

While in New Jersey, MC and a pal she’ll call Drama Queen were regular customers at Jack LaLanne’s health club. The take-away from JL’s was that ’80s styling products allowed Jersey-girl big hair to defy withering humidity. At this co-ed facility, a dreamy aerobics instructor named Mel packed a studio full of writhing men and women and led them to perform acts that in MC’s home town were considered rather personal. After 90 minutes, the studio’s glass walls were streaming with condensation, but the hair? Still upright. Only later was Jack LaLanne’s revealed to be next to a Super-Fund site.

More recently, MC began to notice that time was taking its toll. A snappish Australian step aerobics instructor seemed to have settled into a mid-life metabolism that discouraged significant weight loss. When MC returned from maternity leave, anxious to step off a few chocolate milkshakes, she found the instructor had taken a short cut; liposuction was faster, certainly, than plodding up and down on a plastic Reebok step. After Cranky #2 was born, MC was happy enough to pedal a bicycle and lift weights at a club that offered children’s gymnastics and rehab for adults. Then she discovered that re-habbers require physical therapy accompanied by Fox News. In vain MC changed the channel to CNN, only to watch men wearing black socks and sneakers change it back.

MC swims laps in hopes of convincing her lumbar spine to stay in place for more than 36 hours. Meanwhile, her pal Renaissance Mom finds excitement and celebrity at her neighborhood pools. A Texas Monthly writer! A nationally noted political guru! The mother of an Olympic medalist! MC is so nearsighted that she wouldn’t notice Johnny Weismuller in the next lane. The thrill now is bringing organization to her L-5 vertebra.
–MCG

Because of the events of another tumultuous weekend, Meta Cranky’s clutter meter sounded this morning as clearly and insistently as the smoke alarm does when she attempts to fry fish. MC began the day with Cranky Family’s effluvia waving from every flat surface.

She made incremental progress until she was distracted by The Household Searchlight. This ancient cookbook originated with her maternal grandmother. Cranky’s own mother cooked from this book extensively, but because MC herself never developed a need to make Fanwood Chow-Chow or Oatmeal Gruel, this much-admired 1938 edition has served a reference function. What a revelation, then, to read the Foreword and discover the bohemian vibe of the Household Searchlight:

“The Household Searchlight is a service station conducted for the readers of The Household Magazine. In this seven-room house lives a family of specialists whose entire time is spent working out the problems of homemaking common to every woman who finds herself responsible for the management of a home and the care of children.”

MC considers this information to be rather a bombshell. The tasteful house featured on the cookbook’s cover was apparently the set for a Depression-Era reality show. Who knew that there was communal living going on in Topeka, Kansas? How are we defining “family of specialists” anyway: Was this Jersey Shore with bacon drippings and rendered lard? MC has a new-found respect for the the Kansas avant-garde.

A font of insight, the Household Searchlight (HS) also sheds light on MC’s clutter issue. Open up the cover and what do you see?

Stuff. Two 1978 receipts for replacing the brushes in a Sunbeam mixer. The operating instructions for the wall heater. An onion-skin-carbon copy of the recipe for Berta’s Fan Fan Rolls (hey, I’ve been looking for that one!). A cake recipe written on the back of a flier for the 1993 Azalea festival in Muskogee, complete with a tour of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum.

Meta-Cranky’s HS is the Grey Gardens of the cookbook world. Clearly, MC’s mother had a pressing need for all this data, and MC is grateful that her mother did not feed feral cats. But wait, there’s more. Only when the oddments are removed do you see how MC’s mother customized her personal copy of HS. Apparently, the Topeka family of specialists didn’t provide an acceptable recipe for fudge pie. What’s wrong with kids today is that they don’t ingest enough Milnot:
There’s also a pie crust recipe, because you can never have enough.

All this before you get to the title page. Each of the book’s 25 sections is larded with loose papers; endpapers and margins are comprehensively covered with recipes that begin “1 yellow cake mix.”

Today, MC’s house is The Household Searchlight writ large. Perhaps a scientific scan could identify the clutter gene on her DNA, but she needs look no further than HS to see that she is predisposed to hoard small pieces of paper. She senses a potential research topic for a family of specialists.
–MC

Full disclosure: Meta Cranky has taken an oath with a friend we’ll call Renaissance Mom to write something on a regular basis. This semi-solemn vow means that while the rest of the world is watching Christopher Waltz win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, MC is maintaining her credibility. Truth be told, MC is so far removed from popular culture that she wouldn’t recognize Christopher Waltz if he sacked her groceries at Wheatsville, and she wonders why Quentin Tarantino gets to misspell both Inglourious and Basterds and apparently be rewarded for it. Wait, she does know a smidge about popular culture: A mom friend who is a faithful Vulcan Video customer reports that Quentin Tarantino’s assistant tried to check out a DVD with the Famous Director’s card. The clerks at Vulcan, exponentially hipper than Tarantino’s assistant, were so unimpressed. Mom friend rented a DVD despite a contested fine; Inglourious Tarantino assistant did not.

MC recognizes that Oscar night is about rewarding cinematic excellence, but it’s also about the ritual, elements that have been in place since the time of the flood: red carpet, Harry Winston jewelry, Joan Rivers’ surgically enhanced face. She adores the morning-after fashionista comments and wishes she could authoritatively opine like Salon’s Cintra Wilson, that Devil Wears Prada-era Anne Hathaway wore “a Valentino gown made of unborn ballerina fur.” But when does a self-congratulatory film makers’ award program become a ritual that people schedule elective surgeries around? One minute you’re hoisting a sidecar with Bob Hope in the Roosevelt Hotel, and the next thing you know you’re participating in a full-blown pagan-fertility-Fisher-King-type cult with Meryl Streep.

Late-winter Cranky rituals are conducted without the bling of heavily insured jewelry. Cranky #1 will wince operatically when Cranky #2 does a top-of-the-lung “Jolene” cover. Oldest Cranky consistently will dress for weather 15 degrees warmer than the current temperature, then will scramble to adjust before the 7 a.m. carpool. Youngest Cranky habitually will exit the bath to converse starkers with guests. MC finds comfort and assurance in the regularity of such behaviors. Perhaps this comportment doesn’t yet approach the complexity of a pagan winter solstice, but like those other cold-weather observances, these ritual practices give hope that spring, or at least Spring Break, will arrive soon.
–MC

OK, so Lisa Kudrow apparently has this great new geneaology program on NBC called “Who Do You Think You Are?” I have never seen an episode of Friends, but I respect Lisa Kudrow’s integrity if only for this exchange from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion:

Michele: I’m the Mary, and you’re the Rhoda.
Romy: YOU’RE the Rhoda, you’re the Jewish one.

But I digress. If the people in my family were this program’s executive producers, this show would be titled “Who the Hell Are You?” The blessing or curse of growing up in my small town in the 1970s was that if you didn’t know who you were, someone would tell you in exquisite, tortured detail. Since the griots of my home town no longer stride the earth, Meta Cranky feels obliged to provide Crankies #1 and #2 with a genealogical primer. Let’s begin with granny ladies, shall we?
Hazel was always the Mary, never the Rhoda. Here, she’s standing in front of her cellar door in celebration of her flower garden, although b&w pics don’t do her zinnias justice. Here are some random factoids for Crankies 1 & 2 to know about their great-grandmother:

She had that braided hair thing going long before Yulia Tymoshenko wowed the Ukrainians with her traditional up-do. I don’t know how the prime minister keeps her hair in place, but my granny used armies of hair pins. Here’s a bit of Amusing Family Lore that requires you to know: 1) Granny had braids, she was short, and she could talk until the earth was flat and; 2) My cousin Tim was 6 feet tall and change. When my granny began a story that promised to be the length of Paradise Lost, Tim would look down on her braided crown and begin plucking out hairpins. Her fierce concentration allowed her to hold forth until all the pins were gone and the braids hung, unfettered, down her back.
Since her ears weren’t pierced, she wore devices she called “ear screws” that probably are banned in Scandinavian countries. She never left the house without them. She always looked really good, which was a testimony to genetic material that gave her The Good Hair and some serious bone structure. She also looked good, though, because she decided it was important, and she went to the trouble to apply lipstick and abuse her ears to make it happen. Not to bore small crankies with tales of economic hardship or anything, but let’s just say that Hazel didn’t always have a lot to work with.

The photo at the top of this entry was taken when Meta Cranky’s dad returned from the war in about 1944, and it’s always, for her, been a Dad picture. There’s a different story going on, though, when you look at the faces of his nuclear family.

OK, you’re loving it that Cranky Girl’s dad, granddad, and auntie all have identical dimples in their chins, right? Is that a great trick or what? But now look at Hazel. Her face says pretty much, “they haven’t licked us yet.”

By the time I knew her, Hazel had settled into a matronly comfort that allowed her to monopolize conversations and confidently tell people how to breathe in and out. She could effortlessly deflate egos with this killer phrase: “pretty is as pretty does.” Yet her face in this homecoming picture is all about adversity and endurance: there in those contracted eyebrows you can see her uncertain finances and the worry of a double blue star mother. She was opinionated and prejudiced, utterly competent, and tireless in accomplishing the hard physical labor that kept a poor family from being a trashy family. She cried only on Mondays, wash day, because she could weep while she wrung out laundry alone in a wash house.

She earned the right to be the Mary.
–MCG

Cranky #1’s latest English class assignment is to interview people involved in U.S. civil rights issues. So she’s reading about the Stonewall riots to prepare for interviews with gay rights activists.

Her choice of topics serves the dual purpose of 1)making me feel ancient and crone-like, and 2)allowing me to reflect on my red-state upbringing, with its wealth of homophobia and sheer ignorance about The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name.

I was over 30 before I connected the dots about Alex, the navigator on my dad’s B-24. Alex, a Republican bachelor, exchanged countless letters with my mother, faithfully sent my granny cards on Mother’s Day, and presented thoughtful graduation gifts to my brothers. The salient biographical details for me were that he bought me the most gorgeous Easter dress I will ever own (dropped waist, covered buttons down the front, crinkly skirt, be still my heart), and that my dad always disappeared when he came to visit. Alex and my mother would chatter for hours, Alex would rise to depart, and magically my father would reappear to say farewell. “Where did Charles go?” my mother would ask. Somewhere where his gaydar signal wasn’t picking up, I’m guessing.

My Greatest Generation dad had no useful models for how to behave around a person of a different sexual orientation. Alex’s presence signified Too Much Information, and in the face of this knotty social and sexual puzzlement, my dad headed for the certainty and security of his pickup.

Virginia Woolf claimed that human nature changed on or about December 10, 1910. I can’t put that fine a point on it, but blessedly, humanity found a few clues about gay civil rights somewhere between my Easter dress and Cranky #1’s research paper. Cranky #2 may very well fit into my frothy yellow confection this season, and I would be pleased to tell her about its provenance: It came from Alex, a dear family friend who had a queer eye for fashion.
–MCG

Since the Lyndon Johnson administration, Meta Cranky has had a torch burning for Shadow Castle, a 45-cent book that her youngest older brother (YOB) brought home from a Scholastic book fair. Look at the cover and you’re smitten: there’s princess Gloria’s flaxen hair flowing well past her ass, and a dreamy Disney-quality castle in the background. Prince Mika is practically drooling on himself, he’s so overcome by her fabulousness. Bluebell, the princess of the Blue Fairies, gets a similar over-the-top treatment inside the covers, except that she’s a brunette with a curly do. Elves, goblins, swamp fairies, a vegetarian dragon. It’s Middle Earth with better illustrations.

A cursory check at Amazon shows that Meta Cranky is among a legion of wing nuts who are unable to be ironic, or even objective, about Shadow Castle. Amazon reviewers confess to stealing these books from libraries and loathing former friends who borrowed, then lost, their personal copies. The book you discover when you’re 9 is apparently the book you carry with you, intact and beloved, into geezerhood. Those of us who drank the SC Kool Aid are not going to get all lit crit-y and describe the revealing contrast of fairy and mortal, or analyze the dangerous goblin/swamp fairy alliance. Instead, like YOB, we’ll tell you where we were when we first read it (top of a long-gone mimosa tree) and declare, with fervor and sincerity, “It’s just that good.”

Because of ridiculous sentimentalists like Meta Cranky and her YOB, used paperback copies of SC sell for $28. Someone who is not a liberal arts major, do the math and figure out where your portfolio would be now if you’d invested in 45-cent paperbacks instead of those lousy 401Ks. Even in these difficult economic times, however, Meta Cranky will tighten her belt to obtain the new EXPANDED edition of SC with previously unpublished material. More fairies! Creepier goblins! Those poor slobs reading the books on the Times best-seller list don’t know what they’re missing.
–MCG