The Possum Monument in Wausau, Florida, the Possum Capital of the world.
Quite Tasty
These days I often scratch the itch of my wanderlust soul from the comfort of my living room recliner, but it’s large enough so that my canine companion Scamp — who thinks 45 pounds is the perfect size to be a lap dog — can curl up with me.
From this seat, books and the internet take me all over the world. This morning it was to Wausau, Florida, a small town of only 400 where possums supposedly outnumber humans, and which is home to the Possum Monument.
Erected in 1982, the monument’s inscription reads: “…in grateful recognition of the role the North American possum — to be technical correct possums only live in Australia, America has the opossum — played in furnishing both food and fur for early settlers and their successors.
Possums were also a great source of protein for residents during the Great Depression, the article said.
On reading that, I remembered the time in the early 1940s when my dad went hunting and brought home a possum for dinner. My grandmother cooked it with sweet potatoes, and as I recall the meal was pretty tasty.
If you want to taste for yourself, you should visit Wausau on the first Saturday in August, which is the day the Florida Legislature designated as Florida Possum Day when possum and sweet potatoes will be on the menu.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
Sketching and watching birds, like this Gila Woodpecker, is one way I get my mind off the chaos of daily news headlines.
Agreement is Rare
Political speaking, when it comes to certain things, especially politics, my family pretty much has America covered – and for peace’s sake we usually keep our views to ourselves.
With a great margin for error, this is how I see things among my five children.
I have one child to the left of me, one child to the right of me, one child that knows without a doubt that their side, whatever it is, is always the right side, one child who gets quite passionate about their particular side, and one child who appears not to follow the political arena at all.
That last may be the lucky one. I tried not reading a newspaper for the first four months after I retired from being a newspaper journalist. It was a relaxing, but not a satisfying time, in my life. I came to the conclusion that sticking my head in the sand and ignoring what’s going on in the world is not for me.
These days, reading the NY Times, and then the varied and even conflicting news on my computer’s home page while I drink cream-laced coffee in the morning, gives me plenty to think about — and fume about — for the rest of the day.
My children grew up in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s’, and we often talked about world events. We seldom agreed back then on anything either.
I actually take pride in that. It means I raised independent children who mostly took an interest in the world they lived in and learned to think for themselves.
With my own family as a role model, I know it’s possible to get along without chaos, ugliness or war — even if there’s no way in hell, we’re ever likely to agree with one another.
I suspect it works because we all care about and love each other – and have the sense, at least most of the time, to keep our political opinions to ourselves.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited) and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
“Whatever you do today, do it with the confidence of a four-year-old wearing a Batman T-shirt.” I came across this quote while reading my email recently. I don’t know who said it, but the words say everything you need to know about having confidence.
It wasn’t a Batman T-shirt but a stick horse and a cowboy hat that gave me confidence when I was very young playing a battle game with the neighborhood gang. My weapons were the small pea-size green chinaberries from the tree in my grandmother’s backyard, and I remember flinging them with great energy as I raced back and forth into enemy territory, which was just the other side of a ditch. My comrade was the sister of the two brothers who were our enemies. We had all the confidence needed to rule the world.
This was a time when kids were sent out to play unsupervised with only the instructions to be inside the house before dark. I don’t think most kids today have this kind of freedom – and so must find other ways to shore up their own confidence.
But gaining confidence as a child doesn’t always mean one will take it with you into adulthood. I didn’t.
I made some bad choices, and then felt stuck with them. I let others take over my life. It wasn’t until the threshold of the 1980s that I started reclaiming that childhood confidence, I can’t help but think that, like it or not, I became a better role model for my children, especially my daughters, when I did.
I know, from many years of experience, that education and skills are important. But I also know that having the confidence that one can achieve a dream is the first step to making it come true. So, believe in yourself and begin your journey by perhaps wearing a Batman T-shirt – or even just a cowboy hat.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
In Left at Oz, a profusion of flowers at a farmhouse represents Dorothy’s Oz. — Photo by Pat Bean
It’s All About the Tiny Details
I just started reading Left at Oz, a Jennie Connors cozy mystery by Sandra Carey Cody. It was a free Kindle book, and since the title intrigued me, I downloaded it.
Occasionally I’ll read a book and never really understand what, if anything, the title has to do with the story. For some as yet unknown reason, this bothers me. But I knew before I had read half a dozen pages why this book had been named.
Jennie, the protagonist of the book, was following directions to find her lost car, and one of those directions, given to her in an anonymous phone call, was to turn left at Oz. As a fan of L. Frank Baum, she immediately recognized Oz when she came upon it after passing a gray and dusty landscape. Oz was represented by a white farmhouse surrounded by a profusion of brightly colored flowers.
Clever, I thought. And my writing brain wondered how Sandra had come up with such an idea, especially after finding her car with a dead body in it. Perhaps while taking a shower, or a walk, or as often happens to me simply through my fingers as I type on my keyboard. Such little details are what makes reading, or watching a movie, delightfully enjoyable for me.
My wandering-wondering brain than jumped to Death on the Nile, a movie featuring Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot that I recently watched, and which is based on Agatha Christie’s book of the same name.
Long an Agatha fan, I knew to watch for unexpected and trivial clues as a way to identify the killer. One of my goals in reading murder mysteries is to figure out who done it before the killer is revealed. In this case, one of the clues was simply a missing tube of red paint. I don’t think I’m giving much away as it happens early on, and it takes a lot of other details to make the connection to the killer.
The clue was something totally different in the 1978 movie version of Death on the Nile, in which Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot. That version also starred Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow and David Niven — of whom I’m sure many younger readers are asking: “Who were they?”
Other than the primary setting – a boat floating down the Nile River – the two movies are quite different. I enjoyed them both, but Ustinov was my favorite Poirot. And because I watched closely for insignificant details, I successfully figured out who the killer was before the end of both movies.
Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out who done it as I continue to read Left at Oz, which I think must be a clue in itself. Or perhaps it’s just a red herring. I’m not far enough along in the book to decide.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited) and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
The neatly wrapped packages of deep purple blackberries in my local grocery store tantalized my taste buds – and took me three-quarters of a century back in time to the 1940s and my grandmother’s home in the community of Fruitdale on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas
The home was a square, white frame two-bedroom dwelling with a large backyard, behind which was a fenced off area for the rabbits, pigs and chickens my grandmother raised for the dinner table. My parents and I moved in with my grandmother after her husband died when I was just three-years old. Two younger brothers soon were added to the household, but as I remember, the small house never felt crowded, even though I shared my grandmother’s bed or was put to sleep on the living room couch.
On one side of the house was a large garden, mostly tended by my mother, in which each year was grown potatoes, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, okra, onions, beets, green peppers, carrots and corn. My short. petite mother, whose weight never exceeded a hundred pounds, and my grandmother, a tall, plump woman, spent hours in the kitchen canning the garden’s bounty.
Images of these two women whose genes I inherited were suddenly as clear in my mind as the blackberries stacked in front of me. As was the dark dirt-floor cellar where the canned goods and things like potatoes and onions were stored. The cellar was assessed only by an outside entrance next to the steep cement steps leading from the kitchen down to the backyard. I hated being sent down there for something, but quickly learned it was useless to resist. I grew up when children did as they were told, and if they complained, they usually were given additional tasks.
When we first moved into my grandmother’s home, our ice box was just that. A man driving a horse cart came around twice a week with big blocks of ice for it. I was usually given slivers of the frozen water to suck on, a treat during Texas’ hot summers. The icebox, however, was soon replaced by an electric refrigerator. I missed the iceman, but enjoyed the frozen Cool Aid pops my grandmother made for me when she thought I had been good.
Good to her meant things like bringing home a bucket full of the blackberries she had sent me to gather. The huge wild patch lay behind my grandmother’s animal enclosure and the railroad tracks. Knowing what I know now about such places, I’m surprised I didn’t get bit by a rattlesnake hiding out in the thicket, especially since such snakes were occasionally found in our backyard. But that thought never entered my mind.
I knew that if I picked enough my grandmother would give me a bowl of blackberries sprinkled with sugar and milk before she made pies from the rest. The berries always turned the milk purple.
Another bonus of picking blackberries was that sometimes I used to get a good look at the Texas Zephyr, which roared just beyond the blackberry patch once a day. I always waved at the train, wishing I was on it going off on an adventure. I think that might have been the beginning of the wanderlust that has kept me on the move for much of my life.
All these memories flooded through my head in the few seconds I stared at that package of blackberries – before I added it to my grocery cart.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
As butterflies track flowers, so do sellers track me. Art by Pat Bean
One of the crazy myths going around about the Covid vaccine is that the shots contain a microchip that will let your movements be tracked by the government. Just the thought of this idea makes me laugh.
I recently ordered tuna fish from Walmart. The next time I went online, my home page featured three ads for tuna fish. When my car turned five years old, suddenly I was inundated with phones calls wanting to sell me an extended warranty.
By the way, if anyone has discovered a way to stop these particular calls, please let me in on the secret. I’ve now been getting them for several years. I scream take my name off your list and never call me again – and it hasn’t worked.
One of my friends engages the caller with time-wasting tall tales of her Porsche, her Lexus, her Jaguar, and her BMW. The caller finally catches on and hangs up. But I don’t have five minutes of that kind of patience.
When I was traveling around the country in an RV for nine years, I used one of my son’s homes as my permanent address. Soon he and his wife were getting phone calls asking for me even though I had never given out their phone number. It’s been eight years since I retired from the RV life and have my own permanent address, but they are still getting an occasional call.
Fortunately, there is usually a dead giveaway because the callers ask for Patricia – and I’ve never done business of any kind using that name.
I buy a pair of pajamas online, and I’m bombarded with pajama ads. I buy a book and suddenly ads for books in that genre pop up all over my computer.
People know I’m an old broad, and so I get all sorts of ads for weird medical miracles, not to mention hearing aids and funeral plans. I actually got an ad in the mail about cremation plans yesterday, which irritated me no end.
Perhaps you can now see why I laugh at someone wanting to implant a microchip in me. Not only is the cost of doing so unimaginable, it’s simply not needed. I’m already being tracked. And for those who want to know, I’m also vaxed and boosted.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
Blue-footed boobies like to show off their brightly colored feet. And they do so in a Hokey-Pokey kind of way. I got to dance with one. — Wikimedia photo
If I listed all the things I still want to do in life, I would have to reach the ripe old age of 699 – at least. Besides, I’m not sure I would want to do that. My wrinkles already have wrinkles, and knowing that I only have limited time left on this planet energizes me.
I’m thankful that I’ve crossed off quite a few priority items on my bucket list, like taking an African Safari, rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, sky diving, getting a tattoo, exploring this country in an RV with only a canine companion and meeting Maya Angelou.
Well, actually meeting Maya was never on my Bucket List. It just happened because I was at the right place at the right time – a reporter in a city Maya visited.
The truth is many of the best things in my life have not been on any bucket list. I treasure the time I danced with a blue-footed booby in the Galapagos. I was hiking with an Audubon group and was alone in the lead when I came across the dancing booby. I knew I was invited to join him by the look in his eyes.
Now how do you put something like that on a bucket list?
Realistically, I know I’m not going to see or do most of the remaining things on my bucket list – like revisiting the calm serenity of Lake Moraine in Canada.
Instead of whining about it, or perhaps after whining about it I should say, I’ve started a non-bucket list of simple joys, like sitting with a friend on my third-floor balcony and watching Tucson’s spectacular sunset.
If I look hard enough, I can find something that would never make a bucket list quite often.
I’ve always wanted a canine companion, but how could I know that I would get the one dog I needed to bring balance to my life.
The whimsies of nature are also surprising and delightful. One of my best moments was watching an osprey catch a fish only to have it snatched by a bald eagle. Now who would have thought to put that on a bucket list?
Yup. I think I’m retiring the bucket list for the non-bucket list, which is more doable for old broads like me.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
There’s a special, sometimes peculiar, name for birds when they flock together. For example, widgeons become a knot, pheasants a bouquet, raptors a cauldron, finches a charm, geese a gaggle and storks a mustering.
My favorite, for a personal reason, is murder of crows.
A half dozen women, some journalists and mothers like myself, and all of us not what you would call young chicks, became good friends shortly after I moved to Ogden in 1979. We started getting together once a week for lunch, where we were loud with our laughter and bountiful with our irreverence.
One of the women’s children, a 17-year-old boy, in jest, called us just a bunch of old crows. We liked it, and so named ourselves The Murder of Crows.
As an addendum to the story was that the boy’s mother and I were both tennis players, and probably stymied that we didn’t take offense at being called crows, the boy challenged his mother and me to a tennis game with him and one of his classmates.
We accepted – and Margaret and I beat the 17-year-old boys soundly. It wasn’t that we were that good, but that she and I had the benefit of wisdom that comes with age. We would dink the ball just over the net, a move the boys hadn’t expected and one they couldn’t seem to overcome. Also, the boys’ powerful serves often went out of bounds while our serves almost always were in bounds. All we had to do then was return the serve just barely over the net.
I still smile thinking about that game.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
Me in the Standard-Examiner newsroom in 1985. Note the size of the computer monitors. And for those who don’t know, that big book on my left is a telephone book listing almost everyone’s home and business phone number. — Photo by Charlie Trentelman.
“Knowledge is money,” said a recent headline in the New York Times. The story, in response to four million workers recently quitting their jobs, many for higher-paying position, went on to note that if more workers knew they could make more elsewhere, even more would quit.
The brought to mind, my own decisions, several times, not to quit my job in favor of higher paying job opportunities. I loved being a newspaper reporter, and that was very important to me. In fact, I once stepped down from a higher paying editor’s position to become an environmental reporter. It was my favorite beat, and one that earned me several writing awards.
I had decided being happy, and living on less, was more important than working a desk job. And I didn’t want to be one of those people I met as a reporter, those who thought a position and money made up for them going to work every day at a job they hated.
But then I then remembered, how sneaky I had been to gain knowledge of what the men at my work place were paid. I rifled through file cabinets when no one was around – and discovered that the men in the office were being paid over twice what I was making. This was back in the early 1970s.
I used that information in my fight for equal pay, especially after my boss, who joined the fight with me to upper management, had said I produced more work than any of his other employees.
I got my raise. As the NY Times article said, knowledge is money.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
A good friend of mine came across some old-fashioned valentine cards, the kind everyone in my elementary school classes used to get on February 14. Or at least everyone got one if parents had taught their children that it wasn’t nice to leave some kids off their list.
As I recall, I got fewer than the popular kids, which may be why Valentine’s Day has never particularly been a favorite of mine. There’s also the matter of my name being misspelled.
Back then my class name was the hated Patsy, because another Patricia was in the class and she got first dibs on the name Pat. Some of the valentines I received said To: Pasty instead of Patsy. Of course, some smart-alecky kid noticed, meaning that I got called the gluey name for the next week or so.
Anyway, my former colleague and pen-pal friend Charlie sent me one of the old valentine cards he had come across, asking if I remembered them. How could I ever forget?
There were cards featuring cute elephants saying, “I have a trunk full or love for you.” And ones with bowling balls and the sentiment “You bowl me over.” And my favorite, ones featuring a wall clock with a bird poking out and singing: “I’m cuckoo over you.”
Clearly, being clever with puns was a requirement for valentine creators. Maybe it still is. Do they still make valentines like that these days?
Happy Valentine’s Day All.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
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“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Pat Bean is a writer, avid birder, hiker and passionate nature observer with wanderlust in her soul. She spent nine years living and traveling in a small RV. She now lives in Tucson with Scamp, a rescue who was supposed to be a Schnauzer mix but turned out to be a Siberian Husky-Shih Tzu mix who is as stubborn as his owner, her granddaughter says. She was also a journalist for 37 years, and can be reached at patbean@msn.com
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