Like Jemdandy, I also grew up on a dairy farm, only at our farm we had a coal stove in the kitchen and we did not have running water. Our day started at 5am when we went to the barn to milk the cows and feed the stock and we finally went to the house for breakfast at 9am. After breakfast grandad would assign one of us boys to help grandma in the kitchen for the day. That meant we had to carry 10 or 15gal of water in from the spring then shake the grate and clean the ashes out of the cookstove, and carry the ashes outside, then we had to go out to the coal pile outside and fill the coal bucket. Grandma was cooking 3 meals a day for 15 farm hands plus she canned about 4,000 quarts of fruits, veggies, pickles and sausages to get us through the winter, and in her spare time she baked 20 loaves of bread, a couple dozen yiest rolls and two or three pies every Wednesday and did the laundry for everybody on Monday. When she was canning the fruits and veggies were brought to the house in bushel baskets and we had to continually tote the baskets in to grandma and take the 5gal bucket she used to catch the peelings and veggie trimmings and dump that in the hog lot. When it was time to start preparing lunch Grandma would hand us a basket and tell us to get potatoes, so we headed out the back door, grabbed a hoe and headed to the potato patch where we dug a basket of potatoes. When we got back to the kitchen she handed us a basket and a paring knife and told us to go out in the garden and get leaf lettuce, onions & veggies (whatever was in season at the time). When we got back to the kitchen we had to clean, peel and prep the veggies under her supervision, while she continued working on what she was canning. We had two huge chest type deep freezers and in the fall we would slaughter 2 or 3 huge 900lb hogs, (I bet you guys have never seen a 60lb ham), a couple sheep, and at least two yearling steers, which then had to be cut up and wrapped for the freezer or hung in the smokehouse. When grandma wanted to make chicken we had to go catch the chicken, kill it, then clean & dress it and for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas we had to catch and dress a couple geese or ducks. (The first time I ever tasted turkey was after I went in the Air Force). In the winter we hunted racoons for their hides, but more often than not, a racoon or two ended up in the stew pot..as well as rabbits and pheasants. (We didn't have any deer on our farm). In addition to her veggie garden, Grandma had a huge herb garden and she was an undisputed master with herbs and spices. In summer it was fresh herbs but by fall we had to cut them and air dry them for winter and in the evenings after all our chores in the barn were done we used to sit around the kitchen drinking hot chocolate and coring and slicing apples, which we threaded on a string and hung across the kitchen ceiling to dry for winter stores. To this day I can still remember my Grandmothers weekly shopping list for the grocery store. 50lbs of flour, 25lbs of sugar, 3lbs of brown sugar, two large canisters of Quaker rolled oats, 5lbs of raisins, a gallon bucket of peanut butter (peanut butter used to be packed in 1 gal pails and grandma kept the empty pails for berry picking buckets for the kids), 8 packs of chewing tobacco for Grandpa and two boxes of arm & hammer baking soda and once in a great while she would buy 5lbs of whitefish fillets. At the time I didn't really think about cooking much, but over the years I have known a lot of guys who didn't have a clue how to cook and when they ended up divorced it was pizza or hot dogs and porky beans ( I couldn't live like that). Ladies, if you accomplish nothing else in this life, teach your children & grandchildren how to cook. Sometimes Jan laughs at me, but she knows, I don't need a menu plan. I walk in the kitchen and look around at what ingredients we have to work with, and I can turn out a gourmet meal every time. I may not have much money, but you can bet I eat good.

Maybe it's the yob philistine in me or just plain literary indolence but the last thing I care about in novels is what label the critics (or readers for that matter) want to pin on a particular work. The only question I ask is does the tale hangs together well? I can accept fantasy,surrealism a little magic realism (whatever the hell that is), whatever - just so long as it feels right within the framework of the story. I guess this is purely an instinctual approach but my preferred one. I found Georgio's death one of the most affecting parts of BWW and it did not jar in the least. I do agree that Georgio's drowning diatribe against political,religious and military "F***heads" ruining a beautiful world represent pretty well a summary of deB's own views. I don't think in either novel he takes a particularly anti-Greek, anti- Italian or anti - Turk point of view or their converse. He does criticise unmercifully all their leaders however in all their incompetence, greed, sheer pig ignorance and self aggrandising madness. It is the ordinary people of all these nations that he admires and weeps at the travails visited upon them by their maniacal leaders. I read somewhere that deB said his preferred method of work was to show how the megalomaniacs chew up the societies the try to remake in their own twisted image. Above all this analysis and introspection both BWW and CCM are beautiful human works by a great writer. Larry

Carolyn, I have read a lot of Frank's work and I think she is slipping a bit. Somewhat reminiscent of A.R. Siddon's novels, which get quite repetitive in their vocabulary and plots. (e.g. I think she used "spavined" as an adjective in every book she ever wrote!). I have just finished Ian Caldwell's "The Fifth Gospel." The author claims it took him 10 years to write. In a sense, it is a "tour de force" in terms of scholarship re early Christian church history. The plot has many twists and turns. It is also a study of the separation of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchy from the Western Catholics and the papacy. The novel puts a very human face on the late Polish Pope as well as the Vatican as a small nation unto itself. (Caldwell's previous novel was "The Rule of Four.").

(Elmer and Raee, that's an area of interest for me too, and yay! my library has a copy of "Food of a Younger Land"! I look forward to reading it, thank you!) I like everyone's stories and I try to participate, but my parents were pretty ordinary. Born in late 1920s/early 1930s to families that had immigrated in the early 1900s. Raised in the Depression years, but with love and enough food so they were never in peril. Dad graduated high school and joined the Army in spring of 1945, so never saw combat. Mom graduated from college but in the early 50's, job opportunities for women were such that our family was better off with her staying home and keeping house. Tenuous claims to fame: Mom once met Trigger (Roy Roger's horse), and Dad was in the Army Air Corps as it stood up to become its own service, the Air Force.