Wild Rice Is Life

Nat Geo 3/35, Finlay Photograph by Clifton Adams

Four incredibly color-coordinated pale faces chat about patterns with Chippewa Chief Big Bear in Itasca Park, Minnesota back in 1935. His tribesman sold many items to visitors, including beaded bags, baskets, toy birch-bark canoes, and other handicrafts. They also held husking parties, such as these, with the intent to supply rice for sportsmen’s game banquets.

While other tribes chose corn as their main crop, the Chippewa lived in a “place where there is food upon the water” surrounding the Great Lakes region. Wild rice, or “manoomin” in the Ojibwe language, was integral to their diets as well as their entire way of life. Wisconsin Chippewans have harvested manoomin for centuries.

In 2018, Chippewa Indians from Turtle Lake, Wisconsin continued to gather in the name of rice, hosting their 45th annual Wild Rice Festival. The pow-wow was the showstopper.

While rice beds have been diminishing, threatened by climate issues, pipelines, and mines, Chippewans struggle to protect the crop by reseeding lakes and waterways, hoping to meet the needs of their communities as well as pass on the culture to younger generations.

Who knew wild rice was such a big deal? To most of us, it’s just a side option at restaurants.

Or a delectable holiday dish, such as this cranberry squash wild rice pilaf.

Seriously, I could eat that right now.

Check and see if your state celebrates wild rice as well. Why, we even have a Texas Wild Rice Festival in San Marcos! There’s the mayor floating the river in the middle of the festival.

thevoiceboxmedia.org

Texas.Wild_.Rice_.Festival.2015_save.the_.date_handbill

Prices seem fair in most places, even if you don’t get a pow-wow or float down a river.

And don’t forget to dress up!

Deer River Rice Festival, Grand Rapids Herald Review by Don Batista

When You Want The COVID Vaccine But You Hate Needles

Countdown To May Day

Perhaps your state will start re-opening as per its Phase I guidelines on May 1st. Perhaps it’s May 8th. All I know is it WILL be May, and folks will be getting prepped and ready to shine.

Betty can breathe on Martha, and Martha can cough on Mary.

Carl won’t have to wipe down that wooden chair seat after he gets up.

The line at Great Clips will stretch past the adjacent Subway and Pizza Hut in the strip malls.

The cleaners will be packed with piles of people’s threadbare sweats and yoga pants.

Cobblers will be cobbling.

Diners will be packed elbow-to-elbow.

People might even board public transportation.

Ew. Seriously gross. Kirk is even having second thoughts about cushions never cleaned.

Butchers will be butchering, fileting, de-boning, and slicing deli meats and cheeses.

Department store racks will be scoured for wider waistbands.

Bars and restaurants, clubs and dance halls will throw open their doors and welcome the traumatized masses, stumbling in to relearn dances, to rebuild their tolerance to cocktails, and use public restrooms.

The streets will sound with joyous rapture and merry harmony. “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye” to coronavirus.

At least…for now.

Boxes And Boxes Of Babies

Today we continue in our appreciation for the medical field, who has been streeeeetched to their limits during these past several weeks, and will probably all be suffering from PTSD for the rest of their lives. But back in July of 1970, high-haired Connie Wharton and Jean Davis were keeping it casual and lowkey while lifting newborns out of stork/kitten/kangaroo boxes at Jefferson Davis Hospital, the first publicly-owned Houston hospital to accept low-income patients.

Fun fact Friday: the hospital was largely abandoned in the 80s, thought to be full of ghosts, named a city landmark, and then ~~destroyed~~ renovated into artist lofts for the rich and crafty. Plus, everyone knows buildings cannot be named after a former president of the Confederate States; we’re too busy erasing history to make everything PC.

This next image shows nurses and patients at Houston’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the Fifth Ward in March of 1959. Nobody likes to be barefoot, donning a hospital gown, but some encouragement, attention, and a fire truck can go a long way toward healing.

Our final Houston-based medical subject is Dr. Katharine Hsu, a pediatric doctor who came to America from China in 1948. She served as Chief Resident Physician in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital in Shanghai, but when the Japanese invaded the city in l94l, she fled through enemy lines and joined her husband at Chung Cheng Medical College as Head of Pediatrics. Here she takes vitals of a shirtless youngster in July of 1953 at–you guessed it–Jefferson Davis Hospital.

Fun Fact Friday: After tuberculosis took the lives of her brother and sister, she made it her goal to stop the spread. She established a one-room, one-nurse pediatric TB facility which later expanded into the Children’s TB Clinic and Hospital, where she worked from 1953 to 1969.

Per her obituary in 2007, she died at the age of 93.

When the use of the drug Isoniazid proved beneficial in treating TB patients, Katharine envisioned using it as a preventive against the disease. Since her extensive testing and studies proved overwhelmingly successful, the preventive treatment was adopted worldwide…The International Biographical Center of Cambridge named her International Woman of the Year in l996-l997 for her contributions to medicine, research, and education.

Today we salute the men and women in past and present medical fields, doing their best to keep the rest of us alive, with all the skills to treat and diagnose when we are helpless and vulnerable.

Cremona, Italy ICU 3/13/20 by Paolo Miranda

Coffee & Conversation

One Month Down, One More To Go

Today makes a full four weeks of quarantine for us.

It’s the first Sunday in 13 years that I haven’t sung during the Easter service.

We miss going to the Strand and chatting up high-risk seniors on park benches.

I haven’t filled my gas tank since Friday the 13th of last month, the last day of school, and our last orthodontist visit for the foreseeable future.

No Ross, no Lowe’s, no Hobby Lobby. We can’t even drop off used items to Goodwill.

And how we miss our restaurants! Will our favorite server, Victor, still have a job?

Who will keep our iced tea full come summer?

Meanwhile, kids are hating self-quarantine and distance learning.

They’d rather be at school, texting friends and ignoring their teachers, eating lunch off poorly-cleaned cafeteria tables and discussing lucrative employment opportunities in the 2020’s. Add cyberhacker to that list, boys–and marginal girls!

We long for the days of popping into the grocery store quickly, without 20 minutes of pre-planning, gloves, masks, sanitizer pump, and a towel to protect our car seats from the questionably COVID-covered grocery bags.

Even a trip to the corner Walgreen’s requires the same preparation. Oh, for the days of running inside quickly for their 2 for $1 Arizona green tea specials!

I could be in and out in under 5 minutes!

No more sitting in goat-powered Radio Flyers, eating Drumsticks with chocolate nubs at the bottom of the cones, and spilling the neighborhood tea while the pharmacist informs Mom that the prescription for Vicodin is not legit because the doctor forgot to use the new watermarked paper for narcotics.

We’ve all been there, right? Those were the days.

Why, there probably won’t even be play dates until May at the earliest! No more construction paper tepees and happy little trees.

Yes, it’s certainly been challenging, all this self-isolation and quarantine.

But this shall yet pass, and soon we will gather on the plains for campfire grub again.

Life will begin to bear a semblance of normalcy, although never exactly the same.

Until then, don’t let it get your gander up! That is, your dander. Happy quarantining!

Five Minutes After Social Distancing Is Lifted

This image of busy cash registers at the Evanston, Illinois Conrad Hilton bar was taken nearly 63 years ago to the date: April 8, 1957.

April 8th was the kickoff dinner of the second annual Soph Week, with an evening of frolic and festivities for students attending the “Hi-Guy, Hello-Girl” dance, where Jimmy Palmer’s band played swinging tunes. Here’s hoping we’ll all be in good form at the end of this trial, ready to sip and socialize.

Sales Of Spirits Soar But My Soul Longs Only For Thee

As Newsweek reported when this month began:

U.S. ALCOHOL SALES INCREASE 55 PERCENT IN ONE WEEK AMID CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Yes. I get that. I’ve had a few pints. But it’s not the pints I’m jonesing for.

What I want is Coke. A frosty Coke and then a refill of frosty Coke immediately afterward.

Both of their bottles.

Don’t I deserve to be “really refreshed?”

Coke is everywhere. It taunts me in the pages of my magazines and from the walls of the antique stores. Is that Jane Wyman? I don’t know. All I want is her Coke.

I don’t need two liters of Coke. That’s too big, and it loses carbonation the second you open it up.

Then again, it can’t be too small.

Now this one is just right.

Bewitching Non-N95 Mask

He’ll Be In Mexico Before You Count Ten

Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin’ town, that toddlin’ town … ♪♫♪ No wonder they were toddling! Rolling on rubber was like skating on clouds with Chicago roller skates. This ad hails from my March 1926 issue of Child Life. You can bet they had a WAY better March than we just did. What do you make of this lantern-bearing imp?

The stock market was years away from crashing, so Easter was going to be LIT. Who wouldn’t want kraft toys of bunnies and ducks that ROLLED, just like those boss Chicago skates?