Soup, Soup, Beautiful Soup!

Being on a liquid diet for six months has been a test of my patience, as has much of my life over the past three decades. I'm halfway through now and I cannot turn back so the only way out is to churn forward toward the distant shores of paradise, a plate of real food.

However, I can make and eat soup. Pureed soup only, which limits things rather sadly. Here is one that I really liked, though, and you could even do a cold version with mint like we had at the restaurant Fish in Paris at our home base in St. Germain.

Split Pea Soup

1 cup dried split peas

4 cups boiling water or broth

1 yellow onion, peeled and chopped

1 large garlic clove, minced

1 stalk celery

1 T. dried thyme leaf

1 bay leaf

1 handful fresh Italian parsley, chopped

1/2 lb cooked or dried ham, chopped

Freshly ground pepper, sea salt

Ground parsley for garnish, reserved

Heavy Cream, for garnish, reserved

Put the peas into boiling water or broth, turn the heat off, and let rest for one hour. Add the remaining ingredients and simmer until peas are soft, about two hours. At this point I pureed the soup and served it in bowls garnished with a sprinkling of parsley and a nice little ribbon of cream floating on top.

Random Thoughts about Health Care

We just played at the Edmonton Folk Festival up in Alberta, Canada. Great festival,smoothly run and one we wish we could play every week forever.

I made it a point to ask the Canadians how they felt about their health

photo Alan Budd

care and the answer was uniformly positive, even effusive, with tales about how people had been spared bankruptcy and death by it. Not one negative word. The Canadians thought we were rubes to be so afraid of what they have.

It has been the same experience as we have traveled and worked in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia. Not one horror story. Sure, you may have to wait six months for non-emergency surgery if it involves a very specialized type of care, but you can also get really good quick treatment in the most out-of-the-way locations as well.

This swill that the right wingers are peddling about this subject is irritating when it is merely ignorant and makes me mad as hell when it is cynical and calculated, as in the case of Ms. Palin, that most despicable of humans, or William Kristol, whose ego long ago eclipsed his sense of decency. Or in the case of John Mackey, whose wealth and power have turned him into a selfish, nasty little man. I won't go back to Whole Foods, John, and thanks so much for your sense of mercy and kindness to us little guys down here at your feet.

I am literally living proof of the necessity for humane, affordable health care. I have been dealing with cancer now for thirty years and I won't go into the financial details now, but let me be clear: if it were not for the fact that I have access to health care, I would be bankrupt (or rather, my family would) and dead. I am uninsurable; I have pre-existing conditions. Apparently the Republican Party is ready to cast me and all the others like me onto the ice of greed and let us float away into the darkness. If John Mackey thinks that be eating food from his grocery store would keep me from any of these problems, then he is a fool.

I am tired of shallow thinking, lack of understanding, and loud nonsense about Hitler and Socialism. Americans had better lift this country up out of this petty little mire we are in, and fast, or we won't have enough left to cry over one of these days.

Kimmie Rhodes and Joe at the Edmonton Folk Festival

photo Alan Budd

Eulogy for My Mother

My mother died yesterday. We all miss her terribly, but are glad that she is no longer suffering. I am putting down a few thoughts as they come to me:

Now, as Kimmie and I get to travel Europe in search of new venues for our music, and as we sample the foods and cultures of each place we are in, I think back to my mother’s insistent drumbeat- travel is good, food is worthwhile, new experiences will make you a better person. I would simply not be who I am had she not been there to weave that into the base fabric of my being.

I would not be writing now, for the same reasons. "English is a beautiful language and writing an art that is worthwhile. Reading is fun but it is also a learned skill and one that will repay you a thousand ways. Intelligent people read newspapers and books and learn from them, and never stop. A writer is as much an artist as a painter or a violinist or a dancer." I didn’t just make those things up; she taught me those things, over and over.

I like to tease her friends by saying my mother was a closet liberal, but there is a kernel of truth to this; we were raised to have respect for other cultures and races and languages. I learned from her to despise racial and cultural bigotry . I learned the story of the Jews and the terrible history of the African-Americans. I learned to respect and tolerate other opinions as long as they were morally acceptable. There were no closed minds in my home. Everything was open to discussion and debate and sometimes opinions were changed. We even managed to get through my Vietnam marching and long hair and dropping out of the fraternity, somehow. She hummed along to my Beatles records and drove me to Dallas to get my first bass guitar at the Sears there, and drove me to get my first radio job (but only because that’s how Tommy Vandergriff started). She cussed the liberal media but loved Walter Cronkite, and was proud of me when I started writing for the Austin Statesman, even if it was a column about rock & roll music, and thought it was funny when my father’s friend Walter Caven said “Joe, our kids would be fine if we could just knock some of these damned principles out of 'em”.

She guided us in ways overt and subvert. She offered good advice when my brother was casting about for a good career path. She kept her own counsel when we would make bad choices, most of the time. She tolerated my wild lifestyle, perhaps knowing that I might just grow out of it someday. She sat by my bed for months when I fought cancer at 27 at MD Anderson, and called her friend there to get me a good doctor when I needed it badly.

She took us to the library and the bookmobile religiously, long before there was anything called a Summer Reading Program. She bought us Glen Miller records and broadway musicals and took us to Casa Manana and the symphony and to the Louvre in Paris, and got us into chic restaurants in New York so we would know what really good food was and be citizens of the wider world. She set us up so that we could take off from where she had to stop, and wished us well. She gave us the tools to live these amazing lives we now have, and she did it on purpose, too. I can’t take a step now without thanking her for it. And now, in her passing, she is ours forever. She lives on, very alive in our hearts and minds and actions. God Bless Maryann.