Tinfoil + Raccoon

Gutting the Collection

Another 300-word commentary left untouched by National Public Radio: 

I'm a librarian, but not a book fetishist.  Two weeks ago, when my
husband was fixing a heavy oak door that was pulling away from the
frame, I grabbed the closest thick book, and shoved it between the
floor and the door as a prop.  He gave me a look of horror and
admiration that said, "Damn, woman! I can't believe you just did
that."   But, something has been happening at the library where I work
that has got me frothing mad:  Someone is chopping up our cookbook
collection.  Loss through theft and vandalism are facts of life for
any library.  Usually, libraries know what's going to disappear:
Cobain or Tupac titles, military entrance exam books, Zane's spicy
novels, and occult titles.  About four months ago, the librarian who
maintains the cookbook section started getting cookbooks with
ripped-out  pages returned to her from the check-out department.  It
became apparent that patrons checking them out were not the culprits,
as a few books turned into a cart-load, easily a $2000 loss.   Our
guess is that someone is gutting the books while in the library.  Even
though we all lose materials from our areas, we're all united in our
anger and disgust over this random butchering of titles, many
irreplaceable.   We're looking for patterns, trying to make sense of
it, but aside from the vandal's disdain for gourmet cooking (titles by
Julia and Pepin, or titles with "French" remain untouched), it doesn't
make sense.  It started out with desserts, but expanded to Elvis'
favorites, slow cookery, appetizers and volume cooking.   And not a
neatly razored recipe here and there, but entire clumsily filleted
sections.   We're steaming, stewing, and  boiling, prepared to stand
guard over the 641.5s, cleaver at the ready.  Luckily, we were still
able to find our favorite recipe: cooked goose.

NPR Rejects: Grey Hair and Iron Poor Blood

I came up with a writing goal this summer: to have a brief commentary accepted for National Public Radio's All Things Considered.  As these commentaries are rejected, I'll post  them here.  If  NPR doesn't snap anything up, I'll have lots of rough-drafty material and blog fodder.   I aim to become the Queen-of-the-Unaccepted-But-Still-Pretty-Darn-Good-300-Word-Essay.

The first grey hair that I found in my early thirties was a novelty.  "I earned this," I figured.  My grey hairs have since emerged at a steady rate, but with dishwater blonde hair, aren't so visible to the untrained eye. Once in awhile, under the right (or wrong) light, I get a better idea of the count and like to think that they shimmer like icicles on a Christmas tree.  My 13-year-old daughter, who often stands behind me while I work at the computer, finds greyspotting a great sport.  "You want me to pull this?" she asks.  "Leave 'em alone!" I tell her.   I truly celebrated my 40^th birthday with a “porch sit,” where friends and I sipped wine in the afternoon, laughed a lot, and watched it rain. I did not welcome black balloons or the ubiquitous over-the-hill offerings, and enjoyed this rite of passage far more than 16 or 21 or 30. The novelty officially wore off a couple weeks ago when I was rejected as a blood donor because I didn’t have enough blood to give. I thought I’d been so good to avoid piercings and tattoos, travel to certain foreign countries, and the exchange of sex for money so that I could occasionally fill a baggie for the public good. The Red Cross loved me. I had great veins, bled fast, and didn’t faint. But, the intake nurse told me kindly, women of a certain age sometimes reach a point where they can’t donate any more. She assured me that I shouldn’t be alarmed and suggested I eat lots of Cream of Wheat and try again. Next time I’m out shopping, I’ll throw a box of iron-fortified cereal into my cart, and maybe some Geritol. But you won’t see me in the hair color aisle.