Birthdays and Baby Books

Fifteen years ago, on a hot day that would end in storms, my first son was born. Just two days earlier, my husband and I had made the anxious drive to Welborn Baptist Hospital, sure I was ready to deliver. We were sent home after a few hours, without a baby. We watched movies; I remember watching “As Good as It Gets” — both of us love Jack Nicholson. Finally, late on June 11, we again made the trip to the hospital. At 6:25 a.m. on June 12, Maxwell William Tucker was born after a fairly difficult childbirth. Todd and I had lost patience in the childbirth class. We couldn’t keep our “hees” and our “hoos” straight, laughed, and were scolded by the nurse; we didn’t return for the second class. I don’t know if not having practiced Lamaze-style breathing made it harder for me or not.

As we welcomed friends and family to meet Max, I recorded these visits in my neatest handwriting in his baby book, a gift from my sister. Growing up, I loved looking at my baby book. My mother — a schoolteacher, readers may recall — chronicled my earliest days and milestones in a journal called “Here I Am.” On my 40th birthday, she gave me the book, with a note that it was mine to keep and that she hoped I cherished it as much as she did. I did. When my mother died, I found another baby book — a tiny photo album and journal made for my grandmother.

The pages of Max’s book now are completed with memories and milestones of his first five years, a diligence that continued with his brother’s baby book. Though there’s no page for a 15th birthday, I might make a notation: Maxwell enrolled in driver’s education today!

My husband is in a rock band. He’s the drummer. Every great rock band needs a drummer. What would the Beatles be without Ringo Starr? The E Street Band without Max Weinberg? Or the Rolling Stones without Charlie Watts?  Still — and if you know my husband, maybe you think this is appropriate — in the lexicon of a band, drummer jokes are rampant. Websites are devoted to drummer jokes: How can you tell when a drummer's at the door? He doesn't know when to come in.


Todd began taking drum lessons 8 years ago. As a kid, he quit piano, though there are plenty of musicians in his family (his cousins). He has two drum kits; one in our home and one in a warehouse on the East Side that the band, “Acquired Taste,” leases for practice and jam sessions with friends. 

The band began as an instructional band operating out of the Guitar Lab. Additional members were added and a few other band names inspired by random thoughts were considered. You know the drill: You’re having drinks with friends when someone remarks on a news item, like “Margaret Thatcher is dead,” and someone exclaims, “That’s a great name for a band.”

Acquired Taste stuck when a friend remarked that Todd, and his music, were just that. 

Some might say Motley Crew (I know how to spell the heavy metal band’s name) would be a more appropriate name. Members include an engineer who plays guitar and sings, an ophthalmologist guitar player, a therapist female singer, a marketer keyboard player, a corporate trainer who sings and plays guitar, a CPA guitar player, and a retired heart surgeon bassist. 

Acquired Taste brings its loud and fun brand of rock-and-roll to the Roca Bar North patio this Saturday night at 8 p.m. I’ll be there!

While I look forward to nearly every aspect of summer — sunny weather, sunnier attitudes, weekly swim meets, baseball, my birthday — summertime also means my Monday lunch schedule clears, and that has me already looking forward to fall. 

Since 2006, at least two Mondays a month from September to May (barring magazine deadline conflicts), I’ve attended lunch meetings of the Social Literary Circle. Founded on Nov. 4, 1901, Social Literary Circle now has 19 members on the roll. Our longest-term current member, Susan Enlow, who joined in 1963, practically grew up in the circle as her mother, too, was a member. Our hand-made annual directory, featuring the circle’s flower, the purple violet, lists 54 members in remembrance.

When I was invited to join the literary circle, by a lovely and gracious member, Virginia “Ginny” Schroeder, I eagerly accepted. Though I was the child who competed every summer for the reading award given by the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library — the Golden Apple — I had never before been a member of a book club.

With more than 100 years of tradition, the Social Literary Club keeps its rules simple. Unlike most book clubs, members do not read and  discuss the same book. Rather, each meeting is organized by a hostess and a program presenter. The hostess hosts the every-other-Monday meeting; the member with the program introduces and discusses the book she has read. Traditionally, members choose non-fiction books of significant historic, cultural, or biographic context.

Each member gives careful thought to the book she’ll present and the menu she’ll serve. The club’s requirements of hosting and presenting are not concurrent. While I sign up to host and present on the same meeting day, other members prefer to keep the duties apart — prepare a book report for one meeting and polish the silver for another.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat down at my MacBook to write this week’s “300 Words” entry about the beginning of summer vacation, which began Friday at noon for my oldest son, Maxwell, and will begin Wednesday at noon for my youngest, Jackson — after a field trip yesterday to Lincoln State Park and the school’s Field Day today. I planned to write how thrilled I was to shelve the school morning chaos of searching for clean uniforms and socks until fall. (Even so, it’s really not that different in the summer — we’re searching for goggles and swim jammers.)

I can’t write that story. My thoughts are consumed with the children and adults in Moore, Okla., who were killed in yesterday’s deadly tornado outbreak — children who won’t play in Field Day or look forward to the summer months. For the community of Moore, life this summer, and forever, will be very different. Like Evansville, Moore, Okla., has experienced the pain before.

We remember the unusually warm Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005. Around 1:50 a.m., a tornado touched down two miles north-northwest of Smith Mills in Henderson County, Ky., near the Indiana/Kentucky border, and then crossed the Ohio River into Vanderburgh County, Ind. Staying just south of I-164, the tornado traveled to the northeast causing extensive damage to parts of Evansville, Newburgh, and Boonville. The tornado lifted in Spencer County, 1.5 miles southwest of Gentryville. According to the National Weather Service based in Paducah, Ky., the damage path was at least 400 yards wide and 41 miles long. The tornado’s maximum wind speed was estimated to be 200 mph, making it a high-end F3 on the Fujita scale. It claimed the lives of 25 people; 21 in the Eastbrook Mobile Home Park on Evansville’s Southeast Side, and four in Warrick County.

We remember.

We sent the May/June 2013 issue of Evansville Living to print last week before I left on a press trip to Arkansas. This week, I returned to Evansville and was met by the new issue, hot off the press. It’s always exciting when the new issue arrives. Yours should be in your mailbox this week; it’s on newsstands now.

“Why are you going to Arkansas?” That’s what I was asked before I left on a five-day tour of Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas. (Our lack of information about Arkansas was met by their unfamiliarity with us. Even journalists on this trip had little knowledge of Evansville. Those who did know of our city were surprised to realize it was on the Ohio River.)

The State of Arkansas and the convention and visitor’s bureaus of Little Rock, North Little Rock, Bentonville, Fayetteville, and Fort Smith are working hard, together, to promote the assets of the capital city and Northwest Arkansas — which now include the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. The state promotes its many Clinton destinations as a “Billgrimage,” and certainly the privately-funded presidential library is the first stop.

Up the highway in Bentonville, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton bristles when asked the cost of her investment in Crystal Bridges. “You don’t ask what a gift costs,” is her stock reply, according to the guides we met. The museum, opened on Nov. 11, 2011, attracted 600,000 visitors its first year — more than doubling projections. What also is known is that in 2005 Walton purchased Kindred Spirits, by Asher B. Durand as the museum’s centerpiece for reportedly $36 million from the New York Public Library.

I’ll write more about Little Rock, Ark., and Bentonville, Ark., in our July/August issue.

Photo by Timothy Hursley, courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark.

I had returned from Europe just a few hours earlier. While driving, my husband inquired, “So how are you doing, honey?” “Good,” I replied. “I’m happy to be home to my family and my pretty city.” A look of mock horror crossed Todd’s face. Did he not believe he and our sons were missed? Then it was clear. “You’ve just been through Holland, Belgium, and France,” he said. “Yes, and I am happy to be home to you guys and our pretty city.”

During my 13-day adventure, when spring was just budding in Holland and Belgium and had advanced only a bit further in Paris, a verdant green landscape arose from the chill in Southwestern Indiana. I was greeted with a stunningly beautiful spring. “Pretty enough,” I thought, “to inspire Monet,” the French impressionist still on my mind from various Paris museum visits just a few days earlier.

Of course, the Ohio Valley landscape has long inspired great art. Just three weekends ago, 200 artists gathered in New Harmony for the First Brush of Spring Plein Air Paint Out.

Returning from the European landscape caused me to look at our city with fresh eyes. Our area largely was populated by Western European immigrants who settled here because the countryside was more similar than dissimilar to their homelands. Here, they established many of the European gardening traditions that we enjoy all seasons, and especially in spring. 

As I walked my dog Jed in the Evansville State Hospital park near my house, being happy to be home was still at the top of my mind. How fortunate am I to have a 65-acre park to enjoy across the street from my house? But … if only it were preserved, developed, and maintained to the European standards of parks I had just visited.

(The editor has broken the rule of her blog; please forgive this entry of slightly more than 300 Words.)

Paris in Three Days and a Few Hundred Words
I arrived at Paris Gare du Nord train station on a Sunday afternoon. I got on the right Metro line to the hotel, La Manufacture, I had secured in the 13th arrondissement.  By 5 p.m., Deanna (my husband’s cousin’s wife, an American Airlines international flight attendant) and I were ready to begin our tour of Paris. We left the hotel light on our feet; our pockets stuffed with Metro tickets. With a laminated map of Paris, we were ready to walk at least 15 miles each day and to keep straight which side of the River Seine we were on.

Sunday Afternoon
My first day in Paris was the prettiest day of the year, so we walked up to Montmartre, a hill on the north side of Paris and home of the Basilica of the Sacre Coeur and the famous art district, Place du Tertre. From this stunning view, all of Paris was laid out before us.

Next, we strolled the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to see the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Concorde. We walked through the gardens of the Tuileries to the Louvre, where I stood in awe of its scale and beauty.

We finished our evening tour at Notre Dame, the French Gothic cathedral celebrating 850 years! Across the street, we dined at Brasserie de L'Isle Saint-Louis on buttery omelettes, pommes frites, and French red wine.

Monday
Out the door by 9:30 a.m., our first tour was to see the Eiffel Tower from the vantage point of the Trocadero and the Palais de Chaillot, as well as to walk along the Champs de Mars.

In Les Invalides at the Musee de l’Armee (our Paris Museum Pass provided featured no-wait access), we saw Napoleon Bonaparte’s monumental tomb.

We approached the Louvre with ease — clearly we could not do it all.  Standouts for me were: Mona Lisa, Aphrodite (known as the “Venus de Milo,”) and the Napoleon III Apartments.

After lunch of sandwiches in the Tuileries, we visited the Musee de l’Orangerie, home to Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and works by many of my favorite artists: Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso.

Strolling Rue du Bac, we found Deyrolle, a most unusual shop. Dating to 131, the first floor of Deyrolle is a very nice garden shop. Upstairs patrons find an astonishing mélange of curiosities: preserved insects, fossils, science books and posters, and a vast assortment of taxidermy animals, both large and small.

We visited grocery stories – the destination La Grand Epicerie at Le Bon Marche and the more common, Moniprix, where just 89 euro cents bought my favorite mustard, Amora. Dinner was near our hotel in the popular Latin Quarter on Rue Mouffetard at a brasserie called Mouff’tot Mouff’tard.

Tuesday
We were out the door by 9:30 a.m. Our first stop was the Musee D’Orsay, designed in a historic train station and displaying art from 1848 to 1914, including Monet, Renoir, Manet, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Degas. 

We toured Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris (“Our Lady of Paris”), which today continues to serve as the cathedral for the Archdiocese of Paris. Under the flying buttresses of the ancient cathedral, we enjoyed sandwiches and free Wi-Fi in the adjacent park.

After lunch, we walked in Le Marais to Place des Vosges, the oldest planned square in Paris, where locals took their lunch breaks in the sun.

Realizing the day was waning (“We need just one more day!”), we took the Metro to Pere Lachaise Cemetery to see, specifically, where The Doors’ Jim Morrison was laid to rest.  Before we could make our way to plot No. 30, stern-faced attendants shooed us from the cemetery — it was 5:45 p.m. and closing time was 6 p.m.  We would not be allowed to pay our respects to James Douglas "Jim" Morrison (Dec. 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) — at least on this visit.  (“If we only had one more day!”)

Though the Centre Georges Pompidou, located near the Les Halles is closed on Tuesdays, still it must be viewed. With its infrastructure visible on the exterior of the building, the Pompidou houses a vast public library and a vast public library, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne.

Deanna recalled a nice dinner she had enjoyed several years ago at Camille and we easily located it in Le Marais. We dined on the crowded sidewalk; on my right, patrons sampled escargot. To my left, a French family, with its dog under the table, dined on white asparagus nearly as thick as my forearm.

The next morning we took a shuttle from our hotel to Charles de Gaulle airport. Though we had indulged the day before on Ladurre macaroons (we stopped at the store on Rue Bonaparte), I was delighted to find Ladurre in the airport — and that was my last stop.

I am on a high-speed train to Paris. Just a few hours ago, in Amsterdam, I disembarked Luftner Cruises’ Amadeus Elegant river cruiser, seeing off my shipmates who joined Lifestyle Tours’ “Tulip River Cruise.”

I'm excited about visiting Paris with my husband's cousin's wife, Deanna. What a surprise — the cousins used our Paris vacation as an opportunity to get together, as well. As the landscapes change from canals, polders, dykes, and windmills to gently rolling fields and forests, I will share a few of the highlights of my eight-day river cruise.

The group from Evansville included my stepparents and stepsister and her husband — very much a treat for me. For readers who did not know I had stepsisters, this is a benefit of my stepfather remarrying a wonderful woman (a widow) who, like my stepfather, had three daughters.

The Dutch have a saying: God created the earth, but the Dutch created Holland. This refers to the Dutch’s eight-century history of harnessing the water and taming their below sea-level land. Viewed from the water, I was fascinated by these efforts.

At Kinderdijk, Netherlands, a UNESCO World Heritage site, 19 working windmills dating to the mid 18th century can be toured. They are occupied by individuals or families who apply to live in the windmills and care for them. Applicants must be certified millers. There is a 19-year wait.

Each city and town in Holland and Belgium was as pretty as the last. Bruges, Belgium, certainly must be considered among the world's most beautiful cities, largely untouched by the bombs of war.

On April 30, crown prince Willem-Alexander will be installed during an investiture. His mother, Queen Beatrix, will abdicate the throne. The entire country will take the day off to celebrate.

Next week, “300 Words” will return stateside.

If there’s a cure for jet lag, it is strolling the grounds of the world’s largest flower garden. Keukenhof, or “Kitchen Garden,” also is known as the Garden of Europe. I spent the first morning of my “Tulip River Cruise” walking about the impeccable Keukenhof, located about 45 minutes from Amsterdam, Netherlands, in Lisse. More than seven million bulbs are planted annually in the park, which also features the most current and creative garden and landscape designs.

Acres upon acres (the property is 32 hectares in size) are planted with spring bulbs, and the astonishing beauty extends to Keukenhof's four pavilions, where more than 30 flower shows are produced annually. More than 600 growers present their most prized flowers, and leading floral designers create shows of stunning beauty and size.

In the Oranje Nassau Pavilion, the show changes weekly; I saw roses. In the Willem Alexander Pavilion, more than 100,000 tulips in the most exotic varieties were displayed. The Beatrix Pavilion presented an astonishing orchid show.

The Amadeus Elegant now is docked in Arnhem, Netherlands, a city just a bit larger than Evansville largely destroyed in World War II that is now nicely rebuilt. The cruise will continue through the Netherlands and into Belgium later this week, before returning to Amsterdam, at which point I will travel to Paris by train. I'll post “300 Words” next week from the City of Lights.

I'll owe you a few words - my word count this week is slightly light.

Tulips are finally blooming. I won’t complain about their late show. Saturday I will fly to Amsterdam, where I’ll board the MS Amadeus Elegant for a “Tulip River Cruise” through the Netherlands and Belgium.  After eight days cruising the Rhine and Danube rivers, I’ll take a train from Amsterdam to Paris, where I’ll spend three days.

Todd and I traveled to Amsterdam six years ago. We fell in love with the city of canals. Since I was a child, I have loved tulips and Dutch culture. At age 6, I sang and danced “I Am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl” on the televised Bill Riley Talent Show in Des Moines, Iowa. Please don’t gag or judge – I was only 6 and had a mother interested in performance. (I left the studio with Archway cookies as a prize.)

On the tulip river cruise, I am traveling with a group from Evansville’s Lifestyle Tours, including my stepparents. When I depart the river cruise for Paris, I’ll meet my husband’s cousin’s wife, Deanna, an American Airlines international flight attendant, an excellent guide for my first trip to Paris.

Learning of this trip, people naturally ask, “Are Todd and your boys going?” – after all, we do travel together as a family and for business. But tulips bloom in April, the same time Bronco League baseball begins; and it’s not recommended to take a high school freshman out of school. 

While I enjoy traveling with my family, I hope my trip encourages their spirit to embrace opportunities. I plan to post a “300 Words” entry shipboard next week, and, of course, you’ll read more about it later in Evansville Living. And while I’m gone, I know my family will make it just fine. But feel free to check in on them for me.

On April 1, I celebrated 24 years of marriage to my husband. Married on April Fool’s Day, I’ve been married half my life. How fast the years fly was on my mind when we spent spring break in Seaside, Fla.

Todd and I first visited Seaside soon after we married while vacationing with friends nearby in Panama City. Other than for a triathlon Todd competed in, we’ve never again returned to Panama City, choosing instead Seaside.

Seaside is the 80-acre vision of Robert Davis, who laid down the plat for the town in 1981. Davis, his wife, and architectural partners traveled the south studying small towns to create an old-fashioned beach town with a social and cultural atmosphere. Every house in Seaside is colorful and different, ranging in style from Victorian, Neoclassical, Modern, Postmodern, and Deconstructivism.

While we have stayed in many types of homes in Seaside, this year we returned to a special place with our sons that we first stayed in 20 years ago, The Mathematician, a residence in the earliest community building there. Designed by architect Steven Holl, The Mathematician features a tower and rooftop terrace overlooking a green that collects vacationing kids’ beach bikes (kids really can roam free in Seaside, like we did when we were kids), the famed 30A beach highway, and the emerald Gulf linked to the foliage-lined streets by nine beach pavilions. 

Folks who don’t “get” Seaside, thinking perhaps it is a resort, not a town, might not understand how cottages like The Truman House (featured with the town in the 1998 movie, “The Truman Show”), modern buildings like The Mathematician, and retro Airstream food trucks  work together. They do. 

Last year, Seaside was named Travel & Leisure’s Best Beach for the Family in its first Best Beaches on Earth poll.

I know Southwestern Indiana pretty well. There aren’t too many parts I have not explored, growing up here, and now publishing city magazines about all corners of the Tri-State.

Last weekend, friends invited us to their rural Spencer County home (near Newtonville, between Santa Claus and Grandview). Because the kids didn’t go, my husband’s drums could come along — but that’s a different blog entry. The occasion of the invite — besides good company, making music, and Sunday morning breakfast — was to see Daniel “Boscoe” France play in Ferdinand. Evansville Living featured France in the November/December 2012 issue, and I’d not yet seen the blues guitarist from Madisonville, Ky., play.

But before Boscoe, we made a stop in New Boston for dinner. I’d never heard of New Boston or the New Boston Tavern. Right after we walked into the crowded, worn roadhouse, I heard a pleasant, “Kristen, Kristen” — Evansville friends with a home in Christmas Lake Village had come for mass at St. John Chrysostom Catholic Church and for dinner at the New Boston Tavern. Our table enjoyed prime rib, steak, salmon, German fries, and green beans. Year-round, it’s all grilled outside behind the tavern.

Then it was on to Ferdinand American Legion Post No. 124 for the Boscoe France Band. Next to a large American flag hung by the stage, France, drummer Jimmy Cummings, and bass guitarist John Gillespie quickly warmed up the house — patrons who were there for the band, and the kick-off and lineup announcement for this summer’s Ferdinand Folk Festival.

France was better than billed. He played his Gibson guitar to the enthusiastic crowd with his incredible and unconventional slide skills, behind his back, over his head, with bare feet, head thrown back and eyes rolled – and then with his teeth.

The fourth annual Ferdinand Folk Festival will be held on Saturday, Sept. 21, 2013, in Ferdinand’s 18th Street Park. The event is family-friendly, will feature activities for all ages, and is free to attend. For additional information on the Ferdinand Folk Festival, visit www.ferdinandfolkfestival.com.

Over the weekend, my husband was away on a press trip to Rosemary Beach, Fla. I’ve taken plenty of these nice trips; this time, it was Todd’s turn to join journalists in the Florida Panhandle.

Organizing the schedules of our two boys, 14 ½ and 11 ½, is hard enough for two; take one parent of out of the mix, and we get barely ordered chaos. The boys are in different schools, so that means two trips in the morning (picking up neighbor kids, too, on the second school run). If neither son forgot anything (gym clothes, swim bag), that might be it for the morning. After-school coordination requires texts be sent to parents of swimmers to inquire who can take and pick up; it would be impossible to have a set weekly carpool schedule.

Raising an 11-month old puppy, Jed, adds to the coordination. If he doesn’t go to Doggie Day Care (I state that without the least bit of embarrassment — it’s such a great idea), he needs to be let out and checked on during the day. He saves his best behavior for when one of us is gone. This time, Jed chewed up a prescription medicine bottle that we did not know he could get to. I learned that to make a dog throw up you pour hydrogen peroxide in his mouth — a foamy mess. (He is fine, and we think his teeth are whiter.)

When the traveling parent returns, the family always is happy to share a collective “Whew.” It really does take a village it seems to run a household. Small presents and mementos come home with the returning parent: t-shirts, shells — or a wall plaque with a special message that reminds us just how hard and rewarding the parenting job is.

“I was so close to Cody I could smell his sweat.”

That’s what my son Jackson said after watching sophomore Cody Zeller and the No.1 Indiana University men’s basketball team warm up on the hardwood Saturday night before they won against Iowa, 73-60.

Thoughtful friends with tickets sent us driving up Interstate 69 to Bloomington, Ind. Neither of our children had been to Assembly Hall. After eating at the Scholar’s Inn Bakehouse, we arrived early at the hallowed home of the Hoosiers.

My boys were beside themselves with excitement. 

The IU floor was covered in cream, crimson, and candy stripes. A great many fans in the sold-out crowd of 17,474 were wearing candy stripes, too.

I was thrilled to see Calbert Cheaney, IU basketball’s director of operations and a former Harrison High School player, who was featured along with Harrison teammate Walter McCarty on our second magazine cover in May/June 2002. (Both played for the Boston Celtics.) Cheaney was honored Saturday for breaking the Big 10 scoring record playing at IU 20 years ago, a record he holds still today.

We saw Christian Watford, the senior from Birmingham, Ala. (whose buzzer-beating three-pointer felled then-No.1 University of Kentucky in December 2011) on his knees praying with his father Ernest before tipoff.  Watford’s epic shot was played on the scoreboard during the pre-tip festivities.

As I write, IU still is No.1 and the memories of Saturday’s game will be long in our minds. Zeller, whom we featured in March/April 2012 along with his ball-playing brothers, scored 22 points and had 10 rebounds in the win. Sunday morning, eager to catch SportsCenter’s report, we spotted ourselves in their game coverage. Our kids are absent from the shot. They had run to the restroom to change into their new IU apparel.

Last Friday morning, I sat in Mass with Jackson, my youngest, a fifth grader. This Mass was not the normal weekday school Mass. The church was filled with uniformed students with their parents or their classes who were there for the funeral Mass of beloved third grade teacher, Katie (Catherine Marie) Schwenk.

Miss Schwenk taught both my children at Holy Rosary Catholic School. A former sister of St. Benedict, she was a loving and attentive teacher in the Evansville Diocese for more than 40 years. At her funeral, Fr. Bernie Etienne said, “I really did think I was special around her — until this week, when I’ve had so many conversations with you all, and I look around here and realize Katie Schwenk made you all feel special.”

As I have been thinking about Katie, I’ve thought about the qualities teachers – especially teachers of young children – possess. My husband and I both are kids of school teachers. Through the years, we’ve discussed our own experiences with teacher traits when talking about our mothers. Usually, it’s with warm humor.

I grew up thinking most households required popsicles be “checked out” from the freezer – not that they would be returned, but so they could be accounted for.

And don’t all school teachers make buttons? Where else can a son-in-law get a #1 Syracuse Fan button made (for the Kentucky vs. Syracuse, April 1, 1996, NCAA Championship)?

My husband’s family lived in a holiday world, but not the theme park: Their home was decked floor to ceiling in seasonal holiday décor, strengthening our observations about teachers and holidays.

Though I offer humor relating to growing up in teachers’ households (teachers do live in houses, not schools) perhaps it is appropriate to think about and thank, if possible, your teachers today.

Photo courtesy of Holy Rosary. Katie Schwenk celebrates Field Day with Claire Talbert and Allison Compton.

This was to be a two-pool weekend. Our youngest son Jackson was entered with his team, the Newburgh Sea Creatures, in a meet in Louisville. Maxwell planned to stay home with his Reitz Memorial High School swim teammates in the SIAC boys sectional meet, held Saturday at the beautiful Castle High School Natatorium.

A short-lived illness kept Jackson home from Louisville, enabling the family to attend the high school boys swim sectional at CHS. It was incredibly exciting; Memorial narrowly edged out Castle with a win in the final event, the 400 Freestyle Relay – a dogfight between the teams’ anchors.

While I was glad to have seen the sectional meet, I had been looking forward to the competition in Louisville. I knew the Mary T. Meagher Aquatic Center was located in the Crescent Hill Reservoir Park and was the winter home to the Louisville Seahawks Swim Team.  In July, our boys swim in the team’s summer invitational held at the Lakeside Swim Club, a private – but more like community – swim and recreation club built into a quarry in a Louisville’s charming, historic Belknap neighborhood.

It’s interesting to me that the Mary T. Meagher (now 48, she was an Olympic gold medalist and world record-holder from Louisville) Aquatic Center was built in a park with a historic reservoir.

With our plans to attend the Louisville meet altered, I turned to the web to learn more about the aquatic center, where I found this comment, among others expressing pride:

“As a lifelong swimmer, this place just makes my chest swell with pride. Louisville is a very good swimming town with more than one option for first-rate facilities. This is merely the best public swimming facility in this part of America (for) 50-meter pool, swim lessons, masters.”

I believe Louisville prizes its pools.

I stole away to the tropics of the West Side for lunch today. Orchid Escape opened this weekend and runs through March 16 at Mesker Park Zoo & Botanic Garden’s Amazonia: Forest of Riches.

The foliage of Amazonia is impressive any time of year; it’s a lovely place to spend your lunch hour in the dead of winter. Now, with the hundreds of orchids artfully mounted amid the staghorn ferns and other tropical plants, the effect is intoxicating.

I have an orchid – a white phalaenopsis on my desk – given to me by Michael Simon, executive vice president of his family’s business, Publisher’s Press, which has long printed our magazines, to mark our company’s 10th anniversary. Orchid lore suggests my type of plant thrives by adding to its pot just three ice cubes a week. That’s what I do, and it is nearly in continuous bloom.

The availability of orchids has changed dramatically in the past few decades, and today they are broadly available as houseplants. My mother carried orchids in her wedding – an exotic gift from her college friend whose family raised tropical flowers in Hawaii.

My intrigue with orchids grew with Susan Orlean’s, “The Orchid Thief” (which I listened to on audio book), based on her 1995 story in The New Yorker about the investigation of the 1994 arrest of John Laroche and a group of Seminoles in South Florida for poaching rare Ghost Orchids in the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. The 2002 movie Adaptation was based on Orlean’s book. Though the film is billed as an “adaptation” of The Orchid Thief, its narrative focuses on the screenwriter’s difficulty in adapting the book to film. Most folks I know who saw it were confused.

Take a break from winter and enjoy a tropical respite at Orchid Escape.

Five years ago, on Jan. 31, we buried my mother, Mary Gladys Midgorden Reeder Carter. She was 74. My mother’s death made me, and my two younger sisters, “adult orphans” – a term used today to describe adult children whose parents are dead. My father died when I was 14, at the age of 44.

My mom taught in the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. for 30 years – first at Wheeler Elementary School, now closed and demolished, and then at Caze Elementary, which I attended through sixth grade. When friends and relatives speak of my mother, it is almost always about her easy laugh and good sense of humor.

My family moved to Evansville, my dad’s hometown, in 1970, to settle down from the nomadic life of his career as a high school girls basketball coach. My parents had met in 1951 at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa. (My dad followed his best friend and W. Florida Street neighbor to college in Lamoni.) My mother worked in a travel agency, department stores, and taught school as they embarked on marriage chasing coaching jobs in small communities across the state. The Iowa communities – mostly small towns not unlike we have in Indiana – where I recall they lived are Osceola, Lamoni, Des Moines, Patricia Park, Winterset, Indianola, Pleasantville, Emmetsburg, New Virginia, Baxter, and Melcher.

Somewhere in the mix, they worked in more than a year in Independence, Mo., and also moved to Montana. Under the big sky, my parents lived near Flathead Lake, and my mother taught school on the Flathead Indian Reservation. They returned to Iowa after learning I would soon be born.

It can be sad to be an adult orphan, yet I’m thankful for healthy stepparents and in-laws – and the opportunity to share a bit of history.

Moving toward spring is central in my thoughts, just as it is this time every year. Once the holidays are behind us and we have celebrated the New Year, I count the days till spring. Thank heavens February is short (it won’t have 29 days again until 2015), because a consistent thought this time of year is:  “If we can just make it through February, we’ll have more and more nice days.”

Of course I realize our climate here in Southern Indiana is actually quite temperate compared to most of our state and the greater Midwest. Still, I’m not a fan of cold weather, snow, or ice.

As January comes to a close this week, I’m reminded of this photo, a clipping from the Evansville Press. It sits framed on a library shelf in our family. Evansville Press photographer Don Goodaker (who also was a longtime friend of my husband’s family) took the picture of me walking our dog, Pearl Bodine, along the levee (now part of the Pigeon Creek Greenway), in Downtown Evansville on a nice day in February. Though I didn’t mark the clipping, I believe the year was 1991.  Evansville still had an afternoon newspaper and we lived in the Riverside Historic District with the dog and two cats.

We still have two cats and a dog and I still walk the dog. Like the golden retriever mix Pearl in clipping, Jed, our 10-month old puppy, pretty much walks me, tugging me and lunging at squirrels and birds. (Pearl failed obedience training for posterior sniffing her classmates; I have yet to enroll Jed.)

I’m eager for a few warm dog-walking February days.  It looks like the forecast for this week and early February is in my favor.  And Groundhog Day is predicted to be partly cloudy.

I arrived late to the conversation about “Downton Abbey,” the British series on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater.” I missed the first two seasons. However, I’ve seen all three episodes this season and read about the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, most recently in the December 2012 issue of “Vanity Fair.”

Settling in to watch this season’s first episode, I was struck by the views of “Downton Abbey.” It recalled Harlaxton Manor, the University of Evansville’s British campus, located near Grantham, England. Then, I heard the show’s patriarch character addressed as “Lord Grantham.” As viewers know, the story is about the family of Robert Crawley, Seventh Earl of Grantham. Though I’ve never heard of any connection between Harlaxton Manor and Downton Abbey, I was curious to explore, especially as I visited Harlaxton Manor with my husband in 2005 to write a story for Evansville Living, “College in a Castle.”

The exterior views of Downton Abbey are of Highclere Castle in the county of Hampshire. Highclere was designed in the 1830s by Sir Charles Barry, who also designed the Palace of Westminster. Both have a sand-colored stone exterior and Gothic Revival turrets.

Harlaxton Manor is in Lincolnshire and was built by Gregory Gregory from 1837 to 1845 in Jacobean, Elizabethan, and Baroque styles. The University of Evansville began using the property in 1971 as its British campus, though it was owned by William Ridgway, a trustee of the university, until 1986. Since then, the University of Evansville has actively renovated and restored the manor.

Earl of Grantham was a title created in 1698 in the Peerage of England. (Fellowes uses the title fictitiously.) The title is now extinct. Though there are no direct connections, I enjoyed this bit of research and recalling the vision of the only manor house I’ve visited, Harlaxton Manor.

Over the weekend, I traveled to the City & Regional Magazine Association Publisher’s Roundtable in Cancun, Mexico. Evansville Living has been a member of CRMA since our inception, and publisher’s roundtable meetings have taken me or my husband Todd to many destinations, most often held in the city of a member magazine: Miami, Chicago, White Plains, N.Y., Palm Springs, Calif., Palm Beach, Fla., and Nashville, Tenn., are a few of the nice locales we’ve visited for the meeting. Though there was no host magazine in Cancun, the 25 publishers who attended made the most a sliver of time between deadlines at a location that proved to be extremely accommodating and even economical.

Todd is on the board of directors for CRMA. At the roundtable, limited to publishers (unlike the conference where employees of member magazines are encouraged to attend), Todd typically attends the meetings and I join in for the group social and networking opportunities. (I more fully participate in the conferences, where editorial and art tracks are held.) Through the years, we’ve made great friendships with these resilient publishers. We share information liberally (we generally don’t compete with one another), discussing best practices, printing contracts, circulation fulfillment, and revenue streams.

We have a lot of fun. Paul Byrne, publisher of Okanagan Life, based in Kelowna, British Columbia, never shows up without his guitar. At our farewell party, a wonderful Mexican buffet with a mariachi band, Paul played and sang songs he composed for his play, “Ink! The Musical,” which debuted in his market in 2006 and tells Byrne’s not-too-far-from-true accounts of Memphis and other CRMA magazines. Plans, I’m told, are forming for a CRMA band at the conference in Atlanta this spring. My husband’s drums fit in our car top carrier. Music and magazines unite publishers across North America.

I met Sam Featherstone a few days before Christmas. For more than a year, I carried in my briefcase a small book of my family history written by my great-grandmother. My intentions were to drop it by a printer, a friend, to be reprinted for gifts for my sisters and stepfather.  Finally, just a few days before Christmas, I ran into his shop without an appointment with my late request. I was met by the printer, Bob, and introduced to a family – Andy, Tammy, Susan, and Sam Featherstone – gathered around a computer proofing a book.

A few days later, my family history book was delivered to my office. Two days after Christmas, our family volunteered at SamStrong: Search for the Cure. My husband and our employees were very involved helping to market and promote the event the 19-year-old Reitz Memorial High School 2012 co-valedictorian with incurable medulloblastoma organized to raise awareness and money for pediatric brain cancer research.  Still, I personally had not been involved, nor had I met the Featherstones until that day in Bob’s office.

Not quite a week later, on Jan. 2, Sam passed away. His book, “SamStrong” – the book the family was proofing – is a collection of drawings and poetry he created during his three-year fight with brain cancer. It includes a moving forward by his mother, Tammy. Sam’s speech, delivered at Memorial High School in late November, also is reprinted.  Sam’s event, SamStrong: Search for the Cure, raised more than $200,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research. Also, the Sam Featherstone Memorial Scholarship has been established at The Catholic Foundation of Southwestern Indiana, Inc., for a Memorial High School graduating senior who succeeded in high school while overcoming challenges. Sam Featherstone’s light will long shine on our close community. I am grateful to have met him.

Happy New Year! I hope your holidays have been enjoyable; certainly they have been white. My boys say the city looks like a wonderland.

I’m considering what my family will eat tonight and tomorrow. Food for turn of the year is traditional; we’ll have New Year’s Day bean soup tomorrow. Our family will stay home tonight for a dinner we will prepare together  – something a bit more special.

A long-running subject of family jokes is my recipe collection. (It’s never used, of course.) My collection consists of a few dozen recipe books (a meager number for serious chefs), dog-eared Gourmet magazines (I miss it), and several boxes of family recipes on index cards. My family is wrong, though, about my recipes not being used. For inspiration for tonight’s meal, I’m going to one of my most referenced sources: my college Gourmet Cooking Class textbook, “The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook,” (The Hearst Corporation, 1980).

The best feature of the cookbook is the color picture index. For 24 years, this photo gallery has inspired me for special meals. My family requested beef for dinner tonight and indeed the Pinterest-like depiction of Main Dish/Meat in this cookbook offers plenty of recipes that interest me:

•  Filet Mignon with Mustard Caper Sauce
•  Celery-Stuffed Flank Steak
•  Braised Steak Caesar-Style
•  Mushroom Sherry Pot Roast
•  Beef Bourguignon
•  Carbonnade of Beef
•  Marinated Porterhouse Steak

As I finish this post, I’m not sure what we will serve; I likely will derive final inspiration at the meat counter. Whatever recipe we choose, I’ll garnish with parsley, just as the photos suggest. I brought a handful back over the holiday from a Georgia garden; everything improves with parsley.

I wish you a safe and enjoyable New Year’s Eve and a great beginning to the New Year.

Welcome to Evansville Living's editor's blog, 300 Words. I’ve recently been talking to our writers about the efficiency of telling a story in 300 words. That’s what I’ll do with this blog.

My great grandparents, Ole Midgorden and Mary Nelson, were children in 1871 when they left Norway for the U.S. with their families. They were married in Rock County, Minn., and raised their family of 10 children, in Lamoni, Iowa.  The youngest child, Dennis, was my mother’s father.  For my first post I will share the words of mother’s cousin, Dennis R. Midgorden, who recalled in 1995 the Iowa Christmases of the late 1930s:

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and the day after with the Midgorden family was really a gay affair, with as many as 50 people gathering all day.  What had appeared to be a large house would seem diminished when the clan gathered for Christmas. When we all got there and shared our experiences, with laughter and thanksgiving, these quiet subdued Norwegians opened up, especially the men who had little to say normally.  This was true in spite of the fact that they did not celebrate by using hard liquor.  My father has been known to say as many as 50 words on a Christmas Day, which was way over his allotment on any given day. While the male members of the family were not given to many words and long conversations, the women more than make up for this lack.  Clara, Nellie, Caroline and the other women were jolly and happy, making up for the quietness of the men. Everyone, as I remember, was very careful not to offend anyone else and there was a real congenial atmosphere at these Christmas gatherings, where love and gracious living shined forth.

*Merry Christmas!