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dragonlady7Speaking of DUCKS, Z was poking through the Joy of Cooking yesterday and decided that he must try roasting a duck himself. To do so for Valentine's Day would be perfection, he thought, and off we went to the grocery store. However. He is not home until nearly 6, and so... to me falls the duty of actually doing it.
We could only get boneless (but, skin on!) breasts, rather than a whole duck. So this is not quite as the recipe anticipated. I am not sure how to adapt. I am confident, however, that I will somehow produce something edible. Sure.
I was struck with an idea, in the shower, for a series of short stories, resuming where one of my novels was abandoned. For some reason it was sparked by a line in the book Confederates In The Attic, which I was rereading bits of at my sister's house-- of course she has that book. It's an excellent book. She also has, in the pen cup on her office desk, a tiny Confederate flag. Beside it is a tiny US flag, tightly curled from having been rolled. When she got off the plane in Kuwait, there were some USO folks waiting there, and they gave her that flag. She waved it, then absentmindedly rolled it up and stuck it into one of the magazine pockets of her body armor. It wasn't until she arrived home and was cleaning out the pockets that she found it again, so she put it into the pen cup. The Confederate flag she found in an old trunk of her husband's, something his mother dropped off once they had their own house.
Anyhow. There was a line in Confederates in the Attic that was quoting from a primary source, a soldier's journal or letter. The man was describing a horrific battle. He said something to the effect that afterward, when no one was around, he abandoned his pretense of manliness and wept "like a whipped spanniel". This image affected me, not only because of the man's frankness, but also because, of course, I had just spent the week with a real, live, contemporary spaniel, who is so deeply affected by the emotions of those around her, who so thoroughly needs love, that if you so much as say the phrase "bad dog" she will slink away and hide under the table and wallow in misery until she is consoled, preferably with the Yellow Ball or, perhaps, pork rinds. Quite the opposite of trivializing the image, it made it that much more poignant for me, which probably shows that I am a pathetic individual.
But I got to thinking, for some reason, about primary source materials like that. And I remembered: I have an ancestor, or at least a relative-- he was the sibling of one of my ancestors, for whatever that's worth-- who died at Andersonville, a captive Union soldier.
And I remembered how I had started to write a novel about Captain George Denison and his wife Anne. George was a colorful character, who led the secession of part of Connecticut to join Massachusetts, and who also abandoned his children to go to England to fight for Cromwell. And I thought about taking some of that up again... Perhaps the short story format would be more manageable? I need to call my Grandma, is what that amounts to.
Oop, I have to go get dressed. I'm going to pretend like I have a date tonight, even though I don't. But somehow, in the midst of this, I have to manage to roast a freakin' duck.
We could only get boneless (but, skin on!) breasts, rather than a whole duck. So this is not quite as the recipe anticipated. I am not sure how to adapt. I am confident, however, that I will somehow produce something edible. Sure.
I was struck with an idea, in the shower, for a series of short stories, resuming where one of my novels was abandoned. For some reason it was sparked by a line in the book Confederates In The Attic, which I was rereading bits of at my sister's house-- of course she has that book. It's an excellent book. She also has, in the pen cup on her office desk, a tiny Confederate flag. Beside it is a tiny US flag, tightly curled from having been rolled. When she got off the plane in Kuwait, there were some USO folks waiting there, and they gave her that flag. She waved it, then absentmindedly rolled it up and stuck it into one of the magazine pockets of her body armor. It wasn't until she arrived home and was cleaning out the pockets that she found it again, so she put it into the pen cup. The Confederate flag she found in an old trunk of her husband's, something his mother dropped off once they had their own house.
Anyhow. There was a line in Confederates in the Attic that was quoting from a primary source, a soldier's journal or letter. The man was describing a horrific battle. He said something to the effect that afterward, when no one was around, he abandoned his pretense of manliness and wept "like a whipped spanniel". This image affected me, not only because of the man's frankness, but also because, of course, I had just spent the week with a real, live, contemporary spaniel, who is so deeply affected by the emotions of those around her, who so thoroughly needs love, that if you so much as say the phrase "bad dog" she will slink away and hide under the table and wallow in misery until she is consoled, preferably with the Yellow Ball or, perhaps, pork rinds. Quite the opposite of trivializing the image, it made it that much more poignant for me, which probably shows that I am a pathetic individual.
But I got to thinking, for some reason, about primary source materials like that. And I remembered: I have an ancestor, or at least a relative-- he was the sibling of one of my ancestors, for whatever that's worth-- who died at Andersonville, a captive Union soldier.
And I remembered how I had started to write a novel about Captain George Denison and his wife Anne. George was a colorful character, who led the secession of part of Connecticut to join Massachusetts, and who also abandoned his children to go to England to fight for Cromwell. And I thought about taking some of that up again... Perhaps the short story format would be more manageable? I need to call my Grandma, is what that amounts to.
Oop, I have to go get dressed. I'm going to pretend like I have a date tonight, even though I don't. But somehow, in the midst of this, I have to manage to roast a freakin' duck.
