Now is much better than "the good old days."

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Or were female, or gay, or non-white, or non-Christian.

My grandfather, according to family legend, was 1/8 Native American. My grandfather couldn’t have legally married my grandmother in Virginia at the time they did get married (in Maryland) because of laws against interracial marriages. My parents didn’t tell me about the Native American background in our family until I was 28 and about to get married. Today there’s no stigma to having non-white ancestors, but they can remember a time when there was.

I converted to Judaism as an adult and married into a Conservative Jewish family. This is not a big deal now to anybody in the family or anyone I meet at synagogue, and it’s not something I feel any need to keep secret. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that would have been a few hundred years ago. For that matter, 80 years ago it might have hurt my future children’s chances at some colleges or universities, or meant I couldn’t buy a house in some areas.

On the subject of buying houses, my father had to get a second job when he and my mom wanted to buy a house in 1964, even though with her income they made plenty of money to afford the house they wanted. The bank wouldn’t count her income, because she might have a baby and quit working. I’m sure that sucked for him, having to work another job.

I’ve got one of those old houses, built in 1927 or so. It’s obvious that they cheaped out on some things when they were building our house. The McMansion is not a new thing. For example, we had hardwood flooring on the first floor, but with no subfloors. The floorboards were laid directly on the joists, rather than having some plywood or something under them. This combined with a sunken living room resulted in Mr. Neville breaking a floorboard while stepping down into the living room. Hardwood floors with no subfloors are quite common in my neighborhood. We had a new hardwood floor laid over the old ones, so now the old floor acts as subfloor, this past summer.

Or maybe they had 6 or 7 kids because the only way to not have so many kids was not something they were willing to do. At least by the time my parents got married, they had the option of using birth control and not having so many kids.

Before Cesarean sections, my sister and my niece would probably both have died when my niece was born. Our own WhyNot and WhyBaby probably wouldn’t still be with us, either.

42

When my mother announced her engagement to my father, her father said “Decent white girls don’t marry Eyetalians.” Grandpa liked my father well enough, as a person, though he didn’t approve of my mother dating him or marrying him. I think that Grandpa eventually got over this issue, or at least he no longer talked about it. To his dying day, though, Grandpa was a bigot. He could spew the most incredible hatred against the Irish, the Mexicans, the Jews, the blacks…just about any non-WASPs. He also felt that women were meant to be housekeepers (even though his wife was a Licensed Vocational Nurse and often supported the family) and their primary purpose was to have babies. They certainly weren’t equal to men, and shouldn’t aspire to be. He encouraged me to study science, so that I could be a lab tech or something. He thought I was highly intelligent, but still, he thought that I should not plan on being a scientist or anything similar, but instead that I had a great future as some man’s helper.

I’m glad that I didn’t take his ideas to heart. And I’m glad that times have changed.

43

Heck, when I was working at a garage/gas station while going to college, I got to do my homework at the counter. I’d be sitting doing some calculus studying when customers would come in. A depressing number of them would

1 - assume that I was going to community college*

2 - when finding out I was majoring in Computer Science, say, “but… but… you’re a GIRL!”

This was flippin’ 2001.

  • Not that there’s anything wrong with community college, but when I gave the name of the uni I was going to, there was a wide-eyed stare of disbelief.
44

My dad’s parents objected to a young lady his brother dated because she *looked *Italian. Not that she *was *Italian, just looked like it.

45

If you have any kind of a mental illness, you’re a member of another group who should be glad you live now and not back in the “good old days”. ~200 years ago, they locked mentally ill people up and beat the crap out of them. Cognitive behavioral therapy and SSRI’s, which help many people with depression, only date back to the 1980s.

46

Not so very long ago, it was also considered shameful to have and admit to any mental illness. My sister and I are convinced that our mother had chronic depression, but no one would ever admit to it. There was at least one occasion when we were both whisked off the Grandmom’s house for a week or so for no apparent reason, and we recall various episodes that certainly in retrospect seem a whole lot like it.

47

Not too long ago, most people in the US only ate ethnic food if they were of that ethnicity. Some of them even had a fixed menu for every day of the week- if it’s Thursday, that must mean we’re having pork chops. I can’t imagine how soul-suckingly boring that must have been, for the cook as well as for the people who had to eat the same thing week in and week out.

I read somewhere that the cheap supermarket-brand extra virgin olive oil you buy today is better than any olive oil you could have gotten outside a specialty market 20 years ago.

I remember the days before big Borders and Barnes & Noble bookstores and online book shopping, when your choice of books was limited to what the local mall bookstore had. It certainly wasn’t easy for a budding physics geek to find popular science books. Now, I can even order books from other countries pretty easily (if not always cheaply) online.

It wasn’t easy to find older or obscure music, either. I remember combing through used record and tape stores for David Bowie records. Now, of course, I’d just go online.

I will never hate Starbucks, pretty much no matter how evil they get, because all the places to get coffee before they expanded into the area where I was had awful diner coffee, or even instant (phoo!). Starbucks is a godsend if that’s what you’re used to.

I’m into wine. I don’t like to think about what that was probably like before wine was generally sold in airtight glass bottles.

I tried on my grandfather’s glasses with glass lenses once. They were heavy and fragile. I like my modern plastic lenses much better.

In fact, in certain subcultures at least, showing any emotion was taboo. My grandmother got a prescription for a tranquilizer to take at my mom’s wedding, so she wouldn’t cry from happiness and embarrass everyone.

Same for anyone who’s female, not pure white (I might be close enough, but my grandfather might not have been), not Protestant, or not a member of the “right” ethnic group. 60 years ago, we could have been denied rental housing, the chance to own a house in a particular area (the neighborhood my parents bought into in 1964 was racially segregated), or a job on those grounds, and there would have been nothing we could do about it. Until 1968, it was also legal in the US to refuse to rent housing to someone with children.

48

Some years ago, at a family get-together, we went around the table and figured out who would still be alive had we been born one hundred years earlier. (No, the answer wasn’t “none of us because we’d all be 125-plus” - the question was who would have survived to their current age. Sheesh!)

Of the eight of us, only two would still be alive, one crippled, the other deaf. The rest would have died from various injuries and diseases.

When my mother was a child, she was not allowed to play with another little girl, because she was a Catholic. Now, my mother has Catholic grandchildren, Jewish grandchildren, and the prospect of a half-black great-grandchild.

Just a few changes.

49

We did that fixed menu when I was a kid. It actually wasn’t that bad. We mixed it up a few times, but you always knew what was for dinner. I need to start doing it again, actually. It cuts down on the “stare at the fridge and wonder what you feel like cooking” rut I’ve fallen into.

Oh gods, can you imagine what wine in a skin was like? :eek:

50

Not just that, either. They used animal dung and urine to tan leather. I read somewhere that, well into the Victorian age, they didn’t always get all the dung and such out, so leather might smell pretty foul. I don’t think I’d want to drink wine that had been in a skin that smelled like dog doo.

51

gags

52

On food, oh yeah. We were a standard meat-potatoes-vegetable family. There was one “exotic” dish that was called Roman Holiday – it had macaroni, ground beef and tomato sauce. My mom said that when she was growing up any kind of pasta was exotic and foreign. Oh, and once in a while we had “chop suey” with canned bean sprouts in it. I first had pizza as a teenager. I never had a bagel until I was in my 20s and married, to someone who spent a fair portion of his youth in NYC.

53

And thick. You forgot thick. I used to wear glass lens glasses, and they were extremely thick (because I’m extremely nearsighted), heavy, and terribly fragile. I don’t know how many lenses I broke over the years, but it was more than half a dozen. And glasses used to be comparatively more expensive, too.

Actually, it’s not that bad. The trick is to expand the repertoire to two or three weeks’ worth of different menus, and then alter them according to season. For instance, I’ll work meatloaf into the winter menus, because that requires turning on the oven, and one does NOT turn on the oven in the summer in Texas if one can help it. I find that if I DON’T have a rotating menu, then I’ll fall into a routine of having the same two or three dishes every night, and that’s even more boring. By having a dozen or more rotating menus, I won’t get bored with the menu, and neither will the rest of the family. This plan doesn’t mean that I HAVE to fix pork chops on Thursday if I don’t feel like it. It’s more of a guideline. And if my husband has had a rough day, he’ll tell me that I’m taking him out for a nice steak or Mexican dinner. Unless I’ve been slowcooking, I can usually let today’s meat linger in the fridge and make it tomorrow when he says that. If I tell him that I was planning on making chicken fried steak or spaghetti, though, he’ll usually change his mind. If he had his way, I’d probably cook those two dishes five nights out of the week.

Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, sometimes had his characters rotate items in groups of eight. A woman might have eight photos of her boyfriend, for instance, and put a new one in her picture frame every day. A married(?) couple had a set of eight menus, just so that they could avoid having the Thursday night pork chops. The pork chops could fall on any day of the week.

54

Oh, and I’ve seen an old lasagna recipe that called for ground beef, lasagna noodles, cottage cheese, and KETCHUP. I am not sure what Grandma Bodoni would have called such a dish, but I know that she wouldn’t call it lasagna.

55

An offense to all that is right and good in this world, that’s what I call it.

56

My mom, who was a wonderful cook, served a fixed menu - chicken on Sunday, etc. It was great, we all loved her cooking and it never occurred to us to get ‘bored’. It WASN’T CARVED IN STONE that we had to have chicken on Sunday, etc. , why, once in a while Mom went hog wild and cooked some of the more …interesting…faddish recipes of the day, just to get out of the rut.

Mom worked and had three kids and a husband to cook for, on a limited budget. Frozen dinners and foods, what there WERE of them, weren’t considered real food! No one yearned for exotic ethnic recipes. Besides, the grocery stores of the time didn’t have 20 kinds of sushi, $6 loaves of Italian bread, or a whole Chinese buffet right in front of the deli. We kids each got one serving of meat, potato, veg, and sometimes dessert, and then we went out to play until dark. If we were hungry after school, we could make a peanut butter sandwich and glass of milk. No soda except for special occasions. Candy and junk food bought on a Friday had to last us a week, or we went without.

That’s why American kids are so fat (and their parents probably broke) - there’s too much stuff in the grocery store, it’s too expensive, and everyone eats way too much. I can’t help but wonder if the grocery stores with a billion items are going to stay in business the next couple of years? Wonder if they’ll ‘scale down’ back to the old A&P style…

57

Grandma Bodoni would have not considered this an adequate description. She would have been much more colorful, without using any English swear words. I don’t know if she would have sworn in Italian, she only spoke English with me.

I offered this recipe description only so that we can see just what passed for an ethnic dish in “the good old days”. And so that we can appreciate having a great selection of cheeses in ordinary supermarkets. My mother used to watch out for mozzarella and ricotta when she shopped, back when I was a kid. It wasn’t an everyday item, and Daddy really enjoys the dishes of his childhood. When I introduced him to the fresh cheese ravioli that’s now in the dairy cases, he thought he’d died and gone to Heaven. He says that it’s not as good as his Aunt Mary’s was, but it’s really very good for a prepared meal.