To Hell With Confucious

Killer Cucumber Dill Dip

Making this at Easter time brings a burst of spring zest to cabbage tongues; tongues soured by a long winter’s fill of crock pot soups and stews.  Try it and you’ll be planting spring bulbs the next day.

Ingredients:

1 – 8 oz. light cream cheese, softened

1 cup Hellmann’s light mayo

2 medium cukes–peeled, seeded & chopped

3 tbl. sliced green onions

1 1/2 tsp. lemon juice

3 tsp. snipped fresh dill or 3/4 tsp. dried dill weed

1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes

Directions:

In medium bowl, beat cream cheese and mayo until smooth.  Add rest of ingredients, cover and chill for one hour.  Serve with Wheat Thin crackers.

Next Day Converstion:

Fabulous with grilled chicken on flatbread, in pita bread, or rolled in a tortilla shell.

Detroit River Walleye

Sure was nice to have a sharp Iron River Works knife when prepping these fish for the fry pan!

Woke up 4:45 a.m.  Picked up my son, Adam, across town.

Got fuel and drove to the “D”

Limited out by 8 a.m.

Smallest Walleye was 20″    Largest Walleye was 30″, 8 lbs.

          Several 6 pounders.

Adam got one bigger! His was a 30″ pig. Mine had spawned already.

We had one heck of a time this morning with Captain Ed of Medicine Man Charters.  Great guy.  Knew where the fish were hiding.

Once we had our limit, we were upgrading and tossing fish back.  We threw back more than we kept and I almost wept when having to toss back 20 to 26″ walleye.   We were vertical jigging and the fish were hot.  Great day on a beautiful Ranger Walleye Boat.  Thank you Captain Ed!

Make sure you look at the very last photo!

…later that day, after arriving home to bag our catch for the freezer…THIS HAPPENED!

They are good fighters!

Now you know “THE REST OF THE STORY!”

Blue Jeans and Tee Shirts

It wasn’t until I was in the fourth grade at Sawyer School in Chicago that girls could wear pants to school.  Somehow we girls  had survived the Blizzard of ’67 in those skirts, jumpers and dresses.  Over our bare legs we wore snow pants tucked into boots that were lined with plastic bread bags.  My walk was 3 1/2 city blocks to school and we all had to go home for lunch.  Dawn Kass had the longest walk, almost a city mile each way, in that lunch hour.

Snow pants on, snow pants off, snow pants on, snow pants off, snow pants on and snow pants off, and finally snow pants on and off one last time.   In between wearings, we hung them up on hooks at school in the cloak closet or, at home, our mothers would lay them over the space heaters.  Cloak closets were arranged in a row on one side of each classroom and looked like miniature four or five car garage doors that slid up to reveal a secret room filled with hooks and pegs (and stolen kisses) for outerwear.  When the doors were lowered, we could use them as “side boards” … the real blackboards were at the front of the classroom.

Our wood desks were arranged in rows and had mysterious holes in the upper right corner that teacher told us was for old fashioned ink wells.  If you were lucky, your seat only had two pounds of chewed gum stuck to it, not five.   Being modern children, we had No. 2 pencils and routinely raised our hands to ask permission to go to the sharpener.  For entertainment, we brought straws to school and chewed up little scraps of paper to make spit balls that we aimed and fired at the artwork on the walls opposite the cloak room.   Blue jeans and tee shirts were only worn on a farm back then.

As I reflect, both boys and girls suffered many cold days out on the playground because there was no such thing as a factored in windchill.  The playground monitors (volunteer mothers imported from Siberia) showed no mercy.  There we were, sometimes just in skirts with the wind whipping and our hands holding them down lest a godforsaken boy named Ricky or Jeff or Bill see our white underwear, shivering and shaking without an ounce of sympathy from the powers that be.  THEY were all smoking cigarettes in the teacher’s lounge.

When it wasn’t frigid, the girls perfected double dutch jump roping and the boys chased the girls, pulling pony tails.  We had a merry-go-round that parents today would outlaw.  It wasn’t a good day unless someone threw up or was flung off of it.  The swings were high flyers and we perfected the art of having a sitter on the swing and another person (the pumper) standing astride the sitter, making it fly.  Still no blue jeans or tee shirts.

Bread?  It was 29 cents a loaf.  Regular gas was 18.9 at the Sinclair Gas Station where a young man with big, green dinosaur on his shirt wore a metal coin changer attached to his belt as he  dispensed change and gasoline.  While our mothers walked with metal carts to the neighborhood grocer, we kids would play softball on the street corners using the four sewer covers at each corner for bases.  I always played second base.  Incredibly, some kids never made our home spun team.  Instead, they grew up to be accountants or stamp collectors.

We also played running bases (a twisted form of monkey-in-the-middle) and poison box in the alley.  Each house had its own 55 gallon metal drum in the alley for trash.  The only trash bags known to mankind were the paper ones that our groceries came in and our mothers gingerly folded. The cans were all ripe with maggots and stench by June’s summer solstice.  When told to take the trash out, we would pick up the lids, hold our noses, and wonder at the little rice-like moving creatures.  Blue jeans and tee shirts would arrive soon, along with the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and Laugh-In.

Ahhh, the 70′s.  Credence Clearwater Survival, the Brady Bunch, Charlie’s Angels, blue jeans and tee shirts with round, yellow happy faces on them hit our shores along with the British invasion of the Rolling Stones!  “Blue” always proceeded the word jeans back then and no one wore them to church–yet.  Princess phones with 18′ foot cords stretched down hallways, around corners and behind bedroom doors 24′ feet away.  They replaced the standard rotaries and were available  in olive green, white, pink, or a throw up shade of blue.   Johnny Carson ruled the airwaves while NBC gave birth to Saturday Night Live!

Long live blue jeans and tee shirts.

The Confession

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I have been with a loose girl.”  The priest asks, “Is that you, little Joey Pagano?”

“Yes, Father, it is.”

“And who was the girl you were with?”

“I can’t tell you, Father. I don’t want to ruin her reputation.”

“Well, Joey, I’m sure to find out her name sooner or later so you may as well tell me now. Was it Tina Minetti?”

“I cannot say.”

“Was it Teresa Mazzarelli?”

“I’ll never tell.”

“Was it Nina Capelli?”

“I’m sorry, but I cannot name her.”

“Was it Cathy Piriano?”

“My lips are sealed.”

“Was it Rosa DiAngelo, then?”

“Please, Father! I cannot tell you.”

The priest sighs in frustration. “You’re very tight lipped, and I admire that. But you’ve sinned and have to atone. You cannot be an altar boy now for 4 months. Now you go and behave yourself.”

Joey walks back to his pew, and his friend Franco slides over and whispers, “What’d you get?”

“A Four month vacation and five good leads…”

Fairview Cemetery

Fairview is a large cemetery with a variety of carved granite stones.  Sandy and I knew that finding our ancestors would be the proverbial “needle in a haystack”.  What can I say?

We are German.  We formulated a plan.

She took one end and I took the other.  Soon we began to shout at one another across the silent grass when we found an Ashbaucher!  and then another one.  and then another one.

This is the rest of the story, as promised,

about Wendell Ashbaucher of Bluffton, Indiana.

Wendell was laid to rest next to a small,  unexpected marker.  We were surprised to discover that another son, born before Will, had passed away as an infant, before his second birthday.  We found little Maxwell, gone and once forgotten.  My great grandmother never spoke of this boy; perhaps the pain was too great or his tragic death too common in that time.  Maxwell had truly been my paternal grandfather’s oldest brother.

The planes would literally rattle the window panes as they roared overhead.

Sandy and I are cousins who grew  up in Chicago spending time at our Grandma and Grandpa Ashbaucher’s house at 63rd and Cicero, near the White Castles that sits at the corner of Midway Airport. Grandpa would give us all the change in his pocket and we would cut up the alley to the restaurant and order hamburgers for 18 cents each.  He was an avid fisherman, a quiet man who loved to camp in tents.  Following tradition, she and I were camping and paddling our way through Bluffton, Indiana to find our roots.

James Woodrow Ashbaucher, 1918-1972, my grandpa (center) who passed away unexpectedly, from a heart attack.

But I digress.  Standing among the headstones  that spring day, Sandy and I witnessed that the Ashbauchers had a real presence in Bluffton, Indiana during the early 1900′s.

There was Benjamin Ashbaucher, a prolific photographer whose works can be found for sale on ebay today.

We also found our original family; our great-great-great grandfather, John Ashbaucher (Johan Ashbaucher) who immigrated to America from Switzerland/Germany with his wife.  Together, they passed through Ellis Island just two years before the Civil War broke out.  My three times great grandpa joined the Union Army and attained the  military rank of a senior commissioned officer.

This man and his wife could never have imagined me.  Yet, with thankfulness in my heart, I placed my hand on their grave stones, a product of their immortality.

Rest in peace, Ashbauchers.  You lie near those who knew you and loved you once upon a time in America and you are remembered by those who live now, a century later.

My hope is that through the use of this technology, this story, OUR story, will live on into the future so that other Ashbauchers enjoy this special sense of self.