La Gata

My sister has a cat, a very pretty cat, long slender neck and graceful moves.  Cookie is a refugee from Hurricane Maria which devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017.  It is reported that the cat seems grateful for the largess bestowed upon her, but she does not reciprocate with any kind of overt demonstration of affection. The following is a middle-of-the night creation I "dreamed up" and sent to Ilene a few weeks ago.



I dreamed last night about a cat named Cookie.
I was visiting my sister in the Garden State
Resting peacefully in her guest room
The door a bit ajar; I don't want to fumble with knobs
In the middle of the night.

Somewhere in the wee hours I heard a gentle tap on my door
"David,"  Ilene whispered, "I can't find my cat."
"Don't panic," I replied.  "Flip on the night light."
"The cat's been sleeping with me for the past three nights."
"NO!" the glare of the overhead light hit my sleepy eyes.

Ilene stood, amazed, appalled, moved  toward the bed.
Cat like a flash crawled deep down next to my feet.
"Let her be," I said.  But I could see that Sis was crushed.
"She's okay.  We'll talk in the morning.
"Nice Cookie." I crooned. " La Gata, Senora Gata, duerme ahora."




Cookie

Tale of the Three A.M. Blog Post

A marvelous idea for a blog post slapped me upside my mind at three o'clock in the morning.  This happens.  All too frequently.  I lay abed and composed it.  This is good stuff.  So l edited and polished it, refined it, perfected it.  Four-fifteen I make a trip to the little room next door, return to bed.  Shiver a bit to get warm again, run the post through my head one more time.  It is perfect!

I slept.

After I showered and dressed, eight o'clock, I went to the computer and logged on.  Brought up blogger to write my post.

I could not remember. One. Single. Word. Of that perfect gem.

I wrestled with this throughout the day, convinced that ere nightfall I would recover my work.  Not so.  Not one inkling.  But I do remember that it was an absolutely wisdom-of-the-ages, polished and perfected, ready for the world

One-liner!

Blogging in Bed #T

My "writing" often occurs in the wee hours of the morning as I lie abed longing to be held in the arms of Morpheus but nevertheless gratified that since the mind will not shut down usable ideas sometimes impinge themselves upon my consciousness.

Some of the material you see here on String Too Short to Tie was produced in just this manner.  Maybe the value of that is reflected in the quality of the product.  Be kind.

Thursday night a complete story, fictional but illustrative of one of life's truths, filtered through my mind and finally sleep came.

Often when I dream I can recall upon awakening that I had a dream but find it elusive when I try to remember the details or even what it was about.

Friday morning when I sat at the keyboard to transcribe the tale of the previous night I found that I remembered the story, but the quality of the thing seemed to be somewhat below the standard I hope to achieve.  Pondering on this I realized that what had occurred was a semi-sleep dreamy event in which I was actually dreaming that I was lying awake creating a blog post.

Conclusion:  The whole thing was not worthy of being posted.  Yet somehow I managed to think that this account of the events was blog worthy.  Go figure.

Also, thank me for sparing you the tale.

You're welcome.

Pastries in the Early Morning

It started at 3:08 a.m.  It is not unusual for me to make a trip to the small room around this time of day.  Unfortunately getting cozy back under the covers did not lead to the immediate resumption of sleep.  Which my body craved.  But the mind.  Ah, the mind, she has a mind of her own.

I started thinking about stuff, or rather I started mentally roaming the small realm which is my universe.  Unbidden and with no recall of the trail that led me there, I was thinking of croquignoles. Now I have eaten this delicacy at least once, perhaps twice in my lifetime.  In order to properly order my thinking, I attempted the spelling of the word.  (The time may now be about 3:42.)  I came quite close, dropping the "g" and endowing the word with a second "l" to make up for it.  Not too bad for morning's wee hours, but still sleep eluded me.

This part I have to relate, because it is true, and after you read a bit further you may think I made this up.  But no, it actually happened this way. I was thinking about the restaurant in which Maizie is employed, and decided, in the state I was in, to have the chef, or cook, or whoever controlled the kitchen, to make croquignoles.  When we enjoyed this gustatory creation, I found it to be wonderful beyond my memory of any other such confections.  Louie, I had named him "Louie" by this time, explained that the deep frying process was done in his French fry oil, thus imparting a vague potato flavor to the goodies. By now, I have decided that I can make my own little Frenchy donut thingies.

So there I am in my bathrobe, coffee brewing, I seat myself at the computer at 4:45. Search: "croquignole."  Now we account for the first picture.  The first couple of pages of results were all about hair styling.  Say what?  Hair styling?  There were even articles directed to wannabe cosmetologists on prepping for their state boards.  It seems that a croquignole is a certain type of wave, or the technique used in setting such curls in which the hair is wound on a rod from the tip toward the scalp.  Who knew?  Well, BBBH, for one, but she was still sound asleep at six in the morning.  And seven o'clock, and . . .

And finally! Voila! Recipes for croquignoles of the delicious variety.  The first one I clicked on was by Emeril Lagasse, which I chose mostly because I had heard of him.  And guess what he used as a primary ingredient?  Potatoes.  I kid you not.  Now connect that back to what I told you above.  I am a genius and did not know it.

Reading further, I found a critic, a lady who apparently is the world's authority on croquignoles, and she asserted that Emeril's recipe was unlike any she had ever encountered, and the product, she averred, should rightly be called a beignet rather than a croquignole.  Then she launched into an essay on the origin of the pastries in question.  When I tell you I found it interesting, you need to put things into context: the sun was not yet up.  So now I know the difference between Cajun cooking and Creole cuisine, and so on and so forth.

And I went back to bed, having decided that the manufacture of croquignoles, no matter how delicious, is beyond my pay grade.

And I slept!