Aging, words, and the food I eat

The Virtues of Aging ~ by Jimmy Carter, 1998, memoir, 160 pages

Former president Jimmy Carter reflects on aging, blending memoir, anecdote, political savvy, and practical advice, to truly illuminate the rich promises of growing older.  In this book he shares the knowledge and pleasures that age have brought him.  "As we've grown older, the results have been surprisingly good," he says of the new experiences that come to us with age.  He delves into the issues of planning for retirement, undertaking new diet and exercise regimens, coping with age prejudice, and (on a more intimate level) he paints a glowing portrait of his happy marriage to Rosalynn.  The book celebrates both the blessings that come to us as we grow older and the blessings older people can bestow upon others.

A day or two ago, I happened to notice this book on one of my bookshelves.  Actually, what I noticed was the word "aging."  I'm 82 and feeling my age these days, so I put this on top of my latest pile of books that I'm either reading or about to read.  My post-it note inside the cover says I got this book seven years ago.  Jimmy Carter spoke to one of my classes at Emory University in the mid-1980s.  I still remember the Secret Service guys rushing in and sizing us up, and how much shorter Carter was than I expected.  Anyway, I plan to read this book next.

I ran across the word liminal (p. 168 in Happy Now by Courtney Ellis), and I smiled.  Like proclivity, the word liminality is one of my favorites.  It isn't a word we see often, so there's the definition, if you need it.  I also found this Wikipedia quote for us:  "In anthropology, liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete."  I think of it as being on the threshold of something (see #2 above).

A decade ago, I wrote about salad days, saying:

"I don't usually get excited about food preparation, maybe because it too often seems like a lot of work to make a meal for one.  I do, however, like to experiment with salads.  My process is to toss in whatever I have on hand that sounds good to me at the moment.  It could be leftovers, like this one.  On Thursday, I had a hard-boiled egg from breakfast, a tomato, and some leftover asparagus from a recent meal.  So I cut up those together in a bowl.  After taking this photo, I added Roasted Onion Parmesan Dressing and called it a salad."

Yesterday, I had another salad . . . well, I had tuna salad.  I did my usual thing by combining the foods I had on hand.  What I came up with isn't particularly photogenic, and I'd already eaten it when it occurred to me to write about it.  What was it, you ask?  A tuna salad sandwich with artichoke hearts on it.  Yes, that may seem like an odd combination, but I had tuna salad and bread and artichokes.  Why not?  I tried it, and artichoke hearts taste very good on a tuna salad sandwich.