The Crab Chronicles

Shop Small Businesses This Year

Did you know that most small businesses fail within the first year? I remember my teacher in corporate law in paralegal school telling me that, and I found it depressing. I come from a long line of small business owners. My grandaddy Butler owned a number of small businesses in Cobb County Georgia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

My Thompson grandaddy owned a small country store during the Depression. Dad said they were very lucky -- they always had enough to eat. He was one of the few white merchants to extend credit to black families and I'm proud of that. 

Small businesses and farms are the backbone of America, not giant corporations. 

I was thinking about being thankful and I am very thankful to know so many brilliant, creative, hard-working people. So I wanted to give a shout out to all my friends who own small businesses. I really hope to help boost their sales in some small way, if possible. 

I also want to add that I have tried nearly all of these products and I am very comfortable endorsing them because I know the dedication and quality that has gone into them. 

My friend Erika over at Confections of a Corporate Mom makes incredibly impressive cakes and cookies. She is a scientific whiz kid and coming up with cakes and specializes in kids' birthday cakes. I interviewed her not long ago and you can read more about her here. If you look on her Facebook page you can see some of her delightful, colorful holiday cookies. Order a holiday cookie collection today for that hard-to-please boss, friend, colleague, or teacher.

In these days of mega companies offering mass-produced stuff, I love that Erika's cookies and cakes are all homemade and handmade, and she sources local ingredients. She can do gluten-free and dairy-free, also. 

 

My dear friend Jenean Carlton -- who, like Erika, lives just down the street from me -- creates spectacular wedding and special occasion cakes. I have been helping her with some marketing efforts for her business Carlton's Cakes, and I have enjoyed getting to learn a lot about the custom cake business and the wedding business. Did you know that more than 70 hours go into many of Jenean's spectacular cakes?!? Her customers love her so much they often come back to her for anniversary and baby shower cakes years later! She is a scientist and an artist. I interviewed Jenean earlier this year, and you can read more about her here. 

Jenean has won many awards in recent years including The Knot's Best in Wedding Cakes, and her cakes have been featured in television shows. She has an incredible work ethic and her artistry is unparalleled.

 

Down South House and Home is the brainchild of my friend Stacy Williams Shuker Reece and I absolutely love her many clever and practical creations! I will be interviewing Stacy soon because I am so fascinated by how she started this business and has seen it grow and thrive in a very short time. (Just fyi, Stacy is married to Chuck Reece, head honcho over at The Bitter Southerner, and I interviewed him a few years ago.)

I ordered several of Stacy's handprinted and sturdy dishtowels about 6 months ago and sent them to folks, and everyone was just delighted with the towels. They are practical and different from most any other gift out there, because they reflect so many southern ideas and sayings... 

 

Bulls Bay Saltworks is a great place to get pure sea salt. I have been fascinated with Bulls Bay since I heard about her business from my friend Jon Jackson at Comfort Farms. I interviewed Teresa here. Anybody who can make a living from the sea without having to clean fish is a winner in my book!

 

Feridies is a company in Virginia that has been selling delicious peanuts and peanut products for many years, and I really enjoyed chatting with Jane Riddick Fries not long ago. I am fascinated by family-owned businesses. We have ordered a number of awesome peanuts and gift nuts from Feridies this year and they ship all over the USA.

Blue Donkey Coffee is the smoothest, most delicious coffee I have ever tried. I don't drink coffee any more but I drank some iced coffee a few years ago when I interviewed Ed Lane, founder of Blue Donkey and I was blown away. It wasn't harsh or bitter at all. It was a whole different level of deliciousness.

My friend Allison Leet over at Scull-Craft Engagement Calendars sells a fine product, and a very useful one. I am a bit old-fashioned. I love a paper calendar. Check out what they offer!

Jim Becker and his wife adopted two little girls from Russia years ago and I "met" them through online adoption groups. Jim recently retired and he makes custom wooden furniture and cabinetry for customers primarily in southeastern Pennsylvania and thereabouts, or those willing to pay shipping charges in the continental US. Check out his beautiful work on his website for Buckingham Valley Woodworks. He is also starting to make smaller items like lovely boxes suitable for jewelry and will have an Etsy shop one of these days.

 

So before you get all crazy with the holiday gift shopping, take some time to check out the amazing and unique gifts I've spotlighted here. You will be supporting families, not mega corporations. You will be helping folks who run these businesses to have a brighter Christmas or Chanukah and a brighter 2019.

Thanksgiving Ideas for Those Who Don't Cook

I love to cook. My mom and brother love to cook. So does my son. We are a family that cooks. When there's a potluck, we enjoy figuring out what delicious dish to take. My brother memorized our family pecan pie recipe years ago.

Not everyone cooks, however. 

I remember a female attorney I worked for bragging how she couldn't cook a thing. I always thought that was such a shame, since she had two little boys. Poor kids ate a lot of sandwiches and cereal, she admitted. Lots of takeout. 

I digressed. 

Not everyone invited to a Thanksgiving feast should take food. If you can't cook, don't try. You don't want your family to suffer.

When my dad died a friend of mom's brought a bunch of food to the house the next day. My brother and I thanked her profusely. As soon as her car was out of the driveway the debate started. Should we eat it? [NO! She was a terrible cook.] Should we give it to others in the family? [NO! They were suffering enough already.] Should we give it to neighbors? [NO! We liked the neighbors.] Feed it to the dog? [NO! We didn't want to make the dog sick.] Compost? [NO! Mom and Dad didn't have a compost heap.] It went in the trash.

So if you cannot cook and you have to contribute something, volunteer to bring sodas and ice, or paper plates and cutlery, or napkins. Volunteer to do cleanup duty. Offer to decorate the table -- and get on Pinterest, fast.

Offer to bring the pies. Most grocery stores offer ready-made pumpkin and pecan pies, or there are Edwards pies in the freezer section.

Even better, go to Honeybaked Ham and pick up a couple of lbs. of ham and/or turkey, or an entire ham. Or go to a local place like we have here, Matthews, and pick up food made skillfully by professionals. 

Don't try to learn to cook, though. Not when the pressure is on, like that.

It's a day to give thanks, not fight over the bottle of Tums. 

The Demise of English?

I have stopped counting the number of times I have seen ungrammatical memes on Facebook, or posts or Tweets that use improper English. Somehow, half of the world never learned the difference between "your" and "you're." Comma splices? No problemo. Sentence fragments?! Adorable!

Most people have no clue about The Horrors of Bad English. I see grammar mistakes and they leap off the page and slap me upside the head and make me want to scream. 

So how did I go from being the child who audibly groaned when asked to diagram a sentence in 6th grade to an adult who cannot tolerate bad grammar or the horror of a misplaced comma?

English was my bugaboo as a small child. I much preferred numbers. Numbers are straightforward and simple -- at least before you have to start learning Algebra. Arithmetic -- now that's where I could shine. In fourth grade a friend of mine taught me how to do math in my head, and I became a whiz at that. I see numbers in my head and it's much easier for me to calculate, say, 25% off, than it is for my son. 

I was reminded the other day of the endless, torturous hours learning to diagram sentences when I saw a funny meme about it. 

Here's a fun fact: I had the same English teacher all 4 years of middle school except for 7th grade. Sometime after I went on to high school she stopped teaching English, and for the last 30+ years she has only taught middle school social studies. I don't think I drove her away -- I think it was her disgust at how bad most of her students were at diagramming sentences.

I still remember the torture of sitting there in her classroom, diagramming sentences. I can still pick out the subject and verb in any sentence, and all dependent and independent clauses, though -- blindfolded and under heavy anesthesia just for fun. 

Seriously. 

I mean, I literally cringe when I see nouns and verbs disagreeing in a sentence. [I am a bit perturbed by the overuse of the word "literally" these days...]

English was not always uniform, or rigid. Spelling was fast and loose until the last hundred years or so.

If you look at the history of the English language you learn a lot about gumbo. Yep, English is like the gumbo of languages -- a whole lot of other folks threw in words that became part of English. Now it's a tasty stew, delightful to native English speakers, not always palatable to those trying to learn it. 

English is composed of a lot of appropriated words.

The Vikings gave us these: run, husband, egg, knife. 

The French gave us these: fruit, people, liberty. 

"Spanish also had an influence on American English (and subsequently British English), with words like canyon, ranch,stampede and vigilante being examples of Spanish words that entered English through the settlement of the American West."

I could write a book about all the words we took from other languages, but who would read it?!

Spelling is also a bugaboo for many people. It's easy for me. I rarely mess up spelling. 

All these are fun little facts about English but what I started to write about here was the fact that English is also like Rodney Dangerfield these days, not getting any respect. 

Kids are not being drilled in grammar and punctuation and usage the way we were, long long ago. Heck, the kids don't even have to write in cursive. They are being spared the torture. Is it because everything typed nowadays is on a computer and spell check and grammar check are taking the place of actually knowing that stuff?!? Horrors!

Let me tell you a scary thing, kids: those green lines under your sentences? They ain't always correct. The computer isn't always right. 

Plus, it's like I was telling my student the other day, he can use spell check and every other crutch under the sun right up until he's writing that crucial essay on a standardized test, and then... OOPS. You think college recruiters care about nouns and verbs agreeing?!? Um, YES. Yes, they do. They don't want graduates who cannot write a decent paragraph.

We tend to just look the other way when someone cannot write well, and the world is poorer for it.

I worked for an attorney once who was HORRIBLE at writing and I used to try and correct everything she wrote before it went out, to spare her embarrassment. I wasn't always successful -- she produced such a huge volume of work sometimes I wouldn't keep up. She paid so little attention to proper English that it never occurred to her that opposing attorneys were sneering at her lack of skills -- I guess if you're oblivious to your own bad English you don't understand why anyone would denigrate you for idiotic errors. Most attorneys are good or even great wordsmiths, however. 

I read stories all the time that were published on the internet [okay, some of them were clickbait, but entertaining anyway, so don't judge] and the English in those stories is appalling. Sentences are horribly awkward. 

I hope one day students will once again actually CARE about writing proper English, but I am not holding my breath. 

Folks like my mom, who have beautiful handwriting (in cursive!) and who value proper English and know how to actually use a paper dictionary are a dying breed, much to my sadness.

 

World War I and My Family

I am fascinated by military history because my father loved it, and he passed it on to me. I never spend a Veteran's Day ignoring veterans. I always think about the many men in my family who served in the armed forces, and the sacrifices they made to help our country stay free. 

I knew very little about World War I until I was a Freshman in college and I took a class called Europe Since 1914. The teacher was not southern. He spoke very fast and I couldn't take notes quickly enough, so I started tape recording his lectures, then playing them back later and transcribing what he said. It was tedious, but I made an A in the class.

One of the most fascinating aspects of World War I is that it was fought simply because of treaties and nationalism. 

According to Brittanica:

The war pitted the Central Powers—mainly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey—against the Allies—mainly France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and, from 1917, the United States. It ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. The war was virtually unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused.

World War I was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. It led to the fall of four great imperial dynasties (in Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey), resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and, in its destabilization of European society, laid the groundwork for World War II.

When I was learning about it I knew, vaguely, that my grandfathers had fought in World War I, but I knew nothing about what they actually did. 

My mother's father, Bob Hasty, didn't go overseas. His baseball talent was discovered when he was in training at Camp Gordon and somehow he never had to go overseas -- likely some higher up loved baseball and hated to see a fine pitcher killed on some battlefield in France. However, my grandfather earned the rank of Sergeant. (I never knew that until recently when I found his page on the Find A Grave website.)

Sidenote: Camp Gordon was one of the temporary training camps set up to train soldiers to go overseas in 1917. It was later relocated and became Fort Gordon, near Augusta, where my uncle Bobby Thompson worked for many years as a civilian. Camp Gordon is now the DeKalb Peachtree Airport and it's about 15 minutes from my house.

I have no photos of Pepaw Hasty in his uniform, unfortunately. I think in the family we tend to gloss over his service and focus on the fact that a baseball scout spotted him when he was at Camp Gordon and shortly after the war ended he was drafted by The Atlanta Crackers, and then went up to Philadelphia to play for Connie Mack on the Athletics roster.

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Below, my grandfather Algernon Thompson, when he was in the Army either right before or during World War I. (He is on the bottom row, lefthand corner.) Daddy used to tell my brother stories of how Grandaddy fought at Verdun. Dad didn't tell me the stories. I was a girl. 

Most of how I feel and what I know about World War I comes from books and movies, and I make no apology for that. You can learn a lot from well-written books and movies. My favorite movie about that war is from 1996, In Love and War. Excellent movie about the real love between writer Ernest Hemingway and his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. You can see a trailer for it here. I own the DVD of it. A more recent movie and also excellent is Testament of Youth.

World War I was the first "modern" war -- machine guns and airplanes were used. Men dug trenches and lived in them for months, and when they ventured out they were mown down by the enemy. The slaughter was horrifying. 

Grandaddy Thompson was a professional soldier, for years. He was born in 1888 in Cordele, Georgia. When he was about 12 years old, his father, Alexander Hamilton Thompson, died. In 1900 there was no life insurance in rural South Georgia. There was no welfare or food stamps. There was farming -- hard to do when you are a mom to 7 children.

Grandaddy was one of the older kids. He dropped out of school and went to work, to support his mother and younger siblings. For years, he worked any job he could find, and sent most of his earnings home. He joined in the Army and fought Pancho Villa on the Mexican border in 1916. As a result, he was never educated and never made much money. 

below, a long photo of Grandaddy made during the War

Grandaddy waited until his siblings were grown and his mother was okay before he got married. In those days, it was rare for a man to be past 30 and getting married for the first time. Grandaddy was about 35. 

I never knew Grandaddy. He died in 1957, shortly after my parents married. He was too ill to attend the wedding. 

He died of emphysema, but he never smoked. I have a notion that he must have been exposed to some of the poisoned gas in World War I, and it finally got him. He was very ill in his final years, and an invalid. My grandmother nursed him. They had an incredible bond, I've heard. 

 

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left, my grandparents about 1956

above, Grandaddy and his 3 sons, late 1930's (my dad is the littlest one)

top right, Grandaddy in his final years with a fish he caught

 

 

 

 

 

A Final Thought...

I think we tend to focus on World War II and ignore World War I, which was essentially the runup to World War II. Germany was economically devastated by World War I and that led to Hitler being able to gain traction and seduce the German people with the notion of a return to economic stability by gearing up for another war.

The soldiers of World War I should be remembered and honored. They served bravely. 

 

There's a wonderful article with photos of how some of the WWI battle sites look today -- spooky and beautiful. Look here.

Moments of Clarity

There are very few compensations when it comes to getting older. You wake up with aches and pains in places you'd forgotten about years before. You look in the mirror and wonder how those gray hairs and wrinkles got there and what, if anything you should do about them. You watch your classmates from high school and college go through their own trials and tribulations and you either think well, thank God it isn't me, or well, I feel so sorry for him/her because I know how that feels. 

Every few weeks, it seems, I hear about another person I went to high school with who has died. 

Sobering. 

Sad. 

Scary. 

One of the very few compensations for getting older is this: clarity. If you're not driven by rampaging hormones of youth, or nagging stress over how to raise your children and/or how to pay your bills, sometimes you are blessed with clarity. 

I don't mean clarity as in I've got it all figured out! Woo hoo!

Nope. 

The best one can hope for is a little piece of clarity.

right, me about age 8, and my brother

I was a chubby kid [quite athletic, but always with some extra lbs.] and I went all through elementary and middle school being teased and/or bullied relentlessly about my weight. I used to wish I was invisible. I used to feel like the biggest (I was taller than all my classmates until I was about 12) ugliest, most awkward person in my entire school. I dreaded going, many days. Yet, if I had been able to step back and absorb this little bit of wisdom I think it would have been easier: When someone says something really mean to you, it's not actually about you, it's about them. Human beings are fundamentally kind and caring (I firmly believe) unless they are afraid or stressed out. When children say and do mean things to each other it's because they are under some stress, 95% of the time, I think. [The other 5% it's because of psychological issues or possibly just evil, but that 5% is a subject for an entirely different blog.]

I saw a story on Facebook the other day about a man whose son was bullied at school. He took time to just sit and talk with the boy who was the bully, to try and figure out what was going on with him. The boy had no father and he and his mother were homeless, and often hungry. The father became a mentor to the bully and turned the situation around entirely. 

Here's the beautiful thing about that: once you understand the stress the person is under, it makes it much easier to forgive them.

Forgiveness heals.

This morning I was watching a segment of CBS Sunday morning about television producer/director Chuck Lorre. Towards the end of the piece he talks about at one time being labeled an ANGRY GUY. His response was brilliant. He said basically that he was angry sometimes but it was because he was afraid, and it manifested as anger because he didn't want anyone to know he was afraid. 

Whoa. 

I was glad my son was watching that with me. 

I think guys often inadvertently become angry because they are truly afraid of something, and it comes out as anger because in the masculine mind it's okay to show anger, but it's unmanly to show fear. 

Huge moment of clarity for me. 

Someone I am close to (not my son) got angry with me recently and it really upset me. I have had to think it through and try to figure out where that anger was from, because forgiveness wasn't coming. 

I've learned one really important thing in my 56 years and it's this: if you cannot forgive, you will never be happy. 

Holding onto grudges may sound romantic and noble and it's the basis of a lot of movies with revenge plotlines but as a practical matter, not forgiving someone is corrosive to YOUR soul, not theirs. I like this quote: holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

I have had to try and figure out how to forgive people, over and over, in my life. Sometimes it's quite difficult. 

Sometimes I've had to forgive people who couldn't get past their anger at me. I lost several friends over the last presidential election. Despite my disagreeing with them politically, I still cared (and continue to care) about them, very much. 

I can totally disagree with my friends about who to vote for and still love them. I just wish everyone could do that. 

Anger can also be a manifestation of Depression. I learned that not too long ago and it really caused me to reflect on some situations differently. 

Of course, when someone is yelling at you and being a real jerk, it can be hard to forgive and that's just called Being Human.

Eventually, if you can get to a place of forgiveness, you're doing well. 

I like the meme at right a lot because it's so true. I can be feeling really crappy and take my dog for a walk and feel better. Maybe not awesome, but certainly better. Then I can come home and rub her furry belly and feel a little better. 

Hey, it's better than just eating junk food -- another way to deal with uncomfortable feelings. 

Anyway, for anyone reading this who is younger than late 40's, keep this in mind: the moments of clarity are some compensation for getting old. They make life a lot less awful.