Ketchup?

Okay, I'm done now you can read it.

Fishing Guy reminds me that I have big unfinished business.

No, I don't think ketchup would taste good on these. What was it really?

Remember my clues? It was the hottest days of the year, I didn't say then but I'll say now, I was having this for a snack in the afternoon.

Remember I said in my clues that Marcus Welby MD used to eat a version of these at the end of every show? Only it was supposed to be something else, and supposedly the character had this particular food, that my food represented, every evening.

But it wasn't supposed to be cookie dough as some suggested this might be.

And I think it would be a little weird if Marcus Welby MD had had a plate of blue cheese every night.

My dad watched every week and every week Marcus Welby (well maybe not every week but often enough that it became a trivia question) would end the show eating an ice cream cone.

Do you think this food looked like ice cream maybe?

Then my dad and mom went to visit my sister after she got married and move to Hollywood. (well Van Nuys or Sherman Oaks, or was it... krumb I do not know the LA area that well at all but when he went down there..) and they visited the studios. My dad answered the tour guides trivia question of what was it really that Marcus Welby MD was eating. He was supposed to be eating an ice cream cone. But ice cream would melt under the bright lights of Hollywood. So they put mashed potatoes in his cone.


So Anne Pants, who had actually been to dinner the night we had the blue potatoes from our garden, mashed up with sour cream, was the only one who guessed.

I didn't plant blue potatoes this year, they came up on their own. I didn't even plant them the year before. They are hard little buggers to see in the soil, so if I have any volunteer potatoes come up I most certainly always have some of my old blues come up.

You know these potatoes bring another subject up. How you can be related to someone and be nothing like them. My Brugmansia are related to the potato, tomato, peppers, they all come from the Solanaceae, family. But they don't look a thing alike.

Datura is also from the solanaceae family and it does look a lot like my Brugs, in fact they both have the same common name Angel's Trumpet, but they are different plants. How different you might ask? Brugs become woody and Dats stay herbacious, Brugs' flowers hang down and Dat's trumpet like flower are upright. But trust me Brugs and Dat are way more similar than Brugs and potatoes.

I'm not similar at all to my siblings, well my girls say that sometimes I sound like my sisters after I have talked to them on the phone. But then they say that I start to talk like whomever I am around. Gee, maybe I'm not real after all just a cheap imitation of everyone else. They are all potatoes and tomatoes, I'm probably a Brug, needy, needy, needy.

But really my family, my sibling units, all like to hang out together, they have a lot of things in common. 'Bout the only thing I have in common with them is that I am human and we had the same parents. In spite of what they said all those years I am quite certain that I was not adopted. Familial traits are harder to pick out between my siblings and myself but my middle sister's only child looks just like me. Poor guy. Well actually I'm sure "our" looks look better on a guy than me.

I remember when my 4-Hers were over the same day that my nephew had come out for a visit, a couple of them came running into the house to say, "Mrs. Vick, Lanny, your nephew looks just like you!"

My daughters go places and people know right away that they are sisters, especially the oldest and the third and the second oldest and the youngest, I only had two molds for my children. But when I was growing up no one made that comment about me and what ever sibling I was with.

Not only do I not look like them, we don't think the same, raise our children the same, or desire similar things in life. You could say that it is odd since we came from the same parents. But not really, like my oldest brother pointed out after my father died, we didn't really have the same father. Well actually my brother stopped me from telling a story about my father as we all sat around the dinner table and flat out said that I did not know my dad. But I got his meaning. We knew our parents to be very different people.

Aren't you a different person from the one you were ten, fifteen years ago? I was raised by different people. My brother only knew my mom to be tired and pregnant (she had five children after him). I knew her to be a career mom, always gone, even for entire summers, either teaching or going to college. We had very different parents. So it isn't that odd that I have nothing in common with my family, my siblings that is.

And even more so I am glad that these last fifteen years since my mom died they chose not to spend a lot of time with me. My life used to be way more influenced by them. In typical youngest of the family fashion, I tried very hard to be more like them and take on their perspective. But when my mom died I had already been pulling way, not necessarily by choice, the only time they chose to spend time with me was when my mother arranged it or when I managed to beg to tag along. Like my brother-in-law once said when I asked if my girls and I could go to the zoo with them when they came up from Portland to visit my mom, they had done the little kid stuff, (their youngest was two years older than my oldest and I had two or three more by then and the brother that they were meeting up with at the zoo also had "older" children) and they didn't want to do it, little kids, still.

But it really is okay. I have a far deeper relationship that I would not have had if I had forced them to stay close to me. My relationship to God had already started on its turn around by the time my father died in '82. When my mom died I don't suppose that my siblings were very aware of my faith, they just knew I was weird, I didn't send my girls to school and I was weird. These days, after a few of them came to my daughters' weddings and the few things I do say and the things I don't do, I am sure that they know that a lot of my weirdness is tied up with my "over-the-top" thing with God.

My one brother occasionally calls, won't come to any of my girls' weddings but he occasionally calls. He called on Christmas once and launched into how he thinks Jesus is a load of ... well you can imagine what he said. I never said anything to him directly about Jesus or Christmas, and not in the five seconds of the phone call prior to his anti Jesus and God tiraid. Trust me I already knew what my siblings thought of my opinion on anything, that is if they actually heard me talking.

I am much happier (understatement of the year) with the relationship I do have with God than struggling though a relationship with them. Or trying to balance my relationship with God and my influence from them. Call me weak, not being able to be around them and follow God closely, but I can't, I am. Or at least I couldn't.

And who knows, aside from the brother who actually says he thinks Jesus is a pile of ..., my other siblings may have closet relationships with God, whenever I have been to my sisters' houses around Christmas they always have a Nativity set out. It is just, if they do, like they used to when we were all young, they hide it well now, really really well.

But then I could well imagine them sitting in a chair or two at any number of cultural Christian churches especially a church where they could be lost in the numbers, where the pastors are hardly aware of what the majority of their congregants think or believe, where the pastor just hopes that most of them are listening.

Yeah, most of my siblings would fit in just fine at any one of our many "churches".