Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 23, 1993 TAG: 9301230035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MAGAZINES HAVE THE RECIPE FOR EMOTIONAL BALANCE
When I begin to feel happier than a person should be, I try to keep myself emotionally balanced by reading one of those so-called women's magazines.These magazines take you from euphoria to thoughts of universal and personal doom in a very short time.
There was this page with a wonderful recipe for ginger-glazed beets, and a few pages later, I was reading about all these diseases, many of them fatal or disfiguring.
I pause here to make it clear that I don't think I would care for ginger-glazed beets.
Not long after the ginger-glazed beets recipe, there was this multiple choice test on what to do when your child (a) is in a car wreck; (b) is unconscious after having been dragged from a swimming pool; (c) is unconscious after falling out of a tree; (d) turns blue after swallowing a toy.
There are other life-threatening, or already fatal, situations, but I don't want to burden you too much.
Incidentally, the answer to the swimming pool question is to ask the kid if he or she can hear you. Me? I'd call 911.
I suspect that the husband of the young mother who read that piece came home and asked his wife:
"Where's daddy's little girl?"
And she says:
"If you mean Cremona, I've chained her to the bedpost for her own good. You got no idea of the number of ways kids can kill themselves these days."
There is an advertisement that reminds older women, whose children probably have escaped varied ways of destruction, that they probably have osteoporosis.
Then I read about cataracts, high blood pressure and, somewhat oddly, I thought, the boosting of fertility after the age of 40.
You would have been interested, I'm sure, in the color picture showing the effects of high blood pressure on the human eyeball.
Then there was an article on this young girl who was being stalked in her own neighborhood. If Cremona's mama read that one, the poor kid will get out of her bedroom when she's 35.
There was more on some diseases I'd just as soon not mention and, just to make sure you're ready to jump off the Walnut Street Bridge there is a novel that more or less begins like this:
"Wilhelmina watched the snow from the bedroom window and wondered where Jeremy was. Poor Jeremy. He had asked for her hand and then run very fast when her father had gotten out the horse whip before Christmas dinner."
You know what? I think I'm going to try this recipe for orange-cardamom sweet bread. I don't care whether it goes with ginger-glazed beets or not.