Pixie Dust.... and the raccoons.

Couldn't sleep....... kept thinking about my friend Fran...... knowing that she's no longer here is just so sad. In my mind's eye, I see her cooking, reading, listening to the radio in her kitchen. Fran could take any recipe and duplicate it as if she were a trained chef. Everything she cooked or baked was just so delicious...... such love and care went into everything that came out of her kitchen. And if the recipe called for a stick of butter, then that's what went into the dish.... no scrimping, no paring down, no calorie-counting, no re-writing recipes... which is why everything she made tasted as if Julia Child had been hiding in her kitchen.

When I think of all the time we worked together at the library..... all the books we read... the cookbooks, the craft books, the biographies...... countless titles over the years. And Fran had such a respect for the books and for the library itself...... it was like a treasure-trove to her, all the books that were free for the taking, with just the stipulation that they be brought back when you were done reading them. Those were happy days, happy times, before any sort of cancer was so much as a speck in Fran's universe.

I find myself saying or thinking "Oh Fran" a hundred times a day.... and there are nights, like this one, when I close my eyes and I can see Fran and I sitting at her little round table in the corner of her kitchen, talking and laughing over everything, anything, nothing.


Pixie dust....... we drove up to College Station the other day, and stopped in Half-Price Books. My husband found a book in the business section, its title is "Inside The Magic Kingdom: Seven Keys to Disney's Success," by Tom Connellan. The entire book is about how Disney has created its own special magical world with the 'sprinkling of pixie dust' and time-honored and time-tested traditions of public relations that make each and every guest in their parks feel like everything was created just for them alone. Which, in a sense, it surely was.

The book says that 70% of all Disney guests have been to the parks time and again..... everyone keeps coming back because it truly is "The Happiest Place on Earth," as the Disney road signs will tell you. Everyone smiles, smiles, smiles.... and it's not just a put-on smile, but a genuine smile..... Disney knows that their 'guests' (their word for customers) are the be-all and end-all of everything they do...... and without their guests, DisneyLand and Disney World would just be empty parks filled with colorful rides and attractions.

The Disney managers say that 'pixie dust' is the magic behind Disney....... everyone who works there has the pixie dust spirit, the pixie dust tradition...... and anyone who knows the Disney stories knows that a little bit of pixie dust goes a long way and can fix just about anything. What a nicer world this would be if the Disney-magic could be spread to all corners of the planet. The world outside the Disney parks, on any given day, is filled with less than happy magic.


The raccoons...... we have been putting dry cat food in the cage-trap every night. And every night, between 9:20 and 9:40, the raccoon comes up on the porch, smells the cat food in the trap, and manages to shut the door of the trap without getting inside the cage. That happened twice last night..... we gave up, took the cat food out of there, and left the closed-up cage on the porch.

Tonight.... we tried again. Into the cage went the cat food.... at 9:25, we heard the raccoon on the porch. My husband and I went to the windows in the TV room to watch..... and there was the raccoon, at the back of the cage-trap, trying to put his paws inbetween the wires to get the cat food out. His paws were too big to fit through, so the raccoon started to pull the cage across the porch..... pulling it from the back, so he wouldn't trip the latch that would shut the little door.

We turned on the porch light and went out there before the raccoon had a chance to drag that cage out into the fields. I took the cat food out of the cage, closed up the little door, and let Gatsby outside for the night. Maybe Gatsby will keep the raccoon away from the porch. Depends on what kind of mood Gatsby is in.... he will either run after the raccoon till it goes away, or he'll sit there in one of the chairs and just watch the raccoon as it roams around the porch and the yard. He is such a dramatic cat. "I am the cat, and that's that." (Gatsby's Rule #1.)


Oh well....... the score remains Raccoons 3 - Us 0. We need a smarter trap.... or a dumber raccoon. Or maybe just some pixie dust.