June 16, 1938 - February 22, 2010
Welcome to Milliron Monday where every Monday we celebrate the legacy of Pete Smith, D.V.M., and Milliron: Abbott “Pete” Smith, D.V.M. The Biography (Monday Creek Publishing 2017). A graduate of Colorado State University and a well-known veterinarian in southeast Ohio, Dr. Smith continues to motivate and inspire.
This month we remember Dr. Smith's mother, Elizabeth Cooper Saunders Smith. "Betty" was a prolific writer, writing for several publications at different times throughout her lifetime. An excerpt from her obituary...
Elizabeth was a longtime member of the Millbrook Garden Club for which she wrote their newsletter for many years. She also wrote a column, My Side of the Street, for the Millbrook Round Table for 12 years. In 1996, the family moved Abbott, overtaken by Parkinson's and related medical conditions, to Farmington to reside at Edgewood Manor until his death in 1998. After selling their Millbrook home, Elizabeth moved to Kingfield in 1996 to live with her daughter Susan. In addition to a short stint writing a column for the local (Kingfield, Maine) paper, The Irregular.
I have two different articles from Betty's My Side of the Street to share with you - one this week and one next week. Still relevant today, her writing embraces her own personal journey, her family, and her love of books...
Spoiled
November 6, 1997
The most depressing book that I have seen recently is titled "Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire." The author, Nicols Fox, must have been weaned upon Upton Sinclair or someone equally pessimistic. Or maybe she just takes to heart all the bad news that keeps cropping up on radio and television, making us wonder just what there is that we can eat without danger of immediate demise.
Vegetables, seafood, beef, chicken and eggs - there seems to be nothing safe. Perhaps I had something when I decided that oysters should always be accompanied by martinis ... But chickens seem to be her prime focus. We are all familiar with E.coli by now, but another even more violent bacterium, campylobacter, is now getting national attention. At the head of a chapter on that, she quotes E.B. White's letter to James Thurber: "I don't know which is most discouraging, literature or chickens." Of course he didn't know about this problem!
News of campylobacter may be as destructive to poultry producers as the
spray Alar, which almost put apple growers out of business in 1980. As with E.coli, the solution seems to be thorough cooking. And the same is true of other foods she talks about. Fiddleheads, which grow wild and should be free of problems, can be dangerous. Many restaurants and home cooks like vegetables al dente. Nicols Fox tells of one chef who served very lightly cooked fiddleheads, and 31 people became violently ill. Another restaurant chef used more conventional methods and no one suffered ill effects. This can apply to many wild foods. Pokeweed, for example, must be cooked in several waters, which are then thrown out. Young pokeweed tastes like asparagus.
My medic son [Dr. Pete Smith, D.V.M.] used to worry about his mother's propensity for eating wild plants, but with Euell Gibbons' advice I survived!
I don't plan to finish this book soon, but will treat it like a wild plant, thoroughly cooking it. One must wonder how it is that there are so many of us still alive. Such news does have a tendency to turn us into vegetarians, however.
Turning to more positive stuff, I enjoy a little paperback titled "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" ... and it's all small stuff. This does not deal with food per se, but rather with how one handles the day-to-day problems, "simple ways to keep little things from taking over your life." The author, Richard Carlson, is a Ph.D. who has written other self-help books. Taken seriously, this one should supplant a lot of therapists who try to handle similar problems in a much slower and more expensive way. Others will disagree!
A chapter that has a great deal of merit is one advising us to be better listeners. We should, says Mr. Carlson, let people finish what they are saying without interrupting with some thought of our own. He describes being in a crowded restaurant where nearby people were conversing, but in which each person was trying to get his own ideas across. He suggests waiting until the other person is through talking. Most of us have tried this, but wondered if we could ever get a word in. We all feel we have to share our bright ideas.
In my distant past I recall the teacher "parsing" sentences, showing the difference between simple and compound sentences. She would draw a line on the board, then draw other lines off at an angle, indicating an addition to the basic sentence. We wonder how that would work with a sentence by someone like William Faulkner. We might never get to the end of the original thought. One approach is simple to take it as it comes, as one would sit a canter, and enjoy the ride.
"Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" is a marvelous little book, perhaps one we should read a bit of every day, One A Day mental vitamins! This way we can survive problems as they come along, and decide that they just weren't that serious after all.
Have a great week ahead.
Connect with Gina
Through captivating, powerful, and emotional anecdotes, we celebrate the life of Dr. Abbott P. Smith. His biography takes the reader from smiles to laughter to empathy and tears. Dr. Smith gave us compelling lessons learned from animals; the role animals play in the human condition, the joy of loving an animal, and the awe of their spirituality. A tender and profound look into the life of a skilled veterinarian.
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