Carrots - and other Good Things to Eat

I love to eat and look forward to every meal each day, and I sure want to be alive for a long time and able to eat what I love. I’ll tell you in this column just what I eat--and why.

One food I have every single day is raw carrots, and I advocate them for you as well, for they are very good for us all. Carrots were apparently first cultivated in Afghanistan in the 10th century or even before, though, as they say on line, they were a little “purple or yellow root with a woody and bitter flavor, resembling nothing of the carrots we know today.” Our carrots, on the other hand were developed by Dutch farmers in the 16th and 17th centuries and are, of course, orange.

Unlike some vegetables and fruits, carrots are available all through the year at a good price. In addition, they are said to help us maintain our vision. It’s interesting that though they have few calories, when I eat them between meals, they make me feel quite full. Because I’m always trying not to gain weight, that’s a big help, for it keeps me from eating more fattening snacks. I read online that Americans eat about twelve pounds of carrots per year, but I eat more than three pounds per week--and I never get tired of them.

I also love all other vegetables, especially fresh broccoli, corn on the cob, peas, spinach and lettuce, and eat at least three different kinds each day. And I eat salad at least once every day, as well.  I realize I’m not unusual in loving fruits, but I truly love every one of them and eat them everyday for breakfast. I especially love bananas, oranges and some of the newer apples such as Gala.

You will probably consider my favorite drinks rather unexciting, for they are simply milk and tea. I drink low-fat milk because of calories, but I certainly don’t mind that it’s “thin.” I’ve drunk milk for 75 years, my mother’s for about a year and then milk in bottles, and still love the taste. I have read that it’s especially good for calcium, and I want to be sure that I get enough of that.

And as for tea, I drink about four cups of regular tea every morning for breakfast and then many decaf cups the rest of the day, not because I prefer it to regular, but in order to sleep well at night. Besides loving it, I drink tea often, for, like carrots, it helps fill me up and therefore keeps me from eating anything else between meals.

I also love all meats, but I just have them at most once a day. And I love eggs, too, and we have scrambled eggs with another of my favorites, cheese, sometimes for dinner.

As for desserts, I’m fortunate that I don’t care if I don’t eat them. On the other hand, one food I really love and eat every day is nuts. They have a lot more calories than my carrots, so I don’t allow myself to eat as many as I would like. But they are also said to be good for us, for as it says on line, they are “Rich in energy, protein, packed with antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and much discussed omega-3 fatty acids.”

I hope you have read all of this column, for all of the foods I’ve mentioned will not only help you keep your weight down, but they’ll also help you live longer and stay in better health.

Farewell to "Cabby" Gallagher

I felt extremely honored to play my violin for the funeral of Caroline “Cabby” Gallagher on March 10th of this year. She had lived here in Battle Creek for many years, and when she died on March 7, she was 98 years old.

Cabby and I had an amazing relationship, for she spent her childhood in Wilmette, Illinois, just a block and a half east of our home. We didn’t know each other back then for she was 23 years older than I, and she had gone away to college and graduate school by the time I was born in 1939. But we felt as though we had sort of known each other even back then because we had attended the same grade school and high school and remembered some of the same wonderful teachers at both schools and even a few neighbors on our street.

The first time I actually met Cabby was up north of Traverse City, where she and her family had a very nice summer cottage just down the street from the cottage of Barbara Woodruff, a dear friend of mine. Then I next saw Cabby at Northpointe, where she lived for quite a while in her 90s. She always went to our Olde Tyme Music concerts as well as going to hear Brooks Grantier, his daughter Marguerite and me when we played recitals there. She also greeted me warmly when I played a number of times alone for the special lunches there.

When Cabby turned 97, she began to have trouble walking and moved down to the nursing home, Sterling House, in the south end of town. She missed me right away, she said, so she requested that I be allowed to go there and play my violin. As it turned out, they didn’t have a piano or organ, so when my friend and partner Brooks Grantier came to play with me, he brought his accordion. Even though it’s not as wonderful for accompanying as a piano or organ, the advantage is that Brooks, who loves to play by ear as much as I do, could walk all around with me, playing his accordion.

Because of all of these meetings and my resulting warm friendship with Cabby, I felt particularly honored to be asked to play for her service at the Congregational Church where she had been a member for many years. As we heard at the funeral service, she was truly an amazing woman who was a teacher and the wife of a fine man who was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. She and her husband were both at the base at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked in early World War II. She and the other women and children were quickly sent back to America without knowing that they would ever see their husbands and fathers again. Fortunately her husband survived, and they were very happy together for 55 years, until he died in 1995.

As Rev. Thomas J. Ott said at the funeral, “She was a person who remained curious and open to new insights, new information, new perspectives, new discoveries all through her life.” He also said he learned that “She was the family grammarian, historian, and analyst of news and current events.”

Battle Creek has lost a true jewel, that’s for sure, and many folks will truly miss her.

A Noteworthy Battle Creek Gentleman

Olen Dean Dygert is an amazing gentleman of 88 years right here in Battle Creek. He has lived in a number of cities, but he has been here for 40 years now and loves our city best.

When he grew up in Indiana, his very young parents had no electricity until he was 10 years old. They lived on a rather basic farm, and his father used horses to do work in the fields. Little Dean was responsible for various jobs, such as milking the cows when he was just nine, and he quickly decided, as a teenager, that he really didn’t want to be a farmer for the rest of his life.

After high school, he joined the Merchant Marines and got assigned to go to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Russia. Next he spent a year in Vienna, Austria. Back in this country, he went to Tri-State University in Indiana, where he graduated in 1951, and from there he got a job designing construction equipment.

He had married while in college, and he and his wife worked in many places, including Indianapolis, Denver, and Peoria. He went on to get a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering in Colorado, and then he worked in still more cities, including St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Lima, Ohio. In addition, he got patents for a number of his inventions and also was a member for over 50 years of the Society of Automotive Engineers.

Dean continued to work, partly at home, until quite recently, and has made the most of living in Battle Creek. He has enough of a problem with his eyes that he can’t drive anymore, so he is especially grateful that this city has buses that can take him most anywhere in town that he wants to go. Also, he and his wife, Joann, love the smaller Episcopal Church when they have worshipped for years.

Dean truly cares about preserving his health as best he can. He walks a couple of miles or more each day and carefully eats only food that is good for him.

The reason I met Dean is that he likes my columns and asked me to read and comment upon the early part of his second book about his family. So I went to their house on Wahwahtaysee to look over the draft. While I was there he got to talking about his very interesting life, and I decided I really would like to do a column about him and his new profession as a writer, which he began at age 86. He said he’s always loved reading and exploring his family’s ancestors, so that is what he has written about.

He also lent me his first book, “Rachel,” which is mostly about Rachel Allen Ewers-Hunt Lowther, his great great grandmother. She was born in 1838, but some of the stories go back even a generation before that. It is amazing how much information he has about a number of relatives who had died before he was born. As he admits, sometimes he filled in some unknown incidents with fiction, but he says that what he added was nevertheless “likely the way it happened.”

Many folks certainly don’t know enough about their ancestors to write about them, and even if they do know quite a bit, they’re unlikely to start doing so at Dean’s age.

I feel honored that Dean wants me to check over his second book, and I look forward to his finishing it.

My Favorite Color

So what is your favorite color? Mine is definitely red, and I’ve read a lot about just what that means. First of all, red is not subtle! I’m not terribly subtle, either, and can’t imagine making dull colors like grey or brown my favorites. Even blue, which is probably my second favorite, just isn’t as appealing for me as red.

I’m not thrilled with some of what I read about red, however. For example, I read in the book “The Dewey Color System” by Dewey Sadka, that although “Red gives the impression of seriousness and dignity, represents heat, fire and rage, [and] it is known to escalate the body's metabolism. Red can also signify passion and love. Red promotes excitement and action. It is a bold color that signifies danger, which is why it's used on stop signs.”

In fact, in some ways, I’d rather be a lover of green, which was my mother’s favorite. As the book says, people who love green, “Are sure to be constant in your ways, persevering, sensible and respectable. You have a good balance. Outspoken, with a love of freedom, those who like green are generally social and live in a good neighborhood, have many friends and belong to social organizations. ... Your social standing, financial position and reputation are all of top importance to you. You constantly seek affirmation of companionship and affection.”

I’d also partly prefer to love blue best, for it “Represents temperature, sky, water and ice. It is the second most powerful color. It obviously represents coolness, mist and shadows. In some applications it can represent peacefulness and calmness. And as pink represents femininity, blue represents masculinity…. Blue is a contemplative color, meaning intelligence and strength. It is one of the most politically correct colors there is with no negative connotations of it anywhere on the globe.”

Yellow isn’t at all a favorite of mine, but, as the “Basic Psychology” people say, “Yellow, the color nearest to ‘light’ leaves a warm and satisfying impression, lively and stimulating and in many cultures symbolizes deity…. Yellow birds, flowers and skies are sure to be eye-catchers just because of the way the mind and eye works!”

The colors I truly don’t care for are orange and purple, and yet I read that “Orange is symbolic of endurance, strength and ambition,” and “Purple symbolizes royalty and dignity.”

Brown, which is certainly not exciting to me, is said to be “useful in balancing out stronger colors, and because it is one of the most predominant hues in nature, it gives a sense of familiarity. Light brown confers genuineness while dark brown is reminiscent of fine wood and leather.”

Even gray, surprisingly, is referred to as the color "around which creative people are most creative” and can even “enhance and intensify any other color it surrounds.”

And as for black, though it’s not exciting, like many bright colors, “It is associated with elegance and class (black-tie affair).” And, along with red, it is my favorite color to wear. My hair is almost white but my eyes are almost black, and therefore black seems to bring out contrasting colors best on me.

Finally, however, we surely would not want a rainbow to have fewer colors, and we wouldn’t want painters to feel they couldn’t use any of the hundreds of possible color types in their creations.

Maybe the best approach, therefore, is my sweetheart’s, which is simply to love all colors as important parts of our beautiful world and be thankful for each of them.

The Island of Long Life

My sweetheart and I plan to marry when I’m 100 and he’s 107½. If we stay here in America, however, we might not still be alive in 2039, so maybe we should move to a Greek island called Ikaria which is near the coast of Turkey. That’s because people there live longer than those in most any other place in the world.

There are almost 10,000 Greek nationalists there, and they are said to reach 90 two and a half times as often as Americans. Of course they can still get diseases such as cancer, but for a number of reasons, they aren’t as apt to die from sickness as soon as the rest of us. For one thing, they eat less meat than most of us do. Instead, they eat a number of their island’s herbs which have strong antioxidant properties.

Folks in general also have a less stressful pattern. They get up later in the morning than we do, and they regularly take naps. Then in the evening they get together, drink wine, and have fun with their friends before a rather late bedtime. Also, they don’t care nearly as much as we do about the exact time for anything.  “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here,” said Dr. Ilias Leriadis, one of the island’s few physicians. “When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.” In addition, approximately 80 percent of older folks still have sex regularly, and that is also said to prolong life.

According to a book by Dan Buettner called “The Blue Zones,” a man named Stamatis Moraitis had originally come from Ikaria to this country in 1943, at age 27. He eventually contracted lung cancer in 1976 and was told he wouldn’t even live for another year. When he learned that, he decided to take his wife back to his old country so that he could be buried there. He ended up surviving, however, for over 35 more years. He was 98 when he finally died, and his wife lived almost as long as he did.

Moraitis was of course very glad that he had moved back to Ikaria, and though he did come back to this country 25 years later to see doctors here, he announced, upon going back, that unlike him, all of his old American doctors had already died.

Apparently long-living isn’t new, either, on Ikaria.  In the 17th century, Joseph Georgirenes, the bishop of Ikaria, wrote, “The most commendable thing on this island, is their air and water, both so healthful that people are very long-lived, it being an ordinary thing to see persons in it of 100 years of age.”

The author Dan Buettner said on a TED talk that we have more control over how healthy we remain and long we live than we realize.  As he put it,  “Scientific studies suggest that only about 25 percent of how long we live is dictated by genes. The other 75 percent is determined by our lifestyles and the everyday choices we make.” By working with, rather than against, our biology, “we could add at least ten good years and suffer a fraction of the diseases that kill us prematurely.”

Though I truly doubt that Andrew and I will move to Ikaria, we certainly can try to make all efforts to survive until sometime after December 3, 2039. And that’s what counts!