In Memoriam: Patricia Goodwin 1951-2022

On the morning of August 2, 2022, Patricia Goodwin passed away peacefully in her sleep at home, surrounded by the family, books and art she so deeply loved. As a noted poet, novelist and journalist, she is best remembered for her prolific online and print publications. Her books include Holy Days, When Two Women Die, Dreamwater, and her latest novel, Low Flying. "A Child's Christmas in Revere," an excerpt from Holy Days, was published in the anthology, Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America. Her books of poetry include Marblehead Moon, Java Love, Atlantis, and Telling Time by Apples. You can view videos of her readings and events on her YouTube channel, PoetryTube.

Her books are available on Amazon both in Kindle and print formats. 

We encourage anyone who wishes to remember Patricia to support her this way and share her work as much as possible. Her full obituary is available on the Eustis & Cornell Funeral Home web site. 

Patricia was a champion of the underprivileged, especially women and girls. She was passionate about nature, especially our precious honeybees. If you’re so inclined, we encourage supporting HAWC (Help for Abused Women & Children), PBS, and any organizations supportive of the arts, honeybees, forests, or the environment. 

To know Patricia was to know the music and movies she loved. Below is just a short list of some of her many favorites she'd watch again and again.

We've also created "Patty's Playlist" on Spotify, featuring her favorite music: U2, Talking Heads, The Doors, Radiohead, Mozart, Van Morrison, The Animals, Santana, George Michael, The Cranberries, Sade, and more. 

The Goodwin family expresses their deepest thanks to the 
Eustis & Cornell Funeral Home, and the Harbor Light Inn, for 
their outstanding support and services.

As we reflect on her incredible life, the Goodwins are grateful for Marblehead more than anything, and its vibrant arts community sustaining her for so much of her life. We hope people remember her as a vibrant, passionate artist, and a creative force whose spirit lives on in her work.

Patricia's Favorite Movies & TV Shows

Room with a View
Perfect Murder
Law & Order: Criminal Intent

• Art
• The Extra Man

Law & Order: SVU
Intelligence (Canadian TV series)
5 Flights Up
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Vicky Christina Barcelona
Annie Hall
Adore
Out of Africa
Sex & The City
Great Expectations (1998)
Cheri
Flashdance

Julia Child Brought Real Food to the Modern World

Julia Child

In the 1960s, a movement began to rekindle quality food, you know, the kind of fresh food that is grown on farms. Michio Kushi came to the United States to teach macrobiotics in the 1950s, but he couldn’t find good enough quality food for his classes. After World War II, the modern world of the United States had embraced technology, mass production and adulterated, processed food, designed in the lab mainly for ease of transport and lengthy storage. In restaurants we had what I call, “the white bucket” fake foods, foods made from mixes provided by corporation headquarters. At home, we had frozen food dinners, Velveeta cheese, American cheese slices, frozen sausages, frozen pizza, cake mixes, instant coffee, I could go on forever listing the faux foods that replaced real foods people used to cook and eat for healthy meals. Even something as simple as an egg had undergone processing that had altered the very nature of an egg. All of these conveniences were a relief from the often hard labor of cooking, but they were not a relief for our overall health.

I still remember the scene in the movie, “Infamous,” in which the writer, cosmopolitan Truman Capote, on a 1959 research trip to Kansas, could not find real cheese. He is standing, lost, in front of a huge display of Velveeta processed cheese, the only cheese in town.

In the movie, "Infamous," Truman Capote 

contemplates the cheese desert in Kansas

Michio Kushi couldn’t find good food so he turned to an import/export business back in Japan, Mitoku. By 1967, he had created his own small grocer called Erewhon (Named after the utopian novel of the same name, Nowhere spelled backwards, it now was everywhere!) that provided fresh vegetables, imported Japanese foods, including sea vegetables and whole grain brown rice, beans from American farmers, fresh sour dough bread, homemade jams and jellies and natural beauty products. A revolution had begun. Countless Mom & Pop health food stores opened, including Autumn Harvest, which saved our lives one freezing winter in Chicago; A New Leaf, where I bought my first macrobiotic cookbook by Eunice Farmilant and  Bread & Circus, a small chain in Massachusetts and who could forget, the indomitable, Trader Joe's. Fifty years later, we also have Whole Foods, a wonderfully monstrous chain of natural food markets!

Similarly, Julia Child, in the early 1940s, in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, while working in the Office of Strategic Services, couldn’t abide the awful food in the barracks, so she and her then, friend Paul, soon to become her husband, ventured out into the city for real fresh food, Asian food.

Paul Child had also spent a good deal of time in Paris where he learned what quality food was. To this day, the United States is not allowed to send our adulterated rBGH dairy to France. By the way, have you EVER SEEN French school lunches? Compared to school lunches in the U.S.? And, while we’re at it, how about the school lunches in Africa? Talk about whole grains! In fact, many of our fake foods, popular and accepted as food in the United States, are banned abroad.

American School Lunch: nothing real here

French School Lunch: real food!

African School Lunch: real food!

In 1963, Julia Child began the first season of her now classic TV show, “The French Chef." Julia was not only cooking with whole, fresh, quality foods, she was cooking on television! She was educating the country mired in artificial foods what real food actually was! Sure, for a good many years, Julia’s meals were considered gourmet - fancy French food - but not all! She also cooked peasant food: good simple stews to be eaten with fresh bread, broiled fish, roasted chicken, simple omelettes, and baked apples for dessert. Along the way, she taught us how to go to the store or farmer’s market and choose fresh meats, fish and vegetables. 

Julia at the market

One of the biggest things Julia accomplished was after the fact of her groundbreaking TV show, that is the interest in real food that in turn created new chefs interested in growing their own organic gardens - chefs like Alice Waters, who, in turn, reached out to young people and children to create organic gardens in schools, to teach children about how food grows, where it comes from, how to cook it, how to make it their own! Now many schools across the country have school gardens! Thank you, Alice! Thank you, Julia! More chefs appeared, chefs like Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Anthony Bourdain, whose enthusiasm for real food reached even more people. 

Chef Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard project

Not exactly a chef, but as the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama began her health program, “Let’s Move,” by encouraging, not only exercise, but school gardens, organic gardens, and organic school lunches. Michelle would surprise students with her visits to their school gardens. She created an organic garden at the White House. 

The First Lady Michelle Obama

encouraging students to learn about food

Michelle Obama also worked hard to do away with “food deserts” in this country by encouraging supermarkets to open in places without fresh food sources. Walgreens and Walmart responded with fresh foods in their stores. Two new Whole Foods were opened, one in Chicago, another in Detroit to fill the need.

Julia created ripples of goodness, far-reaching into the future! When we watch the movies created in her honor, we get a sense of how hard she worked and how long she worked hard! When we watch her on TV, she makes it all seem effortless, but we now know how much resistance Julia received for trying to teach people how to cook! She even paid for the food until the show got its sea legs! Could anyone imagine that when we watch her giggle at her mistakes or moan her appreciation of really good food? “Mmmm!”

Not everyone thanks Michio Kushi for bringing us Erewhon, creating somewhere out of Nowhere. Not everyone remembers what it was like before hummus and whole wheat bread were on every supermarket shelf. When a tuna fish sandwich or a dried up hunk of cod was as close as you could get to a vegetarian meal. Ok, maybe a tiny wilted iceberg salad, if you weren’t that hungry. Thank you, Michio. 

Thank you, Julia! 

©Patricia Goodwin, 2022

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her latest novel is Low Flying, about two women suffering psychologically abusive marriages who find and nurture each other. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

***Disclaimer: The information on this blog is not meant to substitute for medical care. Please consult your physician before beginning any new dietary guidelines. 

“If You Don’t Learn To Love Each Other, Things are Going To Get Much Worse!”

Valiant Thor and his gorgeous entourage

Russia is killing the Ukraine, and the spirits of the rest of us. 

How often do you find the Pope quoting you? Random remarks you spout off in the kitchen or bathroom while listening to “the horror and gore report,” otherwise known as “the news?” One of my personal rants at the news that only my family gets to hear - “I thought we were done with war.” All this business of soldiers and guns and bombs and weeping and bleeding. Then, I heard the Pope say so, recently, at the beginning of Lent, the time of purification before Easter, the resurrection of Jesus Christ - “I thought we were done with war.”

But, I’m paraphrasing - here is what the Pope actually said in his own, more eloquent, words -

“The truth is that ‘never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely.’ We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’ Never again war!”

 

“We are called to love everyone, without exception; at the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable.” 

“On the contrary,” the pope said, “true love for an oppressor means seeking ways to make him cease his oppression; it means stripping him of a power that he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others. Forgiveness does not entail allowing oppressors to keep trampling on their own dignity and that of others, or letting criminals continue their wrongdoing.”

From Pope Francis to aliens - Yes, aliens have a stake in our survival as a planet and a species. 

First, aliens cannot write music. For music, they come to Earth. (That’s a joke. However, it could be true. We clearly have something they don’t; they have a vested interest in keeping earthlings well and functional.) Next, aliens harvest Earth’s force, usually leaving a crop circle behind as evidence. If humans were to disrupt the ki flow of Earth’s energy by nuclear annihilation, aliens might not be able to use the force. That’s a pretty simple breakdown of a process which most people have never heard of; even alien watchers have not figured out why aliens leave crop circles for us to decipher or why aliens come here at all, or if aliens are actually humans from the future. We do know that UFOs appear near nuclear power plants and nuclear weaponry. Warnings? What it all means is - Earth’s force must remain the same! We cannot destroy ourselves!

An over-simplification of Absolute Death. We are flirting with Absolute Death. I do not think our souls can survive nuclear war. If they are matter at all, physical in any way, then our souls will explode and dissipate.  

Elliot on the Red Phone

Mr. Robot, Season 2, Episode 1, final scene: An episode that was crammed full of hacker delights: bar codes to scan, Easter egg doors to open, and some choice low-tech hints that no one noticed. I was watching. This is what I saw: Eliot is in the front hallway of an old rooming house. There is a red phone on the wall. In these old rooming houses, a community phone was in the front hallway; no one had their own phone in their room. The red phone, any child of the Cold War will tell you, sat on the President’s desk and was a direct line to the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, i.e. somewhere important in the world leader vein. The phone rings. Elliot picks it up and says, “Hello?” The voice asks, “Is it really you?” (Now we know Elliot is of extreme importance.) Elliot asks, “Who’s this?” The answer: “Thor. Valiant.” 

Fade to black. I’m shaking on the sofa. Who is getting this? No one. Obviously, someone in the writing department knows their shit. (I tried to comment and tell a writer of an Easter egg article about the low-tech stuff I knew, including the meaning of “red wheelbarrow” on Elliot’s composition notebook - from a poem by William Carlos Williams, about getting back to a simple life, but she fucking hacked the shit out of me to show her appreciation of my efforts. Lucky, I know a few things and I deleted her traps. As well as my comment on her article. Taking my ball and going home, fuck you very much.)

The Red Wheelbarrow

by

William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Who was Valiant Thor?

Here is the unofficial story: 

A Visitor at the Pentagon

On March 16, 1957, a strange craft landed in a farmer’s field in Alexandria, Virginia. Local police arrived on the scene with guns drawn, expecting the worst. They were surprised to find what appeared to be an unarmed man stepping out of the craft. They were even more surprised when the man asked to speak with the President telepathically. It must have convinced them, so they immediately took him to the Pentagon. Over the next few days, the visitor would receive his meeting with the President and a fully furnished apartment deep within the Pentagon.

The Mission of Valiant Thor

According to Valiant Thor, he was sent here by a galactic council upholding the tenants of Jesus who was considered by Thor to be an intergalactic God, Savior of All Life Forms, to convince humanity to shy away from their use of nuclear weapons. Thor, and his group of alien assistants, all in the form of gorgeous human beings, hailed from the nearby planet of Venus. Thor convinced President Eisenhower to create a council against the use of nuclear weapons. However, the committee was repeatedly blocked by members of the CIA and DOD. 

Thor had to leave Earth defeated. His conclusion: Earth is more interested in making money than living in peace.

War and Reparation are BIG BUSINESS! Bigger than any other business. First, government contracts to kill, then government contracts to re-build. Until we break it, humanity is trapped by its leaders in this destructive and meaningless pattern. 

Remember, we always become friends again with our enemies - think Japan. The stupidest exchange ever had to be Hiroshima for Pearl Harbor. Isn’t it so much better to exchange sushi, sake, and technology instead of bombs, death and destruction?

Makes war obsolete.

I haven’t even touched on the constant African wars - the Congo, Nigeria - where men use more low tech weaponry, not any less deadly, to destroy. 

The Pope says we should not allow the oppressor to oppress us, but rather share some other options for him to achieve his goals. Negotiation. Talk. Friendship. There is no need to kill. No need to destroy. 

Or is it simply the desire to show the world one’s POWER? Who will be left to read history? Who will witness your power when the world is gone? Is there any power without a witness?

Virgin Mary

wearing her blue mantel of Peace

One more warning:

Came from Jesus's Mother, the Virgin Mary. Fatima, Portugal, 1917. Three young shepherds, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary that spoke to them and gave them predictions of our fate. She showed the children a terrifying vision of hell.

“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out...When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine... (World War II) and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” 

On 25 January 1938, The New York Times reported "Aurora Borealis Startles Europe; People Flee in Fear, Call Firemen." The celestial display was seen from Canada to Bermuda to Austria to Scotland, and short-wave radio transmissions were shut down for almost 12 hours in Canada.

As a result of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis announced he would consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It didn’t make the news. God has become a dirty word on network TV.

Jesus’s mother warned us: “If you don’t learn to love each other, things are going to get much worse!”

The blue of Mary’s mantel has always represented Peace. 

Let us take up that blue mantel for purely practical reasons.

Peace is Life.

Yes, they killed John Lennon, but they did not kill his message.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2022

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her latest novel is Low Flying, about two women suffering psychologically abusive marriages who find and nurture each other. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

I Cook Because I Eat: Why Can’t Heroines Cook?

 Olivia Benson of Law & Order SVU prepares 

Salade Nicoise for herself and her son. He won't like the olives.  

I don’t understand why liberated heroines can’t cook. We need to eat, therefore, we need to cook. Eating fast food is not the answer. The more time you and your family spend in the kitchen cooking real food, the less time you and your family will spend at the doctor’s office and the hospital.

I'm a 50 year macro, wife and mother who cooks from scratch at least three times a day and has over 80 articles and 7 books to her name, plus I ran my own PR business for 10 years. (I started late in life.) I make it work. Why can't strong women heroines face up to the challenge of feeding themselves and their families?

I’m tired of that old feminist chestnut of “Oh! I can’t cook!” I get it, Simone de Beauvoir! It can be perceived as “endless drudgery and domestic slavery.” Wake up! Every person who told me that they couldn’t cook is - guess what? Dead! One woman, a minister, told me she wouldn’t even butter bread because it was too much like cooking. What do you think happened to her? She dropped dead in her driveway on her way to teach an aerobics class to heart patients.

Wake up! Every person who told me that they "couldn’t cook" is - guess what? Dead! 

Often, I’ll be watching - or trying to watch - a TV show about a female detective when suddenly her kid asks for breakfast or dinner and there’s no food in the house. “What?” she calls from gruesome files of dead victims, “What?” “There’s no food!” the child repeats. “I’ll go shopping after work.” Somehow, we know that’s not going to happen. I lose interest in the show.

Another one asks her son if his girlfriend’s fake breasts can make coffee. I’m thinking, are you seriously telling me you can’t make a cup of coffee for yourself - by yourself? You can solve crimes but you can’t boil water? Again, not going to watch it.

I tried to find one. I Googled TV detectives that cook. Lots of TV detectives. None cooking. I did get The Gourmet Detective. My heart skipped a beat. But, no, she’s the detective, he’s the professional gourmet come to lend a hand in the investigation.

Eliminating those fictional heroines who actually are chefs like Jane Adler (played by Meryl Streep) in It’s Complicated and Kate (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) in No Reservations, I found two who cook - one, Erica Barry, playwright, (played by Diane Keaton) in, aptly named, Something’s Gotta Give. She’s not intimidated by the kitchen. She can whip up breakfast, dinner, snacks, picnics at will or romantic midnight scrambled eggs for two when the electricity goes out. The other is Olivia Benson (played by Mariska Hartigay) of Law & Order Special Victims Unit. Olivia does not consider herself to be a very proficient cook, but she takes time out of her busy crime-solving, victim-soothing job, to bravely go where most TV detectives don’t dare to go, into the kitchen to make dinner when she and her son, Noah are hungry! Wow, what a concept!

I have found a few in real life.

Thinking back over literary history, I realized Emily Dickinson was the family baker. Her father insisted on only eating her bread because he liked it better than any other. Emily loved baking. She made cakes, cookies, candies and puddings. She often made treats for the local children, and because she was so reclusive, she would lower a basket full of cakes from her window to the children. Emily became quite famous in town for her baked goods. It was only after she died that her sister, Lavinia, found almost 2,000 poems that Emily had written, some of them started on the backs of recipes or random kitchen wrapping papers. Emily once said, “People must have puddings” and “Love’s oven is warm.”

Emily Dickinson

“I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, salaratus, etc., with a great deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.” 

                                                                    – Emily Dickinson to Abiah Root, September 25, 1845 (L8)

Emily Brontë

writer, poet, baker

Also, the Brontës - Charlotte was challenged by the kitchen, but Emily was something of a kitchen goddess, it seems. The village prized her bread over that of any other baker. She also cooked mutton as a common staple, turnips, potatoes and apple pudding. Oh, and she gave us the incomparable Wuthering Heights among other works, including lots of poetry. 

Jane Austen knew food.

Jane Austen’s household was humble and crowded with sisters, cousins, nephews, neighbors and friends. Many hands pitched in and Jane displays an intimate knowledge of many dishes in her work, often ascribing certain dishes to certain characters to make a point: “a pyramid of fruit which confronted Elizabeth Bennet at Pemberley…Or of the cold beef eaten by Willoughby on his journey of repentance to see Marianne.” (Maggie Lane) 

Okay, so I found some heroines that cooked and somehow managed at the same time to be superhuman in their work. If artists in real life can feed themselves and their families, why can’t fictional ones?

We all need to cook! Our health and the health of our families and our future as human beings depends on our ability to feed ourselves and keep ourselves well.

Even if you hate to cook, you still need to find a way to make meals successfully. I find that planning meals around brown rice really works for me - brown rice and broiled salmon with broccoli; brown rice and pinto beans with guacamole, tortillas and salad; brown rice and broiled chicken with potatoes and green beans, you get the idea. It’s quick, simple, tasty and nutritious.

Give me heroines who can feed themselves and their families good quality food! Do we have to go all the way back to Nancy Drew? She not only stopped the investigation for meals - she did the dishes too! And, might I add, still got her perp!

P.S. Laura of Garden Answer is a busy, professional gardener, mother and wife who stops work to cook meals for herself and her family; she tries to make a new recipe every week. 

Laura and her son making chicken curry with ingredients from her garden.

Here’s a list of busy professionals who love to cook - stars who cook!

 Also Gwyneth Paltrow and Emily Blunt (stars love her roasted potatoes!)

©Patricia Goodwin, 2022

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her latest novel is Low Flying, about two women suffering psychologically abusive marriages who find and nurture each other. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

***Disclaimer: The information on this blog is not meant to substitute for medical care. Please consult your physician before beginning any new dietary guidelines.