Life expectancy for the average male is 75 years. I wish I had not have looked that up. However, the good news is that this week I have passed the average!

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to cover thousands of events and meet thousands of great folks and loved it all. And I know, in meeting so many people in my 70+ years, I’ve had an easy life, relatively speaking.

Many people have had hard lives and have had to overcome much adversity to bring peace and happiness into their world. I’ve had a lot of things go my way for one reason or another. A great family, great friends, perfect grandchildren, a loving and forgiving Savior. I could not ask for more.

At my age, I sometimes embellish some of my stories that I tell my grandkids. Fact is, I was an average student in school, but the grandkids maybe don’t need to know that. I want to be an inspiration to them. And my grades were rather uninspiring. I guess I’ll just have to use selective memory when I write my book.

—CC—

As I prepare to celebrate another birthday (March 17th), I find myself continually looking for new ways to irritate my children. With that in mind, I want to share the following sent to me by one of our readers . . .

12 Ways to Be Cantankerous

1. Decide you’re tired of keeping it all in, and from now on you’re going to tell everyone how you really feel. Then tell ‘em.

2. If it walks, talks, or moves – blame it. 3. In the company of your adult children, repeat no family story less than 50 years old, preferably one that illustrates how insightful and smart you’ve always been as opposed to the insensitive boors you grew up with.

4. To any advice you know you should take but you don’t want to hear, simply say, “You just don’t understand”, and stand your ground. Adamantly.

5. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, call it an orangutan and insist you’re right. Adamantly.

6. Don’t let the fact you haven’t heard the question stop you from answering it in no uncertain terms.

7. Sometime during every family celebration, announce that you probably won’t be around for the next one, then gaze wistfully into the distance.

8. In the presence of your visitors, complain that you never have any visitors.

9. Within earshot of the person who drives you to and from your doctors’ appointments, inform others that no one ever does anything for you.

10. Never settle for a simple request when an angry rant will do.

11. When you receive a gift, put it away and explain to the sender that you’re “saving it for good.”

12. If they don’t laugh at your jokes, it’s because they don’t have a sense of humor, and it’s high time you point this out (see tip #1).

Some of these I had not thought of but certainly plan to use them in the near future.

—CC—

Do you want more happiness in your life? If so, read more newspapers!

A recent study of more than 45,000 adults linked that practice

to higher levels of happiness, while watching lots of TV correlated with lower happiness levels.

—CC—

Daylight Saving Time has returned, and I don’t like it. Never have . . . Never will. It saves nothing and screws up everything.

It is hard enough to get children ready for school in normal time. Trying to get them ready an hour earlier is almost impossible.

Many years ago, an Indian friend of mine said of Daylight-Saving Time . . . “Only a white man could take a blanket, cut off one end of it, sew what they had cut off to the other end and believe that somehow they had made the blanket longer.”

Hats off to Arizona who refused to buy into this nonsense.

—CC—

My mom’s meatloaf was my 

favorite meal. She knew that is what I wanted each year for my birthday meal, along with mashed potatoes and brown beans. The dessert had to be chocolate cake.

Carl Zebrowski wrote an article on meatloaf that I really enjoyed . . .

Americans have always loved their meat. But compared to starches, vegetables, and fruits, meat is expensive. And sometimes it’s hard to come by. Those who lived through the Depression and World War II knew these truths well.

What Americans wanted in the early forties was more meat. But with beef and pork going to feed hungry fighting forces, more meat wasn’t what they got. So, they had to make do with what they had. When dinnertime came, that meant either going without meat altogether or getting the most out of the limited amount of meat that was available. In the latter case, one tried and true trick of the trade was that all-American dish every child of the war and postwar years remembers well: meatloaf.

Meatloaf – a blend of ground meat with starchy and other filler ingredients and flavorings – was no 20th century invention. It’s been around since ancient times. Roman feasts featured patties formed of hand-minced meat mixed with wine-soaked bread, spices, and pine nuts. In the 4th or 5th century, Apicius, a book of recipes named for the 1st century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius and compiled by an unknown author, contained instructions for preparing just such a dish.

This culinary tradition continued into the Middle Ages in Europe. When meat trimmings were left over from dinner, the Cook might mix them with fruit and nuts to stretch them into another 

meal (and maybe to mask any off flavors that had settled in as the scraps crept closer to spoilage). In 18th century France, cooks challenged by limited resources chopped up organ meat and built up a dish by alternating layers of the resulting mash with layers of gelatin made by boiling down animal bones and tissue.

The American variety of meatloaf was a creation of the late 19th century, a take on the Pennsylvania Dutch loaf of spiced pork scraps, corn meal and flour that’s known as scrapple. But it wasn’t that popular at the time. Mincing the meat was hard work, a tiring chopping job done with a pair of curved knives. Commercial meat grinders, which arrived about this time, might have solved the problem, but people worried that they didn’t know for sure what was in pre-ground meat. The 1906 Meat Inspection Act eased their fears a bit, but even then, ground meat didn’t become a kitchen staple until inexpensive and easy-to-operate home meat grinders became widely available shortly after that. Then meatloaf was suddenly everywhere. In 1918, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook included a handful or recipes.

A decade later came the Great Depression. With jobless rates soaring, many families couldn’t afford to put meat on the table – at least not much of it, and never the prime cuts that stood well on their own. Home cooks rediscovered meatloaf for its ability to make meat go farther. After the Pearl Harbor attack pulled America into World War II and women joined the work force, they no longer had time to prepare fancy dinners. Meanwhile, meat became harder to find, and government rationing kept family cooks from buying as much as they needed, even as wartime jobs gave them enough money to afford it. There as meatloaf again.

A wartime meatloaf recipe under the catchy name Vitality Loaf appeared in some publications along with a printed pep talk touting its ability to keep the wartime family healthy. The Wine Advisory Board, a US trade association, promoted an ostensibly upscale version in a 1944 magazine ad: “If you’ll make your meat loaf with a 

little red table wine, you’ll find it becomes banquet fare.”

By the time the war ended, meatloaf, served with sides like mashed potatoes and carrots, was a regular on the American dinner table. President Harry Truman said meatloaf topped with tomato 1.66” X 5.9” sauce was his favorite. The popularity of meatloaf only continued to grow, and with the boom in cars and then roadside diners, it went on to become the dish of the fifties. And it never went away.

—CC—

Speaking of meatloaf . . . Shortly after they were married, Heather said to Mark, “The two best things I cook are meatloaf and apple dumplings.”

Mark sheepishly replied, “Um, which one is this?”