Mutual Saves

Has anyone ever rescued you, figuratively or literally?

So far, in my life, I haven’t been pulled from a burning car, talked down from a literal ledge, or required CPR. I have been blessed to not require having had my actual life saved in such a dramatic fashion.

That being said, I realize that Jonas Salk and any of the other medical researchers who have contributed to developing vaccines may have very well saved my literal life and I have been blissfully unaware. Nowadays, the researchers who have developed the Covid vaccine may be added to that list. With over half of a million people having died from Covid, the countless others who still suffer from long-term problems, and the numbers increasing daily, this vaccine is one that I can presently appreciate and look forward to receiving. I believe that it may very well save countless lives, perhaps mine included.

Of course, my parents and all of the adults in my life who have taught me to not cross the street without looking, to not leave open flames unattended, to not eat poke berries… have all also probably contributed to rescuing my life in some literal way. The folks who have designed our modern safety features very well may have saved my butt without me even recognizing it also.

While many folks may have contributed to saving my literal life in some way, I want to write about someone else, or, more accurately, a group of someones who has rescued me in a more figurative manner.

Back in 2009, a tornado came close to destroying the home of my parents. Thankfully, my parents and my niece were unscathed and, for the most part, their actual home was spared. However, I noted how close we came to losing all of the family photos that we had collected over the years.

Some photos were old family photos and had been passed down from other family members. Some were school photos or snapshots that had been tucked inside Christmas cards before being put in the mail. Others had been taken by my parents and other family members. Moments in time were captured on film; pictures of my brother and I as children, my grandparents when they were alive, the smile of my sweet great-grandmother Granny. I thought about how close we had come to losing these treasures and I was determined to make sure that that never happened.

I knew that there was a way to scan photos onto a computer so that even if an original photo was lost, the image could be saved. I was determined to learn how to do this. I got a laptop and a scanner and with much help from family, this severely tech-challenged lady learned how to save our family photos.

Scanning all of these photos made me wonder about the folks that were pictured. Several of those folks were people that I had never met. They had passed away before I was even born. I began to wonder about who they were, how they were related to me, what their lives had been like. Some of the pictures were of folks no one remembered. No one could say who they were and this saddened me. Mom would tell me that a certain picture was of Uncle John and it wasn’t the Uncle John or the Uncle Johnnie that I was familiar with. This made me curious about who this Uncle John was.

                                                                      Mom's Family

So all of this curiosity led me to get a subscription to Ancestry and getting a subscription to Ancestry has only served to provide more family members for me to be curious about. It has started a vicious cycle.

As I have learned about my family, I have seen what amazing people I come from. For the most part; they had no claim to fame, they possessed no great wealth, they weren’t drop-dead gorgeous. They were ordinary hard-working, tenacious, ingenious, loving people who deserve to be remembered.

Some folks are “called” to preach, to teach, to enter a convent… I began to feel a calling to find out as much about my family history as possible and to share and preserve that history.

I researched on Ancestry. I talked to family members, trying to get them to share their memories and stories with me. I have pestered my parents for information on how they did things back in the day. I have visited family with my laptop and scanner so that I could save their family photos too. I began a family Facebook group so that I could share it all with family and hoped that family would share their stories and photos also.

                                                                           Dad's Family

So for nearly a dozen years, I have been researching, writing stories, preserving and sharing family history. Ironically, as I have been trying to rescue my family’s history, my family’s history has been rescuing me. It has rescued me from boredom and more importantly, it has given me a sense of purpose. My three children have all grown up into fine young adults and don’t need me anymore. Trying to save my family’s history has given me a new purpose in life. Not only am I trying to honor past family members by recognizing their history, but I am hopefully giving a gift to my children, my granddaughter, and future generations. They are little knuckleheads now and aren’t interested in family history but I used to be a little knucklehead too. I hope that one day they will grow out of their knucklehead phase just like I did. When they do, they can read the stories and memories that have been shared with me and by me. Perhaps, then, they will appreciate the family history that I have tried to preserve.

So, my ancestors and I are having a symbiotic relationship. While I am trying to save them, they are in turn saving me!

Raindrops on Roses and Gravy on Biscuits

Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that food just does not taste as good as it used to taste. I can recall as a child, Dad, Uncle Bug or one of the boys would bring home a watermelon from a roadside stand or a cold gallon jug of root beer from the root beer stand up the road. We would all sit on Aunt Alta’s porch on Calumet and enjoy that melon and that root beer and they seemed to be the nectar of the gods! Now, I taste a piece of watermelon or take a sip of cold root beer and they pale in comparison to my memories.

The fruits, vegetables, and meats are just not as satisfying as those of the past. Of course, back in the day, much of that food was raised by Dad and Mom, Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Bug and Aunt Alta, Uncle John and Aunt Hortense. Those foods were grown by the consumer and without added chemicals and preservatives and were picked at the peak of perfection. The true taste of the food could shine through. Still, even allowing a handicap for this, the tastes of my childhood are lofty goals that the tastes of adulthood seem doomed to never reach.

I have come to the conclusion that perhaps it was not the food that was that much better than the same food available today. I have come to the conclusion that the tastes of my childhood were so much better because of the beautiful loved ones present while enjoying them. None of the perfect seasoning blends in the world can compete with the flavor boost that the presence of those loved ones added.

When I have my watermelon or root beer today, I cannot enjoy it on Aunt Alta’s porch. I cannot watch sweet Granny pierce the rind of that melon with her huge butcher knife to slice it and pass it out. I cannot hold out my glass to be filled from the gallon jug by Uncle Bug. I cannot hear Denny and Dale teasing Kookie about something silly. I cannot watch Uncle Johnnie upturn his glass enjoying that last drop of sweetness. Most of them are gone now. They now live in the attic of my mind right next to the tastes of my youth.

So, it seems to me that food is not just a taste thing to me. It is more about the family that that food brings to mind that makes it enjoyable. Heck, I can’t even stand some foods, like liver and onions. I remember Mom frying liver and onions when I was young. It smelled so good but I knew how that liver looked prior to frying and I could not even bring myself to taste it. My brother David loved it though and so when I think of liver and onions, I have bittersweet memories of my brother.

As far as recipes go, my family has been filled to bursting with wonderful cooks who for the most part did not use them. Those wonderful cooks did not happen overnight. They helped their mothers in the kitchen. Those mothers had years of experience that was built upon the years of experience of their mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers… Those cooks didn’t grab a cookbook to follow instructions on making biscuits or cooking a pot of soup beans. For the most part, they didn’t even carefully measure ingredients. They may have put in so many scoops of flour or a kitchen spoonful of baking powder, using their years of experience to eyeball the amounts. Perhaps, there is a kind of cooking memory like muscle memory that becomes ingrained in our brains. Perhaps, there is even a kind of ancestral cooking memory that is passed down generation to generation that makes mixing up a batch of biscuits or a skillet of cornbread almost second nature in some families?

 

                      Three generations making biscuits, a fourth generation photographing it.

As far as favorite recipes, I don’t have many. There are some things that I love. I love sweets, which, I believe may be an ancestral sweet-loving memory from my Smith family. Most of my dad’s family loved/love their sweets. Uncle Dale used to put so much sugar in his coffee that it must have been like drinking syrup. Dad and Uncle Wallace used to walk miles over a mountain ridge to go to a store to buy enough sugar to make fudge. I do love my fudge recipe. I never eat fudge but I will make Uncle Wallace a batch of peanut butter fudge when I know that I will see him. I don’t eat the fudge but I sooo enjoy the joy that it brings to Uncle Wallace to be able to eat it. I make a Mocha torte that is a similar recipe. I don’t really care for it, but it sure gives several family members enjoyment and I love that!

 

                                                    Uncle Wallace "licking' the fudge pot.

Most of the foods that I love are simple foods like pinto beans, great Northern beans, green beans, cornbread, homegrown mustard greens, potatoes cooked just about any way under the sun, fried corn, biscuits, gravy, fried tenderloin, fried apples, homemade potato salad, Mom’s fried chicken,… I imagine that my ancestors for centuries have made most of the things that I love and I call those foods ancestor foods. When I enjoy them, I imagine all of the hard-working and loving hands of family members that have prepared them over the centuries. Call me crazy but a lowly pinto bean links me to folks long gone that I have never even had the pleasure of meeting.

 

 

I suppose that we use recipes to make our sweet treats more than anything else. In spite of loving them, we don’t make them often enough to make them without a recipe. German chocolate cake is one of my personal favorite sweets. Dried apple stack cake, caramel apples, and popcorn balls made with sorghum are more favorites.

My Grandma Smith made dried apple stack cake. Her daughter Hortense made it also and used to take it to our reunions. Now, Mom makes it. Here is our family stack cake recipe as passed down from Aunt Hortense:

Old Fashioned Apple Stack Cake
4 ½ cups flour 

1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp soda 

2 eggs
3 tsp ginger

¾ cup sorghum
1 tsp salt ¾ cup buttermilk
1 cup shortening

Sift flour with soda, salt, and ginger. Cream shortening. Add sugar gradually and beat well. Blend in eggs. Add sorghum and beat. Add dry ingredients with milk and beat well until smooth. Chill dough 3 hours. Divide dough into 5 or 6 parts. Use a well floured board to roll out dough and pat into greased pans. Put fork holes in top of each layer. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until done. Cool in pan 5 min before removing. Cover with dried apple filling (below). Do not put on top layer.

Dried Apple Filling for Stack Cake

1 lb dried apples.

1 cup brown sugar

½ cup white sugar.

½ tsp allspice

½ tsp cloves

3 tsp cinnamon

Wash the dried apples. Cover with water and cook until tender. Mash thoroughly. Add the sugars and spices. Cool before spreading. Put filling on top of layers. Do not put on top layer. Stack layers.

 

Popcorn balls have been made by generations of my family too. My ancestors usually had popcorn and sorghum on hand and they knew that mixing the two resulted in a bit of heaven on earth. This is a version of popcorn “balls” that I make into bars:

Popcorn Bars

Pop four separate batches of popcorn using a nearly full six -ounce yogurt cup of corn each time. Sift through the corn after it is popped to get out any unpopped or partially popped grains. We have to take care of our teeth!

Put the popped corn into three large containers, you need stirring room and set them aside. Also, get two to three shallow cooking sheets ready for the popcorn bar mixture by spraying with cooking spray. I place a piece of wax paper on the sprayed surface so that the paper is greased too and doesn’t stick to the bar mixture.

After the corn is popped, mix equal parts, or 2 cups each, of brown sugar and sorghum in a good-sized saucepan. Use a bigger pan than you think you need because it will expand quite a bit. Heat the mixture over medium heat stirring constantly until a bit dropped into a cup of cold water balls together in a sticky mass. Then take it off the heat. Cooking time is probably about five-plus minutes.

After removing from the heat, add a heaping spoon of soda into the sorghum/brown sugar mixture and stir it in well. This is when the mixture expands quite a bit. Then pour the mixture over the three mixing pans with popcorn. At this time, have stirring help handy as you need to stir the sorghum into the popcorn before it cools too much to mix. Stir the sorghum into the popcorn until it is mixed well.

Next, pick the greased wax paper up from the prepared pans and pour some of the mixture into each of the waiting pans. Put the wax paper on top of the popcorn mixture and pack it down into the pan good. After cooling, slice into squares. If you like, you can butter your hands and form the sorghum/popcorn mixture into balls instead of putting it into pans.

 

 

As I sit here thinking about what I have written, I have begun to see a bit of folly in my ways. I think that the reason that foods just don’t taste as good today as they used to is because of the absence of loved ones who aren’t still here to enjoy them with me. Then I think about all of the new loved ones that I enjoy meals with now that weren’t there back then; my husband, my children, my granddaughter, my niece, my in-laws. I think of all of those beautiful loved ones that I have present now and I have to smile. I know that ten years in the future, I will be looking back to today and wistfully think that food just doesn’t taste like it did back then!

And to end this rambling mess, here is a silly bit of my rhyming:

Ode to Simple Fare

Now some folks salivate at the mere mention of liver called foie gras,

Well, Granny sees fried chicken livers and whoops a loud “Hoorah!”

Eatin’ crisp green beans almondine makes some folks catch their breath,

While I need smellin’ salts waitin’ on shuckies, cooked nigh to death!

Some folks take their tomatoes blended with other veggies in a cold gazpacho,

Grandpa eats a warm mater straight from the garden; well, because he’s macho!

For some folks, scalloped or au gratin potatoes will fit the billet,

Others prefer those taters fried golden brown in a cast iron skillet.

Some deglaze their pans with wine and pour those juices over their elegant food.

Others throw some flour and milk in those drippings and make gravy oh soooooo good!

For some, croissants, pitas, facaccias are the types of bread that make them swoon.

Give me a slab cornbread with my pintos and mustard greens and I’m over the moon!

There are those folks who love their fruit brandied and rolled in thin crepes,

Others prefer their apples fried and a hot buttermilk biscuit on their plates.

Presentation is very important to lots of folks and fancy garnishes, there are many,

I say give me a plate of plain, simple food; just don’t skimp and make it plenty!

 

Meeting My Valentine

 

During my high school days, I had gone on “dates” with guys but those dates were more like friends getting together after school and on weekends. Often, my date and I would end up meeting up with other friends or we might even start out as a carload of friends going out. Sometimes we had more than one carload!

We loved to go spooking. We would tell ghost stories and build ourselves up to a good case of nerves and then we visited cemeteries, spooky old churches, or Wolf Meadows, which was rumored to have been an insane asylum. Of course, we visited all of these after dark because that is when the spooks come out!

So, in high school, that was my dating life. I really didn’t have a boyfriend but I had lots of friends who were boys.

During my senior year, we learned that my Great Uncle Bug, who lived in Ohio, had cancer. Uncle Bug was my great-uncle by marriage but he and my great-aunt had raised my mother from when she was ten years old. Uncle Bug and Aunt Alta were more like grandparents to me than aunt and uncle. When I learned that he had cancer, I almost convinced myself that it wasn’t true, that the cancer was just something that I had dreamed up.


                                           

                                                               Aunt Alta and Uncle Bug

When I found out that he wouldn’t be able to come to my high school graduation, I knew that I hadn’t been dreaming and knew that it was bad.

After that, more than once when I went out with my friends, I would end up in tears. My friends asked me what was wrong but I still couldn’t tell them that the uncle who was like my grandpa was dying from cancer. I guess that somehow, I still felt that if I didn’t mention cancer, it wouldn’t be so. Instead of telling them that my uncle was dying from cancer, I just told them that he wouldn’t be able to come to my graduation. I never told them why he couldn’t come.

After graduation, a few of my classmates and I went to MTSU for college. My friend Carol was dating a friend of my husband’s and one day, she asked if I would like to go out on a blind date with her boyfriend’s friend. She and her boyfriend would go along; so it was a double date and blind on the part of Mohammad and me.

So the first time that I met my future husband we went to a dance club in Nashville. My friend and her date loved to dance but I was not a dancer at all. Mohammad and I ended up staying in the car talking. He is from Iran and it was interesting to learn about a culture so very different from my own.

When I was telling him about myself, I told him about my family, including that my uncle was dying from cancer. When telling him about Uncle Bug, I started to cry. So on my first date with my now-husband, I spent much of it crying. He was probably the first person that I had really told about Uncle Bug’s cancer.

After returning home, I thought “Well, that could not have gone much worse. I will probably never hear from him again.”

I was wrong. God bless him; he called me to go out again. That is probably when I realized he was a good man and from that moment I began to fall in love. I would years later overhear him talking to my family telling them that when I cried on that first date, he had begun to fall in love with me. He knew that family is important to me and family is also important to him. So the very thing that I thought would make him run was what attracted him to me.

After that first date, we saw each other on nearly a daily basis. That beginning to fall in love had turned into a full-blown “in love”.

 
As I said, Mohammad is from Iran. He was in the States on a student visa to finish his Master’s degree. When he finished his degree, he would have to return home. He cautioned me several times that he would have to go home after his graduation and so that our relationship would to be a temporal relationship. He asked if I was okay with that. I told him that I would be happy today and worry about tomorrow when it arrived.

So for a little over a year, Mohammad and I shared our free time after classes during the week. We listened to music with his roommate. We visited with friends. We went to the movies. We played backgammon.

I tried to help him understand the meaning of some of the terminology in his economics books. I felt like the blind man calling the tail of the elephant a rope as I wasn’t certain how knowing what a word meant in English would translate to the world of economics. He helped me through my grief losing Uncle Bug.

We witnessed the Iran hostage crisis play out on the news and we talked about some of the events that had led up to it. We saw Iran/USA relations deteriorate. Then Mohammad graduated and he had to return to Iran.


       Fred's girlfriend Chrystal, Mohammad's roommate Fred, Mohammad, and me

I had a very rough semester after he had to return home. I missed classes, I failed classes and I didn’t even really care. Fortunately, I snapped out of that funk after one semester.

Neither Mohammad nor myself is much of a letter writer, but we exchanged the rare letter. He called from Iran a few times. One of those times I was visiting family in Ohio. He had called me at home in Tennessee to find out that I was in Ohio. He had called at Aunt Alta’s house to find that I was at Kookie’s house.

When he reached Aunt Alta, she had had trouble understanding his accent. She said that he asked if there was a Hatfield there and she had answered, “No, but this is the real McCoy.” Somehow, he got Kookie’s number and he finally reached me there. Kookie told me that I was beaming after his call.

So for a few years, there was an occasional letter and the occasional call. The relationship between our countries was still bad and Mohammad and I hoped that everything would work out between the US and Iran. I hoped that in spite of the distance and the animosity between our countries, everything would somehow work out for us also.

I didn’t date anyone else in college but several friends from Cascade High School were going to MTSU and I had made several new friends in my Dorm there. Just like in high school, several of us started hanging out. We even went spooking!

Finally, I graduated from MTSU in Murfreesboro and entered the physical therapy program at UTCHS in Memphis. It was while I was there in Memphis that I got another call from Mohammad. In that call, he asked me if I would marry him. I said yes but the relationship between our countries was still bad and he couldn’t come here. Instead, I would meet him in Germany and there we would get married. It would take a while to make all of the arrangements.

After graduation, I had started a new temporary job as a physical therapist. When I was offered a full-time position, I told my department head that at some point I would be going to Germany and I would need to be gone a few weeks so I didn’t think that I could accept a full-time, permanent position. She told me that if I took the position, I would be able to take time off when I needed it.

Finally, Mohammad had made all of the arrangements. The tickets to Germany arrived and when the time came, I left to meet him for three weeks in Germany. We had our birth certificates and IDs but there was another paper Mohammad needed and we didn’t have it. He had family members trying to find that document but unfortunately, we could not get it to Germany before I had to return home.

We couldn’t officially marry so we decided that we would marry ourselves. We prayed that God would bless us in our marriage and we decided that His blessing was enough.

I returned home and filled out the paperwork for a fiancé petition. After filling out forms A, B, and C and sending them in, I was told that I needed to fill out forms D and E. After several rounds of this, finally, all of the forms were filled out and Mohammad was able to return to the states so we could marry.

So a few days after his arrival, on a Friday after work, we drove down to the courthouse to get a marriage license. The lady asked us the date we planned to marry and we told her that we weren’t sure because we had to find someone to marry us. She told us that there was a justice of the peace across the hall that could do that for us. So, we stepped across the hall and officially became man and wife. I suppose that we eloped but we didn’t go anywhere to do it and we were as surprised as anyone!

A couple of months later we were blessed with our beautiful daughter, Roxanna. Five years after that, another beautiful daughter Alexandria joined us. Three years later, on Alex’s birthday, we brought our son Cameron home.

Thirty-five years ago this April, my husband and I were officially married. It hasn’t always been easy. Over the years he has made me shake my head many times. Sometimes he will say something in all sincerity, and I can’t help but shake my head in wonder, wonder that he can actually believe what he really, truly, deeply believes.

A bird makes it inside of our screened-in deck but cannot find its way out. He spends hours making a trap and sits patiently ‘til he can spring that trap, catch that bird and release it safely outside. And I shake my head in amazement, amazement that the same man who often doesn’t have time to eat lunch, can take the time to save a little bird, and amazement that his trap actually worked!

I have shaken my head in confusion when he called and asked me if he could buy a chicken or a goat and bring it home. When I told him that A, unfortunately, we didn’t live on a farm, and B we didn’t even have a yard, he in all earnestness said, “What about in the basement?”

A bird’s nest with eggs fell out of a tree and Mohammad asked me if we put it back did I think that the momma would still sit on it. I told him that I really didn’t think so because we had touched it. We picked it up and sat it on the ledge anyway and the momma bird did come back, sat on the eggs, and the eggs hatched! I shook my head in disbelief, disbelief that Mohammad was right and the momma came back even though it probably smelled us all over that nest. For all I knew, it was the same bird he had saved from our deck. I have shaken my head in frustration, the frustration that comes with being late for everything, no matter how important; weddings, graduations…

And as I sit here thinking about my husband, I shake my head again, this time in awe, an awe that of all the people in the world I could have loved, God knew that this man from clear around the world was just the one to plant in my path.  Of course, I know that I cause him to do a little head shaking of his own too. Hopefully, we can spend the rest of our lives shaking our heads together.

 

                                                   

                                                                       Still Valentines.

In the Kitchen

On its surface, the kitchen seems to be a rather unremarkable, utilitarian kind of place where work is done. Nowadays, many kitchens have dishwashers, microwaves, and other extras. Nearly all modern kitchens have certain basic features; a refrigerator, an electric or gas stove, a sink, and usually a kitchen table with chairs. This hasn’t always been so.

I can imagine my great-grandparents, even my grandparents, working in a kitchen that had no sink, no refrigerator, no electricity or gas. The main features of one of their kitchens would have likely been a wood-burning cookstove and a table with chairs. The “sink” would have been a metal washbasin and the water in that “sink” would have been drawn from a well or collected from a spring and heated on the stove. Lighting would have been from daylight streaming through windows during the day and kerosene lamps at night. Refrigeration would have been provided by nature; the cooler temps of winter weather or the cold water of a springhouse.

Wood would have been placed in the stove and the cook would have let her experience aid her in regulating the cooking temperature by finessing the damper and the logs. There were no dials to turn to high/medium/low or the degrees for the oven. Tenderloin, gravy, apples, eggs, and potatoes were likely fried in heavy cast iron skillets as tender biscuits baked in the oven at the beginning of the day. This breakfast has been cooked by my family members for decades, even centuries. I call it an ancestor meal as back in the day, it was likely a regular meal. Nowadays it is likely a special and occasional treat.

 
In the kitchen, mothers prepared the meals that their families’ survival depended upon and children were educated in how to do the same. Recipes and traditions were passed down from generation to generation. Dried apple stack cakes, just like Grandma Nancy’s were baked and assembled. Children learned how to work the biscuit dough just enough and not too much so that the biscuits were light, fluffy, and delicious just as they had been from time immemorial.

                                        

 
In the kitchen sink, dishes have been washed, produce has been rinsed, turkeys have been thawed and babies have been bathed. Back in the day, even adults would bathe in Grandma’s kitchen after filling a large galvanized tub with warm water.

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On the kitchen stove, myriad meals have been prepared. Mason jars have been sterilized in readiness for preserving the bounty of the summer harvest. Baby bottles have been sterilized and warmed. Corn has been popped to make popcorn balls.

In the kitchen, learning to pitch in and teamwork have been taught. One person has stirred the gravy while another has mashed the potatoes, another has sliced the turkey, and yet another plates the ham. All have worked together to prepare a wonderful feast to be shared with all.

 

In the kitchen, many prayers of thanks have been given; thanks for meals as well as the hands that prepared them, thanks for the safe travels that had brought loved ones together, and requests for safe travels on their returns home.

In the kitchen, babes have sampled their first real food and learned how to use spoons, forks, and cups. In those same kitchens, meals have been prepared for ill loved ones; a dish that used to be a favorite prepared to tempt a dying loved one with no appetite.

 

In the kitchen, children have licked cake bowls and beaters, and uncles have scraped the peanut butter fudge pan clean.

 
At the kitchen table, homework has been done, projects have been worked on, Bibles have been read. Catching up with loved ones has occurred over hot cups of coffee or cold glasses of pop. The past has been revisited, and details of the present and dreams of the future have been shared.

 

 

In the kitchen, life has been celebrated. Candles have been blown out after wishes were made. Sweet icing has been licked from lips. The addition of new family members has been celebrated in the forms of baby showers, bridal showers, and wedding cakes. Years of loving togetherness have been recognized. The knowledge of being celebrated by family has warmed hearts.

 

And family members have gathered in the kitchen after the funerals for loved ones. Coffee has been forgotten, growing cold in the cup as family members numbed by grief have sat around a familiar table missing a familiar face.

In a kitchen, living, with all of its joys and sorrows, occurs. In the kitchen, the heart of the home beats.