Month: March 2007

  • Childhood Memories

    One of my favorite childhood shots of my husband, on his birthday

    I have two short quotes for you today.  One is from Amy's Humble Musings

    "Have you ever seen an old, candid snapshot of kids? The couch is all
    ratty. There are brown-paneled walls in the background. The table is
    covered in junk. But they’re all smiling and some of them are missing
    teeth. The glimmers in their eyes blind them to the green shag carpet.
    Maybe you’ve seen some of those pictures too. Good times. That’s the
    stuff of life."

    The other is from Life is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman. Highlights are mine.

    "Junior, what do you remember about growing up in this family?  What do you remember about your father?"

    "Oh, we was always close.  He took me fishing."

    "Tell me about that."

    "Well, Daddy would wake me about four in the morning.  It was still dark then, but we would go down to the lake.  It was about two miles away; but a lot of times we would walk there.  We always caught fish too.  When he wasn't off to work he took me everywhere, just the two of us.:"

    Richard said, "That sounds nice, but there were a lot of children in your family."

    "That's right," Junior said.  "Thing is that Darrell, my only brother, wasn't born till several years after me.  The girls would do things with my mother and I went with my father.  That's how things were done then.  For me and my brother and sisters, our childhood was great.  Richard, if I could, I would give you the experience of my childhood as a gift.  It was that wonderful for me."

    "But from what I have heard, your family was very poor.  You would definitely have been below the poverty level."

    "You're right about that.  Most of my childhood, Daddy had to work two jobs so we could get by. Still, if the Good Humor man came by after a payday, we would all of us get a nickel to get an ice cream.  I still remember the excitement with that.  We had all we needed and then some.  There was no one that told us we were poor and I guess we just didn't know better."

  • Family Graffiti

    From the comments section last week:

    In one of my favorite parts of Westminster abbey there is a decorated
    tomb of an ancient official to an ancient king of England.  It looks
    very much like an old fashioned square bed with the canopy of wood. 
    All around the entire front were written the words that said something
    like, "live to die, die to live, live to die,  die to live". It makes
    me wonder about this man and how he accomplished that desire. I am
    still learning the importance of daily participating in my own funeral.
    Blessings

    I wanted to ponder those words, so I put them up on the white board. 

    Various family members contributed additional thoughts.
    Well, my husband and daughter-in-law.  That's various!

    We've experimented with thoughts that didn't quite work with the paradigm. 
    Enoch...Ananius  Hmmm, Enoch lived to live and Ananius died to die.  Nope.

    Any additions?  What color marker would you like?

  • St. Patrick's Day

    "I am not afraid of any of these things [murder, betrayal, slavery]
    because of the promises of heaven;
    for I have put myself in the hands of God Almighty."
    ~  St. Patrick

    Requisite of Irish monastic hospitality:
    a clean house,
    a big fire,
    and a couch without sorrow.

    Patrick's legacy:  St. Columba and the Abbey at Iona
    It is a dream of mine to see Iona some day,
    to stand on these grounds
    and to thank God for his faithful servants.

  • Millet in March - Fine Art Friday


    Feeding the Young 1850 Jean-François Millet

    La Charité     Jean-François Millet

    I am enjoying these pictures of French peasant life. 

    Tip of the day: 

    Choose people's names for passwords, particularly people you need to pray for.  Typing their name is a reminder to pray for them every time you log in.  One of my passwords is obscure, the name of a person who wrote a book I was reading when I set up that account.  That person is still living and I try to ask God for blessing and protection for this person in a two-second prayer each time I log in.  Just a thought.

    What plans for the weekend?

  • Rules of the Game

    The man I love is an expert in many things; playing ping pong is one of them.   I recently gave him a ping pong table for his (50th) birthday.   Since it's warmed up enough that we can play comfortably in the garage, we've been playing many games.  It's everybody's goal to beat Dad/Curt.  Only one person has accomplished this in recent history, Jessie's 16-year old brother Adam. 

    Curt, who is left-handed, starts off playing right handed.  He can win 90% of the games this way. If his opponent threatens, he switches to left-handed play and swiftly finishes the game. 

    A new life goal: to beat my husband in a game of ping pong while he plays right-handed.  I am starting by just trying to improve my personal best record.  Last night I reached 15 points against him.  I think know he's being easy on me, but he's too much of a competitor, and has too much respect for me to "let me win".  He was born a coach with good observation and diagnostic skills.  Along the way, he gives me pointers to help me improve my game.

    In a Teaching Company tape about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Professor Bonnie Wheeler said this about what makes a game (ludus in Latin) a game:

    1.  It is played between unequal partners.
    2.  A game has rules.
    3.  The play is repetitive (my turn, your turn).
    4.  The playground is well marked, has boundaries.
    5.  The game itself must be uncertain in its outcome.
    6.  The players are expected to be deadly serious about their commitment to the game.

    I love a little competition in my life. 

    It's going to take a while to make #5 a reality, but it's sure fun working while I play! 

    When is the last time you played a game of ping pong?

  • Pondering Privileges and Benefits

    We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes.  But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem.  We received his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others. 
        ~ Elisabeth Elliott

    I attended a funeral this week and was reminded once again of the benefits of death--to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.  To be sure, death remains our enemy until the final resurrection. Then death will gasp its last breath.  Amen!  But remember this also: there is no resurrection without death.  And there is the rub.  Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.  Jesus instructs his disciples: in order to regularly live you must regularly die.  He who gives up his life finds it.  But he who grasps his life loses it.  This is the deep weird.  But it's a mystery we are always confronted with.  Are we willing to die so we might live?    
      ~ Magister Pater



  • Pass the Remote

    Last year when Dan and Val visited, he gave us a Mars Hill Audio Magazine CD, a duplicate of one he owned.  On a road trip in the summer Curt and I listened to it together.  There was a segment on the mystery writer P.D. James, her thorough familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer, and the nuanced character of her detective, Adam Dalgliesh.  I hadn't read any P.D. James, but determined right then to check out what our library offered. 

    Thus, P.D. James became one of my "2006 author finds".  There is nothing quite so delicious as discovering a great author, confirming the discovery with a second read, and then realizing that there are many, many more of that author's books available.  To discover more than one in a year - remember Anthony Trollope? - induces one to think she has won the lottery. And get this -- P.D. James loves Anthony Trollope!


    We enjoyed the film version of Death in Holy Orders.  I found Martin Shaw's
    portrayal of Adam Dalgliesh even better than I had imagined AD in my head.  (The
    last time that happened was with Gollum - I couldn't grasp his
    character until I saw him on film.)  The tenor of his voice, his quiet command, the way he
    held himself so still but communicated so much through his eyes and
    mouth was, frankly, entrancing.  There were plentiful tight close-ups of his face as he questioned witnesses and suspects.  The blurb described his performance as soulful.

    The mystery stumped all of us who hadn't read the book; it required close attention to keep track of the characters.  The setting of St. Anselm's Abbey on the coast of England was gorgeous, the soundtrack lush in parts and eerie in others.  If you enjoy a mystery, set in England, in a cloistered community, I recommend this.

    Caution:  The producer seemed smitten with backside nudity.  There were several scenes of a young man running into the ocean for his daily swim.  There are two brief sex scenes of the gag-me variety: private parts aren't shown but I would have preferred oblique references to what was happening instead of front and center shots.

    _____________________________________________________________________________________

    Ushpizin tells the story of Moshe and Mali, an  Orthodox Jewish couple in modern Jerusalem.  Like Abraham and Sarah of old, they struggle with infertility and they are visited by strangers.  But these visitors are no angels; much the opposite. 

    I wasn't impressed with the acting (think Home Alone's burglars for the bad guys); the storyline was predictable.  The merit in this film is that it was filmed in Jerusalem among Orthodox neighborhoods and gives a great view of life in Orthodox households.
    You see how the Feast of Succoth is celebrated today and what a sukkot looks like.  [We were in a pietistic church, when the announcement guy invited the congregation to come to a Feast of Booths, but said booze instead of booths...it was hilarious!] 

    I particularly enjoyed Mali, but my favorite part was a scene where Moshe asks for forgiveness.  He apologizes profusely and then presses the man for complete forgiveness, insisting that he repeat his words three times.  Very endearing.
     

  • Medieval Movies

    I'm tackling one of the weightier books on my pile: a one-volume history of the Middle Ages, The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor.  According to the jacket, "Cantor's book was innovative in 1963 because it was the first comprehensive general history of the Middle Ages to center on medieval culture and religion rather than on political history".

    In my search for footnotes (which don't exist), I found a list of films Cantor recommends.  Here is my severe abridgment of his list.

    "Here are the ten best films ever made with a medieval context, ranked approximately in order of merit...

    1. The Seventh Seal   Ingmar Bergman's incomparable masterpiece, set in Sweden at the time of the Black Death, is in a class by itself when it comes to evoking medieval sensibility about life and death.

    2. Ran  ...based on King Lear...set in medieval Japan...perfectly captures the violence and beauty of the chivalric world.

    3. Henry V  ...Olivier's version is much closer than Branagh's to the ambience of the fifteenth century

    4. The Name of the Rose   ...wonderful performance by Sean Connery as a Franciscan friar

    5. Alexander Nevsky   Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film about the prince of Novograd's fight with the Teutonic knights...fits in well with the iconology of Byzantine and late medieval kingship

    6. The Return of Martin Guerre   depicts a crisis in an affluent peasant family in France in the early sixteenth century...the story closely follows the record of a court trial

    7.  The Navigator   about half this 1988 science fiction film is convincingly set in a northern English coal-mining village during the time of the Black Death

    8.  Black Robe   1990 French Canadian film about Jesuit missionaries among the Canadian aborigines in the early seventeenth century, is fiercely accurate and evocative of an important and underwritten segment of medieval church history--missionary work among the heathens on the frontier.  Think of St. Boniface and the Frisians in the eighth century.

    9.  The Gospel According to St. Matthew   ...bleakly depicted by the Italian Communist director Pier Pasolini.  The result is much closer to late medieval Sicily than to ancient Judea.

    10.  The Devils   ...over-the-top version of Aldous Huxley's novel about hysteria and witchcraft in early seventeenth century France nevertheless captures persuasively important aspects of the medieval religious experience.  Even its remorseless anti-clericalism replicates a prominent ingredient of late medieval culture.

    I am intrigued. 

    Well, with numbers 1 through 8!

    I've seen Olivier's Henry V (I own Branagh's version and much prefer it)  and I've read The Name of the Rose  (perhaps the only George Grant recommendation which I had to push myself to get to the end); the rest are complete mysteries.  For the first time in my life, I'm not frustrated by this kind of list, thanks to Netflix. But convincing my beloved husband to watch some of these with me might be a challenge, especially with daylight savings time in place.

    Has anyone out there seen heard of any of these movies?

    I'll start with The Seventh Seal and if it's any good I like it, my dear reader, I will let you know. 

    Right here on this blog.

  • A Neighborly Day in this Beautywood


    A photo taken from our car this week

    Please won't you be my neighbor?

  • What I'm Learning This Week

    Whenever, WHEN-EV-AH, my  brother and lovely sister-in-law come for a visit we learn something new. 

    How to make sausage.
    How to make upscale, gourmet homemade pizza.
    How to make a killer green salad.
    How to make bread dough in a food processor. (That was then; we don't do that one anymore.)
    How to make Esther Cunningham's Orange Marmalade Cake.
    How to make prime rib that sits in the fridge for three days unwrapped and forms a crust.
    How to make healthy mushroom soup.
    How to grill red peppers and skin them.

    I used to think my brother was a genius.

    Then he gave me a decade of Cook's Illustrated yearbooks.  As I browsed through them, I recognized familiar recipes and procedures.  Ha!!  He's just a good reader - always has been.  Naw, seriously, he'd make a great baker if he wasn't busy earning a living singing.

    But this year, my friend......this year he's outdone himself.  Loaf after loaf after loaf.  Hungry sons scoop it up!

    Elegant simplicity.
    Outrageously easy. 
    Incredible presentation. 
    Melt in your mouth taste. 

    No-Knead Bread

    You need:
    A cast-iron Dutch Oven
    Flour
    Salt
    Water
    SAF Instant Yeast
    12-18 hours

    You don't need:
    To knead

    Recipe is here.