This was my view of communion from the piano this morning. 
The light, the bread, the words…
After church was over, I asked my friend and elder Rahn if he would let me recreate the moment.

And this a verse from one of my favorite ancient hymns – another one I’m eager to have sung at my funeral.

Reading Margaret Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner was like eating at a gourmet smorgasbord (not the kind with instant gravy);  it was like our church’s monthly Fellowship Feast: tables groaning with wonderful food and you only have. one. plate.  
Margaret Visser calls herself “an anthropologist of everyday life.”  She takes one dinner and examines all the items on the menu with the eyes of a classicist and an historian.  I found it fascinating reading.  Even though it was written in 1986 (and we’ve gone through a sea-change of ideas nutritionally since then), Visser’s concerns about monocultures and industrial agriculture ring true today.  The historical culture of these foods takes us around the world to every continent save Antartica. 

I found Visser’s focus on the “gender connotations” of specific food mildly bizarre; e.g. butter is feminine because it comes from milk, which is feminine.   

Here are some fun facts:   

Corn    the ultimate long shelf-life food, even centuries ago; plant is both male (tassels) and female (silks)

Salt     Salt is an edible rock – a contradiction in terms; it is both mined and harvested; it corrodes and preserves
          
Butter   Napolean III offered a prize for the invention of a cheap butter substitute after a cattle plague.

Chicken  From chicken-carving hierarchy (different pieces have status) to uniform chicken patties

Rice     It sustains half the world, but in North America the largest market is breakfast cereals and baby food.

Lettuce   Imperial (a word with undesirable connotations) lettuce changed its name to Iceberg: cold, clean, hard.

Olive Oil   Olives, the Ancient Roman’s “fast food”, fulfills two yearnings at once: sophistication and simplicity.

Lemon Juice  8 citrus fruits: oranges, lemons, mandarins, grapefruit, limes, pomelos, kumquats, citrons

Ice Cream   Häagen-Dazs name a fiction.  Meant to look Danish, but Danish has no umlaut.  Factory started in the Bronx…

On Saturday, I plan to write a Pizza on the Cheap post.  But I was desperate that this lovely little trick didn’t get buried in the middle of that.  It so deserves fanfare and balloons and those powerful searchlights car dealers used to wave through the atmosphere.

Peel onions. I slice mine, but you can leave them whole if you have a lot of time.  I’ve read recipes that tell you to put the butter in the crockpot first and others that have you put the butter on top of the onions.  Either way will come out fine.

Best method: put crockpot on low and let the onions cook down for up to 48 hours (I’d leave them whole for that long) until they get the gorgeous golden brown color.

When you’ve forgotten to do it ahead:  Set the crockpot on high and go for it in 6 – 9 hours. 

What, you ask, will I do with all those onions?

Oh, my friend…..

There is caramelized onion and gorgonzola pizza.  There are sandwiches which are ever so better with C. Onions. A side for a roast.  A lovely addition to Chicken Feta.

It makes the house smell divine.  Or not.  If you don’t like onion smell, just put the crockpot in the garage or laundry room.

And, if I may confess, I love to eat them by themselves.  

~ Leslie Sansone in Walk Away the Pounds

I always knew that the war ended in 1918 (on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), but not until this year did I understand that Armistice meant that the warring parties just agreed to cease fire.  All fighting stops.  But conspicuously missing are the hands raised in surrender.  It is a peace without victory.

Think of a well-matched neighborhood snowball fight.  Each side has fortifications, supplies of snowballs; both sides are getting pummeled but they are both holding their ground.  Then it starts drizzling.  And it gets dark.  Fingers are numb.  No one wants to surrender but everyone wants to stop.  “What’s the point, anyway?”  is the question going through each child’s head.  They agree to stop fighting and go home.  They negotiate an armistice.  

The tide had turned in what has been called a war of exhaustion, and Germany was about to be beaten.  Since the Allies had not yet moved into German territory, the Germans sued for peace before they were forced to surrender.  Both sides fought, shooting cannons, using up their ammunition, until the minute the Armistice went into effect.  Isn’t that crazy?  Hundreds died utterly senseless deaths.  Of course, one could say that about the 9 million that died in the Great War.

Beverly Cleary gives the view from Oregon on this morning, ninety years ago, in A Girl from Yamhill

“The morning is chilly.  Mother and I wear sweaters as I follow her around the big old house.  Suddenly bells begin to ring, the bells of Yamhill’s three churches, and the fire bell.  Mother seizes my hand and begins to run, out of the house, down the steps, across the muddy barnyard toward the barn where my father is working.  My short legs, cannot keep up.  I trip, stumble, and fall, tearing holes in the knees of my long brown cotton stocking, skinning my knees.

“You must never, never forget this day as long as you live,” Mother tells me as Father comes running out of the barn to meet us.

Year later, I asked Mother what was so important about that day when all the bells in Yamhill rang, the day I was never to forget.  She looked at me in astonishment and said, “Why, that was the end of the First World War.” I was two years old at the time.”   

(Other posts I’ve written about WWI) 

(An absorbing group of articles on The First World War at The Guardian – thank you dear Laurie)

We began studying The Great War this summer, knowing that we would study the 20th century this year in school.  I never expected it to grab me like it did.  I’ve read a dozen or more books, seen a dozen films, discovered poets and artists, and talked my family to death.  In my mind, I’ve made this day, Armistice Day, the official cut-off of our study of WWI.  The Great War is over.  We have 80 more years of 20th century to cover.  WWII – oh. joy.