There's never any privacy, really, in keeping an inn,
even when one lies in one's own bed.
Personal life and possessions are so blended into the business,
there's no telling where one stops and the other begins.
One is ever in the company of others.
But it's what we love, of course, and one pays a price always for what is loved.

 

In Jan Karon's second Father Tim novel, In the Company of Others, Tim and Cynthia Kavanagh take a long-anticipated trip to County Sligo, Ireland. Cynthia's fractured ankle is re-injured in Ireland; instead of touring the country, they explore people —relationships— as they remain ensconced at Broughadoon, a fishing lodge on the shores of Lough Arrow. The unexpected delay allows Father Tim and Cynthia — each in their unique way — to become connected in an intimate way to the cast of Irish characters.  In down times, they read the 1862 journal of a Philadelphia-trained doctor, Fintan O'Donnell. The journal provides a story within a story.

Karon two main themes are redemption and connection. Father Tim's reluctance to leave home, for example:

He was not a man to part easily with home, from his dog,
from his now legally adopted son, Dooley, who was
twenty-one going on forty-five. Such things need
watchful tending, like a cook fire. One mustn't go
long away from connections lest something fragile die out.
 One could not fetch that particular fire from neighbors. 19 

Mitford lovers will recognize Karon's motifs: simple pleasures — reciting poetry, reading books, walks and jogs —; life with diabetes; tortured souls; cackling laughter; and reconciliation. There's a bit of mystery too. I almost choked with laughter when Cynthia said, I wish I'd read more P.D. James.

Jan Karon's prose reminds me of Celtic music: a lilting tune, an unexpected chord, some rhythmic change-ups. There is nothing quite so satisfying as the perfect word, a fluent phrase, a metaphor that makes you gape in admiration:

A goulash of gear... 68
gormless (= stupid, dull)
gobsmacked (= astounded)
In terms of never giving up, this was a very Churchillian dog. 83
Bella Flaherty was fenced by a thicket of nettles... 235
...the chiaroscuro of moldering plaster
...a hat rack of ball caps embalmed in dust
...took [dinner] in their room, withered as weeds

Cynthia sat reading amid a wave of books
washed onto the shore of the duvet. He was
stashed in the wing chair, imbibing his own pleasures. 213

The buzz of the bee marked the runes of his prayer. 323

I found Fintan O'Donnell's journal tedious: more characters to keep straight, a parallel plot to track. My respect for Jan Karon kept me reading, though I was tempted to skip it. It was a good decision. Fintan's story was tied together in a beautiful way that brought me to tears.

At the core, however, the relationship between Tim and Cynthia is what delights me. In Home to Holly Springs, the first Father Tim novel, because Tim takes a solitary journey to face his past, his marriage to Cynthia gets only brief mentions. Happily, the interplay in this happy marriage of two flawed individuals gets front seat in the Ireland book. When their travel plans are stalled, their perspective is refreshing:

We'll never have this time again,
it's come to us as a gift,
maybe we don't know how to open it.

They are comfortable together, but comfortable apart, too.  I love Cynthia's daily benediction to Tim, Go and be as the butterfly. Their mutual love, concern, as demonstrated in small ways, makes this a book worth reading. I'm still ruminating over a remark of Tim's, A pet occupation of the Enemy is to distance us from intimacy.          

 

 

'How would you [make orphanages useless]?'

'I would merely enlighten the hearts of childless people as to their privileges.'

'Which are?'

'To be fathers and mothers to the fatherless and motherless.'

'I have often wondered why more of them did not adopt children. Why don't they?'

'For various reasons which a real of child nature would blow to the winds — all comprised in this, that such a child would not be their own child. As if ever a child could be their own! That a child is God's is of rather more consequence than whether it is born of this or that couple. Their hearts would surely be glad when they went into heaven to have the angels of the little ones that always behold the face of their Father coming round them, though they were not exactly their father and mother.'

~ George MacDonald in Robert Falconer

 

 

From basil...

...to pesto

 

Pesto Recipe

4 -5 garlic cloves

3 cups firmly packed fresh basil leaves

1 cup Parmesan cheese *

1/2 cup pine nuts * (when pine nuts cost the equivalent of gold nuggets, I use 1/3 cup)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil *

 

Mince garlic in food processor.

Add basil and process.

Add cheese, nuts and salt.

Add olive oil in a stream.

 

I used to freeze basil in ice cube trays. Now I prefer snack-sized ziplock bags. A friend freezes hers in baby food jars. Unless you have a reason to use this all today, you must freeze pesto. You can keep it in the fridge in a container with a layer of olive oil on top. Air is the bad boyfriend to charming Pesto; she turns dark and ugly after long embraces with that bad boy.

Add pesto to pasta for a perfect side.

Add pesto to pizza sauce for a perfect sauce.

Add pesto to poultry for a savory main course.

Spread on crackers with sun-dried tomatoes and cream cheese.

(From Sheri's comment, below: Add a dab of pesto to soup to make it amazing.)

Or just Google pesto recipes.

 

[Side bar: I learned the first year of marriage to always have the ingredients of a quick meal handy. Something easy to put together if you had unexpected guests for dinner. Back in the day, I shudder to say, tuna casserole was my go to dish. Maybe that's why friends often had "other plans." Pesto and pasta is an elegant dish to make on the spot.]

 * I buy these at Costco or Trader Joe's. I store the Parm in the freezer, pine nuts in the fridge.

 

::     ::    ::

 

 

from oats (and friends and relations)...

 

 ...to granola

 

Granola Recipe

12 cups rolled oats (whole or quick, your preference)

1 cup each, your choice:

Wheat Germ

Sesame Seeds

Sunflower Seeds

Walnuts, chopped

Cashews, chopped

Sliced Almonds

(other grains per your taste. See note on fruit below.)

 

Mix:

1 1/2 cup canola oil

1 1/2 cup honey

a glug of milk

a glug of vanilla

 

Microwave oil/honey mixture for three minutes.

Give it a swirl, and pour it over the oats.

Mix well. Then mix it again. And again.

 

Turn out onto Jelly-roll pan (a cookie sheet with lip) or onto Silpat. I line cookie sheets with parchment paper, but that is optional.

Bake in oven until deeply tanned, stirring every 15 minutes.

 

I buy oats in 25 pound bags; I get nuts at Costco or Trader Joe's.

I just found a 2 pound bag of sliced almonds at Costco. Nice!

Opt: add dried fruit (raisins, Craisins, dried blueberries) AFTER baking. Trust me—after.

Opt: reduce oil and honey to 1 cup each. Just keep the proportion 1:1.

 

My greatest challenge with granola is baking it to perfection.

My original recipe said Bake 275° for 30 minutes. Eating raw oats does things to you.

Depending on my schedule and my patience, I'll either bake it at 350° with a close eye or I'll bake it at 250° until I can smell it, then start stirring in 15 minute intervals. The edges cook faster than the middle, so mix the granola around the cookie sheet. What I've found is that you wait and wait and wait...and when it turns perfect you have a 5 minute window. Then it burns. I'm pretty much an expert in how to burn granola. Step 1: Check your Facebook...

 Sheri, in the comments section, makes granola in the crockpot.

DUH!

Of course!

That's how I'm making it from now on.

 

 

 

Our beloved Latin teacher gave us so much more than Latin lessons. His knowledge base was so great that art, music, cultural analysis, poetry and word-perfect quotes co-mingled with Latin grammar and vocabulary. But the words. Oh, the words. Inevitably, in dulcet tones, he prefaced his remarks, "Now here's a word you will need to know." And I, silly girl who thought she had, ahem, an advanced vocabulary, would hear him pronounce a word I had never read, heard, seen, smelt or tasted.  Never ever.

It's a wonder my eyes don't permanently face backward, with all the mental eye-rolling I performed.  Hah! How could it be such an important word? I've never even heard of it!  Ah, the arrogance, the pure high-octane arrogance. <blushes>

You know what would follow: that word would crop up here, there and everywhere within days and weeks of my learning it.  But now I owned that word. It was mine.

And to this day it is a sweet delight to read a word taught to me by my beloved Latin scholar.

Palimpsest is one of those words. It means 'a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next.'  Imagine a monk in a scriptorium with no skins to write on, but a vast library close by. He finds something he believes is obscure, scrapes the hide, and carries on with his copying.

Last night I found my old friend palimpsest in relation to a DOG (!) in Alexander McCall Smith's novel Love Over Scotland.

...Cyril [Angus's dog] was rapidly diverted from this agreeable fantasy to the real world of smells for a dog, and Drummond Place, though familiar territory, was rich in possibilities; each passer-by left a trail that spoke to where he had been and what he had been doing — a whole history might lie on the pavement, like song-lines across the Australian Outback, detectable only to those with the necessary nose. Other smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below.

 

 

 

Even though I knew that Louis Zamperini survived insupportable agonies (this can't be considered a spoiler: the word survival is in the subtitle), Laura Hillenbrand's taut pacing of the narrative created and sustained tension as I read along. When I came to the point where—after having been officially declared dead then later confirmed alive, the war having been concluded, his fragile health jacked up above survival levels—Zamperini is escorted home by his brother Pete, the dam of my emotions gave way; spasms of sobs shook my frame.

Over Long Beach, they sank back into the rain and landed. There, bursting from army cars, were their father and mother, and Sylvia and Virginia. The moment the plane stopped, Louie jumped down, ran to his sobbing mother, and folded himself into her. "Cara mamma mia," he whispered. It was a long time before they let go.

Unbroken is the story of a series of rescues in Louie Zamperini's life: how running rescued him from a mutinous youth careening with crime, the rescue from 47 days on a raft, how he was rescued from sadistic focus of a brutal war criminal, and the ultimate rescue of a tortured post-war veteran. 

Zamperini's story is worthy of an epic poem of Homerian proportions. Hillenbrand's prose, however, is magnificent. Here are a few of her phrases which delighted my ear:

a festival of rapid-fire diarrhea

(prisoners) gathered in drifts against the buildings

this warren of captive men

men's bodies slowly winnowed

the sea began to arch its back under the raft

a laughing equanimity

Resilience is hard to detect in a body well nourished, well rested, and well kept. Resilience needs adversity, agony, and misery to have something to rebound from. Zamperini's story is replete with deprivation, danger and destruction. Sharks, both human and piscine, seek to devour him. He offers bodily resistance as long as he is able. His indomitable spirit resists when his body is incapable.  

In the midst of despair in an inflated raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is a day so exquisitely described which completely changed my idea about the doldrums.

It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When a fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness.

For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren't hungry or thirsty. There were unaware of the approach of death.

As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation in color, their slide through the sea...Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.

Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

Louis Zamperini's story continues to the present (he is still alive and recently spoke at my friend's church). It's easier to end a book when the subject has died; there is a clearly defined finish. When the main character is still alive it takes more skill to bring the story to a conclusion. Laura Hillenbrand wraps this remarkable man's story with one final scene. The significance of it escaped me at first. I went back and reread a paragraph. Oh!  Again, emotions pressed down hard to the overflowing point. The beauty, the profound and glorious beauty of this scene was the satin ribbon that tied this story together into a perfect bow. The final sentence undid me.

 

 

From this (frozen elk burger)

 

...to jerky.

 Yum, yum, YUH-um!

 

::     ::     ::

 

 From these overgrown zucchini from my garden...

...to monster muffins in the freezer.

 

con·ver·sion  (kn-vûrzhn, -shn) n.

3. Something that is changed from one use, function, or purpose to another.

 

The request to swap Margaret Ernst's charming book In a Word put me into a panic. I loved this book and didn't agree with my former self who had decided to list it on Paperbackswap. But I resolved to be brave, and also to quickly read it through—one more time—before I sent it off.

The flow of language, the roots of words, the vicissitudes of meaning: I find all these fascinating.

The ability to see the secrets behind the letters of words, their nuances, their humble beginnings, is one compelling reason to study a foreign language.

Companion is one of my favorite words. It comes from the Latin com (together) + panis (bread).  Thus, a companion is a person you share meals with. I know it. I love it. But I didn't know that pantry is a place where bread was made or kept.

I could bore you with a list of stuff I learned. I could tell you that mistletoe is from an Old German word for dung, because it was believed that the plant grew from bird droppings.  I could go on with the word vogue which means to sail forth and comes from the swaying motion of a ship. Your eyelids could close listening to how calm comes from the Greek, burning heat, and how gossamer literally means goose summer. You could nod off to my voice noticing the relationship between climate, from the Greek word slope, and climax, from the Greek word ladder.  Then you would bolt upright in shock when you heard the origin of the word testify, and how the King James Version euphemistically says that an oath is taken by placing the hand on the thigh.

Let's just stop one minute and focus.

Focus - straight over from the Latin meaning hearth, fireplace. I quote Margaret Ernst: In the days before we became nomads in the apartment-house era, the hearth was the focus of the home and home life. Now, like poor photography, we are out of focus. The word was first used in a mathematical sense in 1604 by Kepler, who likened the focus of a curve to the burning-point of a lens.

There are online sources to give you a joyful understanding of words.  Douglas Harper writes:

Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant 600 or 2,000 years ago. Think of it as looking at pictures of your friends' parents when they were your age. People will continue to use words as they will, finding wider meanings for old words and coining new ones to fit new situations. In fact, this list is a testimony to that process.

One advantage print books have over online resources is that they are easy to browse. This is a perfect, ahem, bathroom book, given you are one that keeps books in bathrooms. Perhaps it is a perfect bedside book, one you can spend a few pages with before sleep. Although this is a fun little book, it is not nearly as extensive as the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.