A week on Sunday (no. 33)

Grace

Recently, listening to the latest season of Revisionist History (The Alabama Murders) Malcolm Gladwell describes a particular group of Protestants (Church of Christ) as being especially strict. One of the words he uses, in making his point, is “grace”. He uses it in contrast to shame, or rather, he says that when you feel a lot of shame, it can sometimes be because there is a lack of grace:

When you’re in a context of overwhelming shame, it can do terrifying things to the psyche.

In the absence of any sort of constructive grace, and I don’t mean by that, some flabby sense of, oh, everything’s-ok-grace, but some sort of constructive sense of grace, […] it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness. […]

What [Lee C. Camp] was saying, and what many others in the Church of Christ came to believe, was that their church, particularly their church in that era, 40, 50 years ago, did not understand grace.

[…] Because in the absence of grace, there is no relief from transgression.

But grace is greater than just “relief from transgression”. It reminded me of the end of an episode of This is Actually Happening… A doctor named Tony Dajer talked about a patient he helped on the day of the Twin Tower attack. The patient had been transferred to another hospital and Dajer decided to visit him, to “have a face, to know of somebody that we had taken care of that I could get to know a little more.” The patient had been rendered paraplegic, and Dajer feared that the patient’s wife would be distraught… Instead,

the wife shows up, and it was probably the most unexpected moment of grace in my whole life. She was just, “look, you saved him. Whatever time I had with him, without you, he wouldn’t even be here” and just left us speechless. She was radiant with gratitude and love and “oh, my God, what you guys must have gone through on 9-11,” and “thank you for saving my husband.”

The husband died a few months later, but the doctor and that woman kept in touch. Dajer says:

she visits every now and then, and it’s a touchstone that keeps me connected and forgiven and understanding of what happened. […] What she showed me was that even in the depths of her grief, that somehow her love for him spilled over to us was almost a miracle. That sense of her taking care of us when it’s supposed to be completely the other way around was what was so powerful.

I have never seen another human being so represent what grace means. It’s a human standard that because she can do it, means it can be done, and it is possible to be that way.

The definition of grace in the OED starts with its theological origin. It is “benevolence […], bestowed freely and without regard to merit”. And benevolence is the “disposition to do good, […] to promote the happiness of others”. Grace can also be the expression of gratitude (Thanksgiving is “action de grâce” in French, a literal “giving grace”!). Considering all this, grace feels like an especially potent word and something to aspire to. Grace heals… not just the person who receives it, but the person who chooses to bestow it.

Whereas that doctor found that it stopped him in his tracks, an experience which he gifts listeners of the podcast with the words to translate the intensity of the feeling, I think we aren’t granted such profundity every day… Most days, I suspect, grace flows, if it is unobstructed, like a little stream. I think it can look as mundane as a man taking care of his father with Alzheimer’s, a strength hidden in the willingness of his care for his family despite the merit of his freedom having been unfairly judged. That’s what came to mind listening to In the Dark’s season 2 update, here.

(Grace, previously mentioned.)  

Keeping a diary

I liked what Peter Elbow writes about keeping a diary in his book Writing Without Teachers:

One of the functions of a diary is to create the interaction between you and symbols on paper. If you have strong feelings and then write them down freely, it gives you on the one hand some distance and control, but on the other hand it often makes you feel those feelings more. For you can often allow yourself to feel something more if you are not so helpless and lost in the middle of it. So the writing helps you feel the feeling and then go on to feel the next feelings. Not be stuck. (p. 56)

(I also like how the colour of my sticky notes perfectly matches the pages in this book!)

Food (the subject)

Sometimes, things connect in a delightful way… First, there’s the mild curiosity over the old recipes you can come across while browsing newspaper archives. You kind of wonder, half in passing, if that dish, whose black and white picture is rendered in ink blots, would actually taste good today. 

This recipe, featured in July 1956, is a frozen dessert. It has a crust made of pulverized sugary cereal and butter. The filling is milk, cream, almond extract and instant pudding whipped together for a minute and then set to freeze for 4 hours. It is called a Frozen Royal Pie. Who knows? Maybe it’s delicious! (This is also the newspaper edition that features Christian’s grandpa’s death on page 4.)

Then second, by chance, a podcast asks the same question, going further into the past, and answering with a bit more academic rigour. (At one point in the podcast, the guest, Marieke Hendricksen, muses about one of their experiments, “it also brought home to me that because people ate so many fermented foods, they must have had a higher histamine tolerance than we had.”)

But wait! There’s a third link! There’s this story of Rosie Grant (This is Taste podcast) who collected recipes carved into gravestones and lovingly gathered them into a cookbook titled To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. She’s been documenting her discoveries (Instagram: Ghostly Archive) and when asked about any changes of perspective she had since beginning the project, she answered:

Oh my gosh, so much appreciation for our home cooks. […] On the flip side [of professional chefs] there are people who are just like everyday cooks who really love food. 

They use food to show love. They use it to celebrate someone’s birthday or to celebrate a holiday and bring people together. And there’s a real, like a labor side and gift side to it as well. […] 

Every day I just feel like I have so much appreciation for even my own family members who use food to not only nourish me, but give me some of my best childhood memories to connect me with others. 

I like food best when I’m with a loved one or friend and we’re having dinner or we’re cooking. It’s just given me a lot more of a sense of how it connects us together.”

Eating 

Would you like to see this Nutella croissant from Le Croissant, where I was invited for lunch earlier this week? I was one bite in to my half before my (kind, less voracious) lunch partner suggested a picture of our meal. It was too late for the muffuletta sandwich… But the table decorations were cute!

This week, I made Tikka Masala from The Huckle and Goose Cookbook, a recipe filed away for occasions when I’d need to use up garden tomatoes that were all together ripening, ripening, ripening.  

The boys tried one of their uncles’ favourite desserts… a slice of Wafer Pie from Salisbury House (Instagram). It might not win top spot in their heart, but they didn’t detest it either.

And, in the spirit of the season, I picked up this cookie mix from the Bruxelles General Store last week, made it and served the cookies with a cinnamon glaze to the kids gathered at our house for a playdate. 

PostcardS

Fall is advertised for its colour, but pictures from walks this week advertise its texture instead… the silver pearls of a heavy dew, the ragged cutout shape of maple leaves on the ground, and the fuzzy softness of a plant going to seed…

Happy Sunday! Happy Thanksgiving!

A week on Sunday No. 24

Decluttered

I was about to write how good it felt when I recently decluttered my closet. But something made this “does it bring me joy”-type session particularly satisfying… I think it’s this layered excuse - I hadn’t decluttered in years, because I’d been avoiding shopping (going months without buying a piece of apparel) because there was no time (shopping is intimidating, thrifting is a fun if laborious hunt) because there was no use (I was intermittently on some draft or other of my thesis, or research, down in the basement, hardly venturing out for anything more than strictly practical…). But this week some mysterious tipping point was reached, and I flushed my closet free of two bags of clothing.

When I look at the closet now, the image that comes to mind is of the basement in my childhood home that had an access to a pipe that would regularly get clogged. Mom would lay down newspapers for when the plumber would come, and invariably, the plumber was a man with big boots, hoisting a giant drain snake on his shoulder that rattled as he marched down the stairs. He would leave, blaming the epic willow tree in our yard for creeping its roots into the drain. 

My closet feels like a pipe that’s been unclogged. New energy runs through it.

20th anniversary

July 9th was the occasion for flowers, for lunch at a fancy place, and an afternoon at Thermea. Still spoiled 20 years on!

Baking

These are Tahini Chocolate Chip cookies from the KISMET cookbook, and they are soft and delicious. Zero complaints from the household members.

Informative

Sometimes I think back to my aging Grandmother, I’m struck by how little I understood, how little I could sympathize with the Aunt who took care of her. Adria Thompson’s TikToks at BeLightCare are a really nice resource I’ve been pleased to come across. There are things in life you have to live to appreciate.

Postcard

We are breathing the effects of climate change in the North, and a picture taken on Friday shows the smoke-fogged skies…

This milkweed is pretty cute though, with its pair of ants…

Happy Sunday!

Friday Five

There are weeks in a year when something happens somewhere in time, that sends a bowling ball through your calendar, roaring a path through the quotidian and bending all the invisible structure of ephemeral habits to the energy of its passage. That is to say, things can happen in a week that tear at the gossamer web of quiet moments in which to percolate ideas. Creativity this week is focused on food, the pictures taken while preparing meals, moments in between meals, meals as necessity and care.

1 Bluestem Red

I love how pretty Big Bluestem is in the fall, with its occasional vibrant red blades… Yesterday, I walked the dog early in the morning, before the sun rose, and his nose detected a fox I could not see in the dark, until it ran across the street and its coat shone red in the streetlight. The fox is an elegant animal, its white-socked paws seem to dance across the ground in balletic bounds across the road. It scampered away and Enzo and I made it to the end of the block after so much excited howling. We turned the corner to the left at a quiet suburban crossroad and faced the wind. When I looked back, I could see the fox sitting at the right side of the crossroad, its pointed ears perfectly silhouetted in the dark, watching us as we walked away, the dog oblivious, the scent gone for him. 

2 Beet red

Our garden is yielding beets, and so, this week, I made borsht. I also made refrigerator pickles for another meal. I stopped though, to take this picture, just to marvel at the beauty in the contrasted colours.

3 Seeing red

These are almond crescents, the ones saved from being snapped up by the dog, in the half-minute I left the kitchen and left the cookies too close to the edge. I served them for dessert along with a magical chocolate mousse made with only water and chocolate - but fancied-up with a bit of orange juice, a swirl of whipping cream and a sprinkling of sugary orange zest.

4 Roses are red

Or rather, these lilies are, kindly gifted, happening to match these giant tomatoes, ripening for Deb Perelman’s Tomato and Corn Cobbler.

5 A rosé, not a red

Wine is lovely and this is a rosé, with a bit leftover, pulled from the fridge and so full of condensation, just to say, if you like wine that could trick you into thinking it’s juice, this is just the kind for you!



Happy Friday!  

Friday Five

Last week I did not publish a post and have felt like a shell of a human ever since. That ends today with a quotes on beauty, a fact and advice learned from Kevin Kelly in a podcast, a recipe we tried and liked, cookies too, and what the scenery is like here. (Hint: it's gone from still-hibernating frigidity last week to "where are my t-shirts?" this week.) 

1. Rebecca Solnit's Thoughts on beauty 

Solnit published Orwell's Roses in October 2021. Of the many thought-provoking passages, there are these ones on beauty. (They lack page numbers because I listened to the audiobook and transcribed them later.)

The word beauty is one of those overly roomy words, frayed around the edges, ignored through overfamiliarity, often used to mean purely visual beauty. But the kinds of beauty that the Oxford English Dictionary enumerates include many that are not visual, including "that quality of a person or thing which is highly pleasing or satisfying to the mind; moral or intellectual excellence," an admirable person, an impressive or exceptionally good example of something.

In her book On Beauty and Being Just, the scholar Elaine Scarry notes that among the complaints about beauty is that contemplation of it is passive - "looking or hearing without any wish to change what one has seen or heard." It's a definition startling in its simplicity. What one does not wish to change can be the desirable condition realized, and it's where aesthetic and ethical standards meet. She contrasts that with "looking or hearing that is prelude to intervening in, changing, what one has seen or heard (as happens in the presence of injustice)." Those obsessed with productivity and injustice often disparage doing nothing, though by doing nothing we usually mean a lot of subtle actions and observations and cultivation of relationships that are doing many kinds of something. It's doing something whose value and results are not so easily quantified or commodified, and you could even argue that any or every evasion of quantifiability and commodifiability is a victory against assembly lines, authorities, and oversimplifications. 

On how beauty and integrity go together:

Beauty is not only formal, and it lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear; it lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see. A dancer's gesture may be beautiful because it is precisely executed move by a highly skilled artist-athlete, but even a gracefully executed kick of a child is ugly. The meaning subverts the form, and elegance of form is always capable of being corrupted by what meaning it delivers. "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up," Orwell wrote in his critique of the painter Salvador Dali. "If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down it it surrounds a concentration camp." Form cannot be separated from function. And the beauty - or the hideousness - can be in meaning, impact, implications, rather than appearance.

The word integrity means moral consistency and commitment, but it also means something whole and unbroken, uninjured, and it's a quality found in many beautiful things. (...)

The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People die so that this mine may profit, that these shoes may be produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew these toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.

2. Learning from Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly published, at the top of the month, a book full of advice. He's been a guest on a number of podcasts which is just the kind of promotion I'm most susceptible to. On Conversations with Tyler I learned that costumes are the fist things to vanish from traditional cultures because: 

the amount of effort required to make clothing by hand is so enormous. The traditional way you make clothing is you make fibers from wool. You spin the threads, then they have to make into a loom.

It is an enormous amount of energy to make clothing by hand. It’s much cheaper to buy cloth. That’s one of the first things that people do when they have the ability to have money, is that they buy clothing rather than make it themselves. If you’re not taking the homemade cloth and making it into your native costume, and you’re buying a shirt — it’s just easier to put on a cotton T-shirt, which you can almost get for free. The costumes just disappear because they’re not making the entire cloth and fabric by hand.

In the Longform podcast episode, Kelly mentionned in passing his idea about "protopia" and his website offers an explanation: "(...) just because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them much more likely." And, "Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize." 

(There’s an 8 minute video about it here.)

3. Celebrating asparagus!

There are three categories of pizza in our house. In order of preference, the first is the gourmet stone-fired kind you can get at fancy restaurants, authentic Italian markets or fancy food trucks. These yield simple pizzas with the extraordinary crust that has bubbles and spots of char. The second category are home-made, they have a simple dough and are cooked at regular oven temperatures and have the toppings your family likes. The third kind are quickly delivered from easy-to-remember phone numbers. 

Bearing all that in mind, our home-made pizzas are fine, not fancy, but still a treat, given I'm more willing to make waffle batter than pizza dough on a Friday night. This week, I finally made Smitten Kitchen's Shaved Asparagus Pizza. It's been on my mind a long time considering it's a recipe from her first cookbook published in 2012. 

I think I resisted making it because I figured the kids wouldn't like it. I'm not wrong, but this palate-limiting belief has loosened a little in the last while since I've learned how to split meals between the things the adults want to try and the things the kids are comfortable with. The usual dough recipe I use from Jane Rodmell’s Best Summer Weekends was enough for two pizzas, theirs had pepperoni and ours had asparagus. This will absolutely now be part of our spring menu rotation.

4. A basic cookie got good reviews in our house

This recipe for Jam Thumbprint Cookies comes from Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking (https://www.amazon.ca/Cheryl-Days-Treasury-Southern-Baking/dp/1579658415) actually garnered special notice from my little teenager.

5. Spot the birds!

Look, I'm sorry, but the landscape scenery here is dead boring. The river is high and everything is brown. But the birds are singing... If nature is not much to look at now, it has a lot to offer your ears.

I don't think I understood in Grade 12 why Silent Spring was the meaningful title it was. Even though I take pictures and look for beauty, walking the dog daily has brought me closer to what Solnit describes in Orwell's Roses:

“I have often thought that much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm. The order that matters most is not spatial but temporal. Sometimes pictures convey this, but the habit of seeing in pictures encourages us to lose sight of the dance. Indigenous people who were sometimes despised for not appreciating nature in the English rustic tradition often appreciated it as orderly patterns in time, not as static pictorial pleasure. That is, they might be more inclined to celebrate, for example, key moments in the temporal march of the sun through the year than an exceptionally pretty sunset.”

Happy Friday!