Thoughts

I like the word resentment. I like how it is defined in the OED as “a sense of grievance” and I like the word “grievance” because it expresses a “state of things which is felt to be oppressive”. I never really thought of resentment before, and thinking about it now feels like the discovery of a unique blend, when before I’d been only thinking of varietals. (I like the comparison to wine.) (I also like the comparison to wine because wine takes time and resentment seems to be uniquely tied up with time.) When I google resentment, it assumes it’s a feeling I have in my marriage. When I try to add time, it assumes I’m a resentful caregiver. Maybe sometimes I am. Mostly, I wish an old person wasn’t resentful about aging. But there’s lots of things that are hard about aging that I should take into consideration, before being annoyed by their complaining. They complain. I wish they didn’t. It makes me feel ineffective. But feeling ineffective, argues Flannery O’Connor, is the nature of a kind of suffering. And that kind of suffering has merit. “We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.” So, I suppose that getting old and complaining about it should not be so harshly judged, because Flannery O’Connor says as much in a letter about another old person: “The harshness with which you speak of Caroline is not justified. She may be basically irreligious but we are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord, nor gracefulness. She tries and tries violently and has a great deal to struggle against and to overcome.” So there. If I don’t like an old person’s grievances, that’s too bad. They should be allowed to have them. And I should hold my peace.

Food

This week, we had Caroline Chambers’ Sweet Potato and Beef Flautas and they were delicious!

Enjoying

How this poem, Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye is like a short story.

Postcards

In the spirit of amateur photographers from the Golden Age of mail by post, here are two pictures from my walks this week… Enzo, when startled, deploys himself like a four-legged tripod, limbs rigid, nose pointed at the offending thing…. In this case, it’s a Christmas tree thrown onto the river, and this beagle doesn’t know what to make of it.

This is the progress of a condo called The Banks. Two and a half years ago (July 30, 2022) it was a recently cleared lot and the fences had not yet gone up so that Christian and I could take a bike ride and look at the view sitting on a giant log, imagining the ghosty presence of families who once lived there.

Second, there was Tuesday

Plans were set aside to come to the help of a friend in pain from an accidental fall. It was a warm day but I served our family and guests Corn Chowder from an old Food Network cookbook. The recipe feels like an indulgence, for by its simplicity (corn, garlic, scallion whites, salt, a bit of sugar and water) it elevates the taste of corn and magically intensifies it.

Third, Wednesday

Wednesday, we met teachers and brought school supplies to school. I don’t know that it matters what I think of some product or other, but, so far, I’ve been impressed with the durability of L.L. Bean backpacks, the service for outfitting the kids with shoes at Canadian Footwear, and the quiet and calm of the back to school aisle at Superstore in the second week of August.

Fourth, Thursday

I love the experience of hearing or reading another person put into words a thing you haven’t been able to describe yourself. This recently happened on the Ezra Klein podcast, in his interview with Jia Tolentino. It focused a lot on screens and parenting, following Tolentino’s recent article “How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention”. But this part, in which the host is describing his own attention:

… what always feels limited to me is my attention. And a lot of the need to escape is a need to rest my attention and recharge it. […] And what allows me to access the transcendence of my children, of the world is, honestly, how rested and how awake and aware I am. […] So in that way, I think escape is undertheorized. That escape, it can be good or bad. I think we have trouble with this question of, are we distracting ourselves, or are we recovering? Are we getting a kind of necessary contemplation, so that we can come back and experience a world and process what we’ve experienced and seen, or are we running from it? Are we trying not to feel from it? Are we trying to be anywhere but here?

I like how objectively the need to recharge attention is treated.