pull up a chair

July 26, 2024

summer is for cooking. no, really.

when the day presents itself as sooty afghan, gray and soft and without shadow. when the air is cool, so cool that cranking the oven is not an act of self-destruction. when the bins at farmers’ market are nearly tumbling to the parking lot below, so weighted by their zaftig field-plucked wares. well, on summer days like that the itch to cook begins.

and so it was the other morning i woke up with eggplant visions. eggplant layered lushly with cheesy-herby oozy pillows in between. all bathed in marinara. baked. dubbed summer’s abbondonza eggplant lasagna.

i promised easy reading here in summer time. and thus, below, i keep my promise, with nothing more strenuous to read than a grocery list of things to gather, and step-by-step notes so you can play along.

abbondonza eggplant lasagna, with more than a few idiosyncratic twists

(as always, i read a few recipes, extract a few cues and follow my whims from there. this began from something that zipped by me on instagram, and led me to a website called mediterranean something or other, and wound up so delicious i gobbled two oozy squares the size of my dinner plate. my annotations below in italics, which is basically me talking back to the recipe. . .)

Ingredients

2 to 3 eggplants (about 1 ½ pounds), sliced lengthwise into ½-inch thick slices (about 10 to 12 slices)
1 zucchini, sliced into coins (or honestly any shape you choose)
1 pint cherry tomatoes
Extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
1 large egg
1 15-oz tub part-skim ricotta cheese
1 ½ cup part-skim mozzarella cheese, divided
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese, divided
3 garlic cloves minced (i squeezed mine through garlic press)
1 teaspoon dried oregano
10 oz frozen spinach, thawed and fully dried (wring out all the water)
1 cup packed chopped fresh parsley
½ cup packed chopped fresh basil, ⅔ ounce
Black pepper to your liking
2 generous cups marinara sauce of choice (i used trader giotto’s organic tomato basil marinara)

Instructions

Season the eggplant slices on both sides with kosher salt and set aside for 20 to 30 minutes (if you don’t have the time, this step can be optional). i skipped this part, because i didn’t have time and because i recently read that these days eggplant has been cured of its bitterness.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400 degrees F and position a rack in the middle.
Wipe the eggplant slices very well with a paper towel (you want to dry it well and remove any excess salt), then arrange on parchment-lined baking sheet (or two if needed). Brush both sides of the eggplant with extra virgin olive oil. Roast in the heated oven until the eggplant softens and becomes pliable (about 15 to 20 minutes or so on the first side, at least another 10 minutes for the B side, which might be because i have a cranky old oven). to this step i added sliced zucchini, and a tub of cherry tomatoes, similarly brushed with oil, and roasted on their own sheet pan.
While the eggplant, zucchini, and tomatoes are roasting, prepare the ricotta filling. In a mixing bowl, beat the egg. Add the ricotta, 1 cup mozzarella, ¼ Parmesan, garlic, oregano, spinach and chopped herbs. Add a small pinch of kosher salt and black pepper to your liking. Mix well to combine. i wandered out to my so-called farm (a raised bed alongside the back alley) and snipped a cup’s worth of basil and another of flat-leaf parsley; the freshness filled the air surrounding my cutting board.
Remove the eggplant, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes from the oven. Lower the heat to 375 degrees F.
Prepare a 9 x 13-inch baking dish. Pour a bit of the pasta sauce (i used 1 cup of trader joe’s marinara) and spread it out into one layer. Lay a few eggplant slices (anywhere from 4 to 6 and it’s fine if they overlap a bit). Next, add half the zucchini slices and half the roasted cherry tomatoes. Spread 1/2 of the ricotta filling, then spread a thin layer of the sauce. Repeat the process in the same pattern. Spread the final layer of sauce and follow with the remaining ½ cup mozzarella cheese and ¼ cup of Parmesan.
Cover the dish tightly with foil. Bake in the heated oven for 15 to 20 minutes, then carefully uncover and return to the oven. Bake for another 10 to 20 minutes or until the cheese has melted and the edges of the lasagna turn a nice golden brown.
Let the lasagna rest for 10 minutes before cutting and serving.
Slice and savor. And then daydream about it till you get around to making it again.

not all who wander to the chair believe in the stove as kitchen essential, and thus for those good souls and anyone else who never minds a blessing, here’s a treasure sent to me weeks back by dear beloved chair friend nan. it’s a blessing from kate bowler, who is herself something of a wonder. a four-times NYT best-selling author, a professor of american religious history at duke divinity school, the scholar who wrote the book on the prosperity gospel, a wife and mother and 35-year-old when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, deemed incurable, and now (nine years later) is cancer-free, she’s taken as her mission “giving you permission to be human.” fully human: warts, dents, soft spots, wonders, glories, whole truths and nothing but the truths.

i’ve been in a room where kate was speaking and she is hilarious. and self-deprecating. and doesn’t present herself as the eighth wonder of the world (which isn’t always the case at writing festivals that showcase those who’ve gained fame by building sentences that grow into paragraphs that fly off the shelves and rack up fine profits). so, with no further ado, and deep thanks to our beloved nan, here is a blessing from kate that, to my mind, gets to the heart of so much that matters:

the blessing above is from kate’s book of blessings, co-written with the lovely jessica richie, and titled “The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days.”

may all of us work to be the ones who notice the light in their eyes, or when that light dims, and to always not be afraid of scooting up close, close as need be, to their suffering.

and that’s the news from the summer kitchen this week. xox

where did you find blessing this week, at the cookstove or otherwise?

a little step-by-step picture guide: blops of ricotta-herb-spinach

10 Comments

July 19, 2024

summer idyll: another name for “idle”

summertime is for slow. and slow i am this summer. i watch bunnies make breakfast buffet of my flowerpots. i keep vigil for a redbud tree that might be on its death march. i cut corn off the cob and dump it into confetti-like salads, delicious salads of tomato, armenian cucumber, and fists full of basil. i swim, slowly and gasping for air at the end of the lanes, in a pool where i am the youngest by a few decades.

and of course i read, an exercise that requires little other than the moving of one’s pupils, the occasional blink, and the turning of pages should one resort to that quaint document, the page.

and so it was in reading this week that those pupils of mine––and the braincells behind them––paused for deep consideration when i came across a commencement address by the late great russian poet and essayist joseph brodsky.

in the summer of 1989, two years after he won the nobel prize in literature and two decades after he fled the soviet dictatorship with the help of w.h. auden, brodsky stepped to the podium at dartmouth college to give the commencement address, later published in a posthumous collection titled, “on grief and reason: essays” (farrar, straus and giroux, 1997).

the topic he chose, curiously, was boredom. but brodsky being brodsky, he soared with it. and because i found it altogether mesmerizing, and because his closing passage stuck with me in what amounts to the cerebral iteration of gum to the bottom of your sneakers, i’m bringing it here to the old make-believe maple table.

what’s true, in these months of living fully awake to the ephemerality of time, is that i soak in especially the wisdoms of those who understand that fleetingness to be central to the sanctifying of time’s each and every parcel. to understand that time is not endless, but rather bracketed and with certain end, is for me anyway the gravitational force that drives my attention out of malaise and into full-on savor.

i hold each grain of time, as often as i pause and catch myself, up to the incandescent luminescence that reveals and magnifies its wonder. in other words, i aim to live with one of these in my back pocket, gliding time beneath my ever-ready looking glass:

here then is where brodsky begins his deep-dive into boredom, as he looked out upon a sea of soon-to-be-graduates at that ivy-covered college in new hampshire’s piney countryside (i’d endorse reading clear through these next few grafs, but if you’re pressed for time, leap down to the bottom of read to see if you, too, are struck by brodsky’s likening our time here to a ride on a runaway train, and his admonition to seize each blessed frame as it’s passing by):

Known under several aliases – anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, acedia, etc. – boredom is a complex phenomenon and by large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won’t supply you with that option, for life’s main medium is precisely repetition.

[…]

In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it. That’s what accounts, perhaps, for one’s dread of lonely, torpid evenings, for the fascination with which one watches sometimes a fleck of dust swirls in a sunbeam, and somewhere a clock tick-tocks, the day is hot, and your willpower is at zero.

Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speakes the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life – the one you didn’t get here, on these green lawns – the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you are to rub shoulders with. “You are finite,” time tells you in a voice of boredom, “and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile.” As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significance even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement.

For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust swirls in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those fleck! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small. And do you know what the dust says when it’s being wiped off the table?

“Remember me,”
whispers the dust.

Nothing could be farther away from the mental agenda of any of you, young and newfangled, than the sentiment expressed in this two-liner of the German poet Peter Huchel, now dead.

brodsky closes his address with the words that first caught my eye this week, and that i––once again––will aim to not forget:

[…]

What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to be, the train doesn’t stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck — not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past… receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck. So… look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past.

i reached for that confetti salad glamour shot above because it was a bit more visual than trying to find an image of boredom. it was perhaps the most delicious thing i made this week (the grilled salmon that arrived with the salad was mighty good, but i did nothing other than introduce it to the heat of the grill), and if you’re now hungry, here’s the recipe, courtesy of david lebovitz, a former pastry chef from chez panisse now a cookbook writer living in paris. lucky david.

fresh corn, tomato, cucumber, avocado, basil summer salad

2-3 ears of fresh corn
2 cups (350g) cherry tomatoes , (or 2 cups fresh tomatoes, diced)
1 ripe avocado
1/2 cucumber, peeled and seeded
1 cup (75g) loosely packed chopped fresh basil, (reserve any small leaves for garnish) Freshly ground black pepper
Vinaigrette
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
4 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1-2 small shallots, peeled and minced (1-2 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon sea or kosher salt
6 tablespoons (90ml) extra-virgin olive oil

Shuck the corn and remove it from the cob.
Remove any stems and slice the cherry tomatoes in half.
Peel the avocado, remove the pit, and dice the flesh. Cut the cucumber into similar sized cubes.
Put the corn kernels, tomatoes, avocado, cucumber, and basil into a serving bowl and season with freshly ground black pepper.
In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, mustard, shallots, salt, and olive oil. Pour the vinaigrette dressing over the salad and gently mix together. Taste, and add more salt and pepper if necessary.

Serving and storage: The dressed salad can be served right away or in a few hours. (It can be stored in the refrigerator or at room temperature, but should be served room temperature.) It’s best the same day it’s made.

your thoughts on the runaway train (above) welcome here, with the related question, what are the ways you remind yourself to live each day mindful of the preciousness and miracle that it holds?

5 Comments

July 12, 2024

summer reading: the writer who gave us spider webs and a little mouse, plus other wisdoms

elwyn brooks white, best known to those who loved him as “andy,” and best known to you and me alphabetically as “e.b.,” taught me as much about love as just about any author i’ve ever read. and that includes the sacred texts of just about any religion i’ve happened upon.

every time i’ve pored over the words of charlotte’s web, or stuart little, or “death of a pig,” among the most masterful essays put to paper, i’ve felt the walls of my heart widen, and the bottom go deeper. perched against pillows in the old four-poster bed where both our boys inhabited the dreamland of their youths, i recall the sobs coming in echoes––from the one who was reading and the one being read to––as i choked my way through the tear-blurred words at the top of a still-splotted page 171: “she knew he was saying good-bye in the only way he could. and she knew her children were safe.” (i can’t even type that last sentence now without the tears coming again, filling my sockets.) “. . . she never moved again.” and then “. . .no one was with her when she died.”

we are reading, of course, of a spider. a spider we have all come to love, named charlotte.

and any writer who could make me love with all my heart an arachnid is a writer about whom i can never ever know enough. so it was with purest, geyser-like joy that i turned the pages this week of the first-ever fully illustrated biography of the legendary elwyn brooks white.

part collage, part scrap book, with excerpts of e.b.’s letters, and sketches, and reprints of early drafts and revisions in his own handwritten manuscript, Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White, by the caldecott honor winner melissa sweet, is at heart a love story told of one of the great disciples of love in its quietest, most undeniable forms.

e.b.’s life’s work, as he saw it, and as he wrote in a letter to a reader of charlotte’s web, boils down, pretty much, to this:

love these days seems to be a commodity of which the world is running short. but andy, or e.b., set out to make us see it, and feel it deep in our bones, by telling us the stories, as he put it, “of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart.” he calls those matters “the only kind of creative work which i could accomplish with any sincerity or grace.”

well, dear andy, my gratitude to you is etched on the chambers of my heart, a graffiti of the highest order. to teach a child that love comes in the corner of a barn or even atop the manure pile where wilbur the pig so merrily huddled, well, that’s a blessing pure and certain. and imperative, i’d argue. and too often missed, i’d add.

because he’s earned his post as ballast for my wobbly, sometimes-too-tender heart, wasn’t i delighted when i turned to page 132 in this charmed and charming illustrated biography, and found this excerpt from andy’s letters, which seemed to me a prescriptive for these hard times and the dark clouds under which we find ourselves:

“things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. it is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. but as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time, waiting to sprout when the conditions are right.“

i’ll stop there with my old friend e.b., because that’s the line i want to consider, the line i want us to latch onto and live.

and so, what a curious thing that the next wise soul i wandered into this week was one olga jacoby, a german-jewish englishwoman and mother of four adopted children, who, in 1909 at age 35, had received a terminal diagnosis from her doctor, and sat down to write him a letter on the subject of living and dying without religion, but with moral courage, kindness, and a stunning receptivity to beauty. their correspondence would unfold until jacoby’s death four years later, and her letters, “by turns funny, touching, and intensely sad,” were published posthumously and anonymously by her husband in 1919.

in her first letter, to “my dear doctor,” she boiled down her belief to this:

“To leave a good example to those I love [is] my only understanding of immortality.”

and a year into her diagnosis she illuminated that notion:

“. . . More and more to me this simplest of thoughts seems right: Live, live keenly, live fully; make ample use of every power that has been given us to use, to use for the good end. Blind yourself to nothing; look straight at sadness, loss, evil; but at the same time look with such intense delight at all that is good and noble that quite naturally the heart’s longing will be to help the glory to triumph, and that to have been a strong fighter in that cause will appear the only end worth achieving. The length of life does not depend on us.”

and, she leaves us with this bedrock of lived truth:

“. . . Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give. Once given out love is set rolling for ever to amass more, resembling an avalanche by the irresistible force with which it sweeps aside all obstacles, but utterly unlike in its effect, for it brings happiness wherever it passes and lands destruction nowhere.”

who teaches you on the subject of love? what seeds of goodness harbor in you, and how will you coax them to sprout? and how might you put into practice the avalanche of irresistible force practiced by spiders and pigs alike (at least in the rich imagination of one e.b. white) and that, to the dying mother of four, was the most lasting thing that ever there was?

Some Writer! came to me, as so many of the best so-called children’s books do, by way of my best longest friend, auntie mullane, the children’s librarian, who prescribed it as the sure cure for summer blues, or any blues that might befall us in this dark-clouded era.

12 Comments

July 5, 2024

of joy and hope in hard times

evidence of joy lurking somewhere in the house

joy comes in curious form. in simplest form sometimes. it arrived deep in the night last night in the form of tiptoes up the stairs. and then a creak of bedroom door. had i not been lost in the murky land of dreams i might have been startled, might have worried that burglars were afoot. instead, i somehow thought it was the mate asleep beside me, that he’d roused and went out lurking. but then i felt the lump beneath the sheets. and as the murk faded i realized the night visitor must be the very one who’d called that room his own for so many years.

a night visitor, sometimes, brings joy.

and so it is that the simple knowing that, come the waking hour (his waking hour clocks in hours beyond mine), i’ll be at the stove tossing berries in a pond of batter, is enough to wash me in a morning’s joy.

it’s as simple as that sometimes. as narrow-focused.

these days, i contemplate strategies for making joy. and survival.

we live in dark times. not so dark as other moments in history, perhaps, but dark enough to make it hard to dodge the shadow. or the pit in my belly that will not subside.

i found myself turning, this week, in three different instances to albert camus. not the first on my list when it comes to literary prozac, but thrice he and his wisdoms came through for me. his words, drawn from a collection of posthumously published essays, speak across the decades, and if a writer born into one world war, who lived through another, could find it in his soul searching to seek and find a trail of hope, well then he’s one to whom i’ll listen.

in the year i was born, camus (1913-1960) became the second-youngest laureate of the nobel prize for literature, awarded for writing that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience.” the problems he mined were these: art as resistance, happiness as our moral obligation, and the measure of strength through difficult times.

one of my modern-day muses, as you might have gathered if you read here very often, is the cultural critic maria popova who rarely fails to pluck gems worth tucking in forever chests. in a trail that led me to her this week, i found that some years ago she too took a turn into the deep well of camus. she wrote:

“During WWII, Camus stood passionately on the side of justice; during the Cold War, he sliced through the Iron Curtain with all the humanistic force of simple kindness. But as he watched the world burn its own future in the fiery pit of politics, he understood that time, which has no right side and no wrong side, is only ever won or lost on the smallest and most personal scale: absolute presence with one’s own life, rooted in the belief that ‘real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.’”

she goes on to point out that in camus’ writing she hears the echo of the young dostoyevsky’s exultant reckoning with the meaning of life shortly after his death sentence was repealed (“to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart,” dostoyevsky wrote to his brother, “that’s what life is all about, that’s its task”). these giants of literature belong on our nearest shelves for, in so many ways, they’ve left us instructions––or is it imperatives?––for living.

and here we hear camus:

“What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world?… What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness… I hold onto the world with every gesture, to men with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice… The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair?… In spite of much searching, this is all I know.”

not realizing i was tracing camus through the week, the first time he caught my eye this week was in the single short first sentence below, which hit me as a fist to the belly as i count my days under the penumbra of those first three words:

“Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity?”

and finally, at 27, camus wrote this, speaking for this moment as well as the dark, dark times of 1940 when he wrote them:

“Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.”

as if all that was not enough to carry me across the tide of this july’s miasma, it was with joyful inkling of recognition that my reading unearthed this most unforgettable line of camus: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

do yourself a favor and check out camus’ lyrical and critical essays. and consider leaving the front door unlocked lest any night visitor might wander in with reservation for blueberry pancake breakfast.

and may we all find that invincible summer.

what carried you across the abyss this week?

my night visitor, of course, is the boy we rarely see these days as he is ever toiling in the kitchen of stephanie izard’s famed girl and the goat eatery. but the holiday upon us drew him out of the city to an old friend’s house, where the hour was late enough that trains must have ceased their chugging along the track, and thus we scored him for the night. good thing the sheets are always clean, and the griddle ever at the ready.

the cookie dome above, scattered with bits of brownie crumb, is one of the few clues left behind by the night visitor. i always delight in remnant evidence when i awake in the morning and find the kitchen not exactly as i’d left it. those crumbs bring volumes of joy to me…

6 Comments

June 28, 2024

where my rabbit hole led me this week. . .

one in a series of summertime esoterica, in which for no particular reason my attention is drawn to this, that, or the other thing…

deep in my summertime poking-around ways, a pursuit of reading akin to ambling barefoot through dew-sodden grass, i found myself the other day burrowing into a rabbit hole, following the trail of a late-19th-century theologian with radical ideas and gloriously poetic prayers. (i might just as effortlessly follow the trail of what to do with too much zucchini, or why banana-peel-steeped waters are so fine for my fledgling tomatoes…it’s a carousel of wonders here on curiosity row…)

the theologian of the week, here in rabbit-hole land, is one walter rauschenbusch, the late 19th-century clergyman and theologian who led the Social Gospel movement in the U.S., and whose work is said to have influenced a litany of great 20th-century social-justice warriors, among them martin luther king jr., desmond tutu, lucy randolph mason, reinhold niebuhr, and george mcgovern. his animating idea was that not just individuals but the whole of society needed to work toward what he termed “the kingdom of God” on earth, a place where justice and peace as well as equal rights and a democratic distribution of economic power were holy and necessary works, ones that demanded constant and unrelenting effort.

rauschenbusch’s radical theology, it seems, was informed by eleven years working as a baptist pastor in NYC’s aptly-named Hell’s Kitchen, where he presided over the funerals of hundreds of children who died from the ravages of impoverishment—malnutrition, domestic violence spurred by overcrowded tenements, or any of the other ills born of economic destitution.

rauschenbusch wrote: “I began to realize that God hates injustice and that I would be quenching God’s spirit within me if I kept silent with all of the social sin of the world around me.”

of the hundreds of children’s funerals over which rauschenbusch presided (many of them for children younger than five), he wrote:

“At each funeral I would find myself crying out to God, ‘Why do the children have to suffer in this manner?’ I recall on one occasion one of the church members, a single father who worked at a factory for 12 hours each day. His daughter was dying at home and calling out for her daddy. The employer refused to allow the father to go home to be with his daughter in her last hours.

“It was not uncommon to see grown men near our church just begging for work, just so they and their families could survive.

“It was in this context that I began to understand sin in a new and radical way. Baptists had always been known as railing and condemning the sins of alcoholism, smoking, gambling, and sexual promiscuity, such as were exemplified in the lives of the many prostitutes who lived and worked very close to our church. . . .

“The radical conclusion that I came to was this: all of these personal sins which were so obvious to everyone were somehow connected to the sin of structural injustice. So many people saw no hope, no way to extricate themselves from their living hell, their dead-end street. So many would resort to alcoholism. Women would feel compelled to become a prostitute so they could feed themselves and their families. Charles Dickens in his writings helped us see and somewhat feel the environment that could ensnare anyone who was trapped in a world of deprivation and desperation.

“The less obvious sins to most Baptists and other conservative leaders were those that were represented by the vast gulf between those who were extremely opulent, you might say ‘filthy rich,’ and the vast majority of people who were barely able (and oftentimes not able) to get by.”

finding wisdoms from the past for these arduous times is, perhaps, too futile a pursuit. but i believe in the endosperm of hope. and rauschenbusch’s prayers––and his theology––seem apt for a dusting off. and, besides, his prayers are beautifully wrought.

my eye was caught first by one of those prayers, the evening prayer (below) but as i kept reading it was the line above––“I began to realize that God hates injustice and that I would be quenching God’s spirit within me if I kept silent with all of the social sin of the world around me.”––and the children’s funerals that informed it, that clutched me at the gut and won’t let go.

here, as a place to begin, is but one of his prayers, with particular resonance for one who delights in all of creation, especially the trials and triumphs just beyond my own back door:

FOR OUR WORLD, OUR EARTH

O God, we thank You for this universe, our great home; for the vastness and richness of our cosmic environment; for the manifoldness of life on the planet of which we are a part.

We are thankful for the morning sun and the clouds and the constellations of stars.

We rejoice in the salt sea and the deep waters and green leaves of grass.

We thank You for our sense by which we experience earth’s splendor.

We would have souls open to all this joy, souls saved from being so weighted with care that we pass unseeing when the thornbush by the wayside is aflame with beauty.

Enlarge within us a sense of fellowship with all that lives and moves and has being in space and time, especially with all who share this earth as their common home with us.

Remembering with shame that in the past, we human beings have all too often exercised high dominion with ruthless cruelty, we admit that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to You in song, has been a groan of travail.

May we so live that our world may not be ravished by our greed nor spoiled by our ignorance.

May we hand on earth’s common heritage of life, undiminished in joy when our bodies return in peace to You, our Great Mother who has nourished them.

and here is the beginning of his evening prayer:

LORD, we praise thee for our sister, the Night, who folds all the tired folk of the earth in her comfortable robe of darkness and gives them sleep. Release now the strained limbs of toil and smooth the brow of care. Grant us the refreshing draught of forgetfulness that we may rise in the morning with a smile on our face. Comfort and ease those who toss wakeful on a bed of pain, or whose aching nerves crave sleep and find it not. Save them from evil or despondent thoughts in the long darkness, and teach them so to lean on thy all-pervading life and love, that their souls may grow tranquil and their bodies, too, may rest. And now through thee we send Good Night to all our brothers and sisters near and far, and pray for peace upon all the earth.

if you’re interested, here’s a link to a PDF of rauschenbusch’s 1910 collection of prayers, For God and the People: Prayers of the Social Awakening.

in the book’s preface, rauschenbusch explained the collection’s genesis: “The language of prayer always clings to the antique for the sake of dignity, and plain reference to modern facts and contrivances jars the ear. So we are inclined to follow the broad avenues beaten by the feet of many generations when we approach God. We need to blaze new paths to God for the feet of modern [women and] men.”

amen, pastor rauschenbusch, amen.

as long as we’re quoting old white men, i admit to being an admirer of the writings of that old-time radio humorist garrison keillor, who has mellowed beyond measure with age. in an ode to summer’s slow pace the other day, he wrote this about morning light, one of the blessings that comes with waking early, a habit i consider essential to the deep breathing of my soul:

It’s a revelation of delight, of our Creator’s delight in His creation, and though we’re brought up to be skeptical, wary of big hopes, prepared to deal with the injustices of life, still the dawn light argues with stoicism and you see the beauty of the ordinary.

what ordinary beauties or big ideas captured your imagination this week?

and here’s a harder question (to ponder in your own soul): what shall we do so as not to stay silent in the face of the social sin of the world?

and happy blessed blessed day to my beloved andrea, who makes me laugh hard and often, and whose goodness seems vaster than the circumference of this big blue globe. (A is one of the chair friends who reads dutifully nearly every week, and more often than not sends along a note that melts me or makes me laugh every time…)

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June 21, 2024

of darkness and sunlight in shifting proportion

night was on my mind this week, as the sunlight upon us stretched to its longest shift of the year, the apex of the solstice on thursday, and now the night grows longer minute by minute till winter’s solstice takes its turn, a doh-si-doh of celestial bodies. the interplay of light and shadow is eternal, has been, according to genesis, since the beginning, day one. and it was good.

it might seem counterintuitive to contemplate night when the day is at its longest, but it’s often through the paradoxical that insights are gleaned. a wise and soulful priest pointed me toward considering the illuminations that come in darkness, at a saturday morning retreat in the great gothic-revival church that so often stirs me these days.

and then through the week, i kept stumbling on poems that made me marvel, made me think deep and deeper of the hours of darkness. here are two:

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

––Night in Day by Joseph Stroud

Night Ferry
by John Burnside

Had I been less prepared, I would have left
in springtime, when the plum tree in the yard
was still in bloom,
the windows open after months of snow,
one magpie in the road
and then another.

I could have slipped away, late afternoon,
while everyone was busy somewhere else,
the fish van at the corner, children
dawdling home from school
in twos and threes, a porch light
lit against the dusk on Tollbooth Wynd.

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to prow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.

it’s the last stanza of burnside’s that spoke to me most profoundly. “give me these years again and I will / spend them wisely.”

and then, with celestial bodies on my mind, i stumbled onto john burroughs, the naturalist whose wisdoms and poetries never fail to stir me.

“If I had my life to live over again, and had my choice of celestial bodies, I am sure I should take this planet, and iI should choose these men and women for my friends and companions. This great rolling sphere with its sky, its stars, its sunrises and sunsets, and with its outlook into infinity — what could be more desirable? What more satisfying? Garlanded by the seasons, embosomed in sidereal influences, thrilling with continents — one might ransack the heavens in vain for a better or more picturesque abode.” — John Burroughs

but mostly this week i indulged in the sunlight of one of the oldest, dearest friends i have on this planet: my roommate in college, my roommate after college, my maid of honor, godmother to my firstborn, and my heartmate and soulmate through life’s most scouring hours. she’s a california girl, blond still (naturally so), and more beautiful than ever, and she married a man who might be the twin separated at birth from the one i married. not only do they both wear the exact same spectacles, they both dress in old-line khakis and oxford-cloth shirts, and think deeply about the subjects they love (film for the one from LA; bricks, mortar, and marble for the one i married) as well as the ideas that animate the life of the mind. we played, the four of us, at being playful: took long walks through woodsy ravines, gobbled ice cream from cones, motored downtown to see georgia o’keeffe at the art institute, and before we got there stumbled into one of the world’s great symphony orchestras rehearsing schumann’s piano concerto in frank gehry’s bandshell with someone billed as one of the world’s greatest pianist. all for free. and all in the sunlight.

and tomorrow, my firstborn marks another spin around the sun at the center of it all. there are not enough blessings under that sun for me to wish and hope and pray for my boy, but i wish every last one for him and his heart and his soul and his dreams. happy blessed life, you who made me a mama.

how did you mark the solstice, the day when the sunlight shines longest?

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June 14, 2024

settling in and summer serendipities

clippers, shovel, trowel. those are the implements of my tranquility. of returning to my roost and sinking in my roots.

i’m back from travels far and farther. old home seeps into all the crags and crevices. knows me as intimately as any living soul. the familiarity of this old house’s creaks and cracks, the way the one floorboard at the top of the stairs whines its arthritic whine (you too might whine if, for a good 85 years, you’d been underfoot to the clumsiness and weighty soles of so many), the way the light falls in at the same afternoon hour day after day and casts a halo on the old clock that never chimes the proper hour, it all is home to me. and it all comes rushing in, as if a tide pool filling once again, oozing into hollow parts now on their way toward sated.

i loved the adventure of my travels. loved being nursemaid to my boy. but coming home is, in deep down ways, where i belong. it’s in this old house that i finally found my peace. and, every time, it soothes me, quietly awaits me.

the garden, most of all, is living breathing companion. more than just a place to dig and poke, it almost speaks to me in whispers. delights me. returns the favour of my attention with its unfurled petals, its landing spot for bumblebee and butterfly and red-breasted robin. as one schooled in the storybook pages of tasha tudor, kate greenaway, and the norton anthology of children’s poetry, i honed early on my imagination’s muscles (thank you, mama). i spy a delphinium in bloom, a bloom as cobalt blue as neptune is thought to be, and i am certain an elfin soul will soon be stretching out a hammock from stem to stem down there where ladybugs and caterpillars roam. and so the garden to me is endless canvas of delight, whimsy, and unfolding tale, as if i’m something of the puppeteer to my plantings.

i relish sinking back into the rhythms of my chores: the way i stack the mugs, the wee bouquets i tuck around the house, the shopping list i know by heart.

all of it serves to cradle me. tells me i’m home where i belong.

the world and its adventures will be mine again, should i choose to wander. but for now, the summer––and the cicada––are upon us, and the tempo’s slowed, and my tank feels very much in need of filling.

i intend to surrender to summer, and let the whimsies steer me. i might not write each friday. i might write wednesdays instead. i might go a spell in silence. i might write in the middle of some night.

the point is, summer plays best in serendipitous tones. and i intend to listen. and to play along.

what will you do new this summer?

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June 7, 2024

that inextinguishable instinct

post-tonsillectomy children’s memorial, january 2000

dispatch from 20037. . .

two dozen years ago, a little guy I loved, a little guy of six, was wheeled down a long hallway to have his tonsils plucked. i walked the whole long way beside his gurney, straight into the OR, where they let me hold his hand till they were ready to send him off to dreamless land. and then, back I walked to wait, eyes awash with tears.

just now, that same kid was wheeled away again. and I, the nurse who flew in from chicago because I couldn’t imagine being even a mile away, was by his side. This time, though, I skipped the long walk, and no tears.

I seem to have been born hardwired to not stay far away, not when someone I love is being wheeled down long hallways, and the day begins at 4:45 a.m.

It’s an urge as irrepressible as anything I know. So much of mothering comes to me instinctively, without the synaptic pause that populates most thought. I leap before I think—leap into the fire, into the deep end, into wherever is the urgency. I don’t know how not to. And, yes, maybe sometimes I’m too much. And maybe I’m unnecessary. Or redundant. But where is there room for redundancy or un-necessity in the chambers of the heart?

Among the breaths of my life that I relish most, being by the side of the ones I birthed will always, always, be my most precious, most savored.

And so, in living my days with all I’ve got, this blessed day, being plopped in this hard chair, in this cacophonous waiting room in downtown DC, is one I will always hold so close to my heart. Truth is, I pray for as many of these sorts of days as time will give me. And as long as I can be there to plant one last kiss on the forehead I have loved since the hour of his birth, I am going to board all the planes, trains, and automobiles to get me here.

And now I’m signing off to keep my holy vigil.

xox

No need for any worries; all will be well here in the nation’s capital. Trust me on that.

PSS my uppers and lowers are a jumble today because I’m typing in my wee phone and can’t stop the gremlins from insisting on at least some proper capitalization.

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May 31, 2024

a narrative twist and the wisdoms that come in its wake

when last we pulled up a chair, we were a gladsome foursome giddily gadding about the eternal city. unbeknownst to us, a fifth was among us. a red-ringed hanger-on who might have climbed aboard on the plane that flew through the night. or perhaps in the crowds in one art-ringed room or another.

but by nightfall one friday ago, a mere four days into our roman romp, one among us was lying flat on his back when he plaintively asked, “could you feel my head?” and suddenly the tiniest of sniffles i’d been hearing for the past two days, and the uncharacteristic naps that were beckoned mid-morning and again mid-afternoon snapped into sense, and a not-so-subtle hypothesis bolted into my brain: “this couldn’t be covid, could it?!?”

and with that, lickety split, i leapt out the door and wiggled my way through ancient streets and crowds thick with myriad tongues. i found myself a farmacia and in the clearest italian i knew, asked, “covid test?” the farmacista knew too. it seems the red-ringed word is universally understood. she handed me the prova covid, i handed her euros, and off i flew.

didn’t take more than a minute for that dreaded double line to flash into sight. bright purple it was, as my pictures of rome in quartet whirled down the drain. we had among us a covid-plagued fellow, the very one who had spent weeks and weeks planning and plotting. signing us up for this tour and that. and now, the poor chap was confined to a room at the back of the Airbnb, and i was moved to the couch.

i felt my heart crack.

i pictured a big pink eraser descend from above, dashing our roman holiday and turning our fine little appartamento into a quarantined clinica covid. i feared, right away, that the dastardly viral intruder would tear us asunder. that i, too, would be felled. and then boy 1 and boy 2.

i reached for my phone and dashed off a text to my beloved american doctor. as the sun set in rome, it was just reaching its midday peak in the states, so, lo and behold, she swiftly wrote back. told us they’re basically treating covid as a head cold these days, and that 24 hours after the fever broke or symptoms abated, our chief travel guide would enter the five-day mask-and-distance phase. and the rest of us should hope for the best.

without delay, the ailing one and i both reached for our phones to alert the dear friends with whom we’d shared the previous evening of rooftop aperitifs and a long and lovely roman dinner. and, belly flip-flopping all the while, i texted the sorry update to our boys, who’d gone out with a professorly friend for pastas and spritzes and whatever else might unfold on a friday night in glorious rome when you’re young and with nary a care.

i couldn’t sleep. so i lay there on my couch till the wee hours, listening for the boys’ signature voices and the clomp of their feet on the stone-cobbled street down below. when in they wandered, i confirmed that they’d seen the bum news spelled out on their phones. and we figured the weekend engagements — a guided tour of the colosseum and forum, as well as a lazy sunday lunch on our friends’ rooftop terrace (which had been the imagined highlight of the trip to little old me) — had gone up in vatican smoke.

but here’s where the story once again takes a turn, rises into the allegorical, and makes of one player a hero: assuming the boys would never in a million years awake for an early-morning architectural tour of ancient roman ruins, i’d already scratched the colosseum and forum off the list. so wasn’t i proven to be the fool when, with an hour to spare before the already-paid-for tour, the bedroom door cracked open and out strolled a towel-clad gent on his way to the shower. as he sauntered sleepily past me, he uttered only three words that soon set the tone for the day and all those that followed: “when in rome. . .”

and so we were off. if he, a boy who’d slept a mere few hours, could pull himself off the pillow to make good on his papa’s pre-ordained plot for the day, certainly boy No. 1 could follow, and i — who had originally declined a tour of what i referred to as “the ancient blood bath” and imagined instead a leisurely morning alone — could step into gear. turned out we missed the guided part of the tour, but we managed to get into the old ruin and carried on the self-guided way. all that walking and gawking made us hungry, so kid No. 2 called time-out and guided us through the meandering streets to an osteria that he’d been told had the very best food in all of roma (and it certainly did)*. and then, bellies full and sunscreen slathered, we climbed to the tippy top of the palatine gardens, and all of rome lay majestically, magnificently sprawled out before us.

the boy’s simple instructive “when in rome. . .” is the essence of carpe diem, the code by which he not only lives but inspires. he’s a mere 22, a kid born just before 9/11, a kid whose years have been punctuated by the horrors of parkland and sandy hook, a kid who cowered inside our cambridge apartment the terrible week of the boston marathon bombing when we could watch the police helicopters whirring in the sky just out our windows, a kid who went to college during covid and got sent home for half a semester to watch pre-recorded lectures on the laptop perched on the covers of his boyhood bed.

he’s emerged with an unshakeable knowing that life comes around but once, and you’d better seize it while you can. because there’s no cinch on tomorrow. which pretty much is the truth it’s taken me decades — and a medical scare of whopping proportion — to figure out.

we talked plenty (be it discoursing eternal verities or swapping silly serendipities) as we wound through the ancient streets of rome (his hand always reaching for mine, to make sure i didn’t wobble or fall), as he insisted we mosey down the block to the corner watering hole for spritzes at dusk, as he and his brother led us hither and yon to the best eats in the city. and his ironclad creed is that life is to be lived to the fullest.

my number one teacher in rome was the kid who grew in my womb long after the doctors insisted there’d never be another; an odds-breaker ever since, a kid who dwells in the joy of exclamation. and his lesson is one i’ll not tuck away on a shelf now that we’re home. nor ever.

it’s a beautiful and glorious thing when the teacher appears in the form of a kid who serves up his lessons with spritzes and leads you through rome on a quest for flavors you’ll never forget.

bless you, and thank you, dear T.

post script: our covid-afflicted fellow made it through mostly unscathed, and is now back among the unmasked. once his fever broke, and 24 hours had passed, he made the most of his unfettered hours to stand and absorb the architectural wonders of rome for as long as his big ol’ heart desired. none of the rest of us ever tested positive. though we missed the rooftop lazy sunday lunch of our dreams, we now have reason and incentive to return. i brought a good chunk of rome home in my heart.

what wisdoms have come your way in the wake of a narrative twist?

*in case you find yourself in the eternal city any time soon, the best food we inhaled in rome was at the little osteria il bocconcino, just up the hill and around a few bends from the colosseum. if you ask the boys, there are multiple other contenders as well. every bite, in a word, was sublime.

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May 24, 2024

sometimes, joy makes you wait. . .

A year ago, I was crushed. Four of us were supposed to be in Paris, but one of us never made it on a plane. Passport tangles tangled him. We tried every option known to humankind, but after days of holding our breath, we faced the cold hard inevitability: there would be no four of us in Paris. No four of us encircling the cafe table, as I’d pictured it, prayed for it, since the day the doctor told me the thing in my lung was cancer. And all I wanted in the world was to be held tight, held together, by my boys. My beautiful beautiful beautiful boys.

We were determined to try again. This year: Roma. We made the law professor with the failed passport get in line early, and expeditedly, for a new-spangled one. He complied.

I held my breath anyway. The closer we got to takeoff, the harder I held all the breath in my chest.

But Monday night, two planes, carrying four people, were crossing the globe, flying through the night, pointed toward Rome.

Ever since, I’ve been inhaling in double time, breathing as deep as a girl with 1.5 lungs can possibly breathe. Because this is the stuff that makes my life hum like a mezzosoprano, like a nightingale, like the merriest mama that ever there was. We are, the four of us, entangled as one, under the blue blue of Italy’s sky.

Sometimes the unthinkable happens. And you stumble and bumble, and shed tear upon tear. But then you pick up the pieces. You make the most of what’s there in your midst, and try to not ache for what’s missing.

And life, every once in a while, gives you a rare second chance. And you realize the heartache of the past has only hollowed more space in your heart, so that when the rushing in comes in, you’ve all the more capacity for unparalleled joy.

I am giddy and dizzy and pulsing with joy. It’s the sweetest sonata that I’ve ever sung.

It’s the song of my deepest prayer answered: dear God, give me sumptuous sumptuous time with my most blessed and beautiful beautiful boys.

Amen.

A perfect poem for this moment:

Mary Oliver’s “Mindful”

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

What are the somethings for which you’ve had to wait for what felt an unbearable wait?

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