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Working on some new disciplines here.
Yesterday was a good'un -- two church services in two different communities with (highly different) potluck meals after each. My oath, those ladies can COOK. Wow. Anglican baptism with Eucharist in the morning, and preached; Taize singing, with no sermon, in the evening.
On the way home, before I reached the Big Highway -- here came the SNOW out of the north-west. It was an interesting 120-kilometer drive home, but NO difficulty, lots of traffic but nobody doing anything quixotic in my vicinity.
Meditating on saint-ness...and its misunderstandings. Things never yet quite adequately explained to my satisfaction. Not "holy celebrity." Not "co-dependent martyrdom." The term "personal holiness" gets bandied about more than is useful or comfortable, (or it used to) and I have never ever heard it defined or illustrated as anything other than -- basically -- inexperience, of a particularly sidling, bridling, eyes-rolled-upward sort.
Who was it, now, who said that the saint we most admire -- instinctively -- may be the greatest threat to our spiritual/moral wellbeing?
Ah well. We sang Sine Nomine at least once, yesterday, all verses, although we could have had a bit more "WHOMP" -- (this is the hymn known in my household as "WHOMP For All the Saints" you understand).
So here's to the saints with some WHOMP in their natures.
The coffee's made, speaking of WHOMP, and this to-do list isn't going to do itself. Defend yourself, Monday!!!
Celebrating "all them saints," this morning with the Giotto Madonna from Ognissanti in Florence (I see there is a splendid new book about the Umiliati as patrons of painters...)
And here we go, trying this blogging bit, yet again. A timed exercise, this morning.
I am still trying to find a schedule that will accomplish the things that MUST be done (and there are more than a few, even among "the retired") and leave as much time -- and energy -- and daylight! -- as possible for the WANT to be done...the reading and writing, the small creativities, the sociable moments.
I'm not there yet! But partly in aid of that, and in reflection that I am now not just in the second half of my life but in the fourth quarter, in fact -- I've embarked upon the Ignatian Exercises ("in daily life" -- i.e., spread over 8 - 9 months instead of packed into a month).
It has been a long time since I undertook anything at even this modest level of discipline (an hour a day). It's frustrating, but it seems to be helpful. Good to be confronted again with the Principle and Foundation, for one thing.
Struggling with Ignatian "indifference" (easy come, easy go?). There was a moment's insight yesterday when I realized that "greed for" (books, let us say, for example, yes) followed up by "neglect of" does NOT, arithmetically, amount to "indifference." Or "detachment," if that word is more comfortable for you.
So at present I am doing some work "honorarily" at a parish in town, and doing Sunday duty, remunerated financially, at a parish out of town (with the same patron). This assignment involves about 90 minutes driving each way. It's eastward to work and westward home -- squinting into the sun, in other words. But before long it will be dark both ways, as I know, which will solve that problem definitively.
Yesterday afternoon I began a big cooking binge, with the aim of having meals in the fridge or freezer needing only to be warmed up at mealtimes for the rest of the week. We shall see. Still trying to adjust my grocery purchasing to the reality of ONE two-legged occupant and ONE (very small) four-legged occupant in this abode.
Hallowe'en last night was not overwhelming. I might have had a couple of dozen callers, most of them quite, quite young, and all of them very polite. Trick'or'treaters in this area are heavily parent-accompanied...usually by shadowy figures out on the sidewalk, calling, "What did you SAY?" to cue the "thank you." But one Mom appeared on my porch as the Seuss Cat, complete with goldfish in bowl, closely partnering her offspring as Thing Two, with a placard explaining that Thing One was felled by chicken-pox. All this drama!
It was mild enough for light jackets, fortunately. And then just before eight o'clock a very light rain began, and that was that -- turned off the porch light, blew out the pumpkin-candles, and firmly returned the left-over sweets to the freezer.
And time's up.
I have been cogitating (agitating the cogs) over what sort of schedule would best suit this semi-retired existence -- more and more truly retired all the time, I realize.
The problem has been that I can think of about eighteen different tasks or functions, each with a serious claim to be First Thing of the Morning. But how to rank them?
And the default resolution of that problem has been to stay in bed and ponder on the matter until either I fall asleep again or the external world intervenes in some fashion, usually less than altogether welcome.
(And yes, those of you with full employment, and/or families, and/or partners and/or roommates, and/or walkable dogs, etc., I can hear your unsympathetic snortings from here, believe me, and I do not blame you.)
For a week now -- a whole week! -- I have had a Trial Schedule working -- and I'm still doing it, which is both unusual and promising. (I'm working on the general theory that as the day goes, so goes the life, and as the morning goes, so goes the day. You see there are indeed macro-considerations in play here.)
1. GET OUT OF BED.
2. Take morning meds if any as appropriate.
3. Take large mug of plain hot water downstairs
4. Ensconce self in library armchair with good light and resources at hand.
5. MORNING PRAYER according to the (old) Book of Common Prayer, without Scripture readings other than the Psalms appointed in the simplest of the reading tables.
5a. Pluck Biblia Sacra (the Vulgate, that is) off the shelf and have a go at the morning's Psalm or Psalms in Latin, just to shake up the synapses.
5b. Note prayer concerns in handy notebook by my left shoulder. Then trot across the landing and hop onto the
6. ELLIPTICAL TRAINER!!! for a few more minutes/calories/metres-equivalent than the day before. Keep heart rate under 150, mostly, and do a sprinting thing in the last 30-40 seconds. Hop off (high side first!) and step into the laundry/furnace room to
7. SCOOP THE CAT'S BOX (loud cheers from the cat).
8. Wash hands, contemplate what needs to be taken upstairs -- clean laundry, food from the pantry or the freezer or both...
And there I am ready for my shower and my coffee and my breakfast. And the rest of the day!
Serendipity -- my MP armchair is between the end of one old desk and the bookshelves. Earlier this week I became aware that just abaft of my right eyebrow, on the shelf with "Eliot, George" and "Eliot, T. S." there was also "Edwards, Jonathan." That's right -- "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" Edwards (although I've always thought that vice-versa would have made a much more interesting sermon).
But where the book opened, when I took it down, was his "Resolutions". And I was stunned to see how often he re-made his resolution to "speak WELL of others," "speak FAIRLY of others": over, and over, and over. To resist the temptation to DETRACTION, that besetting besetter.
I am working on that one, too.
OK, I've just got a whole THANG going on here about radicchio, this week. Bear with me.
Almost the first thing I learned, reading Jennifer McLagan's Bitter -- I'd seen Tweets, I'd heard her interviewed on the radio -- was that radicchio is like roses; it comes in a huge range of colours and forms and variegations. But if your food-distribution server is like ours, the kind you see probably looks like the little guys in the picture up top, there -- not as big as a red cabbage, tighter and tougher than a red lettuce. Maybe you know it well and like it, maybe not; whatever. In our corner of the cosmos, you can expect to pay about five (deflated, Canadian) dollars for a head of it.
But I have to step back a bit. In recent weeks I have been taking up space (= "filling the position") in an Honorary way (no filthy lucre changes hands, that is) at a parish I shall call Our Lady of the Lost and Found (with apologies to Diane Schoemperlen; whom, if you have not read, you should. But I digress). Up at OLLF, there, we are one of the weekly drop-off points for grocery hampers from the city food bank. Normally we see somewhere between ten and twenty recipients. The food comes in standard big cardboard boxes; the recipients re-pack it in their own shopping bags, or bags we provide. We then break down the boxes, with great flourishing of utility knives, and stack them for "next week's truck."
Now if you've ever worked at or been served by a foodbank, you probably know that the array of comestibles provided is often... eclectic? So people are quite liable to receive food that they may not even recognize, let alone like, and their children after them. Like for instance those little narrow needle-pointed red Thai hot chili peppers? I mean, really? I suppose if a financially-struggling homesick person of Thai origin showed up at the depot, he or she would be enraptured. But most of the rest of us, well, no.
But last week, the Strange Thing du jour was -- drum roll -- RADICCHIO. Great big beautiful fresh unblemished heads of it. Now at OLLF in the hall where the food is sorted and packed, we also have a "give'n'take" table. You don't like Thai hot chilis, you put your package on the GT table. And you can take anything OFF that table that you DO like. There's a pretty good rate of flow-through; although we did have a challenging surplus of Thai hot chilis there for a while.
And last week, we had radicchio TO SPARE. So here's where it gets kind of sticky. I happened to be looking just as the first client strode up to the GT table and whacked down his head of radicchio. And I gasped. "But ... that's GOOD" -- I don't know whether I said it out loud or not. I wasn't assigning blame. I was just so sad to see somebody who needs food rejecting or relinquishing or refusing or abandoning good food ("I like it" = "it's good" right?) -- nutritious, EXPENSIVE good food mind you...
So then I had to do the analysis. People are allergic, sometimes. People have dietary restrictions, sometimes. People may not have proper food storage. People may not have the wherewithal to store OR cook food -- they're in shelters or they're in friends' homes or they're in single rooms or they're in cheap motels. People may not know what the heck it is that just showed up in the food hamper.
So i don't know what the answer is. Part of me wants to set up a hot plate and a stock pot at one end of the church hall, and hurl the rejected groceries into one almighty no-two-weeks-alike slumgullion, meantime crying out in the wilderness -- "Look, look, you can eat this, this is so good, just do this and this and you've got supper tonight and lunch tomorrow...."
Then I go and pick up McLagan's book on hold at the Library, and she is rubbing my nose in it, for one delirious radicchio recipe after another comes tumbling from the pages. I've just taken the Radicchio Pie out of the oven. I'm working on repressing my gasps of distress on food bank days.
There's got to be a solution...
Particularly, grandmothering the Infanta in the second picture. And what joy it is. She is getting so leggy and "grown-up" -- full of little linguistic and imaginative ploys of one kind and another, Grandma struggles to keep up. Such a blessing to be surrounded by her and her two cousins -- all these very different and utterly perfect young ladies!
I am baking, this evening. Not this bread, exactly (it's clip art bread off the Web)...but my "white" bread that also includes wheat germ and instant oatmeal and sometimes a little cracked wheat for TEXTURAL INTEREST. Didn't have any cracked wheat tonight, so it got bulgur instead (fingers crossed). It's now in the second rise -- I find the oven with the light on is just the ideal temperature to make bread rise (or to get yogurt yogu-ing), without heating up the whole house. Any more. Than it is.
So now there is a little over an hour to accomplish something--else--before i have to go and attend to the final phase. Meantime the dishes are washing...sun still quite high in the sky (eight p.m.), children playing in the back yard next door...
I have been moving piles of work material around from one desk to another, upstairs and down...you would think with three desks, two full-sized Old Oaken Office type and one good-sized ladylike corner type, I would not have to resort to the eternal dining-room table in order to get anything REAL done, but that is often the case.
Getting a lot of reading done the last couple of weeks and I have confirmed what I suspected, that I CANNOT READ BOOKS IN BED. Magazines, all right. But not books. Luckily I have two good comfortable well-lit Reading Stations, one upstairs (that is, on the main floor) and one downstairs (for hot days).
And on the reading list, or heap, at present? Hermione Lee's biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. Cheryl (Wild) Strayed's collection of the Best American Essays of -- some recent year. Maeve Binchy's Evening Class. Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. Daniel Coleman's In Bed with the Word. Ted Bishop's The Social Life of Ink. Ethel Wilson's Hetty Dorval and The Innocent Traveller. Lisa Deam's A World Transformed (on the spirituality implicit in mediaeval maps). Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness. And Ann Patchett, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Oh yes -- a 1907 English translation (Everyman edition) of the Essays of Giuseppe Mazzini (yes, the "Risorgimento" Mazzini).
Should keep me out of the pool hall, don't you think??? Books, and bread.
We've been fairly busy with the Fete Nationale this week -- falling on a Wednesday, which makes it more difficult to "faire le pont" -- of all the days of the week, obviously, Wednesday is the most difficult to inveigle into a WEEKEND of some description. Although the streets were pretty quiet at rush-time this morning; and school, of course, is out for the summer. Great hootlings of young children next door with a combination of sprinkler and trampoline (and dog).
I managed to find the Actual Canajun Flag, eh, and its flagpole, and hang it on the front of the house in a truly Rural Illinois manner. This is about the extent of my proactive patriotism at the moment.
I continue to "shop in the fridge" for the makings of my meals--too often in the past my practise has been to do a Monster Grocery-Shopping expedition, and then, exhausted, take myself out to eat.
But last night was a very special treat -- dinner with good friends -- I took some salad, and brought some (less!) back, which has now all been eaten. And by way of an early supper, I converted some pollock-pretending-to-be-crab into a seafood salad suitable for sandwich filling. I have eaten the sandwich...
Planning to tiptoe away and be faintly creative for a bit, later this evening...exercise a bit -- but I did walk today, a few blocks downtown; went down to buy a most excellent book (because just borrowing it from the Library, which I've now done twice, did NOT suffice) -- "The Social Life of Ink" by Ted Bishop (published last year). And we have one, count it, ONE remaining independent bookstore (for new books) in the city, so rather than engage Amazon, I thought I'd go downtown. FATAL...just inside the front door, a large table arrayed with soft-cover Canadian fiction, some of it classic. And HALF PRICE. Going to spend some time this next week with MiriamToews and Ethel Wilson. None the worse for that.
