Small

Apple picking with my wife on a brilliant fall day, christening my neighbor’s wood burning oven with pizza one week and a full Sunday dinner the next, clamming on the mud flats of midcoast Maine as temperatures continue to fall, and cobbling leftovers together to make meals at other times. And a trip across a swath of southeast Asia, eating from food stalls in Singapore and private dining rooms in Jakarta. And all of this amid kind, welcoming people who defy our poisonous president’s attempts to vilify people and divide us from our neighbors.

I will continue to defy his pathology of greed and deceit, especially as I witness some of the extraordinary work done by inventors and scientists, doctors and policy makers, poets and musicians, all motivated to make the world, or just our community, a better place. And it's necessary to keep in mind that so many of these efforts, gestures, are small. A non-profit board meeting yesterday and someone brings cookies which he makes every time we get together. The hosts of our regular poker party make snacks that meet the mood of the times, ghoulish Halloween treats included.

We need presidents and prime ministers who make treaties that improve the lives of people, recalibrate our energy consumption habits, and promote peace. Equally important are the steps you and I make to comfort a friend, help a neighbor, share with our family. Our being, our strength, is nourished by this. Always

After the Death of Pope Francis I

All those years ago I waited for priests to come and say Mass in a language I couldn’t discern as Latin, Italian or English at the Carmelite Monastery around the corner from my childhood home in Buffalo, and I usually arrived before the priest and when I went through the side door of the chapel, up the concrete stairs and through a thick wooden door, always I was greeted by nuns in full habit, soft spoken and kind and as mysterious to my twelve and fourteen year-old brain as God and the warmth of the sacristy made it easier to slip out of my coat and into the vestments of the day, usually black and white except for holy days and feast days, and on those days my fingers fumbled with innumerable buttons up the front of my cardinal red cassock and when the lace surplice was laid over my shoulders I sometimes saw the censer I would later open for the priest to spoon a heap or two of precious frankincense and myrrh onto the disk of charcoal I had earlier lit, which certainly pleased our Lord, and in those few minutes before Mass began I would sit in a small room at the side of the sacristy and begin or continue to read a brief life of a Saint as weak morning light only just illuminated the stained glass above me, and I, a young boy with no understanding of the world, as innocent as the far away lives I read about, still can remember the huge oak drawers that held priceless hand-stitched and already ancient feeling silk chasubles and stoles for every season and feast that belonged in a museum but served instead to adorn the bodies of those who through the Sacraments brought God into the very Bread we ate though they stumbled at times through words that didn’t fit their mother tongues, and the austere iron grille that extended high into the side apse and kept the entire order of nuns, but for the two or three who dealt with the likes of electricians and milkmen and altar boys and priests too old or addled to work in a parish, removed and separated from the rest of us who wandered the world and ate, played, fucked – though I didn’t know it at the time – worked, disobeyed, drank, argued, reconciled and confessed, and when they sang, their voices lifting higher than our sacrificial offerings, the few neighbors in the pews at seven-thirty, the only Mass to which the public was welcomed, looked to find the source of these voices, they saw only me and an old priest on the altar, the nuns themselves as incorporeal as incense drifting in the still space, able to make their presence felt in vibrations of their Heaven-bound prayers and as I knelt during the Consecration of the Holy Eucharist and rang the bells that signified the descent of the Holy Spirit into the bread that became the Body of Christ, I always tried to place the bells back onto the hard marble step without causing them to jangle and perturb the solemnity of the moment, and when I rose my fingers lightly clutched and lifted the bottom of the cassock, whether black or red, so I didn’t step on myself and fall backward, and how many times did I wash his hands with Holy water to cleanse him from his sins and watch as he poured all of the wine from the crystal cruet into the chalice, after which I would stand facing him, holding in my hands the large red Roman Missal as he flipped its pages to the part of the Mass we were in and everything had a name and meaning and a history and purpose and all of it was held together somehow by the Pope and in our front hallway vestibule we had a framed picture of a wedding blessing given to my parents and signed by Pope Pius XII and everything was in Latin except for their names and it hung in a place of honor at the entrance to our home and at our cottage my dad had the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on the wall next to their bed and I never thought of him as gentle or sensitive but he looked at that prayer every day and at home I didn’t go into my parents’ bedroom often but when he got home from work and went upstairs to change into his khakis and flannel shirt he would often kneel down and pray, his thumb and forefinger pulling Rosary beads along their well known path or else his eyes would be buried in his right hand, bowed down and God only knows what he was thinking feeling praying crying out to deepen his compassion or lessen his anger or fear or frustration or help him remember how to live kindly gently in this ruptured world and still when I kneel in a church and listen to the silence that sacred spaces create when they put walls and a roof around the idea of God, and I look at the altar or stained windows or icons or mosaics and see all these representations of God and wonder still at the inherited traditions and beliefs and do not know if it matters if I believe or not but when I find a space that is silent and empty and has an air of reverence it’s not hard for a string of words to run from my mouth my heart my racing brain and as much as I try to silence everything I hear and feel and think and know, it is in the tumult of these conflicting and contradictory and unsettled thoughts that eventually I find a rhythm to the beating of my heart and if I allow it to expand perhaps I return to the received notions I’ve been taught but there’s another possibility among all those out there that the worn course gives me access to push along this trough and use its trajectory the way a satellite uses the gravitational orbit of the sun moon or Earth to propel it deeper into space and untraveled emptiness and in the newness of that space the words I speak and write are not bound by the gravitational pull of my past and I can grow and expand and disappear into the immensity of the universe, an impossibly faint beating heart that resolves itself into the silence

before I find myself sitting at my desk or remembering my childhood and no time has passed except that of my life and still

I wonder if God exists

Echoes

Hi friends. A move to Maine, a job change, long spells in Asia and undiminished curiosity about food and how we get it and where we get it and prepare it and how we share it and whether we find ways and time to think about systems and processes and the politics that make things possible or point us toward some kind of social political culinary catastrophe, and as we ease into September and the long glory of warm days and a sun that doesn't rise as high, I continue to make stories, cook food, eat it, and think about it. A pasta machine and an outdoor wheelbarrow stove are two pieces of equipment I use with more regularity than I did in Vermont, or Minnesota before that, and my bread baking has all but disappeared. Pork, duck, rabbits and lamb have mostly given way to clams, crabs, mussels, fish, oysters and lobster, most of which are found at the end of our dock or just down the road, and the corresponding stocks and broths have been supplanted in equal proportion.  And, despite a long silence, it's still this life, and we change and grow and our tastes and opinions evolve and some of them we settle into and others we leave behind, and if there's a thread woven through this, it's my continued belief that with hospitality and generosity and a welcoming table we can address most of the important issues of life.

The space between notes: listening to the whole of Beethoven in 2020

The one time I visited the Vatican museums I stayed in the Sistine Chapel for nearly five hours, but before the famed Chapel Raphael, Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and a beautiful Redon, always the delicate pastels, a cruel Max Ernst crucifixion, just like his slabs of meat, a stunning hall of cartography, but nothing, nothing like the Sistine Chapel, the scale the perspective the narrative sweep the wholeness of the space, but wandering in I first thought to myself, is this it? Is this all it is? Maybe I was looking for something familiar so I could say to myself, oh, this is God creating man, feeling that if I identified it I had seen it, or maybe I was surprised that it was a finite, contained space. Instead, I wandered, and hours later, was floating in a sea of perceptions, each one informed by the order and the framework that Michelangelo painted across the vault of the Chapel, giving us time to consider his art. If tasting wine is about allowing our taste buds to be receptive, to taste what we taste not what we want to or think we should, but to let the wine roll across our tongues, cheeks, throat, and just look, look, what do you see? Not what we know, not what someone has pointed out to us, although those bits of information can guide us at certain points, but first, or second, or at some point we have to pull up our anchor and let the winds push us, float across the deep blue sea and travel on fresh water and waves, not where someone else is leading us but alone, alone in the wind, the night, the dark sky the blazing sun, letting our own senses guide us as we look into the work before us, asking, what is that, and letting the work speak through its color, form, composition, narrative structure, and giving ourselves the freedom, the right, the responsibility to look at Michelangelo for the first time, to be alone with his art and say this is what I see, this is what unfolds hour after hour, as this arch and that takes form, as one panel leads to the next, the beginning of time to the creation of light and darkness, the creation of sun and moon and the glory of mankind, and always looking, looking, at aspects large and small, the overall scope and scale to the details of one look, the direct eye gaze of one African wise man staring right at us as only the one man on the altar wall, one hand covering half his face, Michelangelo himself, perhaps, gazing and gaping, is this all there is, is this the end, is this it, but the wise man with a kind, compassionate, intelligent and sophisticated plain look stares straight at us like no one else in the whole chapel and I wonder, who is this man, who is he? And down at the other end the Last Supper and I wondered where Judas was and I look and see a devil on his back, black and winged, whispering into his ear his heart his thoughts all the while sitting there with Christ and yesterday in St Peter’s a man talking below in a chapel in the crypt, evangelical almost but moved by the power of the place, and saying, god is there when you are broken, a failure, riddled with mistakes and half formed ideas, broken hopes and bad decisions as parents, spouses, humans, and we think about our glory when perhaps we should be more open to our frailty, our faults, our many almosts, and perhaps why the Church really survives, because God is God but we only know that when we’re weak and incomplete, filled with failure and regret, there’s the space where we’re receptive and open, willing to admit what is right before us and that’s our own shortcomings and failures and know that we’re only vessels for god’s word, God’s ability to – no, that’s not it, that’s not how I started, I meant to say to think to express that in our silence we can hear something besides our own voice, but that’s not it either, because – right before the Sistine Chapel a glorious delight of Matisse, a man filled with the joy of the Church – the pilgrim church on earth – long before Vatican II gave permission for joy; in 1950 or 1952 he made a vestment, simple crosses, a tree of life, a joy in creation and God, and a large Mother and Child and she is a vessel, a face of circles, the eternity of infinity, wise and joyous, a church that is procreative and open to happiness. Michelangelo is glorious. He praises God forever with his work, and the Pieta is the most sublime sculpture imaginable, a liquid, limpid, sensual, dignified, caressed piece of marble, coursing with the soft quiet of sorrow, the deep sadness of death of loss and the ultimate triumph of life after all.

After St Peter’s I thought, why are we what we are? How do we become this, and why, if we are expressive beings, are we who we are? Shouldn’t all life be a constant prayer of thanksgiving, a hymn of thanks for life for life itself? What exists except to praise God? All art is the magnification of God, the pushing of a boundary that gives voice to what could not be said or shown or thought or sung or read before we gave it that voice, those words, those thoughts. We are needed because each of us reflects the light of God a little differently, piece after piece of tessera/tesserae used in the many mosaics in the basilica, the Raphael one – not by him but a copy of one of his painting into a mosaic, with pieces so small that it looked like an oil painting. I returned to our hotel room near dinner time, the whole day having passed, and I was quiet with a full soul, having drunk in the glory of art celebrating creation, itself an act of creation.

 

And then last December, shortly after a particularly good concert by the Heath Quartet, I realized that for all my love of Beethoven’s string quartets and symphonies I knew little of his other music and decided – essentially on a whim – to listen to the whole of his catalogued, published music, from Opus 1, a piano trio published in 1795 to the final string quartets that I thought I knew. Cataloging a musician’s work reminds me of the difficulty we sometimes encounter when we look at wine labels from an unfamiliar region. Beethoven’s music is catalogued using opus numbers, opus being Latin, meaning work or a work. The ordering of opus numbers is not strictly chronological and there are a few notable exceptions of early works being assigned a late opus number – like Op. 103, which was written in 1792/3 but not published and assigned an opus number until much later, but the chronology of opus numbers roughly matches the order of composition. However, many of his pieces, especially well known ones, are known by multiple names, like the Emperor Concerto, which is also known as Piano Concerto No.5, as well as Opus 73. Sometimes, an Opus number has several pieces in it, like Op. 59, which is comprised of three string quartets. Op. 59, No. 1 is also String Quartet No. 7, and Op. 59, No. 2 is String Quartet No. 8. All three pieces in the opus are also known as the Razumovsky Quartets, named after the patron to whom Beethoven dedicated the quartets. There also are pieces that were not published during Beethoven’s life, and were never assigned an opus number. They have a different numbering system, Without Opus, or WoO, but Beethoven’s WoO pieces were not part of my listening repertoire. Nearly a year later, all the way through the 250th anniversary of his birth in 1770 and the devastation of Covid-19 and the final year of Trump’s destructive, annihilating presidency, I’ve listened to one, two, sometimes six or more recordings of every piece of Beethoven’s catalogued works, and these last pieces, sometimes blistering and other times limpid with grace tremble on the edge of knowing, pushing sound and instruments to their limits, diving too into profoundly personal, soul-aching tenderness, and I struggle to find a framework even to begin to fashion a response to his call.

 

Haunt, v., n., from Middle English: to reside, inhabit, use; from old Norman: to go back home. Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European: village.

 

We all of us at times are haunted – the word has for the most part turned negative, except when we say someone visits their favorite haunts, and I’m thinking of a pull that was deep in him where phrases, tunes, melodies - kept returning, ones that he was always recapitulating, putting forth as a sonata here and then part of a trio later in life, but why do these phrases resonate with him the way they do, why do they become the foundation for an entire new piece again and again? And these notes, phrases find their way into so many pieces. He is returning home, going back home, and we are haunted – by a melody, a fragrance, a memory, a glance, or maybe a composition of the sky melting into the sea on a grey day cloudy with drizzle in November when color absolves itself of any role in the world and we for a moment live monochromatically with no differentiation between the elements of the world and it is hard too to avoid the dissolution of our own boundaries and these moments, remembered from childhood and lived through until now, these notes are my emotional repository for so many slow movements of Beethoven, falling first in love with the second movement of the 7th symphony in college in the 80s, and then I’m in 2020 and the scraping of a bow across a string, a vibration just barely willing itself into being and when I first heard David Oistrakh (violin) and Lev Oborin (piano) play Opus 30, No. 2 and its adagio – this, I thought, is the sound of two lovers who have over the course of their lives loved and fought and shed tears and laughed and still they held on and waited for the other and this, I thought, is where we begin to hear the emergence of Beethoven as a mature artist, writing voices for instruments that meld seamlessly into one another, the vast differences between the piano and violin diminished as they engage in a hushed conversation we are privileged to be welcomed into, and the human, deeply personal articulation of emotions, thoughts, and feelings that are so visible and present in the three sonatas of Opus 30 disarm us with gentleness. We listen to these pieces vulnerable, open, tender. Here is Beethoven so empathetic, human.

 

What do we look for when we walk in the woods? Do we try to spot that migratory warbler, identify the spring ephemerals that gild the forest floor, forage for ramps and morels, or just smell the perfume of spring, the ripeness of August, the November earth? I did not know I would have to reckon with nearly a century of recordings, traditions passed from one pianist to the next generation of students, orchestras with conductors whose careers spanned both sides of WWII, as well as contemporary musicians who eschew the well wrought, finely tuned instruments of today and choose to play with gut strings on period instruments, studying manuscripts and striving for historically informed performances, recognizing as well that their ears and ours cannot unhear Philip Glass, Frozen 2, and Straight Outta Compton. My early exposure to Beethoven was pretty standard for a kid from Buffalo who grew up listening to Yes, Grateful Dead and other rock and prog rock combos. One of my mom’s parenting regrets was that none of us ever learned how to play a musical instrument. She did all the cooking, driving, clothes washing, shopping, and sewing, and if she added music lessons for eight kids she would have walked out on us one Tuesday afternoon and never returned, so I’m glad she stuck around and instead instilled in us a love for learning, and her many years of listening to Peter Allen’s Texaco-sponsored broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera eventually rubbed off, too, because one of the best jobs I ever had was as an usher for the 1987 Metropolitan Opera season at Lincoln Center. I got paid pretty well to direct people to their seats and then stand by the door and listen to the best opera in the world. Some years later I was the assistant director at Greater Buffalo Opera Co.’s production of Il Pagliacciand had to be onstage, in costume, for a scene change with all the union stagehands during the performance and once, because I couldn’t read music and still don’t know what the second measure after C-sharp means, I walked onstage during the middle of a singer’s aria and, halfway onto the stage, realized I was about three minutes too early and had to stand there like I belonged, with 3000 audience members and one director looking at me. That being said, my permanent– in the same way that Jamestown was the colonists’ first permanent settlement in the Americas – love for classical music, especially opera, began while painting houses in the summer and getting tired of the three-minute rock and roll songs when we had a ten hour day in front of us, so I started listening to operas and suddenly The Magic Flute helped the time go quickly, and Rigoletto’sdramatic arc made sense when I had the patience to listen and nowhere else to go. But, I got started with all of this as a fourteen or fifteen-year old because a friend’s older brother would wow us with his great stereo and sometimes after a few bong hits would play Pachelbel’s Canonor Beethoven’s 9th, which he discovered watching A Clockwork Orange, and I guess it stuck with me. With virtually no musical knowledge or training I was more than a little lost when I started listening last December, thinking this journey would be an interesting exercise of listening to one or two recordings of each piece, checking it off, and moving on. I wrote notes from the beginning, quick half sentences and sentence fragments documenting the performers and year of recording, but by the time I got to Op. 5 added in my notes that I didn’t know how to listen to the piano and cello playing together and knew I had little context to assess what I was hearing.

In the beginning I listened to recordings on YouTube and read much of the accompanying commentary, written by aficionados, musicians, crackpots, and casual listeners who shared sometimes-poignant stories about a significant encounter with the piece of music, and these comments led me to other recordings I hadn’t heard before. Before I knew it I was listening to multiple recordings of a single piece of music, mesmerized and sometimes confused or enthralled by the differences between performers playing the same piece. I was learning to listen, and realized that an interpretation of Beethoven in the 1940s can be as different from one today as the difference between episodes of I Love Lucy and Giri/Haji. So many traditions and styles are handed down and passed on while others are rejected or changed or evolve into something altogether new. Interpretations and recordings of music bear just as much a mark of their time as other mediums. I didn’t expect that and so discovering new ensembles and quartets and conductors became just as significant as hearing a piece of the Beethoven repertoire for the first time and falling in love with it. First, this happened with pianists and his piano sonatas because everything was new. I had to learn how to listen to the piano for the first time, really listen to it and over time I began to notice the differences between Brendel and Perahia and Barenboim and Annie Fischer and Ashkenazy and Sviatoslav Richter and Goode and Paul Lewis and Gulda and Emil Gilels and Fazil Say and Maurizio Pollini and then I heard Ronald Brautigam, a Dutch pianist who plays the fortepiano, which Beethoven used and played on because the big-ass Steinway Concert Grand pianos that we hear today every time we go to a concert didn’t exist and when I heard the Waldstein Sonata, Sonata No. 21, op. 53, I listened to it again and again, enjoying Vladimir Ashkenazy’s 1988 recording and wavering between the intensity – which does not lose its clarity – of Annie Fischer, and the timing, beauty, and phrasing of Ashkenazy, whose second movement reduces the universe to one quivering string, a single vibration left alone in the universe and it is from that simple, profound beginning that all life, all energy springs – a single vibration. Fischer pours all her feelings into every note as though it’s the one time she will ever play this note, this piece, and she wants us to know how much it matters - she is the Bruce Springsteen of the piano. But listening to Ronald Brautigam playing on a period fortepiano, there is a clarity that isn’t heard on modern instruments – beautiful, and in the space of several notes in the 2nd movement, an adagio, we witness

the dissolution of time and space,

the world reduced to silence, a world without vibrations,

time with nothing to mark it, resignation. And in that silence

a single note

– the Big Bang –

posits life as the alternative to that silence, and in one, two, ten, twenty notes – sound, music

again swells in its life affirming majestic triumph – life and sound and music and friction and vibrations will regenerate this barren world. And he does this with a piano.

 

(To be continued...)

Election day

Sympathy? You have got to be kidding. Last week I wrote this rather foul-mouthed diatribe and sent it only to my sister and a friend, knowing it was too raw to share publicly. But after the debate and positive Covid test, I saw people wondering how they should respond. So, I removed the (really) foul language from what I wrote, although it's still raw and I’m still unable to rationally talk about this miserable creature. The man’s ability to blind people to his malice and play the victim is confounding and leaves me unable to simply say, just look at what he’s doing, and my voice goes into near-hysterics as his followers point out all the reasons Hillary should be in jail. I lose my general good humor and flexibility with language and words and instead froth and fume at his continual abhorrent behavior and despicable disrespect for democracy. What’s worse is that he would wipe his filthy ass with the flag if it was nearby, and his followers wouldn’t care because he’d simply say, the left are socialists who don’t love America, and they fall in line and ignore what they just saw and know to be true. And I get apoplectic and start shouting, don’t you see that he just wiped his filthy ass with the flag and that he doesn’t actually care about our country, and they say something about how they suffered under Obama and that Biden will do monstrous things. And I fall over myself and forget how to be calm and rational and instead find myself with bursting blood pressure and the vocabulary of a drunk sailor. My negligent, disrespectful behavior becomes the object of condemnation and I’m left feeling shame-faced at my inability to stand and deliver the indictment this mockery of a leader deserves, a man who would beat his mother before he suffered any discomfort, who would give this great country to Russia in order to protect his guilt, who would sow dissension among Americans and make us mistrust and even hate each other before he would allow his sins against this country to be known, his ruthless plundering of the goodwill that’s been built in neighborhoods for years and years, where Americans, everyday ordinary Americans who are white and black and fifth generation and new immigrants and struggling and loud and poor and brash and irritating and generous and in your face and intimidating and freedom loving and all of us are the real thing, salt of the earth Americans who push cars out of snowbanks and look for lost dogs and he, he wants you and me to think we don’t care about each other or don’t want to sit in our camping chairs next to each other by the curb on Memorial Day when we watch the middle school band and fire department pass by and we cheer and clap as one community, one nation, and it doesn’t matter what party we’re in because we all want a good, safe, strong town and he, that fucking horrible person wants you and me to argue with each other so we ignore him while he grabs and takes and pilfers and pillages and lies lies lies all the time, so indifferent to any facts or the truth that he will say anything he wants, anything he thinks of and won’t care if he’s never thought it before or ever cares about its veracity and he will try to divide you and me and I sit here silent, unable to stand up and point out the raw basic and simple truth that the man is a despot, a desperate, unholy man with no regard for life, certainly not the unborn because he would abort his own child if it inconvenienced him and he will turn and say he loves life and his followers will ignore everything they see the man do and say to one another, see, he cares about life, he just said so, and meanwhile his weak, bloated body festers with his evil soul and when he dies a dark stain of horrid smelling mucous will remain, even after it is hosed down and rained upon, and dogs will avoid it and cringe when its malodorous spirit drifts too close, and nothing will grow there and his grave will be barren and smell of death and the putrid flesh he inhabits now will not return to the earth because the earth will reject it and so it will rot and fester and the spot will forever be known as the stain, and for generations historians scientists and poets and bartenders will gather stories of his and the accumulated wisdom in those tales and books and jokes will let us know that we survived an evil of this magnitude because we finally understood that this almost man was in fact a piece of shit who no more deserved to be admired than the coward he is. And me? I wish I could calmly say all the things that people have been uncovering for years and barely need repeating, the words of diplomats and generals and regular bureaucrats whose public service keeps this country running and we haven’t listened to them, people who have dedicated themselves to putting pieces together and understanding and telling stories so that we’re a smarter, better country, better able to make decisions and face challenges and adversaries and adversity, and their words have already told such a story that I can add nothing new except, perhaps, if I take a few deep breaths, exhaling and inhaling deeply between each one, and center myself with a decade of Hail Marys as I am wont to repeat when I run, walk, or feel restless and unsettled, when I know that I am agitated and perhaps not thinking straight and when I call to mind the wisdom innocence grit fear courage and generosity of Mary I know that my foul mouth diatribe does no good and probably only incenses his followers and that the stillness of Mary when her spirit is troubled and she wonders if God is with her, if God is, if she knows anything, and somehow she, she who is young and naïve and bare footed is the one to teach me, the one I should listen to and look to for guidance and courage and an example and I think she would tilt her head down and to the side and pass him by silently, shrinking a bit into herself hoping to pass by unnoticed because he’s the kind of bully coward who would taunt a young girl, mock a disabled man, and make their hard life even harder by his hubris and callous tongue, his hands rapacious paws that claw and swat what’s nearby as he manhandles even the new fruit just brought to market, and he makes even that feel dirty, and I remember Mary and her calm and pray to have some of the patience and restraint she does, and some of her strength to expose this man who is wholly unfit to occupy an office held by some of the most courageous and honorable men to have lived in this country of ours, this one nation under God. But it’s unlikely I’ll gain any patience or wisdom from Mary or anyone else because I’m still sitting here, fretting about November and wondering how in the world we Americans can’t see what the rest of the world can, that the man debases the dream of America, the idea of America, and that’s really what we are, an idea, born in the restlessness of centuries of people who chafed at being the youngest, the poorest, the kookiest beliefs, the frightened sad and lonely ones who made their way here and in one generation or ten became Americans and fought against some of the despots and dictators and regimes that threatened that idea, that idea that there is a place in this world where you don’t have to be from a certain class or race, that you can show up and be part of the mix, part of the fabric that we’ve woven, so I just want you to know that this blustering slick talking talking from the hip using his gut to rouse people into malice kind of almost man isn’t my choice on election day. What about you?

Dormancy

A remarkable number of half-finished entries over the past six months, a reluctance to hit the "post" button, and unfamiliarity with the mix and jumble of words that spill out when I start typing.  Moving, I think, is like pruning.  While my roots and foundation remain intact (to clone two unwieldy metaphors), much of the outward expression of how I represent place has been shorn back, clipped to the trunk.  At first glance, there's not much visible difference between a pruned vine and a dead one, only the hope that it will send new growth out once again. 
Despite this dormancy, I continue to eat, cook, and think about food.  Everything is slower, maybe like a trout in a cold stream in Vermont, or the apple tree in my neighbor's yard, a few unfallen fruits frozen in place.  Maybe terroir - the expression of place - has more to do with a plant's dormancy than its growing period. Perhaps in the cold grey of February apple trees absorb the still-earth they rest in, and - without even a bud to dream of - gain the characteristics of the Champlain valley.  The summer sun shines equally on all, but in the cold, quiet earth of February, next year's harvest is already taking shape, framing its profile as cold snaps and rain storms rearrange our expectations about what will flourish next.
That which thrived last year, grew when nothing else did, still must be pruned back.  May, the bursting forth of new life, depends on January, February.  So, too, do my words.  For now, I am still
in winter's hold.

Summer 2010

We ended our summer in northern Minnesota, where each year we fish, play cards, swim, and sauna.  One night we sat around a fire and my daughter roasted marshmallows for us.  What a lovely night.

I've written this blog because I love to share food and talk with friends about tomatoes, sauerkraut, chickens and beets.  But one season blends into the next and as this summer progressed I found myself unable to say anything else about the glorious Brandywine tomatoes I was slicing and eating, about the blood red beets we forked from the bowl at dinner time, about the rich yolks of our backyard hens.  Additionally, as I read the 17 million other food blogs that also celebrate confit, ramps, and the ineffability of good zinfandel, I am bowled over by how many good writers and excellent photographers have surpassed my parochial interests and limited writing skills.  Food is such a hot topic that I'm seeing some of the writing moving toward the competitiveness we see in sports, fashion and other interests and I wonder if we're all really and truly interested in piment d'esplette peppers or if we're searching them out because no one else has written about them yet?  Do we enjoy slaughtering animals or are we trying to outdo the next writer who merely bought his sow's belly at a butcher's market?  Me?  I got my piment d'esplette seeds from a guy in Vancouver because I had read about the pepper for years and met a fellow blogger who is from the region in France where they're grown, and she knew the guy with the seeds.  So while there may be a back story to the things we cook and eat and write about, it's easy to seem like a carpetbagger.  So, all summer I've avoided writing, spending the time instead with family and friends, doing the things I usually do, and eating delightful things.  I still have to figure out how to move past this awkward stage of my blog, where I've written about the foods and traditions I care about and don't want to be too repetitive.  At the same time, I've missed writing and sharing the stories of food and the way it connects us as a family and as part of a community.