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spinach
cucumber
green beans
bell pepper
red onion
strawberries
whole grain bread
all of it local
My favorite moment in Sideways is when Paul Giamatti’s character, Miles Raymond, demonstrates the art of wine eva
Mr. Raymond had nothing on the Red Guitar poetasters.
The wine I was about to pour smelled of “
Take a sip. What do you taste? “Sour cherry and grape, a bit candy-like, with dried fruit notes and hints of spicy vanilla”? “Very tart cherry, briary almost like tree bark”? “Cranberries giv[ing] way quickly to bright jammy cherry fruit cola”? “B
As T.S. Eliot noted in “Burnt Norton,”
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Hey, Red Guitar is a delightful, inexpensive, fruity red wine. It goes well with chili and corn chips, hamburgers, barbecued chicken.
It's OK to drink it in silence.
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Whenever we pray for a sick person we say, "May God who blessed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, bless and heal _____, the [son or daughter] of ______." The last blank is not the father. The sick person is always referred to as the son or daughter of the mother. We invoke the mother's name. This is based on Jeremiah 31:14-19.
And so the rabbis remark on this passage that in the end of days when it comes time to redeem Israel, God will not listen to the pleas of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. Rather, what moves God most is the plea of Mother Rachel. This is based on the simple Jewish notion that what women and God share in common is the very custodianship of the sanctity of human flesh. Both are creators of the flesh. Men by definition are not. For that reason we pray for sick people in the name of their mother.
I have not wanted to turn this blog into a confessional of any sort. I completely understand a friend of mine who, during her first visit with a spiritual director, said, “I don’t want this to be about me.”
I can think of several ways I’d rather spend a day.
Yes, I know my chances of full recovery are excellent. As my incredibly young doctor-chick with the perky smile and Gap trousers puts it, “Almost everybody survives. You just gotta do what you gotta do.” She’s abso
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Still, I do not “go gentle into that good night,” even the good night induced by anesthesia. Though I accept that “all flesh is grass” (Isa 40.6) and that “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Eccl 3.20), I resonate with Woody Allen’s observation: “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
The prospect of heart removal, repair, and replacement is a powerful memento mori, even though I may well go on for another twenty, thirty, even forty years. My great-great-aunt Emma, when she was 97 and living with her 94-year-old sister, Ella, said to my mother, “We’re coping fine right now, but I do sometimes wonder what we’ll do when we get old.”
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Squirrel-caging isn’t all bad. After running round and round the wheel day after day, eventually this squirrel gets bored and goes off in search of nuts. Today I caramelized six pounds of onions. Tonight I will set a pound of navy beans to soak, and I will put a batch of bread dough in the refrigerator to rise overnight. Tomorrow a dear friend I have known since we were eight years old arrives from
Over the years our parents have died, our children have grown, our bodies have slowed. But thank goodness we are not pure spirits, even if the dust part of us isn’t as lively as it once was. Tomorrow night we’ll enjoy hearty peasant food and drink good red wine as we talk about books, travel, friends, family, and the way we used to scandalize the small college town where our fathers were respectable professors (“What will people think?” my mother kept wailing).
It takes a body to enjoy an evening like that. An imperfect one will do.