Let's talk about food ... and wine!

[Caravaggio, Bacchus, 1596]

A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.

--Brillat-Savarin, or maybe an Italian proverb

 

I enjoy wine. But I readily acknowledge that some people should not drink wine: recovering alcoholics, of course; drinkers who don't realize they're alcoholics; people taking certain medications; people who are about to drive cars or pilot airplanes; children; and so on.

To be fair, there are people who shouldn't eat bread, either, though not as many.

Yes, wine can be dangerous. In scripture and other literature, it can indicate evil and punishment and terror.

In the Bible, wine sometimes accompanies wickedness and judgment. For example, the Psalmist writes that "in the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed; he will pour a draught from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs" (Psalm 75:8).

St. John of Patmos says that Babylon--herself a symbol of corrupt governments and multinational corporations--"has made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication" (Revelation 14:8; 18:3).

In "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Julia Ward Howe uses wine production as a double symbol, evoking both the Last Judgment and the American Civil War: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored."

But more often, wine brings to mind abundance and contentment and friendship.

Hear Moses' final blessing on his people: "So Israel lives in safety, untroubled is Jacob’s abode in a land of grain and wine, where the heavens drop down dew" (Deuteronomy 33:28).

And the Preacher's summary of a good life: "Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do" (Ecclesiastes 9:7).

And the delightful quatrain by Hilaire Belloc:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino.

A drink that can evoke friendship and anger, blessing and corruption, joy and addiction, holiday relaxation and highway death, family harmony and family destruction--what a symbol!

In Prince Caspian, Book 2 of The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis describes the Pevensie girls' reaction to a wild party with river gods, forest goddesses, maenads, Silenus, and Bacchus himself:

"I wouldn't have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we'd met them without Aslan," [said Susan].

"I should think not," said Lucy.

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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: Hospitality for shy people

[Mother and me, 1950]

Something you should know about tall women who seem reserved and even distant  - they may just be shy or socially awkward, and they may really want to be your friend. I've understood this all my life, of course, but I was well into adulthood when my mother told me she understood it too.

My mother was not the kind of woman who could chat easily with strangers or charm other people's children. She would not have survived as a social worker, therapist, or nurse. If she had belonged to a church that equated righteousness with personally comforting the deranged or the homeless or the dying, she would probably have changed denominations.

I tell you this only to point out that hospitality has many faces.

My shy mother did have close friends, and she was known in our small town for her unrelenting hospitality. During my grade-school years when my father was president of a small college, she invited faculty families to dinner nearly every weekend. It was the late 1950s, and the dinners were pretty formal: white Quaker Lace tablecloth, Noritake china, and Community silverplate. Stemmed goblets filled with Hawaiian punch and ginger ale. Individual Jell-O molds with dabs of mayonnaise. A centerpiece. The amazing thing is that, with virtually no help (my father and I were useless in the kitchen), she managed to make all the hot foods finish cooking at the same time.

This was hospitality, to be sure, but her company dinners are not what impressed me most about my mother's approach. Back in the 1950s and 60s, I've learned, most American social occasions were one big Noah's Ark: you came in pairs or not at all. I did not realize that at the time, because it wasn't the way my mother operated. She had friends whose husbands got sick, or left them for other women, or died. These friends were often at our house. Sometimes we all went out and did things together. I never gave it a second thought.

Years later several of my mother's friends told me that once their husbands became unavailable, most invitations dried up. Couples they used to go out with stopped calling. For a time my mother was just about their only friend who continued to have them over for dinner.

I was dumfounded. It had never occurred to me that the death or desertion or illness of a spouse would make a mid-20th-century American woman a pariah. I thank my mother - a tall, reserved, possibly distant woman - for keeping me ignorant of such heartless behavior. And I thank her for giving me a lesson in hospitality by treating her hurting friends with such dignity that even her daughter had no idea she was doing anything unusual.
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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

Let's talk about food: Restoring soul to food

[Jan Steen, "Meal," 1650]

"Food has a profound capacity for meaning and fostering community."

So writes Thomas Moore in "Food for the Soul,"an article in Resurgence and Ecologist magazine (Nov/Dec 2008). Moore, a former monk, a psychologist, and the best-selling author of Care of the Soul (1992), believes that food is (or should be) much more than fuel. When we bring imagination to food, we allow it to enhance community, conviviality, pleasure, beauty, spirituality--and no doubt lots of other good things.

"There is always a place for a quick meal," Moore acknowledges, "but everyone also needs communion, the intimate experience of conviviality that only food can provide." Here are two paragraphs from the article that especially pertain to this week's conversation topic at St Barnabas, hospitality.

Food ... brings people together, mysteriously serving the emotional life. Say you have trouble in your marriage. You call a friend for help. Do you say, “I know a solitary place with no distractions where we can have a serious talk”? Or do you say, “Let’s have lunch”? On such occasions do you need the calories or the chemicals? Do you need to deal with your hunger? Or do you know deep down that eating together will intensify your conversation?

Perhaps the greatest challenge in this time of rapid technological advance and the shrinking of the globe is to create a world community. But that important task can’t be done in the abstract. Food can play a role. Food as community, not as a commodity. Whatever power allows lunch to foster friendship, wedding cake a marriage, and bread and wine a religion could make a community of the world’s population. But we need first to restore soul to food.

Moore's article is short but deep. Though my friends who have studied the 16th- and 17th-century Puritans will point out that his comments about "puritanism" have little to do with the behavior of actual Puritans (apparently the first Thanksgiving drinks included "beer, brandy, gin, and wine," for example), the word "puritanical" has taken on a life of its own and I'm willing to give Moore a pass.

St B parishioners, here are some questions we might talk about Sunday:

• Think of some hospitality stories from scripture. What foods were involved?
• How does food foster community?
• Are some foods better than others at fostering community?
• Do we ever use food as a substitute for community?
• How might we pay more attention to the "soul" of food?

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This is part of a series of short posts especially for people who attend St Barnabas Episcopal Church in Glen Ellyn, IL, where I'm leading conversations about food on September 22, September 29, and October 6. I'll post about food every weekday between September 16 and October 4.

What civil discourse sounds like

Like you, I have friends who lean left and friends who lean right. Sometimes we all get along just fine, sometimes we annoy one another, and sometimes we de-friend each other on Facebook. I've been thinking about what makes the difference, and I decided to try to write something that we all might confirm - unless, of course, we would really rather rant than communicate. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could combine conviction with passionate intensity - and still talk peaceably with one another!

Choose your column ...

BFF - 50 years and counting

Kathy and LaVonne, c. 1961

As of today, Kathleen and I have been friends for 50 years.

Our mothers were close friends before we were born, but Kathy lived on the east coast and I lived on the west so we knew each other only through Christmas letters. We finally met on my 12th birthday, in Kathy's aunt's house, and we talked all afternoon.

We never stopped talking, though the topics keep changing.

Back then we talked about boys and parents and our impending move to Michigan - she from Washington, DC; me from California. We spent the next four years (grades 8 through 11, when we lived four houses apart on the same street) arguing about which coast was better, confiding about the boys we had crushes on, sharing books (which our strait-laced teachers sometimes confiscated), complaining about our unnecessarily restrictive parents, and dreaming about what we would do when we grew up.

Then I moved to France, California, Michigan, Washington state, and Illinois; while Kathy lived in Michigan, France, California, Indiana, and Maryland. Except for a few months in Michigan when we were in our 20s, we never lived in the same place again. But together we've toured vineyards in Napa Valley, shopped for curtains in Indiana, and groaned about loud American tourists in Oxford.

Over the years we've talked about boyfriends (several ) and husbands (one apiece), dogs (mine) and cats (hers), sex, food, wine, friends, and travel. We both left the conservative denomination of our youth and became Episcopalians. We both spent many years caring for aging parents. We consoled each other as our parents died.

Kathy and I don't get together all that often: she's back in DC, and I live near Chicago. After 46 years apart, our lives are quite different, and we don't know most of each other's friends. But we stay in touch through email and Facebook and telephone. Just yesterday, in fact, we discussed Social Security and buffalo mozzarella.

My granddaughters, who are older than Kathy and I were when we met, talk about their BFFs - best friends forever. Everyone should have at least one. Forever isn't nearly long enough.

LITTLE BEE by Chris Cleave

Thanks to my friend Beth Spring for recommending Little Bee (or, in the U.K., The Other Hand). It's the best novel I've read so far this year.

First published in 2008 and now available in paperback, the story concerns a teen-aged Nigerian girl who calls herself Little Bee. Fearing imprisonment or death, she seeks asylum in the U.K., is intercepted at sea, and is thrown into an immigration detention center.

The story also concerns a British couple, Andrew and Sarah, both journalists. Having briefly crossed paths with Little Bee while on holiday in Nigeria, they meet up with her again in England two years later. Sarah befriends her - and finds her whole life being called into question.

If you want to know more than that, you'll just have to read the book yourself. Much of its charm is in the way the author gradually unpacks and enriches the story, and I would not be doing you a favor by telling you what happens.

As a best book must be, Little Bee is excellent in many categories:

• Exquisite writing, right from the start: "Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming."
• Rich characterization of the two first-person narrators, Little Bee and Sarah. An interesting supporting cast as well, especially Batman, age 4, who removes his bat suit only at bath time.
• Conflict and suspense. Little Bee is in danger, and every character faces a moral dilemma. Batman neatly divides the world into "goodies" and "baddies," but things are less clear for the others.
• Significance. Without ever preaching, the book looks at immigration policy, journalistic responsibility, and selfishness vs. self-sacrifice.
• Comic relief. And yet the author manages to inject humor into the darkest situations - not inappropriately, but as a survival technique. "I don't get you," a man says to Little Bee. "If you understood how serious your situation is, I don't think you'd smile." Little Bee shrugs. "If I could not smile," she answers, "I think my situation would be even more serious."

Above all, the book is simply a joy to read. Take this paragraph, for example, where Sarah encourages Little Bee to go with the family to London. "It's a beautiful day, we'll laze about on the South Bank and just watch the world go by.... Come on, it'll be an adventure for you," she says. Little Bee thinks:

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

To learn about the author, Chris Cleave, or to read the first chapter of Little Bee, check out the author's website here.

Review of "Best Love, Rosie" by Nuala O'Faolain

You may have to be at least 50 to understand how a book could be about aging and death and troubled relationships and failing bodies and eldercare and loneliness and depression and alcoholism - and still be not only inspiring but often very funny.

Of course, Best Love, Rosie is also about Ireland and New York and best friends and a good dog and silly self-help books, which lightens the tone.

Rosie, now in her mid 50s, has spent decades living anywhere but Ireland. Her most recent love affair clearly doomed, she decides it's time to return to Dublin to look after Min, her 69-year-old aunt, who alternates between too much time at the pub and too much time home in bed. But Min, suddenly transformed, flies to the United States, makes improbable friends, and begins enjoying life immensely, while Rosie turns to rehabbing an ancient house that once belonged to her long-dead grandparents.

At the same time, Rosie is trying to write a self-help booklet for middle-aged women. The problem is that her likely publisher is American, and - as Markey, an Irish-American friend of hers, keeps pointing out - Americans want dreams, not realism. Especially not realism about death. "No German thinkers," he tells Rosie when she attempts to quote one. "Particularly, no suicidal German thinkers. That is Rule Number One.... No Auschwitz survivors! That's Rule Number Two.... We're trying to sell to ... nice, open-faced women who look about fifty but are sixty-four, who still wear hats and are dear people and ignorant of bad things, Rosie."

This presents Rosie with a bit of a problem, especially when she's asked to suggest titles for the booklet. I once worked for a publisher on the other side of the pond whose self-help titles generally started with the word Coping. "American don't cope," I kept telling them: "we overcome!" Markey tries to convey the same message when Rosie suggests The Bittersweet Years, or Making the Best of the Middle Years, or Time to Destination. "Lay off the European gloom!" he orders.

Rosie does not have a Hollywood ending, but Rosie manages to escape the gloom. The book closes with several helpings of hope and love - enough to please Maeve Binchy's fans, but not so much as to put off people who find Binchy too sentimental. In the introduction, O'Faolain writes:

Best Love, Rosie - my fifth book in ten years - is the book of my years of commuting between the melancholy of Ireland and the optimism of America. It insists on celebrating what those years showed me. That the world in all its shades of black and white is wonderfully interesting. That sorrow can be managed: it can be banished to a minor place within. And that even the most seemingly moribund life is open to the possibility of change - in youth, in middle age, and always.

She wrote those words on January 14, 2008. On February 8, O'Faolain was diagnosed with lung cancer, which had spread to her brain and liver. Two months later, on April 13, she spoke extremely frankly in a Sunday Independent interview. When the interviewer asked her opinion on people who advise positive thinking as a coping mechanism, she responded: "Yeah, I was just reading about some best-selling man who says 'Live your dream to the end' and so on and I don't despise anyone who does, but I don't see it that way. Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy it isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life."

O'Faolain died Friday, May 8, at age 68, less than four weeks after giving the interview. Her obituary in The Independent  noted that "during the months between her diagnosis and death, she had travelled to Paris, made a trip to see art works in Madrid and visited the Berlin Opera. Only the Sunday before her death, she had returned from her travels to Sicily with her sisters and close friends."

Best Love, Rosie was published posthumously.

I like to think that in the weeks between the despairing interview and her death, O'Faolain managed her sorrow and soaked up the love of her family and friends. I'm sure that if Rosie had contracted a fatal illness, that's how she would have wanted her to go.

How to cook for your vegetarian friends - 10 ideas

"Help! I just discovered one of my dinner guests is a vegetarian! What can I do?"

Take a deep breath. If your friend has been a vegetarian for more than a few weeks, she is already quite used to fending for herself at meals where meat is served. A new convert to vegetarianism, on the other hand (like a new convert to almost anything), may go all righteous and preachy on you. Don't argue with her. Ask questions, listen, and resolve to give her a few months to settle in before inviting her back.

We have quite a few vegetarian* friends, and they are, without exception, gracious and appreciative guests.

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*Note: It helps to find out what your friends mean by vegetarian. Many vegetarians happily eat dairy products and eggs, while some (vegans) eat nothing that comes from animals, not even honey. A few people who call themselves vegetarians are actually pescetarians - they eat fish, but not meat. And some are selective meat eaters - they will eat meat only if they know it comes from a family farm that treats its animals humanely.

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Here are 10 ideas for feeding vegetarians and meat-eaters together.
 1.   Do nothing. Serve whatever you were planning to serve before you knew your guest's eating habits. Just be sure to provide, alongside your steaks, plenty of side dishes that the vegetarian can eat.
 2.   Provide a selection of sandwiches, soups, and/or salads and let everybody take what they want.
 3.   Serve buffet or family style to maximize choice.
 4.   Serve pasta with a choice of sauces.
 5.   Serve pizza with a choice of toppings.
 6.   Serve tapas or meze - a wide selection of appetizers that make up an entire meal.
 7.   Ask your vegetarian friend to contribute a hot dish.
 8.   Host a potluck.
 9.   Cook a vegetarian meal for everybody (see suggestions here, here, and here).
10.  Meet your friends at a restaurant.

Two elegant hedgehogs

As a former French teacher who lives with an elegant little terrier named Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, how could I not like Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog?

A runaway best-seller in Europe--over a million copies sold in its native France since its 2006 publication, translation rights sold to 31 countries--the book is #14 on the most recent New York Times paperback trade fiction best seller list.

Last September when the U.S. edition was published, Caryn James characterized it as belonging "to a distinct subgenre: the accessible book that flatters readers with its intellectual veneer." I love being flattered, I am pining for France, I'm a sucker for best sellers, and there's the hedgehog thing. I put a hold on it at the public library.

In James's New York Times review, she offers this interesting insight into the book's title:

The sharp-eyed Paloma guesses that Renée has “the same simple refinement as the hedgehog,” quills on the outside but “fiercely solitary — and terribly elegant” within. Yet there is no mention of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Renée’s beloved Tolstoy, which may make this the sliest allusion of all. (What are the odds that a philosophy professor with a working knowledge of hedgehogs and Tolstoy would not have known it?) In Berlin’s famous definition of two kinds of thinkers — foxes gather multiple unrelated ideas, while hedgehogs subsume everything into a controlling vision — Renée, intellectually eclectic yet determined to cram her thoughts into a self-abnegating theory of life, resembles Berlin’s description of Tolstoy, who was “by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog.”

Well, actually, Ms. James, the hedgehog idea wasn't Berlin's. The ancient Greek poet Archilocus said it succinctly 27 centuries ago: πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα; and Erasmus of Rotterdam ran with the idea some 21 centuries later: Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. You can read all about it here, if you happen to be a fox.

But enough intellectual veneer. Now that I've read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I'll suggest another important literary reference buried within it--an allusion to Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. Consider Potter's story: Depressed little girl meets "a very stout short person" with bad hair. The prickly person works for many people of higher status than herself, including the sad child. A garment gets lost in the washing. Eventually the old woman serves the girl a cup of tea, and the two look "sideways at one another." An improbable friendship forms.

And then there's the whole thing about laundry and dry cleaning, about which I will say no more to avoid spoiling Barbery's plot.

OK, I've been playing with you. What I just did is exactly what Renée, the concierge/ hedgehog/ protagonist of Barbery's book, despises. "If you want to make a career" in academia, she muses,

take a marginal, exotic text ... that is relatively unexplored, abuse its literal meaning by ascribing to it an intention that the author himself had not been aware of (because, as we all know, the unknown in conceptual matters is far more powerful than any conscious design), distort that meaning to the point where it resembles an original thesis, ... devote a year of your life to this unworthy little game ... , and send a courier to your research director.

That kind of reflection permeates this strangely absorbing little book, which--after a great deal of philosophy and French spleen--ends up affirming art, music, friendship, beauty, goodness, and the wonder of daily life.

I'll say no more. For a really fine introduction to and review of The Elegance of the Hedgehog--far better than I could provide--read Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.

How to live long and prosper

“What Makes Us Happy?”

It’s an eternal mystery, and it's also the title of a fascinating article by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the June Atlantic. Shenk was given access to archives of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been following a group of men—Harvard College sophomores in the late 1930s—for over 70 years. About half of the original 268 are still living.

Reading their stories and talking with the study’s longtime director, psychiatrist George Vaillant, Shenk tried to find reasons for some men’s happiness and others’ dissatisfaction, failure, or ill health. The key to happiness proved elusive and complex, but one factor stood out. Shenk reports:

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Tony Woodlief, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, comments on the Atlantic article and half a dozen other sources in “Ya Gotta Have (Real) Friends.” Woodlief links to Jeffrey Zaslow’s WSJ article “The Ties That Bind,” pointing out that women are more likely than men to cultivate lifelong friendships. Zaslow cites

a 14-year project at Flinders University in Australia that tracked 1,500 women as they aged. The study found that close friendships—even more than close family ties—help prolong women’s lives. Those with the most friends lived 22% longer than those with the fewest friends.

Woodlief points out that Facebook “friends” don’t really count. But how do we keep in contact with flesh-and-blood friends who live far away?

I’m still in touch with several childhood friends. Sharon and I met the summer we were 8; she has lived in Italy for the last 35 years. Kathleen and Molly and I met the summer we were 12; now we live in Maryland, Idaho, and Illinois. Thank goodness for Penny—we met at age 13—who lives only an hour away! And for airlines—Molly visited in May, and I’ll be seeing Sharon and Kathleen later this year.

Some of my post-college friends are amazed that we've all kept in touch. It helps that we all grew up in a well-networked subculture, and that we knew each other's parents and siblings and cousins. It also helps that, even though we didn't all go to the same college, we each spent a year in the same little school in Haute-Savoie, France. Not even the same year, but we sneaked out of the same dorm and bought Swiss chocolate in the same stores and knew the same shortcut up the hill to our school (turn right at the dog).

I wish we all lived in the same city now. Paris would do.

A fairly frugal feast with friends

This morning we met our frugal friends Janet and Ken at Caputo's Cheese Market in Melrose Park, just north of the intersection of North Avenue and 15th Avenue, in an industrial building bearing a huge "Wisconsin Cheese" sign. It's a great place not only for cheese (much of it made locally) but also for wine, pasta, deli meats, Italian canned goods, pastries ... all at very reasonable and sometimes unbelievably low prices.

Our plan was to buy whatever inspired us at the cheese market, then go to Caputo's Fresh Market in Elmwood Park for equally inspirational produce. If you click on the link, you'll understand how this could turn into an ecstatic experience. Baby Brussels sprouts at 79 cents a pound! Avocados at 79 cents each! A good-sized handful of fresh asparagus for 60 cents! Plum tomatoes at 49 cents a pound! Seven limes for a dollar!

Eventually we tore ourselves away and drove to Janet and Ken's condo in Chicago. There we sliced and diced and chopped and stirred and baked and boiled and poured and sipped, and this is what we came up with:

• Baguette rounds topped with caponata di melanzane (ready-made in a tin)
• Salad of baby spring lettuces, sliced pear, feta cheese, walnuts, and green onion
• Orrechiete with fava beans, ricotta, and shredded mint (we used canned beans, not fresh; you can see our actual concoction above)
• Assorted cheeses (Siciliano with walnuts, Eiffel Tower triple-cream, Fontinella, Cheddar, Gruyère)
• Individual ricotta cheesecakes, made spontaneously and with ingredients at hand. This time we added a little diced candied orange peel, a few chopped walnuts, and lemon zest (see picture below; you will notice that we couldn't wait to take that first bite)

It was a feast, but a fairly frugal one. All ingredients were wonderfully priced, and plenty of food was left over for future meals. We had wine with dinner, and that pushed us beyond our daily budget. Still, when you can buy a Chianti classico that usually costs between $15 and $20 for only $5.99, it seems sinful to pass it by. So we didn't.




Yesterday's fare
Fish tacos without the tortillas. Trader Joe's gave out samples of fish sticks a few days ago, and they were really quite nice. Such a classic choice for a Friday in Lent! Serve them on a bed of sautéed onion, red and green bell peppers, and garlic, surrounded by baby spinach leaves lightly sautéed in olive oil, top them with crumbled queso fresco and diced tomato, and there's no need to feel penitential.

Lucille Leonard, 1925-2008, resting in peace

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My friend Lucille died last Thursday. She had just turned 83, and she had been fighting cancer for several years. Her friends and family gave her a big birthday bash when she turned 80, thinking she wouldn't live out the year. She fooled us.

Lucille's faith was pietistic and evangelical, bordering on fundamentalist. A devout Anglophile, she fell in love with the high-church services at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church and became an Episcopalian five years ago, just before the controversy over Bishop Robinson shattered the Anglican peace. For many months she wavered. She felt she couldn't stay in a denomination whose theology she abhorred, but neither could she leave the liturgy she loved or her friends and the pastoral staff, all of whom she knew to be deeply Christian. Eventually she joined an evangelical Anglican parish, the Church of the Resurrection, where she made new friends without losing the old.

Meanwhile Lucille's husband died, she moved into a new apartment building (where she made still more friends), and she had surgery to remove a lobe of her lung, which contained some malignant tumors. The doctors thought all the cancer was gone. Then, at a routine check-up, some spots were discovered on her liver. Lucille and I began making regular visits to an oncologist's office and a chemotherapy clinic (where, of course, she continued to make friends).

The names chosen by Lucille's two churches reflect her personality and deep faith. Like St. Barbabas, she was an encourager. That, along with her oft-expressed gratitude, is why she had so many friends. And she wholeheartedly believed in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. She knew that to die was to be with him. She had no fear of death itself, but she hoped she would not have to die alone.

Click here to read a moving account of Lucille's last hours by her friend Barbara Gauthier, a prayer minister at the Church of the Resurrection, who held her hand as she passed peacefully to her rest.

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Out of the squirrel cage

I have not posted anything for quite a while. This is partly because I’ve been traveling (Maryland, Cape Cod) and partly because I’ve been thinking. Or, more accurately, squirrel caging, defined by one website as “the act of rumination on negative thoughts.” Mr. Neff calls this obsessing. I call it seeking information and making contingency plans.

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.”

But maybe I’m being too reticent. Lively Dust is about being human, earthbound, mortal. It’s about the interplay between spirit and flesh. If I can write about food and wine, maybe I can also write about malfunctioning bodies, even if one of them belongs to me.

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I have known for five years that I have a defective aortic valve and an aneurysm of the aortic root. Every year I get scanned various ways, and so far my structural defects have not affected my daily life. But last month I learned that my heart is growing less efficient (qualifiers like “moderate-to-severe” appeared on my report), and my cardiologist predicts that sometime between now and Medicare I will be split open, my heart will be stopped and removed from my body, machines will sustain me, and my aorta and two valves will be repaired or replaced as needed.

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 absolutely right.

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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 Italy, where she has lived for the last thirty-some years.

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.

Putting wine in context

"Wine's Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?" asks Eric Asimov in yesterday's New York Times, reporting on a forthcoming book, The Wine Trials: 100 Everyday Wines Under $15 that Beat $50 to $150 Wines in Brown-Bag Blind Tastings. Even if a lot of wine drinkers prefer Two Buck Chuck to Dom Perignon, Asimov writes, there are some flaws in the book's approach. More significant is another study he mentions, "in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it."

I was interested in the article because I'd been carrying on my own unscientific study. A few weeks ago I went to the semiannual Wine Thing, a 100-bottle tasting offered by the Cabernet & Co. wine shop in nearby Glen Ellyn. I approach a wine-tasting as an educational experience: I pick a theme (a grape, a region) and see what I can learn. This time I focused on sauvignon blanc.

I rarely meet a sauvignon blanc I don't love. I'm especially fond of Marlborough wines from New Zealand, but I like Californian and South African versions too, and the cheap Chilean from Trader Joe's is delightful. It had occurred to me that I am insufficiently snobbish about sauvignons, and perhaps I should educate my palate.

So I sniffed and swirled and contemplated and discussed, and yes, the wines varied in complexity and interest; but at the end of the hour I liked them all. As the CIT researchers would have predicted, some of the more expensive bottles seemed to have a je ne sais quoi that the cheaper bottles lacked--but would those whiffs of gooseberry and licorice even be discernible once the wine was paired with food?

I decided to find out. I bought two bottles of sauvignon blanc: a Viñas Chilenas 2007 from Trader Joe's ($3.99) and a Mulderbosch 2006 from Binny's ($17.99). I put them both in the refrigerator at the same time so they would be equally chilled. I served them with a goat cheese and pear and spring greens salad, followed by tilapia baked in buttered panko and asparagus on the side.

My wine panel consisted of four non-experts who appreciate good food: male, 60; female, 59; female, 35; female, 21. Result: we all liked both wines.

The youngest panelist preferred the TJ. The other three found the Mulderbosch more interesting. The practical old guy suggested serving the more expensive wine to our more discerning friends but sticking with TJ for everyone else (when you come to dinner, you'll know what we think of your palate ...).

As research, our evening was fatally flawed by the fact that all four of us knew what we were drinking, and how much it cost. We discussed the wines among ourselves and no doubt influenced each other's opinions. None of us is a wine expert, nor can we afford to be.

But as an evening among friends, we had a great time. We told stories, we laughed, we enjoyed good food. And ultimately, says Asimov, "the food, the company, the environment" are more important than a wine's price or rating. "Context," he writes, "may be the most underrated aspect of enjoying wine."

Asimov quotes Tyler Colman, a wine writer whose new book A Year of Wine: Perfect Pairings, Great Buys, and What to Sip for Each Season is scheduled for a November release: “'The mood and the food and the context really matters,' he said. 'It’s the neglected pairing.'”
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A Lenten birthday feast

crudités with hummus

Martellozzo prosecco (Veneto)

potage aux patates douces

crab ravioli with shallot cream

Litorale vermentino (Maremma Toscana) 2006

risotto with porcini, cremini, & shiitake mushrooms

roasted root vegetables

L’Ecole N° 41 syrah (Columbia Valley) 2004

fromages assortis

flourless chocolate cake

Hardy’s Whiskers Blake classic tawny dessert wine

Café

Why I am a Catholic

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,

There's music and laughter and good red wine.
At least I've always found it so:
Benedicamus Domino.

--Hillaire Belloc