Lost & Found

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"I've got this little thing I've learned to do just lately . . . When it's so hard I think I shan't go on. I try to make it worse. I make myself think about Berkeley [a friend who died]. Our camp on the river. How good it was. When I'm certain I won't stand it, I go a moment more. Then I know I can bear anything." [ellipses in original]

Karen Blixen, from the screenplay Out of Africa

*******************

"Stand on the edge of the abyss of despair and
when you feel that it is beyond your strength,
break off and have a cup of tea."

Sophrony (Sakharov)

*******************

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)
Poet Laureate of the United States, 1949 to 1950
Pulitzer Prize Winner, 1956

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Last Spring, my friend Jan (www.jandonley.com) sent me this poem, sure that I would love it. What a fine poem! It was new to me, I did love it, and how timely! Because what Jan didn't know was that at my house around that time we were all going a little crazy looking for Gerry's watch (misplaced somewhere within the house and still unfound) and three tiny watch / calculator batteries that I had bought and promptly misplaced upon returning home from the store! I had just celebrated the one - week anniversary of the missing batteries by going out and purchasing a new batch, begrudging the wasted time and effort of the first trip, the fruitless search, the second trip. Even so, I was still obsessively determined to waste even more time by continuing my manic search for the originals.

Isn't that always the hard part? All that time down the drain and just not knowing when to stop? Reading Bishop's poem, I have to admire the way that she recommends letting go even of that "hour badly spent." Plus it helped me at the time to consider that the batteries themselves were "filled with the intent / to be lost." What chance did I stand against them?

Reading Bishop's poem reminded me of another that I have known since my earliest teaching days: "No Loser, No Weeper," by Maya Angelou. I used to carry around a low-tech cassette player so that my students could listen to a scratchy recording I had of Angelou reading this poem. The two poems follow a similar pattern, starting with a concrete list of trinkets lost and found, ending with love, the greatest of all loss.

Bishop mentions a watch, keys, time, places, names, houses, cities, rivers, continents -- all lost. Perhaps her reference to such a vast geography is intended as a metaphor for something more intimate, closer to the heart. On the other hand, maybe not; maybe she really did lose all those big things. In the final stanza, she acquiesces bravely to lost love, not entirely convincing the reader that the art of losing is as easy to master as she claims. Not disaster? More likely the opposite is true. She may know how to "Write it!" yet is, in fact, devastated.

Angelou provides a very straightforward list -- a dime, a doll, a watch; and, in the end, her "lover - boy" -- and a straightforward tone to go with it. She hates to lose something and doesn't mind saying so:

No Loser, No Weeper
by Maya Angelou (b 1928)
American Autobiographer, Poet, and Shero
Pulitzer Prize Nominee, 1971

"I hate to lose something,"
then she bent her head
"even a dime, I wish I was dead.
I can't explain it. No more to be said.
Cept I hate to lose something."

"I lost a doll once and cried for a week.
She could open her eyes, and do all but speak.
I believe she was took, by some doll-snatching-sneak
I tell you, I hate to lose something."

"A watch of mine once, got up and walked away.
It had twelve numbers on it and for the time of day.
I'll never forget it and all I can say
Is I really hate to lose something."

"Now if I felt that way bout a watch and a toy,
What you think I feel bout my lover-boy?
I ain't threatening you madam, but he is my evening's joy.
And I mean I really hate to lose something."

A lost watch in both poems? A literary motif? A metaphor for lost time? Or merely one of your more commonly lost items, along with sunglasses and umbrellas? I like the way that Angelou's watch just "got up and walked away," motivated, apparently, by "the intent to be lost" described by Bishop. I pointed out to Gerry that perhaps he could take some comfort in knowing that his predicament was none other than the human condition! Well, he resorted to wearing his second - best watch but was not resigned.

Nor was all lost! Not only did his watch show up; but, a few days later, the missing batteries re-appeared as well. As for the watch, we could all agree that it had last been seen on the kitchen counter, and Sam remembered playing with it while sitting there reading the paper. So it was not a big surprise when the watch turned out to have been on Sam's dresser top the entire time. He must have absentmindedly been twisting it around in his hand, walked up to his room for something, set it down, and completely forgotten about doing so.

Of course, he'd been in and out of his room a hundred times since then but just never spied the watch amidst the other dresser-top items. He didn't want to admit his oversight to Gerry, so I came up with the idea to put the watch around our cat Beaumont's neck and call out, "Hey, does anyone recall that old Disney movie about the cat [Thomasina? No, it was That Darn Cat!] who wore a wristwatch for a collar?" As per usual, no one else laughed at my joke, but Beaumont cooperated with my prank, and I thought I was pretty funny. Haha.
[Beaumont: Puss in Box, Shopping For Boots]
More good news! A few days later, I went to the freezer for a package of frozen vegetables (lets say something classy like edamame), and there were the three little batteries! I had simply twisted the plastic grocery bag around the veggies before storing them, without ever noticing that the batteries were in the same bag. At the onset of my extended search, when I realized that I had never unpacked the batteries, I did shake out every single grocery bag -- without ever remembering that one had already been stuck away in the freezer. Ah ha! Who knew?

To conclude this narrative of the ridiculous, just a day or so after I finally went out and replaced the lost batteries, I received the following in a list of "thoughts for the day" from my brother Aaron, who knew nothing about our lost and found issues: "The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement."

It certainly worked for the batteries; and, if Gerry had purchased a new watch, it would have worked in that case too!

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ More Lost & Found
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Faith Kept Me Back Awhile

The fresco, "Zachariah in the Temple" (1486 - 1490)
by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1486-1490)
Italian Renaissance painter
Detail: Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino,
Angelo Poliziano, Demetrios Chalkondyles
Location of fresco: The Tornabuoni Chapel
in Santa Maria Novella Church, Florence, Italy

Back when I was an undergrad in a class called Major Trends, I was given the assignment to pick a significant historical event before 1550 and provide examples of its effect on literature up to the present day. I seem to recall taking a stair-step approach, starting with

Italian Renaissance (1400 - 1550)
produced humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino
(Italian, 1433 - 1499)
who wrote Theologia Platonica (1474)

Fun Fact: Ficino coined the phrase "Platonic Love" [to be misquoted several centuries later by one of my Freshman Comp students as "Plutonic Love"]

Ficino's Neoplatonism influenced Edmund Spenser
(English, 1552 - 1599)
who wrote The Faerie Queene (1590)

Fun Fact: Spenser is believed to have crafted the phrase "neither rhyme nor reason"

Spenser's allegorical poem influenced Nathaniel Hawthorne
(American, 1804 - 64)
who wrote Mosses From an Old Manse (1835)
and Twice-Told Tales (1837)

Fun Fact: Hawthorne named his first child Una, after a character from Spenser's "Faerie Queene"

In "Young Goodman Brown," one of Hawthorne's allegorical tales, Young Goodman Brown leaves his young wife Faith for a visit to the Dark Side. As he hurries away to keep his appointment with Fate, he sees Faith's sad face, framed on either side by the pink ribbons of her cap. He is torn between his faith and the insistent call of cynicism. Arriving late for his assignation, he explains his tardiness, "Faith kept me back awhile."

Throughout the story, Young Goodman Brown's spiritual faith, his faith in goodness and humankind, and the person of his wife Faith become one. Should he leave his "dear Faith" to pursue the Knowledge of Good and Evil? He longs to sleep "in the arms of Faith!" Yet he feels compelled to enter the dark wood where he is startled to hear Faith's voice echoing through the trees. When he finds one of her pink ribbons caught on a branch, he seizes it, crying, "My Faith is gone!"

"But where is Faith?" he asks. It appears that Faith has become as jaded as he, and by the end of the evening their mutual disillusion is complete: " . . . ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived."

When I first read this story in 1977, in a unit of literature concerning the theme of Initiation, I attempted to write a poem on the same topic (as a student of Andrew Grossbardt, Jim Thomas, and Jim Barnes):

INITIATION
So,
I have finally told you about the dot and the line.

The dot, a hard knot, a hurt fist between my breasts.
The crying fingers clinch in painful safety
all that I have loved and lived with and believed in for so long.

The line, a right margin the length of my body.
A fence allowing no escape for the dot,
guarding, keeping it right beside my heart.

In time,
when with a wiser hand I force the tear-stained fingers open
I will find, preserved in brine, Faith's pink ribbon.

I hadn't thought about this poem for ages, until driving in the car the other day, I caught the words from Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." The lyrics brought to mind the imagery of my old poem -- the dot and the line, the knotted heart and the fist. I couldn't help wondering if the shallow beating heart, the divided mind, and the border line in their song are similar to those I was writing about so long ago:

"On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams . . .

My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating . . .

I'm walking down the line
That divides me somewhere in my mind
On the border line
Of the edge and where I walk alone . . . ."

Kiss Today

A PLACE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSPRINT BY EUGENE SAMUEL GRASSET (1845 -1917)FROM HIS LA BELLE JARDINIERE CALENDAR SERIES, 1896

*************
"IN this Æglogue two shepheards boyes taking occasion of the season, beginne to make purpose of loue and other pleasaunce, which to springtime is most agreeable. The speciall meaning hereof is, to giue certaine markes and tokens, to know Cupide the Poets God of Loue. But more particularlye I thinke, in the person of Thomalin is meant some secrete freend, who scorned Loue and his knights so long, till at length him selfe was entangled, and unwares wounded with the dart of some beautifull regard, which is Cupides arrowe.

Thomalin, why sytten we soe,
As weren ouerwent with woe,
Vpon so fayre a morow?
The ioyous time now nighest fast,
That shall alegge this bitter blast,
And slake the winters sorowe.

Sicker Wyllie, thou warnest well:
For Winters wrath beginnes to quell,
And pleasant spring appeareth.
The grasse now ginnes to be refresht,
The Swallow peepes out of her nest,
And clowdie Welkin cleareth." [Welkin = sky, heavens]

Woodcut illustration
and poet's introduction and opening stanzas
for the Month of March
from "The Shepheardes Calender," 1579
by Edmund Spenser, English Poet (1552 - 1599)
With the coming of March, Cupid, "little Love," as the shepherds call him, has awakened and is sneaking about the woods, "abroad at his game." He flits behind trees and bushes, betrayed by the vivid colors of his "winges of purple and blewe . . . spotted winges like Peacockes trayne." [You'll notice that Spenser wrote back in the good old days when you didn't have to remember your apostrophes!]

Also easy to envision is Emily Dickinson's breezy personification of March walking down the path and bursting through the front door. The narrator welcomes March with open arms, a kiss perhaps. Sometimes March is a Lion, sometimes a Lamb, but for Dickinson, March is a Gentleman Caller:

Dear March, come in!
How glad I am!
I looked for you before.
Put down your hat--
You must have walked --
How out of breath you are!
Dear March, how are you?
And the rest?
Did Nature leave you well?
Oh, March, come right upstairs with me,
I have so much to tell! --Emily Dickinson

March and the Poet are left to catch up on all the latest gossip before April arrives, much as Spenser's two shepherds discuss their strategies for love and courtship in the coming months, one imparting advice to the other:

"Let be, as may be, that is past:
That is to come, let be forecast.
Now tell vs, what thou hast seene."

In other words:

Kiss today goodbye,
The sweetness and the sorrow.
Wish me luck, the same to you.
But I can't regret
What I did for love,
what I did for love.

Look my eyes are dry.
The gift was ours to borrow.
It's as if we always knew,
And I won't forget
what I did for love,
What I did for love.

Gone,
Love is never gone.
As we travel on,
Love's what we'll remember.

Kiss today goodbye,
And point me toward tomorrow.
We did what we had to do.
Won't forget, can't regret
What I did for
Love

lyrics by by Edward Kleban
from A Chorus Line
music by Marvin Hamlisch

In the center are the two conversing shepherds, behind them is winged Cupid, and above them is the zodiac symbol for Aries, the Ram. To the left is Love's victim, "entangled [in a fowling net], and unwares wounded by the dart . . . of Cupides arrowe" and to the right is Thomalin fighting with Love, throwing stones to no avail.

Thomalin's rueful conclusion about the difficulties
of Love in the Springtime,
i.e., the Sweetness and the Sorrow:
Of Hony and of Gaule in loue there is store:
The Honye is much, but the Gaule is more.

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, March 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Year of the Tiger

YEAR OF THE TIGER STAMPS: HONG KONG, 1998















At an art exhibit many years ago, I saw a wooden sculpture of a cat sitting atop a metal climbing frame, entitled "Little Tiger in the House." How I would love to see that again, but I don't know where to find it or who the sculptor was. How could I have neglected to write that name down?

Two of my own Little Tigers in the House
Josef (left, in 1993) & Pine (right, in 2007)
Same Chairs: Refinished & Reupholstered












In observation of the Year of the Tiger, here a few of my favorite fortune cookie proverbs that I have saved over the years.

1. "Answer just what your heart prompts you."

As I was once advised in real life (not in a cookie) when I was mulling over a potentially very bad decision: "You can go ahead and toy with that idea all you want, but I don't think your psyche will ever let you do it." How reassuring to think that my psyche was on the job, looking out for me, prompting me.

That thought has never left me. Even now, it is very reassuring to think that my psyche should care so much about me and be so trustworthy, that at some level, I have my own best interests at heart -- not just selfishly, but protectively! I am not self - destructive. The capacity to choose correctly is already within me, quietly working away on my behalf, giving me the confidence to answer just what my heart prompts me!

As Steve Jobs advises, "Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become" (Stanford Commencement Speech, 2005).


2. "Stop searching forever, happiness is just next to you."

Not in Oz. In Kansas.


3. "Launch a regiment for a new healthier you!"

This is my all - time favorite. I like the idea, even if unintentional, that it might require more than a "regimen" -- it might require a "regiment"! You have to be aggressive in the quest for health and happiness!

I don't recall exactly when or where these fortunes came into my life, but I've had them magneted to three successive refrigerators for well over a decade and have transported them with me through two moves -- that's how much I value them!

I carefully removed them from my refrigerator in 2001, and packed them for our move across town, from one side of Philadelphia to the other; and again in 2004 when we returned to Indiana. Just little scraps of paper, but I'm hanging on to them. So many others have gone by the wayside -- all that take-out, all those buffets -- but these three are keepers.

Fortune cookies always remind me of that section in The Joy Luck Club, when the Joy Luck Aunties first come to America and find work at the cookie factory, inserting silly, pointless fortune-like dictums into the hot cookies as they come off the assembly line: axioms such as "Money is the root of all evil. Look around you and dig deep."

Auntie An-mei then translates back into Chinese for Auntie Lindo:

"Money is a bad influence. You become restless and rob graves."

"What is this nonsense," I [Lindo] asked her, putting the strips of paper in my pocket, thinking I should study these classical American sayings.

"They are fortunes, she [An-mei] explained. "American people think Chinese people write these sayings."

"But we never say such things!" I said. "These things don't make sense. These are not fortunes, they are bad instructions"

from The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, 262
It's true. Break open your fortune cookie or your Christmas Cracker and more often than not you will find some ridiculous little proverb whose so-called meaning evaporates even as your read it aloud. Luckily, though, every once in awhile, Fate makes an exception and offers an idea you can run with, one that will speak to your heart and bring you Good Fortune.Joy Luck: "It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. . . . What was worse . . . to sit and wait . . . Or to choose our own happiness? . . . So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. . . . And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck" (from The Joy Luck Club, 24 -25).

Happy New Year of the Tiger! Joy! Luck! Good Fortune!

STAY TUNED FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, February 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Take a look at
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Saying The Old Town's Name

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

RAIN
from One Morning by Yohji Izawa and Canna Funakoshi
January: rainy one day, snowy the next; sometimes both on the same day. For a delightful depiction of the changeable wintry weather, take a look at this trio of simply beautiful picture books, filled with succinct, sensory, haiku - like text by Canna Funakoshi, and vivid, magical collage - like illustrations by Yohji Izawa:

One Morning (1985)
Winner: First Prize for Graphics
at the Bologna International Children's Book Fair
Selected by New York Times:
Ten Best Children's Books of 1987

One Evening (1988)

One Christmas (1989).

[All three titles from Picture Book Studios]

"Homeward" from One Evening
The books feature a nameless, faceless man and his saucy, loyal little cat. One Day moves gently through an early morning routine, concluding with a charming sequence of the man leaving for work, then returning a few seconds later to pick up his umbrella. In One Evening (later that same day? maybe another day) it has just begun to snow as the man is catching the 5 p.m. trolley home from the office, knowing that his little friend is waiting there to welcome him and help at the typewriter: "Play? Letter."

One Christmas includes among its illustrations two collages in black, white, and gray, representing old memories of Christmas stockings and plum puddings. Later in the book, similar scenes are portrayed, but now in color, in the present day: the same bed post where the stocking was hung, the same table by the dining room window, the same candle stick. My favorite line occurs, when the man is at the railway station purchasing his train ticket and "Saying the old town's name."

Saying the old town's name. The old town. Is there really a hometown for everybody? Somewhere like "that place Just over the Brooklyn Bridge" that Art Garfunkel sings about:

A world of its own,
The streets where we played,
The friends on every corner were the best we ever made.
The backyards, and the school yards
And the trees that watched us grow,
The days of love when dinner time was all you had to know.
Whenever I think of yesterday,
I close my eyes and see,
That place Just Over The Brooklyn Bridge
That will always be home to me.
It'll always be home to me.

--music by Marvin Hamlisch
--lyrics by Marilyn & Alan Bergman

I guess when I close my eyes and think of yesterday, I see the small Missouri town where I lived between the ages of 5 and 10. As a matter of fact, my parents helped us kids plant a tiny little evergreen in the yard there, back in 1965; and when I drove past the house 25 years later, I missed it, crying out in dismay, "Where is the little tree?" Towering high above the house, that's where it was! But I hadn't even thought to glance up; I was searching at eye-level. I suppose if we had continued on in that house, that would have been the tree "that watched us grow."

A few summers ago, my dear obliging family indulged me with a visit to this old town, Neosho, Missouri. I wanted them to see my house and school, the town square and the park, all the places I had been allowed to walk and roam and wander. I loved showing them the house, which, gratefully, was not run down but still in good shape. It looked newly painted and very quaint; and I lingered longingly at the edge of the yard for several minutes, trying to envision every room.

Sadly, the town was more rundown than I had remembered it, the center square, alas, sacrificed to the Walmart Strip on the edge of town. Inevitably, as soon as Walmart appears on the horizon, the entire landscape of the town begins to change. The bulk of my happy memories of growing up in Neosho have to do with being able to walk around all day, wherever I wanted to go.

In her memoir, An American Childhood, Annie Dillard describes the joyful independence of such an upbringing, the sense of pride in navigating successfully and making one's own way:

I walked. My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number. I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it. At night in bed I rehearsed the small world's scheme and set challenges: Find the store using backyards only. Imagine a route to my friend's house. I mastered chunks of town . . . Walking was my project before reading. The text I read was the town; the book I made up was a map. . . . What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding" (42, 44).

A walking childhood hardly seems possible now, not in Neosho. We kids used to walk to the Ben Franklin 5 & 10 Cent Store , but you can never walk to a Walmart! If you've read much Bill Bryson, you'll recall that he writes a lot about this kind of unsatisfying, pedestrian - unfriendly commercial development. It didn't take me long after moving to downtown Philadelphia to realize that, ironically, the best place to find the small town life in America just so happens to be in the middle of a big city. When living there, I could walk and walk to my heart's content. But that's another story, another town.

Coincidentally, not long before our trip to Southwest Missouri, I had encountered a new poem that kept swirling around in my head every time I heard myself "saying the old town's name." Although it is a poem about interiors, it captures precisely how I felt touring around Neosho, looking at the stony exterior of all those old remembered buildings and boarded up, empty storefronts:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

by Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985)

Five years after the bittersweet visit to Neosho, I tried taking the family to another small town, this time in Southeast Kansas, where I had spent many days as a girl, visiting my grandparents.

Running through my mind during this visit were the opening stanzas of a lovely Judy Collins song, introduced to me only shortly before by my friend Eve. Amazing how just the right poem or song can suddenly appear in one's life in so timely a fashion:

Secret Gardens
Words and Music by Judy Collins

My grandmother's house is still there
But it isn't the same
A plain wooden cottage
A patch of brown lawn
And a fence that hangs standing
And sighing in the Seattle rain

I drive by with strangers
And wish they could see what I see
A tangle of summer birds
Flying in sunlight
A forest of lilies
An orchard of apricot trees . . .

Great grandfather's farm is still there
But it isn't the same
The barn is torn down
And the fences are gone
The Idaho wind blows
The topsoil away every Spring

I still see the ghosts
Of the people I knew long ago
Inside the old kitchen
They bend and sigh . . .

Secret Gardens of the heart
Where the old stay young forever
I see you shining through the night
In the ice and snow of winter . . .

"Just As I Remember" from One Christmas
These nostalgic lyrics from Judy Collins describe exactly how I felt that Thanksgiving, driving down the old brick streets to see the former houses of my mom's parents & my dad's parents. If only my children could have seen what I saw: the old porch swing, the rocking chairs, the flower beds, the lilac bush, the rhubarb cobbler cooling on the window sill, my grandma on the front step waving hello / goodbye . . . but they could see only a couple of incredibly humble, patched - up, tumble - down, little old houses. Even when I tried to describe what was in my mind's eye, all they could say was, "Oh." Nor could I blame them. I would not have seen it either, had it not been for that Secret Garden in my heart!

So sad, so sweet . . . saying the old town's name.


Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, February 14th

Between now and then, be sure to read
my shorter, almost daily blog posts on
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Emmanuel, God With Us

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"~ Look for a lovely thing and you will find it ~
~ it is not far ~ it never will be far ~"
~ Sara Teasdale ~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
Hebrews 13:2
A couple of months ago, on this blog, I listed a few of the illuminating observations that appear in Emerson's essay, "Experience, including one of my favorites:

There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. . . . I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguise so ever he shall appear. I know he is in my neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. . . . Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are (from "Experience" written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1844).

Yes indeed! One of them might be King! Or the Peacemaker. Or an Angel, unawares! As poet Sara Teasdale says, "Look for a lovely thing and you will find it; it is not far -- it never will be far."

Brian Andreas (a messiah for the New Age, if ever there was one*) draws a similar conclusion in his story of the "Purple Madonna":

One time on Hollywood Boulevard I saw a young girl with a baby. It was a crisp winter morning & her hair shone dark purple in the sun. She was panhandling outside the Holiday Inn & the door clerk came out & told her to be on her way & I wondered if anyone would recognize the Christ child if they happened to meet. I remember thinking it's not like there are any published pictures & purple seemed like a good color for a Madonna so I gave her a dollar just in case. (from StoryPeople)

Madonna with us. Child with us. God with us. Angels with us.

Jeff Smith (1939 - 2004; aka The Frugal Gourmet and onetime chaplain) gives an excellent etymological breakdown of this very concept, and his enthusiasm is infectious. He provides a definition of The Messiah, The Holy One of Israel that encompasses the lord among the vagabonds and the Christ Child on the street corner:

The Holy One = "one who is so far above man and womankind, so distant and beyond our understanding, so heavenly and unapproachable, beyond the beyond, never near us."

Of Israel = "right here in town."

"That is to say, The Most Distant One is here in town with us, always. I love that!" (see The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas, 3)

In our neighborhood. Hidden among vagabonds. On the Boulevard. Here in town. With us.

Emerson, Andreas, and Smith all convey the importance of persistently acknowledging the humanity of others, at all times, just in case. "A golden impossibility" -- that's what Emerson says we are, but also an "inscrutable possibility."

Smith's book, The Frugal Gourmet Celebrates Christmas is the best holiday cookbook I know of. More than a collection of recipes, it is also a fascinating narrative of cultural history and seasonal tradition, ingeniously illustrated and creatively organized. Each chapter presents a dish for a different character from the traditional manger scene: angel hair pasta for the angels, green olive soup for the shepherds (I tried this recipe one year -- odd), lamb chops for the tax collector, Persian meatballs for the Magi, right down to milk and honey for the Baby Jesus.

In addition to the tempting recipes (both my latkes and my mincemeat are taken from here), this book beautifully achieves the author's stated mission of bringing "the Manger and the Donkey, the Angels, and the Blessed Mother with Child into your Christmas," thus helping the reader to "better understand this profound and joyous holiday" (xviii, xx).

An ordained minister as well as a chef, Smith recalls an epiphany of sorts that occurred one Christmas during his graduate school years when he and a group of fellow theology students were singing "O Come All Ye Faithful":

I realized it was the first time in my life that I understood the words: 'Word of the Father, Now in Flesh Appearing.' The fact that God had to go to such extremes to explain the meaning of our place together. God declares Himself / Herself to us by becoming a baby in our midst. The greatest sign of weakness, 'living flesh' in its most vulnerable state, a tiny baby, becomes the greatest sign of the strength of the Holy One, a strength born out of love beyond our furthest imaginings, a strength that, I suppose, still looks to many of us like weakness. (xvi - xvii)

After reading Smith's unforgettable explanation, the song took on a whole new meaning for me. Every time I hear it now, I listen a bit more closely than I ever did before:

Light from Light eternal . . .

we too will thither, bend our joyful footsteps . . .

who would not love thee, loving us so dearly . . .

I love that!

*Brian Andreas: "We're already in the new age, she said. What does that mean? I said. It means we can stop waiting & start living, she said but after she left, I still waited a little while more just to be safe."

FOR MORE INSPIRING HOLIDAY COOKBOOKS
READ THE LATEST POST ON MY BOOK BLOG:
"FEASTS AND SEASONS"
KITTI'S BOOK LIST
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

On this blog, look for my next Fortnightly
post on Thursday, January 28th

Between now and then, be sure to read
my shorter, almost daily blog posts on
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

JANUARY ROOFTOP