Grits and Bacon

The simple rhythms are the best ones for Lent.

Simple meals can be the most satisfying.

Saturday morning gave me the chance to bring three slices of bacon to old-fashioned crispness. The balance of grits and bacon and coffee did its customary job.


The lessons from years of preparing meals provide some of the surest ways we return to ourselves.

Bread

I know you can write all sorts of things about bread. I will try not to do that self-congratulatory thing that food writers sometimes do when bread is their topic.

I want to talk briefly about the experience of walking to my car with a large brown paper bag, the kind with twisted handles. Nothing is in the bag but a loaf of bread -- no wrapper, no twist tie.

I bought a larger loaf of sour dough bread than I technically needed. It was what the bakery had labeled a "grande round," and it was the last such loaf they had at that point early Saturday afternoon.

I bought the grande round because it looked like something I would enjoy holding in my two hands when I took it out of the bag at home. It might look like an extravagance -- but in the way that a simple bundle of supermarket flowers can look just a bit like an extravagance.


I sliced into the loaf this morning for beakfast. I had wanted toast, and the long bread knife cut easily through the crust. The side of bread that my knife exposed was a pleasure to see.

It had been a good extravagance to buy for this long weekend.

Leaving Your Mark

Responding recently to an invitation to dinner, my oldest brother proposed spending part of the evening at my apartment discussing a trip that he might make to Paris.

What my brother and my sister-in-law wanted to do was simply talk with someone who had already been to Paris more than once or twice. They wanted to hear what someone a little more familiar with Paris than they were might suggest.

What kind of memories do I have? What might I suggest?

Buildings in Paris can be centuries old. Unheated buildings that are centuries old settle each in their own way and each at their own pace. At some point custodians of those structures must have begun to shrug their Gallic shoulders. Where there might originally have been tight corners joining wall to wall, cracks developed. Up and down a wall, fissures snaked.

During the eighteenth century, Europe developed a taste for picturesque ruins. If you had that "Romantic" turn of mind, you might have pressed your face up to one of those cracks in a Paris wall and convinced yourself you were breathing air trapped since the Middle Ages. You could have imagined slipping something through that opening -- a message of some sort maybe -- and known that it would remain undisturbed behind that wall for centuries to come.

You had left your mark in a way.

One Paris visit I took a liking to the idea of leaving my mark in just that way. I packed in my bags a printed reply card left over from a celebration at home. When I came to a sight in Paris that moved me in some special way, I determined, I would look for a way to leave that card. I was intent on not making work for anyone else by my gesture; under no circumstances would I deface or litter.

Stopping by myself one afternoon in a neighborhood church in the Latin Quarter, I sat in a side chapel for several minutes of reflection. There was a statue of the nineteenth-century French saint Thérèse of Lisieux next to an altar that was in some disrepair. An unevenness in the floor had developed over the centuries, and the altar leaned forward, away from the niche in the wall into which it had been built. Into the opening created by that leaning, I slid the small card I had brought from home.

I am part of that church in Paris now. As long as that church stands, I imagine, I will be there.

From River Road to Richardsonion Romanesque

I like grits. I really like them.

This Saturday morning I needed to replenish my supply of Quaker Grits. On my grocery run I bought a fresh container of the kind of enriched white hominy that can take an average of twenty minutes to prepare on stove top on a winter morning.

I would feel a little like Geraldine Page if I took the full twenty minutes, but I generally use a microwave. And then it is only eight minutes before a pat of butter blends its yellow with stir after stir of smooth, creamy grits, steaming in a white bowl.

What other New Englander had treated himself to that kind of breakfast Saturday morning?

Any of my fellow concertgoers Saturday evening?

I had not ever before been in the church where the choral concert took place Saturday evening. Friends who were members of the chorus were performing here for the first time. Not a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment, and I sat in a setting so unexpected and beautiful that I had to take pictures.

At intermission I stood with my usual crowd and gaped with them. I learned from one of them, a student of architecture, that the church was not -- as I had presumed -- the work of the architect of Boston's Trinity Church, Henry Hobson Richardson. The style was definitely Richardsonian Romanesque, but this 1888 structure had been designed by another architect -- John Lyman Faxon.

Well, what did I really know about Henry Hobson Richardson anyway, I asked myself this Sunday morning.

Not that he was a native of Louisiana, I assure you. But that's what I learned this morning, again and again, all the online resources corroborating the fact that he had been born and raised on a plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana.

I had travelled along the River Road through Vacherie time and again in my youth. My own father's mother had grown up in another of the plantation homes there. We had passed the home of Henry Hobson Richardson in our green Chevrolet, most likely, without knowing it.

Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect of Boston's Trinity Church, a man who ate grits for breakfast on winter mornings growing up?

Most likely.

Neo-Victorian Dust Jackets

I think I know what the story would sound like that could use this solemn photograph for its dust jacket.

Something like French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles comes to mind. Or something like Possession (1990) by A.S. Byatt.

It’s a Victorian – or Neo-Victorian – image for me. If the book suited to this image had a distinct Victorian forebear, it would by something written by Thomas Hardy rather than anything by Charles Dickens or George Eliot.

If the novel were good enough, it might be hard for it to escape an eventual screen version. And that would be the disappointment – to have an easy way for the story to go away, reduced in memory to movie stills, an IMDb listing, a line in filmographies. The story would become so much data, fodder for Wikipedia articles, a target for comparisons, something you found in Google searches.

The image is about winter and an earth that absorbs the universal return to something indistinguishable. The image is about a point where no amount of care can preserve or make compelling. The image is about being forgotten.

A latter-day Matthew Arnold might agree to have his literary portrait snapped as he holds the book with this cover, his finger apparently keeping his place in a read he is determined to resume as soon as the photographer's session is over.

Who would not be aware of another mood when a book with this sunny wall on its cover happened to hand? Which of us latter-day Matthew Arnolds would not pause before just such a winter wall and salute the design below the window sill? What photographer of latter-day Matthew Arnolds would not drag his equipment outside to capture it?

If a book could be written worthy of that moment, its winter readers would be on their way to being cheered, heartened, infected with a chance for mirth.

The Measure of Our Days

How do you take the measure of a week? What gives a week its flavor?

Do you measure it by a book you finished reading?

Do you measure it by a meal you ate at a friend’s table?

Do you measure it by whether you wrote something of which you are proud?

Do you measure it by a film you saw?

Do you measure it by the range of temperatures through which the sun shone through the dining room windows?


Do you measure it by the person who stopped by your office and asked for help?

Do you measure it by the meals you prepared in your kitchen that week?

Do you measure it by the number of nights you managed to sleep straight through?

Do you measure it by the plans you made to celebrate a family birthday?

Do you measure it by music you heard?

Do you measure it by photographs you took?

Do you measure it by the grocery run?

Do you measure it by the freshly laundered flannel sheets with which you made your bed?


Do you measure it by whether the reflection at Sunday services moved you to tears?

Do you measure it by an hour of therapy?

Do you measure it by a museum visit?

Do you measure it by the bills you paid?

Do you measure it by the dishes you washed and the rooms you cleaned?

Do you measure it by the ideas that came to you?

Do you measure it by love?

A Voice That Is Not on My Side

There is a particular voice I sometimes hear inside that is not a reliable one or a helpful one.

I don’t always know to say it like that.

It is a voice that purports to explain things in my life about which I am fearful or conflicted. However, it is not a charitable voice; it explains by accusing; it explains by blaming me. It claims to represent the consensus of key individuals, individuals whom other people listen to and believe. When I don’t stop myself – and often I can’t – I mistake the script this voice reads; I mistake it for an objective and insightful analysis.

Its goal is not clarity, however.

In the language of classic sixteenth-century spiritual directors, this is a voice that requires discernment to recognize its true nature. This is not a voice whose goal is a peaceful awareness that can move things forward.

This voice is not on my side. I may initially assume it is, but it is not on my side.

Sometimes the patience and good humor I need, though, manage to make it through.

Even on a rainy January morning.

Christmas Puppets

"Hello, Paul! Hello, Paul!"

My voice goes very high as I move a fat, fluffy lamb ornament across the arm of a chair toward a one-and-a-half-year-old on Christmas Day. Hanging on a low branch of his grandparents' Christmas tree, the lamb had been an easy target for Paul's finger. Rescued from the floor, the ornament became an impromptu puppet and I its puppeteer.

When Paul's mother was growing up, she and her sister and her brother used to take turns moving three creche figures of the Magi across the living room. Day by day, the three kings got closer and closer to where the doll-like figures of Mary and Joseph flanked an infant Jesus. It was a custom I did not recall from my own childhood Christmases, but I loved the idea of animating the figures -- making them puppets, in effect.

A little boy like me had been permitted to like puppets, slipping my hand into the cloth garments, nodding a puppet head with a sudden crook of my finger, making my voice sound like Tinker Bell or Muggs. Those were my favorite puppets, and I could make them hop and fly and appear to sleep and then wake up. I could do with the puppets what I saw girls my age and older do with their dolls.


On a corner of the mantlepiece in my apartment are three figures that belong to a creche set that I had bought when I was in grammar school. Each figure shows an old ink imprint of twenty-nine cents on the underside of its base -- these three kings had been a dollar's investment.

I think I have grown up to resemble one of them.

January Retreat

The picturesque angels of Christmas are ready to leave.

Real angels only appear in real lives. In other words, they appear in lives that are not ready for angels or expecting the need of them. They appear in messy lives. They appear in lives that are about to change. They appear in lives that seem unable to change.

Do they ever appear in the Travel section of The New York Times?

Last night I was ready to say yes. The Sunday edition lay open on the kitchen table before me. At first I could not believe my eyes: "A Quick Shot of Peace, on a Budget" by Susan Gregory Thomas featured photographs of a retreat house that I have visited.

The real angel appeared in the columns of print threading the pictures. A real life appeared in those columns of narrative. A real voice named ways in which the author's life had hurt and bewildered and frightened her.

If her life could use an angel, I wondered, certainly mine could as well? My life with all its striving for the appearance of sage serenity, of emotional balance and elegant expression? Have you read this blog before? Have you ever wondered about the stories that keep safely out of the postings?


It is a customary month for me to wonder about angels. January four years ago I was planning a retreat, a weekend away at a monastery north of Boston.

January forty years ago I was getting ready for another kind of retreat, thirty days of silence and reflection in consideration of life as a priest.


I went back this morning to a retreat house about which I have written before. In a cemetery on the grounds, I searched out the grave of the spiritual director who had listened to me over the years. I stood under the grey sky and asked him again what a heart was for, what this heart was for, and whose approval it could be hoping for.

An angel like him sometimes made it possible to believe that I was perfectly all right.

New Year's Day Way Down Yonder in New Orleans

For me, part of this sunny New England New Year's Day involves making a pot of blackeyed peas.

Part of this day also involves playing a 78 rpm picture record, one of my favorite Christmas presents.

For the moment, I know more about blackeyed peas than I do about Vogue Picture Records, but 2012 is the year that I get to taste both.



Happy New Year!