Maple Walnut Summer

I found it – my mother’s occasional personal splurge when it came to ice cream. Chocolate might do it for the rest of us, vanilla, strawberry, three flavors – but the ice cream treat my mother occasionally required was black walnut. Sometimes it gets called maple walnut, and I looked for some yesterday in my neighborhood frozen food cases. Eureka!

Nothing much changed for my mother at the June end of each school year. She still had to do the daily load of laundry, the house cleaning, the preparation of my father’s dinner and ours. Summer lunches for us just added to the work she was accustomed to the rest of the year. No ironing of school uniforms, though! The sacrifice she and my father made for private education certainly made for a busy life.

Without a driver’s license my mother was limited for much of her life to our family outings for her distraction. Every other Sunday was a day-long trip to our four grandparents. Secret: there was a young doctor in New Orleans who paid her some attentions when she had just graduated from high school. Her choice of my father, though, the brother of a classmate, was one she made and, but for her children and sisters, no one would have heard her say a word against life with him.

Might her life have been different with that doctor or a lawyer or a college professor? She might have thought so. What about a summer house? A dream come true. The chance at a job that would take her regularly out of her house? Not in the stars for her.

For the first time in fifty years I had maple walnut ice cream last night. I like to think that pleased her.

Father's Day Weekend

At pater infelix, non iam pater, “Icare,” dixit,
“Icare,” dixit, “ubi es? qua te regione requiram?”
“Icare,” dicebat...

For someone translating a poem from a language other than his own, there is a joy in repetition.

“Icare,” dixit...

“Icare,” dixit...
“Icare,” dicebat...

“Icarus!” he called...
“Icarus!” he called...
“Icarus!” he kept calling...

Destined to sit in a Dartmouth College classroom for a Classical Association of New England summer institute, I had work to do one June weekend six years ago. Kindly invited to visit friends at their home on Martha’s Vineyard, I needed to spend some time preparing for an upcoming mini-course on the Latin poetry of Ovid scheduled to be taught by a Dartmouth professor.

The Friday afternoon ferry ride to Oak Bluffs, then, found me – incongruously – with a Latin text in hand.

It was an odd moment, feeling the ferry move out of Falmouth harbor and opening the book on my lap to the ancient story of Daedalus and Icarus.

For someone who had last pored over these Latin lines as a high school senior, there was a joy in being able to recall easily how some of the words fell in place, how my Latin teacher had read through them for us in a pre-lection, even how my classmates and I had pieced together the words and phrases in awkward English renderings for homework.

I could have worked on other passages from Ovid’s collection of mythological tales called the Metamorphoses. I had actually made a start on the story of Apollo and Daphne, but the waves, the wind, the spray around me as I sat on the upper deck of the ferry suggested I search out some sea-borne plot.

What better than those scenes of a father fitting handcrafted wings onto the shoulders of his son Icarus? What more apt passage than the ultimately vain warnings by Daedalus that his son not fly too low over the waves of the sea or too high near the sun?

The Sunday two days later would be Father’s Day. What is a father’s job more truly than to fit his son with the hope of finding a life away from the labyrinthine confinements of a childhood home?

My reading of the Metamorphoses progressed over Father’s Day weekend that June six years ago, and I too was changing. Returning to a text that I had met long ago, I was beginning to recognize a truth about fathers and sons, about home and risk that I may have been too young to claim before then.

I Bought the Smallest Slice I Could

I did it. As small a slice as I could ask the gentleman behind the cheese case to cut.

I watched him use the cheese wire and halve the smallest wedge of Cob Hill Ascutney Mountain on display.

My anniversary gesture.

Eight dollars.

For the past four years I have hardly made a trip to Whole Foods without spotting the Cob Hill cheese in the glass case. Ever waiting for the sale sign that would bring it within my price range, I have only purchased this cheese two or three times before. It is never a sale item.

Whole Foods cheeses are a two-income treat to which I rarely treat myself.

It is early June, however. Few vacation moments match the Saturday morning four years ago when I raised my eyes from the tombstones of a roadside churchyard in Cornish, New Hampshire. In clear view across the Connecticut River was Mount Ascutney in neighboring Vermont.

There are times when you ask the universe for something with all your heart. That morning in June, I could not stop myself from asking for what I wanted – a life in which the beauty I saw in that vista could fill my heart. The future of your heart matters when you have undone the way your life looks the year before.

All this in a raw cow’s milk cheese from Vermont? Yep.

Summer Air, Open Windows

At age 19 I left a home in New Orleans in which I had lived only one year. It was my family’s first year in a house with central air conditioning, a first year of hearing a fan begin whirring at unpredictable hours of the day and night, signaling the arrival of magically cool air. My mother in particular was happy to have cotton blankets to draw up to her chin on nights in July when the fan and cold air seemed never to stop.

My father, practical as ever, installed two large window units in strategic places in the new house. A housing inspector for the federal government, he knew that central air conditioning could suddenly give out. If my mother had to, she could turn on the window unit in her bedroom and live in there for a day or two until the central air was repaired.

Come what may, she would not become like her mother, living with a handkerchief always in her hand to mop the perspiration around her forehead and neck as she sat quietly in a rocker next to open windows in rural Louisiana.

And that was precisely the life that I was choosing when I chose seminary. It was an older Louisiana toward which I was heading. It was not so much that air conditioners were unreasonably expensive at the time. The bedrooms for guests to the seminary each had a window unit that rumbled out cold air for a visitor’s comfort. All of the seminary staff had the same window units in their own living quarters.

Tradition simply suggested that the large exhaust fans that for years had moved air through the high-ceilinged hallways off which the seminarians’ rooms opened might suit us as we started this new life. Why say we could not live in the 1970s as generations of priests entering before us had lived?

Public areas like the chapel and the library and the community room and the dining room did benefit from central air conditioning. The main adapting before us seminarians came at night when we retired to our rooms. Adapting to those nights and waking in the morning to savor any coolness that lingered around open windows is a vivid memory.

Sitting in a rocker next to the window and cradling a morning prayer book in our laps, we unwittingly recalled our grandmothers.

That memory makes the start of New England summer this particular weekend not just something to endure. It makes my open windows an opening onto a history I get to keep remembering.

 

Picture That

As I wandered the aisles of vendors at the Brimfield Antique Fair last Saturday, I was spending hours among items that predate electronic communications. The world in which a lady’s straw hat and a tilting easel table mirror and wooden printer’s type trays were first created was a world in which it had taken time and stationery and postage to send a message. There had had to be a physical place for a communication, a place as real as the physical space in which the item that was the subject of the communication took up room.

One vendor’s stall at the fair was devoted exclusively to vintage postcards. Each card had originally taken up space somewhere in a recipient’s home or among her effects and perhaps later at an estate sale. The gentleman who was displaying the cards at the Brimfield Antique Fair had arranged them in alphabetical order by continent and country and state and town. Used or unused, each of the cards had been slipped into a cellophane sleeve to preserve it from further wear and tear.

The inspiration was a sudden one. I would attempt to find a postcard of Portsmouth, Virginia, and send it to a friend who lived in that city. The friendship had arisen somewhat around his reading of Writing Cabin. I determined that I would send a piece of old-fashioned mail to someone whose familiarity with the things I regularly write about was the electronic experience that any blog offers.

I was crossing lines, I realized. I would need permission to do this. In our next exchange of emails, I attached a digital image of the postcard of High Street in Portsmouth, Virginia. I typed out a message on the screen of my laptop, explaining to him that I wanted him to have the postcard. I hit “Send.” From what he typed in his reply, my reader seemed delighted at the prospect of receiving the vintage image.

And then the days passed.

Early Monday morning on my way to work I had driven to the nearest post office and slipped an envelope into a mailbox. It was Thursday afternoon when my friend in Portsmouth, Virginia, got home from work and went to check the mailbox by his front door. The Boston postmark told him who had sent one piece of that day’s mail.

Brimfield Antique Fair had arrived at his door. Something had traveled from those aisles of vendors to a home with an address in the Virginia Tidewater. I received an image on my iPhone that evening, attached to an email sent to my Yahoo account. There it was – the postcard I had sent taking up space in another man’s home.

Picture that!

And on a rainy Massachusetts Saturday I got to write about it all.

Strawberries to Share

He stuck the spoon in the bowl. It remained standing as he carried in the dessert on the butler’s tray. Fresh from the backyard, the strawberries were the treat he gave himself for saying what he had wanted to say and hearing no demur. He could share those strawberries now.

Thanks to projectbuddy at 1 Graphic 50 Words for the inspiration to experiment with this genre.

German Theology and May-blue Sky

If you are an art history enthusiast, you know this stained glass window from the cathedral in Chartres. You recognize Notre-Dame de la Belle Verriere. You recognize the Blue Virgin Window.

You may know that that this is one of the oldest windows in the cathedral, having survived a devastating fire in the twelfth century. You do not need to be Catholic or Christian to acknowledge that you are dealing here with what has become a cultural commonplace. There is no end of scholarly writing about this window, and even an untrained viewer will find things to say about it.

Note now the use made of Notre-Dame de la Belle Verriere in a dust jacket. Its distinctive colors reduced to monochrome, the image was chosen for a book of scholarly reflections on Mary by German theologian Karl Rahner. From the time this English translation appeared in 1963, it became a staple in seminary and divinity school and convent and retreat house libraries.

This is the third time I am reading through what started as conferences delivered in the University Church in Innsbruck. Drawn originally by the compactness of the volume, I have only twice before taken on the task of making my way through all eight theological meditations from beginning to end. I am not always sure I can explain the insights to which Rahner's text leads me. I will only say that while I am reading, I sometimes glimpse the reality of a God whose sovereign determination to love this world reveals the stinginess of my thoughts about Him.

German theology and a May-blue sky. Some writers can make those two sound companionable. Whether or not I have, they are linked for me this year.

New Venues

Just as spring weather was deepening these past three weeks, I came across a restaurant business card that I had picked up last summer. A travelling friend and I had gotten up from a meal in a restaurant close to our hotel in Paris; satisfied and full, I had picked up the card on our way out. The card must have stayed on the desk in the hotel room amid accumulating receipts and Metro tickets and made it into my carry-on bag.

The business card might as well have had “Mission Accomplished” printed on it. I think I picked it up because I wanted a reminder of a successful search months earlier for affordable Paris restaurants that served up creative and authentic cuisine. The weather may have been just like this during last spring when I called the restaurant to make the reservation.

A business card coupled with the spring sun triggers memories that I barely thought could be this vivid. The memories are of a meal that I had wanted to be special. The memories are of a trip that I had wanted characterized by new venues, exploration, risk taking.

If I am not planning another such trip right now, I feel the spring sun doing its customary work nonetheless. I am ready to go places I have never been before. I am eager to know more about the mission on which I am now launched.

Friday Tired

It had been a long work day, with the last three hours particularly dense. Leaving the building close to six o’clock, I walked to my car through a parking lot that had largely emptied out. It was quiet and still, no one apparently out there for me to greet or wish a good weekend. I had the rare experience of being able to flag visibly, slow my pace, stop smiling.

Disabling the alarm from a distance, I disabled more and more of the professional me the closer I came to the car door.

Nothing was wrong. I was just tired.

It was still a sunny spring afternoon, later, though, and a little cooler than I had expected.

By the time my short drive home was over, I had mentally cancelled a tentative plan to catch 7:30 theatre. I had not yet bought a ticket nor had I committed to meet anyone there. It had been an intriguing Friday evening prospect at one point but no longer.

Dinner proved an easy this and that, a relaxing routine in the kitchen, full of cold ingredients that required no patience or waiting. It was healthy fare, celery and carrot sliced and chopped to add to a larger salad. It took no energy to be grateful for the clean colors and smells.

Nothing else to say about the evening except that an online jazz station stayed on through it and living room lamps stayed off. My parents’ china cabinet, illuminated by low-watt bulbs, provided all the light I needed for the next few hours of sitting.

I did look around at one point and ask myself what else was needed. I could not think of anything.

After Lockdown

It was the view whenever I settled with my library copy of The Little Stranger during last Friday's lockdown. The mood that Sarah Waters creates around a decaying country house in 1940s England matched the uncertainty of the Boston day that had to be spent inside. I kept the volume of the television in the next room as low as I could and moved through long chapter after long chapter. The quiet was not unwelcome. The leisure, unexpected though it was and mandated by a host of authorities, was something I could handle. Living alone, I profited on Friday from being someone used to his own company. No one was going to be seated in that armchair across from my leather couch. At least not for another twenty-four hours. And then...welcome guest! Hospitality did its healing work. Air moved again in helpful ways.