Entertaining 101: The Children's Playdate and Luncheon

Here's the whole procedure for a Pleasant Children's Playdate, With Lunch Included. For maximum success, it is important that you follow each step meticulously.

1. Go to noon Mass, having forgotten to feed anyone a snack by 11.

2. Follow noon Mass with Latin class.

3. Invite your friend, her six kids, and a couple of extras over to your house to kill time until Holy Hour at 6, which is going to be canceled because Father's mother's plane from Peoria is delayed, but you don't know that yet.

4. Realize, belatedly, that you have tons of staples like flour and flaxseed, but no actual, prepared food.

5. Hope kids are all too busy trying to take the chain-link fence in one leap to notice that their flesh is starting to cannibalize itself. You and your friend can drink like six gallons of hot milky tea to keep from fainting.

6. No such luck. You don't faint, but kids aren't stupid.

7. Eggs. You have eggs. Children can boil eggs.

8. Et voila. Lunch at 4:45, and nobody says, "I don't eat that."

(I poached this from my own Facebook profile, by the way. Can't be bothered to write TWO somethings . . . ).

Note to Self

No more renting movies from the $1-movie kiosk at the Bi-Lo. The last dollar movie we rented was Kit Kittredge: American Girl, and by the time we took it back we'd paid $14.95 for it. Not a thrifty experience. No no no no no.

Someday, when I work up the nerve, we'll talk about me and libraries.

P.S. Aelred says it was more like $16.97 that we paid for that movie. And we only watched it the one time. The waste!

Hello, My Name Is . . .

Yeah, well. And I don't much like Facebook, though it's awfully ensnaring if you've got a free moment, and someone's happened to break your weeks-long run of ignoring the fact that you've got a Facebook page by sending you something like, oh, I don't know, this, for example:

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

Really? Write about myself? Oh, but I couldn't. Really. I'm way too modest. You don't want to hear about little old me. Well, maybe you do. Of course you do. And what kind of person would I be if I hurt your feelings? But how will I ever, ever, ever come up with 25 random things to say about myself?

Turns out, amazingly, that I can think of random things to say about myself at the rate of approximately one per minute. And because you're dying to know -- in fact, every time you stand in the grocery-store checkout line, and you look at the covers of the magazines, you think, "But where is Mrs. T? What 25 compelling stories of her life are going untold?" -- here they are:

1. I've lived in my current house since August, and been down in the basement exactly once.

2. I don't know what the state bird of North Carolina is, but I do know the state dog.

3. I've never been in my attic.

4. I love having a teenager in my house, but I miss having a baby.

5. I'm planning to till up my driveway and become a smalltown urban farmer.

6. I met my husband in church.

7. I spend way too much time online.

8. I'm wearing my daughter's shoes.

9. I sang a solo at Mass on Christmas Eve.

10. I like Mason's English Ironstone china -- a lot.

11. I'm a grad-school dropout.

12. I'm supposed to be finishing an article on teaching sonnet-writing for a homeschooling magazine.

13. I procrastinate -- a lot.

14. I'm still in touch with one student from my brief high-school-teaching career 20 years ago.

15. I'm still in touch with my high-school English teacher.

16. I like cooking, but hate folding laundry.

17. I used to hate the very idea of going to Confession, but I don't any more.

18. I used to hate the very idea of being pro-life, but I don't any more.

19. I have helped to build a school gym in Jamaica and a pioneer sauna in the NC mountains.

20. I once gave -- well, it wasn't the coat off my back, but it was my favorite sweater -- to a woman in a parking lot who was asking for money for a bus to Little Rock, and who looked really cold. I figured it was what Jesus would have done.

21. I used to suffer from debilitating panic and anxiety attacks, but since I started making a regular confession, they've pretty much stopped.

22. I have had two cavities in my entire life.

23. I spent two summers in college teaching horseback riding.

24. My favorite item of clothing is a dark-teal silk-velour winter scarf.

25. I once wrote 37 sonnets -- one a day every day, excluding Sundays -- as a Lenten discipline, and every year I wish I could think of another discipline that perfect, but I haven't yet.


All right, are you happy now? Of course you are.

A Day of Homeschooling

I've been neglecting my homeschooling blog, as anyone who visits will see: the latest post is entitled "Advent 1." Still, whether I'm writing about it or not, the show has to go on, though it does so typically in a kind of lollygagging fashion, like a dog being walked on one of those expandable leashes, stopping to smell around under all the bushes and . . . well, anyway. Like that.

Realizing that readers here might not necessarily follow our trail to another blog -- not that you couldn't, just that you might not think yourself all that interested -- I thought that since it's been a while anyway, I'd write a bit here about our homeschooling day.

Now, we are not masters of organization, or scope-and-sequence, or even creativity necessarily, on a daily basis. Mostly we live together, balancing some necessary formal "sitdown" work with a lot of whatever we'd just do in the course of a given day, but from which we can learn things if we're paying attention. And we talk. A lot. Some of us more than others. Some of us simultaneously. I consider that we do continual, free-form narration.

So, our day today:

1. Around 10 a.m. we sat down at the kitchen table -- Amicus, Helier, Crispina and I, Epiphany having gone off to campus for Latin class and a day of schoolwork in the library -- and we said Terce. In the form we use, there's some chant to sing, so we sang that.

2. I read Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance aloud to everyone. Halliburton is a lively narrator, and his travels, in 1925, make for entertaining and frequently funny reading. This is really Amicus's book, to cover geography, but Helier and Crispina like it, too. While I read, Helier played with Star Wars figures, and Crispina colored in a coloring book. Amicus listened and did a math lesson, some Latin grammar, and a sentence-diagramming exercise. I took one sentence from our chapter as an impromptu math word problem for Helier and Crispina: Halliburton remarks that the bos'n of the ship on which he is working his passage to India (hm, you know, that would make a good title for something . . . ) has been at sea for forty-two years and is fifty-two years old. So I asked them how old the bos'n had been when he first went to sea, and we worked it out together.

3. Last night Helier had dragged out our UsborneIntroduction to the Second World War and wanted to read it. We read a couple of pages last night -- as with most Usborne books, a double-page spread pretty much counts as a complete "lesson" on a particular theme -- and this morning they wanted to read more, so we read about the state of various world democracies in the years between the wars, and about the rise of Nazi Germany.

4. Helier and Crispina being still much taken with Richard Halliburton, I made them up a handwriting exercise based on the chapter we had just read. On triple-lined elementary-school writing paper I wrote some words from the chapter we'd just read -- oil, gas, tattoo, and so forth; it really was a very lively seafaring kind of chapter -- and they first traced over my words, then copied them on the blank lines I'd left below each line I'd written on. While they wrote, I read the next chapter of our current Arthur Ransome book, Swallowdale, aloud.

5. We finished reading and writing at lunchtime, so we said the Angelus and ate soup and bread for lunch. After lunch everyone was free to read and play. I set to work unpacking more of the boxes of books which still fill our back porch, and Amicus dug out some old friends, including a bunch of old issues of National Review, and went off to read them. We all did a bit of housecleaning. Crispina colored. Amicus and Helier dressed up in old Cub Scout and Webelos uniforms, which they said were their military uniforms for their imaginary country, Berzerkistan. Crispina and I made more bread and talked about yeast. Helier and Crispina did a good bit of very loud fighting over some old Cub Scout patches which the unpacking of boxes brought to light, but after some contemplative time in their rooms got back together to string beads -- they are making gifts for a friend who's coming to visit tomorrow.

Right now Helier's reading a Superman comic, Amicus has just finished washing some dishes, Crispina's playing quietly here in the room with me, and dinner is cooking.

All our days don't go so straightforwardly, but today was typical of an ordinary pretty-good day. So for those of you who wonder what we do all day long, now you know.

Using Up the Pancakes, Episode III

As I was walking the dog today under leaden skies, I contemplated many things which had nothing to do with dog-walking or leaden skies -- pancakes, for instance, and the perennial question of what to do with all the leftovers. I was thinking, actually, that I ought to write a cookbook devoted to leftover pancakes and the various ways they can be pressed into service (besides just being reheated and eaten, which never happens in this house, because reheated pancakes aren't what people here want when they want pancakes).

I've already posted here and here about recycling them as dessert. Yesterday, as usual, we had pancakes for breakfast after Mass, and as usual Aelred made enough for twice our number to eat until they burst, and as usual by dinnertime people were itching for something sweet, and so I did the following, making use of about seven pancakes, one large apple, some leftover homemade pancake syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, two eggs beaten into about a cup and a half of milk, and roughly a half-cup or so of homemade granola:

First I buttered my cast-iron skillet. You could use a larger or smaller baking dish, depending on how many leftover pancakes you have, and how many people want dessert. I laid four pancakes (these were nice whole-wheat ones made with King Arthur flour, but any kind will do), slightly overlapping, in the bottom of the skillet. Then I diced the apple, spread the pieces over the pancakes, and sprinkled them liberally with brown sugar and cinnamon. I poured on some pancake syrup and let it soak into the apples and the pancakes on the bottom, and while all that was soaking, I tore up my remaining pancakes into pieces and layered them over the top, and sprinkled on more brown sugar and cinnamon. Over all this I poured more pancake syrup and let everything sort of dissolve in it. Last I poured on the beaten-egg-milk mixture and while everything was dissolving even further, I sprinkled on a liberal topping of granola. I baked the whole thing for, I don't know, half an hour? Forty-five minutes? I've got to learn to attend to the passing of time, but anyway, I baked it until it smelled good and looked done.

The result was a kind of apple-dumpling-bread-pudding thing with a crispy granola crust, and it was delicious. Everyone said so, even the skeptics who greeted the vision of me with a cast-iron skillet in one hand and a platter of cold pancakes in the other with moans of "Not again." I suppose I do have this unfortunate tendency to obsess over a particular sort of recipe for weeks on end, and to those outside the immediate circle of my obsession (ie those who are not me), the pickings can grow tiresomely monotonous. But, well . . . nobody ever seems to tire of those Sunday pancakes, so I imagine we'll be eating them in various recycled guises for a long time to come.

Hymns for the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul

At MusicaSacra

and at Sing Lustily and With Good Courage

and this one via Nunblog.

A Saturday Miscellany

Frederica Matthewes-Green on "The Judgement of the Next Generation" (via Mere Comments)

More on CPSIA at Overlawyered

The Frugal Hacks Consider a February Challenge

Weekly Current-Events Roundup at Radio Derb Learn all about PETA and "Sea Kittens" from John Derbyshire.

Want to know how to fly a college straight into the ground? There's more to this story, as it happens, than a poor economy. During the lean years which intervened between the completion of his Ph.d and fulltime academic employment, Aelred taught in this college as an adjunct. In the course of his experience there, he witnessed firsthand precisely the transformation described by jamesz87 in the comments accompanying the article, including the abrupt dismissal of a number of talented and committed faculty whose hard work in the service of something like Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University went unthanked, to put it mildly.

How to ruin a modest little Christian liberal-arts college:

*decide that education is all about equal access

*think of your students, particularly your "urban" students, as "clients"

*base hiring decisions on the assumption that "urban" students need to learn more about "urban" concerns and experience, and less about anything else

*fire faculty and staff who disagree with you

*find yourself asking college secretaries to teach business classes on the side, because you can't find anyone else to do it

* . . . uh . . . .

The first class Aelred taught at this college included our own dear Monica the Man, as well as a number of other bright, thoughtful, serious young people. After several years, however, of dealing with increasingly illiterate students, rampant plagiarism (because if you can't write, you can still cut-and-paste from the internet), and belligerent encounters with the outraged recipients of D grades awarded in a spirit of charity (the husband of one student whom Aelred had flunked for plagiarism insisted on meeting with Aelred himself, the better to tell him, "I think you are not a Christian."), Aelred arrived in exhaustion at the conclusion that even though we weren't in much of a position to turn down income opportunities, he could no longer in good conscience teach at this institution. He wrote the administration to inform them of this decision and to articulate the reasons why he could no longer trespass upon their goodness by seeking employment under their roof. He was right, but I guess they didn't read very carefully. Here's the college's mission statement, in case you're interested.

And finally, because one wants to end on a cheerful note, don't you know:
That Brilliant King Arthur Flour Whole-Wheat Bread Recipe Epiphany's making some even as I type.

Friday Poetry: George Herbert

Man

My God, I heard this day
That none doth build a stately habitation,
But he that means to dwell therein.
What house more stately hath there been,
Or can be, than is man? to whose creation
All things are in decay.

For man is every thing
And more; he is a tree, yet bears more fruit;
A beast, yet is or should be more;
Reason and speech we only bring.
Parrots may thank us, if they are not mute:
They go upon the score.

Man is all symmetry,
Full of proportions, one limb to another,
And all to the world besides;
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amity,
And both with moons and tides.

Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey.
His eyes dismount the highest star:
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh; because that they
Find their acquaintance there.

For as the winds do blow,
The earth doth rest; heav'n move, and fountains flow;
Nothing we see but means our good,
As our delight, or as our treasure.
The whole is either our cupboard of food,
Or cabinet of pleasure.

The stars have us to bed;
Night draws the curtain which the sun withdraws,
Music and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kind
In their descent and being; to our mind
In their ascent and cause.

Each thing is full of duty.
Waters united are our navigation.
Distinguished, our habitation;
Below, our drink; above, our meat;
Both are our cleanliness. Hath one such beauty?
Then how are all things neat!

More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of; in every path,
He treads down that which doth befriend him,
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
O mighty love! Man is one world and hath
Another to attend him.

Since then, my God, thou hast
So brave a palace built: O, dwell in it,
That it may dwell with thee at last!
Till then, afford us so much wit,
That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,
And both, thy servants be.


(Alas I can't get Blogger to let me reproduce Herbert's indentations, so you lose the rhythms of text and white space which form the visual music of his poetry. Still, if you read attentively, you'll hear his metrical shifts and the interplay of his rhymes, and so not lose it all.)

Think Think Think About It

If there's one thing we as a blog want to deal with, it's the issues.

On The Agenda

Today, of course, is the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, and Aelred and Epiphany have been Marching for Life in Washington, DC, with several hundred thousand of their closest friends. (link via Strange Herring)

This morning, while waiting for the children to make their beds, put on their clothes, and come decorously downstairs for prayers and schoolwork, I took some time to read the new President's Agenda. One should do this, I think, as a matter of courtesy as well as of self-education, regardless of one's own political leanings; I say this because I know otherwise rational and enlightened people who turn off the radio whenever a politician or commentator with whom they disagree begins to speak.

I haven't made my way through the whole thing yet. Naturally -- and I mean really naturally, because this is how human nature works -- I turned to the sections which concern me most, those on women and family.

Now, there are some items on the family agenda to be guardedly happy about. I know, I know, I know what there is to say about socialized medicine; still, the idea of "home visits by trained nurses to low-income expectant mothers" seems a not-unreasonable step, given certain realities, towards helping high-risk mothers carry their babies to term, thus lowering the infant-mortality rate, which in one zip code in my hometown equals that of Nigeria. It's also a gesture, at least, towards supporting their choosing to carry those babies in the first place; it's a gesture which says that in our culture a poor woman's child, if she's chosen to let it live, is worth protecting. And you know, that's something.

I also applaud any gesture of support for the intact family. Rhetoric about strengthening families is rhetoric in the right direction, and that is not nothing, either, particularly when it emphasizes the role of the father. Of course, what doesn't seem to be acknowledged in this agenda is the connection between the role of the father and the high infant mortality rate in poor black communities in cities like the one I come from. The women who are to be served by the home-nurse program, and their babies, are vulnerable not simply because they are poor, but because by and large the men who father their children decline to acknowledge their role as father. The realities which drive the need for a government-funded home-nurse program include abandonment of pregnant women by the men who made them pregnant; abuse of pregnant women by the men who made them pregnant, or by other men who shuttle in and out of their lives; homelessness; substance abuse; and any number of other dysfunctions stemming from the absence of any stable family life or support which would derive from the presence of a man willing to take responsibility for his child and its mother. The lowest socio-economic classes, as G.K. Chesterton observed, endure the real suffering from the trickle-down of bad upper-class ideas. Feminist ideals which play out well enough on an academic level spell doom for too many of the economically vulnerable, not least because these ideals undermine the role of father as provider. Misguided political ideals designed to end poverty have only perpetuated and exacerbated it: the Moynihan Report articulated a particular set of bad ideas and prophesied the breakdown of the black family. The factors which create the need for a home-nurse program in communities like my hometown -- the violence, instability, and degradation which go hand-in-hand with contemporary poverty, especially contemporary urban poverty -- suggest that in fact a woman does need a man rather more than a fish needs a bicycle. At least, if she's going to have him in the first place, then she needs for him to stay.

Why won't he stay? Well,as the 1965 Moynihan Report suggests, in some communities the reasons are legion, but in a culture which regards human life as disposable, why should a man stay with the mother of his child? Why should he be persuaded to view her in that light at all? If a culture is steeped in the assumption that the sensible and humane thing to do is to terminate a pregnancy -- read the comments accompanying this article in the Daily Mail if you want to know what idea-saturation sounds like -- then the cultural notion of what's "responsible" gets turned on its head. Parents take their pregnant daughter to the abortion clinic because a baby will "ruin her life," and she'll be "throwing away her opportunities." A man urges his pregnant girlfriend to abort the baby they have conceived together, because he's not ready to settle down, their life is so unstable, he can't support her -- in short, because he's unwilling to throw away his own opportunities, having a child would be the "irresponsible" thing to do just now. Society, of course, largely concurs with this view. The American people have elected and seen sworn in a President who would view his daughter's unintended pregnancy as a punishment, a sentence to be commuted, because it's just not sensible, or kind, to have a baby at the wrong time. Clearly mainstream America, and certainly the mainstream media, concurs with the President, to judge from the vilification Sarah Palin endured on the subject of her own daughter's pregnancy.

If abortion, then, is the sensible and responsible alternative -- safe and legal, as the Clintonian rhetoric has it -- then what is the irresponsible choice? To have the baby, of course. So he told her and told her and told her to get rid of it, and she had it anyway: well, that's her problem. He told her the rational thing to do, and he made it clear that he would support her in her decision, but she wanted to be pigheaded about it. Fine. Let her deal with it, then. She's on her own. Of course, too many men are gone long before events are discovered to have taken their course, but men who might in another climate have grown up fast and provided for their families have little motivation to do so in this one.

There seems to me to be a radical disconnect, to say the least, between rhetoric encouraging intact families and responsible fathers and rhetoric celebrating the "right to choose." What the culture has chosen, in fact, in endorsing this rhetoric is to make women more vulnerable, not less. At the very least it makes them vulnerable to the soft violence of coercion. It makes them all the more vulnerable to exploitation and abandonment. It reinforces the kind of environment in which even babies who are wanted, or at least not actively not-wanted, die too young because their mothers live not only in poverty, which in itself is not an evil, but in violent and unstable circumstances, under no one's protection, least of all the protection of the very ones who should feel some compulsion to protect them and the unborn lives their bodies nurture: the fathers of their children. If it's not a child -- and the larger culture seems in agreement on a default position that it's not -- then there's no reason why a man should feel compelled to behave in any way like a father. And that is bad news for women and families.

Crispina on My Aversion to Wearing High Heels

"Well, if you're at a party, and it's cake time, you can take them off and put on something else. If you brought some other shoes."

Fashion wisdom for our age. Bring an extra pair for cake time.

More! More! More! More Food and Thrift!

Visit Milehimama and check out her Food Stamp Challenge. How low can you go?

Meanwhile, preparing today for tomorrow's trip to Washington for March for Life, Epiphany made homemade granola bars for her and Aelred to eat on the bus. Here's her recipe, from the Sierra Club's Simple Foods for the Pack cookbook:

1/2 c oil
1/2 c honey
1/2 c molasses or maple syrup
1 TB vanilla (sounds like a lot, doesn't it?)
1/4 c milk powder
2 TB nutritional yeast (we left that one out)
1 TB orange or lemon peel, grated
1 c raw wheat germ
5 c rolled oats
2 c rolled wheat (didn't have that, either)
2 c rolled rye (ditto -- and rye in granola? Bleh.)
1 c unsweetened coconut
2 c raisins or currants
1 c each cashews, almonds, pitted dates, sunflower seeds (didn't have those)

Heat oil, honey, and syrup/molasses in a large pot until thin. Remove from heat. Add the remaining ingredients in the order given, except fruit, nuts and seeds. Stir well after each addition. Spread the mixture into two large ungreased cookie sheets with sides. Bake at 250 degrees for 1.5-2 hours, stirring occasionally. Cool. Stir in remaining ingredients. Store in airtight container.

Note: that's the plain granola recipe. To make bars:

Follow the granola recipe using 6 cups of the rolled grains instead of 9. Press into two 8-inch square pans and bake at 300 degrees for 30-40 minutes, or until golden brown. Cut while hot, but cool before removing from pan.

Epiphany sort of de-Sierra-fied her granola bars by melting baker's chocolate and mixing it with butter and sugar to make icing, then spreading it over the top. Not so virtuous, but oh, so delicious.

Meanwhile, I baked more bread, so that they can take peanutbutter (sans salmonella, it is to be hoped) and jelly sandwiches with them as well. I made two wheat/oatmeal/honey loaves and one smorgasbord loaf, made more smorgasbordish by the fact that I ran out of flour . . . I had enough to make the dough, but not enough to flour my surface to knead it on, so I had to use cornmeal. I was opining, in the comments to the last frugal food post, that maybe it was the corn meal which made Pentimento's loaf so "unpalateably dense," as I believe she put it, and indeed I noticed that this loaf of mine, which had managed to absorb a good bit of cornmeal by the time I was done kneading it, weighed roughly twice as much as either of the other loaves, which were of a comparable size to this one. It makes sense. There's something about cornmeal which calls cement to mind, except when it's baked up in cornbread, which in most recipes really only has a little bit of cornmeal in it anyway. Anyway, I think I'll make the sandwiches on the nice cornmeal-free bread, which looks beautiful because I brushed the tops with egg before baking, so the loaves are satisfyingly glossy and brown. They're so pretty, in fact, that I took pictures of them, which seems almost as vain as taking pictures of myself, now that I think of it; the battery ran out of juice, however, before the camera could disgorge its contents into my iPhoto, so it may be that nobody will ever see just how totally ducky they were. Well, nobody but a bunch of people on a bus, who may or may not be moved to ogle those peanutbutter sandwiches as Aelred and Epiphany draw them tantalizingly forth from the recycled ziplock bag.

Of course, they really won't ogle those sandwiches if I don't go and make them in the first place.

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Robert Frost

Yep, that's a weather report. Epiphany's appointment at the allergist is canceled. Oatmeal all around, then I want you people out in the fresh air.

Dream and Vision

Read Fr. Neuhaus on Remembering Martin Luther King. What caught my attention, what should catch all our attention, on the eve of the inauguration of our next president, on the heels of which will follow the annual March for life, is this passage:

I am inclined to the view that Dr. King was taken in mid-passage; he was not yet forty and nobody knows what he might have become and might have done. He might have departed further “from the temper and received liberal sophistication of his times,” not because of the radicalism that Frady attributes to him but because of a deeper radicalism grounded in the Christian gospel. I have entertained the hope that King would have confronted the epoch-defining moral crisis posed by what then was called, long before Roe v. Wade, “liberalized abortion law.” That is no more than a hope. I have no idea what he would have done with respect to this crisis of all crises in our time. But recall that Jesse Jackson, to his credit, was a powerful defender of the unborn for several years after 1968. About abortion he declared, “The war on poverty has been replaced by the war on the poor and the most defenseless.” To his great shame, he promptly switched sides when he was bitten by national political ambitions. Had King lived and continued in his aversion to politics, it is reasonable to hope that he would have made the obvious connections between the civil rights struggle and abortion, both being the cause of expanding and defending the community of human dignity. That is, of course, no more than a hope, and we will never know.

There is also this, on the Reverend Ralph Abernathy:

I am in the minority with my admiration for Ralph Abernathy’s 1989 autobiographical account of the movement, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. Abernathy was beyond doubt closer to King than anyone else. After the assassination, he took King’s place as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), although he knew as well as anyone that he was no Martin Luther King. His book was harshly criticized for its candor about King’s sexual vagaries, but other published accounts had been more explicit on that score. What I think got to many reviewers is that Abernathy refused to toe the line on the leftist ideology of the movement and even, in the early eighties, took a conservative turn, offering some favorable words on, of all people, Ronald Reagan.

His gravest violation of conventional tellings is that he declined to see black Americans as a victim class oppressed by white racism, or to depict the movement as a response of revolutionary rage. As he told the story, King was a privileged son of the black bourgeoisie of Atlanta and he, Abernathy, was the heir of a tradition of black dignity in a rural Alabama he describes in almost idyllic terms. Abernathy was daringly “incorrect,” and he paid a steep price for it. “Though slavery as an institution was wicked and foreign to the will of our Lord,” he wrote, “it was not uniformly cruel and abusive. Some slaves, in the midst of their degradation, were treated with a measure of Christian charity, just as some prisoners of war have always been treated better than others. In the worst of circumstances, the human heart is still a mysterious variable.”

His grandparents were slaves, but did not understand themselves to be victims. “In Marengo County during the first half of the twentieth century, the name ‘Abernathy’ meant integrity, responsibility, generosity, and religious commitment—and it came to mean that largely through the life and testimony of the black Abernathys. . . . So I feel no shame in going by a last name to which my father and mother brought such character and dignity. It was their name. They didn’t just borrow it from a long-dead white man. They paid for it with their exemplary lives and therefore owned it outright when they passed it along to me.”

Abernathy's take on the meaning of the Civil Rights Movement, according to Fr. Neuhaus, is that it was a quest for mutual courtesy among the races; what bothered him as a child, growing up in rural Alabama, was not segregation per se, but the fact that white people did not address his father as "Mister" Abernathy. In his view, the struggle was not for reparations or re-engineering of the playing field of opportunity, but for the universal recognition of human dignity. This is a meaning which transcends politics; it is a meaning sadly underserved by Affirmative Action and by cultural-sensitivity policies which, paradoxically, foster divisiveness via their emphasis on grievance. I would rejoice to think that tomorrow's inauguration represented a true realization of a true civil-rights dream, as Abernathy has articulated it, but I am not persuaded that it is so.

Waiting for Snow

We live in the South, which makes us officially pathetic when it comes to snow. Our eight years in Utah, where we drove through blizzards without breaking (much of a) sweat, have proved in the end not to have taught us anything lasting: we were born and reared in the South, and nature and nurture together are stronger than either memory or rationality, which is why when I had to go out to the store for something tonight, I actually hesitated and thought about the weather and wondered whether I should go, even though at the time all that was happening outside was darkness. Well, snow is PREDICTED. We could have a TWO TO THREE-INCH ACCUMULATION. In such a situation, there are only two possible responses available to the Southerner: run right out and buy milk and toilet paper, or do nothing. The second, naturally, is more attractive to us. That's why we have front porches, even though they aren't much use when it's cold. Our traditional residential architecture is all about doing nothing, unless you consider drinking iced tea and fanning yourself with the Shopper's News to be something. These are the things that come naturally. Snow does not. Go ahead and laugh, you people in Wisconsin and upstate New York. This is the way it is down here, and this is how we are.

The very mention of snow on the radio sends the children into paroxysms of paroxysmation, or whatever the proper word for the state of being hysterical because you can't think of anything to do but be hysterical would be. If a teaspoonful of snow should fall, rest assured that they will be outside scraping it up and molding it into tiny conical figures meant to be snowmen, which will stand unmelted in the brown yard for days after the rest of the frozen precipitation has disappeared. To tell the truth, there's something infectious in that kind of excitement, just as there's something about the tenacity of that scraped-up snow that's to be admired, even as you're muttering under your breath about how the yard has been churned up into a mud-wrestling arena, which has then been brought inside, bootprint by bootprint, until you're surprised that there's anything left out there but bedrock.

I like snow well enough. In fact, I'm sure the reason I like it at all is that it's a rare occurrence in most of the places I've ever lived, and that in most of those places when it does snow the. entire. universe. grinds. to. a. halt. I don't mind sharing that sloth is my besetting sin, and there's nothing sloth likes better than a day when whatever was on the calendar is suddenly and unexpectedly whited out. Sloth even likes anticipating such a day; the night before, while the lights of the town shine pink on a low-clouded sky, sloth likes to make itself cups of tea and pull the covers up and luxuriate in the thought of waking to the silence of a snowy morning, when things are so still that the tick of the flakes against the windowpane is audible. Sloth is an aesthete and loves things like that, especially as they require you to lie still and listen with your whole being, so you can't really be bothered with making breakfast any time soon.

On the other hand, cold weather in general can motivate me to do all kinds of things. I like walking in the cold and in the snow; I also like cold days spent in the warm kitchen, making things that fill the house with good smells. Epiphany and I have been baking bread all weekend, for example, in a spirit that's become more than a little competitive. I'll see your basic white loaf and raise you two whole-wheat-oatmeal flaxseeds with BRAIDS ON THE TOP. I tire of being out of sandwich bread all the time, and even when it's not snowing I don't like trudging out to the store, so the obvious thing is to bake lots of bread and learn to slice it thinly enough to make sandwiches and toast with. I also find kneading bread dough to be a superlatively meditative experience, though today I wish I'd done it before I put on my black sweater and not after.

Below is Epiphany's favorite basic bread recipe, which comes from the Usborne 30 Healthy Things to Make and Eat. This is a handy pack of thirty heavy and durable recipe cards for simple things like soups, salads and pastas, and a great thing to have on hand if you want to encourage your children to cook. The bread recipe is actually a recipe for yeast rolls, but you can just as easily make loaf bread with it, and we vary it by using whole-wheat flour and wheat germ and adding other ingredients like flaxseed, honey, molasses, oatmeal, etc, as the spirit moves us. Here it is:

3.5 cups flour (it says "strong white bread flour," but as I say, you can vary this for a more nutritious bread)
1 tsp salt
1 package rapid-rise yeast
2 tsp sugar (you can substitute honey, molasses, or any other sugary thing to activate the yeast and sweeten your bread)
1 cup warm water
2 TBSP olive or vegetable oil
milk for glazing
optional: poppy, sesame, or sunflower seeds for a topping

preheat oven to 425F 25 minutes into the second rise

1. Combine flour and salt in a large bowl. Add yeast and sugar and stir them in, then make a hollow in the middle.

2. Pour the oil and warm water into a container together, then pour them into the hollow in your dry-ingredients mixture. Stir everything well to make a soft dough.

3. Put the dough onto a floury surface and knead for ten minutes

4. Put the dough into a bowl, cover it (they say to use plastic wrap, but I always use a clean dishtowel), and put it in a warm place to rise for 90 minutes.

5. Knead the dough again and form into rolls or a loaf on your baking sheet.

6. Let the bread rise for another 40 minutes. It's about 25 minutes into this stage that you turn on your oven.

7. Brush bread with milk, sprinkle with topping if desired, and bake for 12-15 minutes (a little longer if you're making a whole loaf instead of rolls). A loaf is done when it's golden brown and sounds hollow when thumped.

Mmmmm.

My own bread-baking technique is a little more free-form. I begin by dissolving the yeast in warm water in a bowl and adding honey or molasses (usually about a quarter-cup of honey) to activate the yeast. Once the yeast has foamed, I add whatever flours and grains I'm going to use. I'm not one for measuring much, but I think I use roughly two cups of water, and enough flour to make a smooth, soft, non-gummy dough. I find that my method tends to produce a better-rising dough than the one above, though that recipe has turned out fairly well for Epiphany. I don't use rapid-rise yeast in mine, though I do have some, and I assume that that's what she's been using in hers, though again hers doesn't seem to rise quite as much. It makes very pretty loaves, though. I usually only do one rise with mine, though I could do two; techniques seem to vary from recipe to recipe, and after trying pretty much every bread recipe I've ever seen on a yeast packet or the back of a bag of flour, what I do on my own is more or less an amalgam of them all.

I tried Epiphany's recipe this afternoon, however, and came out with two smallish, rather dense molasses-wheat loaves which were very good with our peasanty dinner of diced potatoes with sweet onion, garlic and kielbasa slices, all roasted together in one dish. Whether it snows or not tonight, we ate very warmly. Also, we remembered to take the butter off the table before the dog could climb up and eat the entire stick before our backs were turned, which we hope will have saved us no end of grief, all along the upstairs hall and down the stairs. Not to be too graphic about it or anything. Our dog has been looking very glossy lately, but our habitually forgetting to put the butter away has not made him happy on his inside.

The Weather is Here; Wish We Were

there.

Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Made

Where were you in 1981? I was watching SCTV.

It's Cold Outside

So I thought I'd post a poem I wrote on a similarly frozen January day some years ago, in Cambridge. The scenery's different, but the feel is the same.

Frost


Sun-struck at noon, the stiffened grass
stands blades-up, hilts-down, like buried knives
which from this window-distance simply glitter:
fool's gold, fool's silver, fool's snow.

On the roped-off cricket pitches, seagulls natter,
their scrappy whiteness dark against the whiteness
of frost and full-bore sunshine. Every shadow
shrinks into what casts it. Nothing moves
or seems to move, though three teenage boys
knock a football back and forth -- is it lunch break
already? -- watched by blue-sweatshirted girls
who elbow, laugh, and pass around a smoke.

The fag-end brightens on their lips. Their small noise
splinters on the brittle air; it whirls
up in white wingbeats and dissolves
with a shriek into the sky:

tricky winter light and my own eye
bending the world, if not to beauty then
strangeness, on which the cold sun
shines, and the grass shines back like knives.

(grateful acknowledgment is due the editors of The Rialto, in whose pages this poem first appeared)

Thrift? Food Slumming? How to Eat in Lean Times, or Not?

Over at The Common Room there's been an interesting conversation about what does and does not constitute a "frugal" food purchase. Seems that newspapers around the country are running stories on the theme of eating cheaply in difficult times, which is all well and good, except that -- depending on which paper you're reading -- journalists' concepts of what "eating cheaply" means don't necessarily comport with reality. Set aside your shock, right now, at the very notion of a journalistic concept's not comporting with reality, and consider what's being floated in the name of frugality: on the one end of the spectrum, "budget" recipes involving ingredients like asiago cheese and sea bass, and on the other, Velveeta, canned soup, and Spam.

Now, if for you sea bass constitutes a budget food, you probably don't need to be reading this in the first place. Long before the stock market began to wobble on the edge of the sinkhole, chefs had been making money out of reimagining classic comfort foods, the kind of foods your mother made in 1975: tuna casserole, meatloaf, and so on, all that stuff which you, the enlightened post-millennial eater, now regard with contempt. Recipes that begin, "Open a can?" Please. But say you substitute a glistening slab of ahi tuna for the Chicken of the Sea; say you crank some hand-crafted whole-grain noodles through the pasta machine; say you whip up a delicate little cream sauce with some asiago cheese grated in -- say you expend hours your mother didn't have, and cash she might not have had, either, in creating an artisanal rethinking of the tuna casserole. Okay, say you did. What you end up with is, I'm sure, delicious. And it resonates with nostalgia for -- well, for what? For things you thought you'd gotten past, but which in uncertain times you now recognize, albeit through the wrong prescription lenses, as simplicity itself.

Ditto, actually, your impulse suddenly to lay in things like Velveeta and Spam which, if you cost them against real cheese, real meat, and any number of other foods which you might buy in greater quantity for the same price -- beans, rice, potatoes -- don't turn out to be such thrifty buys at all. My theory about this, as about the ahi tuna casserole trend, is that it's very easy to confuse food slumming for actual thrift. If you're a foodie kind of person, used to chevre and imported balsamic vinegar, and you find yourself in reduced circumstances, your understandable impulse might well be not to sit down and cost out various food options, but to reach blindly into the past, and dredge up all that stuff you swore you'd never eat again, and to feel virtuous doing it. It feels like sacrifice; therefore it must be thrift. This is good news for Kraft, Campbell's Soup, and the purveyors of sea bass, but it's not necessarily good news for your budget.

I was interested to receive, by way of an email loop I belong to, two items regarding food and frugality. The first was an article by Dave Ramsey, of Financial Peace fame. It was reproduced in full in this email, so I'm going to reproduce it here, though I'm not sure quite where it originated:

Everyone is looking for ways to save money. Consumable items are one
of the most obvious areas of savings. I am often asked how we manage
to keep our grocery budget low, and the tips below will help you find
ways to slice your grocery bill by at least 20 percent.

Plan a Menu
Write the menu on the family calendar that has everything else on it.
The activities listed on this calendar will trigger your thoughts on
who will be available for each day's meals. It will also highlight
crunch days so you can plan accordingly. Days where you are running
kids around after school or work may require a slow cooker meal. The
family calendar helps you recognize these days and plan accordingly.
One key element for saving the 20% is to use your favorite store's
sales flier when planning the menu which leads me to the next item.

Shop the Sales
If you do not get the weekly sales flier delivered, look online. I
review our store's flier on the web each week. Plan your menu around
the meats and produce that are on sale that week. If there is a
particularly good sale item that you use often make a note to stock up
on it. Over time, you get a general feel for how much of one item you
might need before the next sale. Many areas repeat sales every twelve
weeks. I find that certain items go on sale much more frequently. I am
fairly aware of how often the sales come around for my most commonly
used ingredients. In my house, this week's menu will have sale items
from both last week's and this week's ads. If ground beef family packs
are at a super low price, you can stock up and use it for several
weeks. I generally bring the sales flier to the dinner table one night
and mention the meats and produce on sale. I ask family members what
sounds good to them and get other requests for the grocery list. Make
your menu from the sales flier and then make your grocery list using
both the menu and the sales flier.

Buy Only What You Need
I make my grocery list on business reply envelopes from junk mail
inserts. It provides a place for the coupons and cash. We all know
that you are supposed to make a list and stick to it. That is
impossible for me but not impossible for my husband. I am the family
cook so when I go through the store, I end up spending more. Sure, I
might pick up an item or two that should have been on the list but
reality is that I pick up a lot of things that we really do not need.
So, my husband takes the list, shops only the list and comes home with
whatever is on the list. I chuckle as I write this because it is
important to note that he calls me at least twice during every grocery
excursion. If everyone is agreeable, give this chore to the one who is
most likely to spend the least.

Cook from scratch
There are those who are clueless on how to cook from scratch and know
it, there are those who think they are scratch cooks, and finally,
there are those who really are scratch cooks. I ask people to check
their pantries and refrigerators to determine which kind of cook they
are. True scratch cooks usually don't have a lot of the following:

. Boxed mixes such as pancake mix, brownie mix, cake mix, seasoned
noodle mixes, seasoned rice mixes, and muffin mixes.
. Jarred items such as meat marinades, pasta sauces, cheese sauces/
dips, and salad dressings.
. Packet mixes such as taco seasoning, gravy packets, and soup packets.
. Bottles of iced tea, sports drinks, chocolate milk, and sweet drinks.
. Cans of soup, enchilada sauces, chili, ready-made pasta dishes, and
spaghetti sauce.

If you routinely buy a lot of the items above, that isn't scratch
cooking. Scratch cooking is making nacho cheese sauce using a basic
white sauce and cheese. Scratch cooking is making pancakes and muffins
using flour, sugar, milk, oil and eggs. Scratch cooking means making
gravy from pan drippings, taco seasoning from spices kept on hand, and
iced tea by boiling tea bags in water. Scratch cooks make their own
chili and a lot of their own soups. Scratch cooks use basic brown or
white rice and season it accordingly. I do not wish to imply that
scratch cooking is necessarily the best way to cook, but it certainly
is the cheapest way to cook. Most scratch cooks have their favorite
packets, boxes and jars, but for the most part, you won't find their
pantry full of them.

If you realize that maybe you are not a scratch cook, there are all
sorts of websites and cookbooks that can help you become one. It is
very rewarding because it allows you to have more control over the
quality of food you serve your family in addition to saving money. If
you choose not to be a scratch cook, make note of the prepared items
you buy regularly and know what the rock bottom prices are for them
and try to buy them at those prices.

Clean Like Grandma Did
Cleaning supplies has gotten very fancy and very disposable. It is
also very expensive. Think about how your grandmother cleaned windows.
She probably used basic ingredients like ammonia, vinegar and water.
She probably used old newspapers to wash her windows. Take a hard look
at your cleaning supplies and see how it compares to Grandma's. Is
your glass cleaner now a pack of wipes rather than an off brand bottle
that requires a rag? Is your furniture cleaner now a wipe? Does your
duster and toilet brush now require disposable replacements? These
things are very convenient but add greatly to the grocery bill. My
cleaning supplies consist of some very basic items such as ammonia,
bleach, soap, and lots of rags made from old t-shirts, towels and
sheets. When you wish to save money in any area, consider how grandma
handled it.

Prepare for Tomorrow's Meal Tonight
This suggestion came from a frugality book I read several years ago.
This alone, saves our family about $100 a month. I know from personal
experience that one of the hardest things to do at the end of a busy
workday is to come home and cook dinner. Regardless of our vocations,
we family cooks are busy all day. Thinking ahead by one day can save
your family hundreds of dollars a year by avoiding fast food and
restaurant meals. When I think ahead by one day, it almost guarantees
we will eat at home the next day instead of heading to a restaurant.
How many times have you eaten out because you forgot to thaw the meat?
When cooking and cleaning up dinner tonight, take some steps to
prepare tomorrow night's meal. Check the menu, verify you have the
ingredients, gather the ingredients and place them front and center on
the counter or on a shelf, and pull out the meat to thaw. If you are
going to use the slow cooker, put all the ingredients in the crock and
place it in the fridge. If you need another family member to start the
process before you get home tomorrow night, put up the reminder sticky
note tonight. If you need to marinate meat, whip up the marinade
tonight and put a note on the garage door or fridge to remind yourself
to pour the marinade over the meat in the morning. Also take the time
to pack tomorrow's lunches for those who need one. My husband and
teens clean up so I am free to work on these other things while they
are busy. A nice benefit is that we are all in the kitchen after
dinner still spending family time together. This simple change in
habit of starting the process the night before saves us a minimum of
$40 a week because it stops us from eating out.

Put Smorgasbord Night on the Menu
This represents one of those things I thought everyone did and was
surprised to learn otherwise. Smorgasbord night is our term for using
leftovers. It is best understood if I describe a typical night. The
night before grocery shopping day, I will do smorgasbord night. What I
do is inventory everything we have not eaten during the week. I make a
special effort to use anything that has a short life span. I generally
display all the smorgasbord items on a big white platter or large
cutting board for appeal. Here is how it works. One or two leftover
pieces of pizza get cut into bite-sized pieces, heated, and placed on
the platter. Remaining fruit gets cut into wedges or bite sized pieces
and added to the platter. Enough deli turkey for one sandwich will get
made into a sandwich, cut into wedges, and added to the platter. Raw
vegetables are added. Sometimes I have some ingredients I can pull
together from leftovers to make a wrap or a quesadilla. I will pull
those together, cut them into smaller portions and add them to the
platter. I use party toothpicks on some items like wraps to keep them
together or on chunks of pineapple or other fruit for easy handling.
Even an extra piece of lasagna or an extra burrito will get warmed and
cut into smaller portions. Each family member gets a variety of food
and walks away from the table feeling satisfied. I get the
satisfaction of a cleaned out fridge and the good feeling of making
sure we use up the food before bringing in more food.

Make Do with What You Have
I initiated a $25 a week grocery challenge to some members last year.
The goal for each family who took the challenge was to commit to
cutting their grocery bill to $25 a week to buy bread, milk and
perishables so we could use up what we had. The challenge forced us to
make our own chicken broth, it forced us to use up some unusual grains
we bought for special recipes, it forced us to get very creative with
our cooking and to try new things. About a dozen took the challenge
and the reality was that several of us felt like our food was
multiplying. I found a mystery grain in my cupboard and after figuring
out what it was (bulgur), cooked it like rice and now we know my
family likes it better than rice. I started making chicken broth from
scratch again by throwing the bones into a crock full of water with
celery ends, onion ends, a clove of garlic and some pepper. I let it
cook all night, turn it off in the morning and allow it to cool.
Strain it and place the broth in container to freeze. Several of us
made it 7 weeks spending 75% less than what we would normally spend.

Save Bits and Pieces
I keep two containers in my freezer, one for beef based items and one
for chicken based items. A small portion of beef roast left, it gets
cut into soup or stew sized pieces and goes into the container. Six
green beans left, they go into a container. A little dab of onion goes
into the container. A small bit of gravy goes into the container. When
the container is a little over half full, I make soup with it. Did you
know that leftover mashed potatoes make terrific potatoes soup the
next night?

Take a Trash Inventory
Analyze your trash and see if what you are throwing away tells you
something. Are you throwing away Ziploc bags instead of rewashing and
reusing? Are you throwing out beef or chicken bones before using them
to make broth? Are there a lot of paper towels going into the trash
instead of using dishrags and cloth towels? When you throw away an old
t-shirt, do you cut it up into rags and only throw away the unusable
parts. Are you throwing away the heels of bread instead of saving them
up and making homemade croutons, using them for French onion soup, or
your own Italian bread crumb mix? I dust my house with old gym socks.
I put them on both hands and go through with my spray and do double
handed dusting. There is a lot of money in that trash can if you look
at it with the right thought process.

The Art of Leftovers
I don't know if everyone's family is like mine but no one in my house
(except me) will actually open the lid of a plastic container to see
what is inside it. That is where most of my food waste use to occur.
These days, if I have enough roast beef and mashed potatoes left over
for someone to have for lunch, I arrange it on a plate. I will put the
gravy in a small glass bowl on the same plate. Then I will wrap the
plate up with plastic wrap and set it on a shelf in the fridge. If I
do this, DH will actually grab the plate and heat it up for lunch. I
will often make a platter of fruits and veggies and do the same thing.
I find that if I make the food look appealing and set it where it can
be seen, it will actually get eaten and I have less waste. When the
kids were younger, I would pull the platter of fruits and veggies out
of the fridge right after school. I would add crackers and pb or
cheese and maybe a couple of cookies. Since they were always starving
after school, it was a great time to get them to eat some fruits and
veggies. After school, I think they would have eaten cardboard if I
arranged it artfully enough.

Learn to Pull a Meal Out of Thin Air
You look in the fridge and there doesn't seem to be much there. This
is where creativity kicks in. I can usually pull together a fried rice
dish or a quesadilla with just about anything. A little chicken or
beef can easily turn into chicken or beef fried rice. Chopped carrots,
chopped onion, chopped celery, a florret to broccoli chopped, one egg
and the little bit of meat, an egg and some soy sauce can easily
become an entree. Some tomato paste, dried herbs, chopped garlic and
onion can become pizza sauce. Flour, water, sugar and yeast can become
pizza crust. Greens such as fresh basil or some spinach and some
cheese can become the toppings. Cheese, spinach, peppers, and onions
and a little leftover chicken often become quesadillas for us. Cream
cheese mixed with herbs and garlic can be spread on bagels or crackers
served along with the remaining fruits or veggies to become a lighter
meal. Think about some of the appetizers you see on restaurant menus
and try to duplicate them as a lighter meal.

Learn to Say NO to Overconsumption
My brother was complaining a couple weeks ago that his family goes
through 4 gallons of milk a week. I just looked at him and said, "So
stop it and don't buy 4 gallons. Only buy 2 and see if they still
survive. I guarantee they will." He said he never says NO to milk. I
disagree wholeheartedly. Just because they will consume it doesn't
mean you are obligated to provide it to the saturation point. The
nutritional needs AND the family budget need to be balanced. In our
house, if we are out of milk, that means we are out of milk until
shopping day. It taught our kids to ration things out a bit and to not
be gluttonous about consuming all they wanted. If your kids can
holler, "Mom, we are out of milk," and you replace it within 24 hours,
you might consider evaluating consumption habits. Allowing family
members to think they can consume from a limitless well is both
expensive and leads to bad eating habits.

The point of this post is to think a few years back and consider how
your grandmother would manage her household. As you get ready to pull
an item off the shelf, ask yourself if your grandmother would have
bought that item. If not, what would she have used instead? Bets are
it is a lot cheaper than what you are about to buy.

I was especially interested in the "cooking from scratch" spectrum. It's been so long since I've routinely used a mix, a prepared sauce, or a box meal of any kind that I don't even think about it any more, which I suppose makes me a "scratch cook." My first thought, on reading these categories, was that I was probably a "thinks she's a scratch cook," because my cooking can be hit-or-miss. Then I realized that we weren't talking about quality, but about basic habits of shopping for and assembling meals. Now that I think of it, my own grocery-shopping philosophy corresponds almost exactly to my philosophy regarding toys: if it's made to do one thing only and nothing else, it's not worth buying. I like open-ended toys (like sticks, for instance), and I buy open-ended groceries, like flour and oil and milk and rice, out of which, with a revolving selection of other ingredients, I can make anything we need to eat.

With this in mind, I was interested in the second item on the email loop, regarding Angel Food Ministries. This is, I think, a nationwide feeding ministry, offering a monthly supply of groceries to all comers at a greatly reduced cost: roughly $30 for a box of groceries worth more than twice that amount. It's not really a month's supply of groceries, though for a small family the box might last a month; generally it's more like a supplement to your regular grocery shopping. I've seen Angel Food Ministries mentioned on a number of homeschooling and frugal-living email lists and websites and certainly, for families trying to make ends meet, this ministry offers a way to put more food in the larder at a decent price.

Still, I was interested to read a list of what I guess are the typical contents of an Angel Food box:

6 frozen hamburger patties
> 2 pounds frozen sliced turkey with gravy entrée
> 4 6-ounce pork chops
> 3 pounds breaded chicken legs
> 1 pound chicken nuggets
> 15 ounce can pork and beans
> 1 box macaroni and cheese
> 24 ounces frozen French fries
> 3 pounds frozen boneless, skinless chicken breasts
> 7 ounces Armour Brown and Serve Sausage
> 1 cheeseburger dinner (a box dinner; just add hamburger)
> 16 ounces frozen sliced green beans
> 15 ounce can crushed pineapple
> 8 ounce package biscuit mix
> 10 ounce jar peanut butter
> 1 frozen apple pie
> 8 ounce package pancake mix

How many of these items are actually good and useful buys for a family, for the outlay of money? Virtually all of them are one-time meal options: a can of pork-and-beans, two box dinners, a frozen "sliced turkey" entree, a frozen ready-made dessert, one-meal packages of pancake and biscuit mix. A number of them aren't especially healthy options. I don't buy chicken nuggets or French fries, because I don't really want to eat chicken nuggets or French fries, and if I did, I'd make them myself from real chicken or a bag of potatoes. $30 seems like a great price for a cart of groceries, but not for a cart of groceries I either wouldn't use or would use up so quickly that I'd just have to go right back to the store for more. Literally the only items on this list which I would find useful would be the chicken breasts (though on my own I buy thighs and drumsticks, which are cheaper so that I can buy more of them, because my family love chicken and are always hungry), and the pork chops, though I'd have to think of something to put them in, because four pork chops won't feed my family of six. The frozen green beans are okay; I do buy frozen vegetables, so that I always have some kind of vegetable on hand to cook with or serve, without worrying about using them up before they go bad. I could find a use for a can of pineapple. The sausage could be useful, especially if it's patty-type sausage which could be crumbled up and put in a casserole.

Otherwise, for our family, what's in this box is a waste of money. My dream discount grocery box, $30 for a roughly $80 value, would include a big bag of rice, a big bag of some kind of beans, flour, oil, butter, and cheese. In other words, not one-time convenience-meal options, but pantry essentials, out of which one could create a number of meals.

Actually, I think the single greatest thrifty food purchase a person could make, the one which would save the most money in the long run, is a decent cookbook. Nothing gourmet, just plain, from-scratch food, using basic, inexpensive, easy-to-find ingredients. That's it. Want to save money? Learn to cook.

Remembering Suddenly That I Meant to Bake Bread Today

I went out in the cold this morning to walk the dog and found the back passenger door of the big van standing open as, presumably, some short person left it on disembarking last night upon our return from church. The battery, of course, was stone dead. Aelred, rushing out with Epiphany to go to campus, did not have time to shoulder the van down the narrow driveway to put it nose to nose with the MPV and jump it off, so there it sits outside, a big lifeless thing like a beached whale, while here we sit inside, not altogether ungrateful for the excuse not to go anywhere.

Of course, as luck would have it, after a steady stream of houseguests from the twenty-third of December until this past Tuesday, our stores are starting to get low and, in our stranded state, today's meals have been more than usually odd. The other night I recycled a lot of leftover pancakes, which I'd been freezing for just such a moment, into a big cinnamon-and-brown-sugar bread pudding -- butter the baking dish, lay in a layer of pancakes, mushing them up a bit, shake on the cinnamon and the brown sugar, dab more butter on, then add another layer of pancakes and repeat the whole process until you're out of pancakes. Beat together some eggs and milk to make a custard, pour it over, and bake for . . . uh . . . I don't know. Until it's done, or you get over forgetting that you put it in the oven, whichever comes first. This was good for dessert the other night, and it was good for breakfast this morning. For lunch we had cheese grits and the last packet of Boy Scout Happy Trails popcorn -- it was a corn-themed meal. For dinner, I've got spaghetti, some sweet red peppers in a jar, some onion and garlic, and some cheese, as well as frozen asparagus and broccoli, and after that we'll really be hard up, so I hope we get around to starting the van. I have to admit, though, to enjoying the challenge of coming up with SOMETHING to eat out of disparate items that have been pushed to the back of the cupboard till now.

Or maybe it's just that we've been reading Swallows and Amazons aloud, so that it seems natural to play desert island on a cold Friday when we don't feel like doing anything else. I love these books, though I do so wish that my favorite girl character, the Able-Seaman, had a less-anatomical name; thankfully the unfortunate connotation is lost on my innocent little audience. For the uninitiated, these books -- and it's quite a series, I forget how many exactly -- are about children and sailboats and adventures large and small. The large adventures include being captured by Chinese pirates, as in Missee Lee, while the small adventures take place mostly on Lake Windemere and aren't really small at all in the imaginations of the adventurers.

In Swallows and Amazons, the first of the series, a family of brothers and sisters has possession of a little sailboat, the Swallow, for the summer, and permission to camp alone on a little island in the lake which they have been observing through a telescope. This in itself is enchanting. As Epiphany put it years ago, when we were reading these books together, and she was devouring Enid Blyton "Famous Five" stories on her own at the same time, "These stories are all about unsupervised children. How did they get to be so unsupervised?" Autonomy, after all, is the secret dream of many, if not all, children -- to be able to go out alone and live, even if all you do is swim and fish and cook regular meals and go to bed when it gets dark, is beyond the reach of the average child who, even if his parents would let him out of their sight, has no place to go to be alone for any length of time.

And it's the being alone, in the sense of being away from adults, that's important to the adventure. What happens, actually, in Swallows and Amazons is utterly simple and basic: the children camp (looked after by an officious older sister whose function is to cook and make sure that the seven-year-old gets his sleep), sail, swim, and pretend. They invent new place-names for the lake's islands and the town at the far end. They refer to adults, including their own mother, as "natives." When they meet up with two sailing sisters, in another little boat called the Amazon, they wage a "pirate war" which involves strategy, trickery, and a lot of sailing around in the dark -- the fact that it's all pretend did not stop Helier from jumping up and down the entire time I was reading. There is some "real" adventure in the form of conflict with a man living on a nearby houseboat and, at the end, a storm, but for the most part it's a book about the power of children's imaginations, and against the notion that children need adults to dream up their fun, or elaborate toys, either -- though I guess a boat might count as a fairly elaborate toy.

As a kind of footnote I should add that Helier has just appeared beside me wielding a hunk of styrofoam stuck all over with plastic forks, which he says is a "marooner gun," whatever that is. I mean, I get what it is, basically, of course. Crispina, meanwhile, has bundled up and gone outside to poke around the bushes outside the kitchen window, which she and Helier call their "village." It's not exactly an island, but I don't know what they do out there most of the time, other than talk to the neighbors, and that's as it should be. It's four o'clock, and I know where my children are, but I don't really need to know what they're doing.

And yes, I did mean to bake bread. There's still time to do it before dinner.

Friday Poetry

A bit late for the Feast of the Epiphany, perhaps, but I consider that we're still in Epiphanytide, until Candlemas on February 2.

Three Gipsies

Three gipsies stood at my drifted door,
One was rich and one was poor
And one had the face of a blackamoor.

Out of the dark and the moor they came,
One was leaping, two were lame,
And each called out to me by my name.

"Is there a baby that wants within
A penny of brass and a crown of tin
And a fire of spice for original sin?

"Hold him high at the window wide
That we may beg for him a Bride
From the circling star that swings outside."

"Rise up, rise up, you gipsies three
Your baskets of willow and rush I see
And the third that is made from the Judas tree.

"No boy is born in my bed this day
where the icicle fires her freezing ray.
For my love has risen and run away.

So fare you well, Egyptians three,
Who bow and bring to me the key
From the cells of sin to set us free."

Out of the million-angeled sky
As gold as the hairs of my head and thigh
I heard a new-born baby cry.

"Come back, come back, you gipsies three
And put your packs by my Christmas tree
For it is my son's nativity!"

Over the marble meadow and plain
The gipsies rode by the river's skein
And never more did they come again.

I see a star in the window tall,
The bread and wine in my waiting hall
And a heap of hay in the mangers all,

But the gipsies with their gifts were gone,
And where the host of heaven had shone
The lunatic moon burned on, burned on.

Charles Causley
Collected Poems 1951-2000
London: Picador 2000

Prayers for Life

My friend Pentimento posts the following prayer request, from another blog friend:

Please pray for my friend R. She is twenty weeks pregnant with her third child, and went for a routine fetal anatomy ultrasound yesterday, which showed that she is carrying a boy with two markers that correlate with Down Syndrome. The doctor ordered an amniocentesis to verify, but the results won't be known for two weeks. Although they are Catholic, her husband has indicated that he would want to terminate this pregnancy if the amnio proves conclusive. R. is feeling guilty (she has two boys, and had been praying for a girl) and scared. Please keep her family and her new little one in your prayers.

I have several friends whose families have been blessed by children with Down Syndrome and other mental and developmental conditions. They bear witness to the fact that often what turn out to be our greatest blessings are the very things which we initially fear and reject, the things which make us say, "Anything but that," but which, once we're living them, make us say, "How did I live without that?"

Tonight at Holy Hour I prayed for this family. I prayed that whatever the outcome of the amniocentesis, this father would be moved to embrace and protect his child, who exists not four months into the future, maybe, but now, absolutely: a boy, a little living boy, who does or does not have Down Syndrome. Either way, his life is a gift, to him, to his family, to the world, and I pray that his parents, and his father especially, don't foreclose on that gift out of fear.

For a moving story of life with a Down Syndrome child, read Amy Julia Becker's "Babies Perfect and Imperfect, from a recent issue of First Things. Also of interest is her December First Things blog post, The Good Life, on prenatal screening and eugenics.

For a wealth of links related to Down Syndrome -- blogs, resources, support networks, testmonies -- check out Gifts. Parents confronted with what is known as "poor prenatal diagnosis" may be especially interested in BeNotAfraid.net.

A blog of particular interest: The Catholic Down Syndrome Society, written by the mother of a Down Syndrome child and winner of an American Life League Pro-Life Blog Award.

Still More About CPSIA

For updates and commentary on this lunkheaded piece of legislation, go here, here, here, and here.

Also visit Holy Heroes, another home business, run by friends of ours, which CPSIA would shut down.

"We Shall Not Weary": Fr. Neuhaus on Life

The culture of death is an idea before it is a deed. I expect many of us here, perhaps most of us here, can remember when we were first encountered by the idea. For me, it was in the 1960s when I was pastor of a very poor, very black, inner city parish in Brooklyn, New York. I had read that week an article by Ashley Montagu of Princeton University on what he called “A Life Worth Living.” He listed the qualifications for a life worth living: good health, a stable family, economic security, educational opportunity, the prospect of a satisfying career to realize the fullness of one’s potential. These were among the measures of what was called “a life worth living.”

And I remember vividly, as though it were yesterday, looking out the next Sunday morning at the congregation of St. John the Evangelist and seeing all those older faces creased by hardship endured and injustice afflicted, and yet radiating hope undimmed and love unconquered. And I saw that day the younger faces of children deprived of most, if not all, of those qualifications on Prof. Montagu’s list. And it struck me then, like a bolt of lightning, a bolt of lightning that illuminated our moral and cultural moment, that Prof. Montagu and those of like mind believed that the people of St. John the Evangelist—people whom I knew and had come to love as people of faith and kindness and endurance and, by the grace of God, hope unvanquished—it struck me then that, by the criteria of the privileged and enlightened, none of these my people had a life worth living. In that moment, I knew that a great evil was afoot. The culture of death is an idea before it is a deed.

Read the rest here.

When the Party's Over

Our dear Monica the Man left this morning, early, after an eight-days' visit. Everyone else in America had reverted to normal non-holiday life by this time last week, but in our house the party went on, and on, and on, and on, and now I think I've forgotten how to sleep, except sitting up at the table with, I am told, a smile on my face. MM did the dishes, read me short stories by Wendell Berry and two chapters of The Man Who Was Thursday, helped Epiphany with her math, assisted Helier and Crispina in a lot of airborne slow-motion acrobatics, went to the movies with Amicus, sat up late talking with Aelred and me, and endured the dog, whose drooling he found not so endearing as I suppose, in some universe, it might be possible to find dog drool. That is to say, I don't find dog drool especially endearing, either. I just don't notice it much any more.

Actually, he endured a lot from Helier and Crispina, too, who despite all my efforts to educate them still confuse affection with full frontal assault. One day MM, lying down on his bed in the study, felt them approach with great stealth. They surrounded him, as much as two people under the age of seven can surround a 200-pound prone adult on a futon, and began to whisper, "Slow mooootion tiiiime . . . slooooow moooootion tiiiiiime," meaning of course not that time itself had slowed down, but that it was time for him to get up and sail them through the air like the Six Million Dollar Man again. He ignored them. Finally Helier turned to Crispina and said in a stage whisper, "Maybe if our breath is MINTY FRESH, that will wake him up." "Yeah," said Crispina, "Let's go brush our teeth!" Thud thud thud they went up the stairs. Thud thud thud they came back, and stood around him again, and breathed on him, open-mouthed, chanting, "Minty fressssssh. Minty fresssssssh." And you know, today he really seemed sorry to leave.

Last week, on Epiphany -- the real one, January 6, which is also our own Epiphany's birthday -- we had a feast and blessed the house with blessed chalk which we'd brought home from church, saying a little liturgy together and writing, on the lintel of our front door, "20+C+M+B+09." This odd equation stands of course for the year, plus the initials of the three Wise Men, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The next day MM helped me to take down the Christmas decorations and the tree, a ritual which always leaves me with an emotional solution composed in equal parts of sadness and relief. I always feel that the twelve days, and the four weeks before that, have gotten away from me without my having paid enough attention to them or done them justice; at the same time, I am so glad to see the pure clean light of January streaming through my windows unencumbered by greenery or the competition of Christmas lights. It's one thing to make your house fair, and quite another to make it clean and ready for what comes next. So we did that, and I felt all that, and now, having celebrated Aelred's birthday and sent MM home, I'm feeling it all over again, a kind of inner undressing and cleaning which leaves me both empty and a little expectant. What will we do next? And could we go back and do all the fun things again, because I'm sure I didn't drink them in enough the first time around?

Well, in the short term, Aelred went back to school today, and Epiphany will go tomorrow, for a second semester of college Latin. Today she did all her subjects in her room, while the other three and I sat around the kitchen table and said Terce, then read Swallows and Amazons and played with Cuisenaire rods (Helier and Crispina) and did Latin and converted units of measurement (Amicus). In the afternoon Helier, Crispina, the dog and I all went to the park, and on the way home stopped in at the Episcopal churchyard, where several Civil War heroes lie buried. Helier amused himself by picking out all the Confederate flags on the graves of the South's war dead, under those quiet bare trees. We walked home on the greenway trail and had leftovers for dinner.

Leavetakings always put me in this elegiac frame of mind, thinking of Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay", and meditating on the transience of practically everything. I love people intensely and probably too needily a lot of the time; I also recognize that all our lives, mine and my friends', are moving forward, not always at the same rate, into and out of intersection with each other, which is why unjoinings, even temporary ones, feel like the end of the world. Saying goodbye, you renounce your claim and give a beloved person up to the rest of a life which does not involve you. It's a presaging of greater leavetakings to come: moves, marriages, vocations, death itself, all of which require friends to offer each other up to God in hope and trust that He alone, above all His creatures, is sufficient for our heart's need. I love my friends. I love having friends. I love having friends with me, in my house, sharing my life for a time, and while they are here I wish that the time would slow down. I wish that it would stop. I'd be just as happy if they never went away, and if our need for each other's friendship never altered or outgrew itself. Ultimately, though, all that does happen. People pass through, and then they go home, in various large and small ways and finally in the truest way. When they go, I mourn them, but then I turn back to my life where Aelred and the children wait for me, and the house needs sweeping. I remember what I have to do until I go home myself, and that's all right, too.

Stolen Time, Saturday Afternoon

I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to say that I'm stealing this time. I think it belongs to me anyway, more or less. At the moment, though, everyone else is doing things with it which do not require my presence, my labor, or my advice, so here we are.

The situation could change at any time, of course. Epiphany is in the kitchen making, by herself, a dinner for five of her friends to celebrate her birthday. So far we've weathered one minor crisis: of the collection of bottles of vanilla extract gathered at the end of my spice shelf, exactly none of them has any vanilla left in it, to speak of. I suggested that it was very likely that each one of those bottles was coated inside with a vanilla film, and that if she put a little water in the bottles and shook them up well, she'd get some approximation of the right amount of vanilla flavor to make her cake taste right. We've already been to three grocery stores this morning, and I don't feel like going out again for a bottle of vanilla extract. So there's been that. Now she's making some kind of bread. Fortunately Monica the Man is with us this week, and he's in the kitchen right now washing dishes, so if she needs laughing at for any reason, we've got that covered, too.

It has been a week of -- not sorrow and worry for us personally; around here we're happy as a bunch of . . . uh, happy things, I guess . . . but of sorrow and worry for a number of people we care for. On Monday, a high-school friend of mine suffered an episode of cardiac arrest, resulting apparently from a torn aortic stent; mercifully her husband was with her at the time, the paramedics got there fast, and her life was saved. She will have a long, slow recovery, but after a couple of critical days she is expected to recover fully and should, we hope, be home with her children next week.

Meanwhile, most people reading this blog will already know of the death on Wednesday of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things. I met him only once, briefly, and can offer no personal tribute beyond what any longtime reader of the magazine might say: that his writing challenged me out of any number of assumptions I had held quite comfortably for a very long time, and into a thirst for truth. For thoughtful commentary on Fr. Neuhaus's life and work, go here, here, here, and here.

It looks as though I may be required in the kitchen. Crispina is wrangling with Epiphany for the right to write something in cake-decorating gel on her cake, while Helier is positioning himself to swipe at her icing. Also, there's a Risk game on the living-room floor which is going to demand some kind of peace initiative before people start showing up later on. You know how it is when you're the leader of your own personal, small-time free world: so much to do, so little time.

From Our Mailbag: Helpful Household Hints From Mrs. T

Q: Dear Mrs. T,

If, in the kitchen, some person attempts to make candles by melting all the old candles in the house together in your one functional saucepan, and uses birthday candles stuck into the resulting grayish wax goo for wicks, and pours the whole concoction into a jam jar, and in the process a lot of grayish wax goo gets spilled on the kitchen floor, is it a good idea to try to remove said wax from said floor by way of a hot iron?

A: No.

A Visit to the Allergist

Aelred went to see allergist, above, last week, for a battery of those prick-tests where they inject your forearm with a little of just about everything on the planet, to see whether it swells you up like a pair of collagen lips or not.

Now, we already knew that he was allergic to lots and lots and lots and lots of things. Cats, for instance. I think he might still not be fond of cats, even if they didn't make him sneeze and his eyes run down his face -- EVEN if they didn't all somehow seem to know in advance that they have this effect on him, and didn't all therefore single him out for their special affectionate attentions -- but the fact that they do make him sneeze and enjoy flaunting this little power they exert over an alien species larger than themselves really un-endears them to him in a way I simply can't find words to describe. Pollen, too, he does not love, though it doesn't seem particularly attracted to him in the same way that cats are, and he doesn't indulge in the same measure of withering contempt for it.

The prevailing wisdom in our house -- in all our houses for the past nearly-nineteen years - has been that dogs also make him sneeze. For years and years the children asked for a dog and were told no, because they make Daddy sneeze. Actually, for years and years there were all kinds of reasons why a dog would have been a bad idea -- we lived in a foreign country, we lived in flats with barely enough room for the people in our family, we were broke, we had enough to worry about -- but the bottom line was that Daddy was allergic to them, and we all resigned ourselves to being satisfied with rabbits and betta fish forever.

At last, however, we moved to this town and into this house, and out of nowhere, really, Aelred suggested that we might sweeten the whole moving deal by promising the children a dog. This, I fully recognized, was an heroic sacrifice on his part. I still recognize it as an heroic sacrifice, given what he expected the personal ramifications to be. In an even more heroic sacrifice, he agreed that the dog could be at least a partially-indoor dog. Really, I'm not being tongue-in-cheek: this was heroic, and I will admire him for it until my dying day.

So, to be sensitive to him and his heroism, when we set out to look for a dog we tried to find an especially hypo-allergenic one. This aspiration, however, was given the kibbosh by the allergist, above, who says that that there is no such thing. What the allergy sufferer is allergic to, he told Aelred, is not hair or even dander, but airborne proteins which compose the dog's saliva. Once a dog has breathed in your house for a week, said the allergist, you have these airborne proteins in your ductwork, in your wallpaper, in your sofa -- and they're there for a year, even if the dog only stays that one week.

When Aelred came home and told me all this, I was afraid that we were in for some terrible reality-acclimatization with the children. We had told them that they could have a dog; we had told them that Daddy had agreed that it could come inside, provided that it wasn't a terribly allergy-inducing dog. And now we'd found out that ALL dogs are allergy-inducing in equal measure. Take THAT, breeders of Labradoodles. And take THAT, kids, too, I thought. I thought we were in for a whole fleet of consolation bettas, is what I thought.

But the plans for acquiring a dog rolled forward (see also "heroic," above), and before we knew it, we had a dog. He is a shorthaired dog, to be sure, but of course we now know that this has nothing to do with anything except the lifespan of the vacuum-cleaner bag.

Several days into our life with this dog, I remarked to Aelred that really, the dog didn't seem to be bothering him all that much. I'd been expecting heavy-artillery sneezing, the ingestion of massive doses of Zyrtec, and some martyrdom. In fact, I assumed he'd been taking lots of Zyrtec all along, and I was surprised to learn that no, actually, he hadn't been taking all that much, and wasn't it odd that the dog affected him so little, but then again, he was careful to wash his hands every time he petted the dog, and so on, blah blah blah.

Well, I was thinking. This is a little miraculous. I'll take it.

So he goes to the allergist for the prick tests, so that he can start the allergy shots to enable him to live more comfortably with the dog, and they prick him with a little helping of pretty much anything you can think of, and the results are . . . .



He's allergic to everything -- everything -- with two significant exceptions. Food is one. And you already know, don't you, what the other one is.

Day of Rest, Which Pretended to Be But Was Not the Feast of the Epiphany

An exchange which just took place right here in this study. I have no idea what it was about, but it went like this:

Amicus: Over my dead and rotting body.

Epiphany: DON'T use my catch-phrase.

Amicus (mumbling): . . . my dead and rotting body . . .

Epiphany: Step ON your dead and rotting body?

Amicus: No, no, no. Step OVER it and keep on walking.


It's been a day of unexplained tearfulness around here. A little while ago I was reading an Epiphany-themed story to Helier and Crispina, all about old Babouscka, whom the Wise Men visit and invite to go with them to Bethlehem. It's snowing outside, however, and old Babouscka tells them to toddle along and she'll catch up with them in the morning. In the morning she realizes that she's forgotten to ask for directions, and so she sets off after them with a basket of baubles and toys for the Christ Child, asking everyone she meets if they know the way. She never gets there, but as she tramps on her weary way, seeking the Holy Child, she stops at every house where children live, and she leaves a toy on each child's pillow, "for His sake."

So I was reading this story, and for no reason whatsoever that I could think of, because it's not THAT sad a story, I began to feel chokier and chokier and had to keep clearing my throat and taking strategic sips of tea. By the end I was boo-hooing outright. "F-f-f-o-or H-his sssssaaaaaaaake." I am not making this up. I had tears rolling down my cheeks and had to keep smearing them away with the heel of my hand, and I felt like an idiot.

"Mom, why does your voice sound like that?" said Helier, by which he meant, not again, and what on earth is the MATTER with you, woman? Because I love you more than I can say,/If I could tell you, I would let you know . . .

If you wish to attempt to read this story, by the way -- and I realize that your mileage may vary; in fact it is to be hoped that your mileage WILL vary -- it is "Babouscka," by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey. Mistrust lady authors will three names, that's what I say. They will mess with you in all kinds of nefariously sentimental ways. Beware, and again I say, beware.

But the teariness seems to be -- well, not an epidemic exactly, or if it is an epidemic, it's a contained one, affecting, besides me, only Crispina. She's been at it all day, full of misery and woe about the cup she got her milk in, the plate she got her food on, and other matters of world-class urgency. Tonight as we were sitting down to say the rosary, she decided that she wanted first one person's rosary, then another's, for her own, because the one she'd been offered wouldn't do. In the end she got no rosary to hold, and we went blithely on reciting Our Fathers and Hail Marys over the white noise of sobs and wailings. Every time her turn would come round, and I'd say, "Would you like to say a Hail Mary now," or whatever it happened to be, she would go, "Huuuuuuuhhhhh," in a voice full of tears. So we'd go on, skipping her, which only turned the faucet on again, harder. At last her turn came round, and when I asked her if she wanted to say a Hail Mary this time, she did, with a degree of misery that I can't possibly reproduce here, though it sounded a little like this:

hailmawyfullofgwacedalaudiswivyoublessedahtdowamongwomenandblessedfruitdywoomjesussnifsnif.

By the end, this delivery had struck even Crispina as funny. She is five, after all, and possessed of enough self-awareness by this time that she knows perfectly well when she's acting like the mewling infant she wishes she still was half the time. So she started to laugh, which set Helier off. Again, I cannot reproduce Helier's laugh, but if it were a virus we'd all be dead. Within minutes. He just opens his mouth, and this enormous laugh falls out and sort of shatters everywhere and the shards strike everyone else in the room, and it's all over. Let us just say that our sacrifice of prayer turned out to be like, I don't know, the splodge of hardened clay which your child has spent time pummelling together for you, and which you are told in no uncertain terms is a teapot.

So, you know, it's been like that around here. For all of us. Maybe it's the rain; maybe it's just an unusually severe case of the human condition which has afflicted us today, the only redeeming feature of which is that if we're willing to find ourselves a little ridiculous, we have a neverending source of amusement and entertainment before us, in the form of our own souls. I often wonder what the dog makes of it all. When we speak, he put his ears up politely; when we go away, he sits on the upstairs windowseat and pines aloud, in little falsetto trills, looking and sounding for all the world like Rapunzel in her tower. He gives every impression of preferring our company to no company, but I think we must puzzle him mightily. Well, welcome to the human race, dog, and enjoy your stay. That's what I say.