The Jeeves of Prayer

A propos of the St. Andrew Novena, my dear Pentimento has asked me to write a post on this theme. "The Jeeves of prayer" was a phrase I'd tossed off in a comment to qualify my use of the word "Indeed."  I'd meant to respond, "Indeed I will," to a request for prayer, and instead I said only, "Indeed," which is what Jeeves always says when, for example, Bertie Wooster insists on bringing the white mess jacket down to Brinkley Court for a weekend of sorting out Angela and Tuppy and Gussie Fink-Nottle and The Bassett.  It's not really the kind of thing you say to someone for whose intentions you mean, in good faith, to pray.

In fact, there's not much I can say about being "the Jeeves of prayer," because I'm not. I'm the Bertie Wooster of prayer. My prayer life is Bertie Wooster's love life:  frenetic, chaotic, and largely driven by avoidance of commitment. It's not that Bertie doesn't fall in love, sort of, and it's not that I don't pray, sort of, either. As it happens, I pray a lot -- sort of. I'm the person going, "I say! Right ho! Tinkety-tonk, then!" while someone else behind the scenes arranges everything with serene competence, a raised eyebrow, and a lot of hair pomade.

I've frequently wished I had a Jeeves. Everyone in this house wishes he or she had his or her own personal Jeeves, which is a testimony to the scattershotness of my domestic genius. How lovely, we all think, to be awakened with a cup of tea, to have our baths drawn for us, our clothing ironed for us, our telephone answered for us, our personal triangulations straightened out by someone reliably smarter than we are, though we hate to own the truth of it. How good to be taken care of, always.

I was thinking all this tonight, in deepening dejection, as I was putting a child to bed in a room like -- well, like the kind of room an abused and neglected person would sleep in, which was more or less the tone of the whole putting-to-bed episode. I have been butting heads lately with this particular child, and our evenings have taken on the flavor of predestination:  child does x, I say y, child says z, in a tone up with which I cannot put. Bedtime stories get cut short, and the house fills with screams. And on top of that, this child's room looks like Monday morning after the apocalypse, and so does the study, and so does at least one other child's room, and let's not even talk about the laundry, and who's running this show, again?

Jeeves! Where on earth have you been? Because frankly, things are going just the tiniest bit to hell around here.

Whenever I go to Confession, which is frequently, the conversation inevitably cycles back around to this  theme of chaos, and also sloth, of which the chaos is largely a function. My confessor knows me, and I know he knows me;  we've given up the charade of anonymity, so that he says, "Now, two weeks ago you were telling me . . . ," and I say, "Last week you called me on X, and I want to say more about that." So it's not entirely because he's decided to tell everyone to pray the second Joyful Mystery for their penance on a given Saturday that his counsel to me always has to do with praying more, and praying better. That's not all he says, not by a long shot, but it's a consistent enough motif that you'd think I'd have done a better job of amending my life by now. This one thing! It's why other things are out of whack;  it's why I can't deal with the out-of-whackness. And yet, instead of spending more time on my knees, I spend time on -- this, for example, and on running around going, "What ho, old thing?" at God.

But I did pray that novena fifteen times today, I think. I did. Didn't I? I did . . .

The Holy Spirit, about now, is raising one eyebrow and answering, "Indeed."

P.S.  If you wanted to include this child and me in your novena intentions, I think we'd both thank you.

Advent Novena

Via Pentimento, with many thanks, a Saint Andrew novena for Advent:

Hail, and blessed be the hour and moment at which the Son of God was born of a most pure Virgin in a stable at midnight in Bethlehem in the piercing cold.  At that hour, vouchsafe, I beseech Thee, to hear my prayers and grant my desires (mention your intentions here).  Through Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother.

You pray this prayer fifteen times a day, from today, which is Saint Andrew's feast (and happy name-day to all the Andrews I know) through December 24.

Pentimento asks that anyone with prayer intentions or needs for  which she can offer the novena please leave them in her combox. I'll offer the same -- if nothing else, having your needs to pray for will make me remember to pray the novena at all. I'm very good at starting novenas, not so good at keeping them up. But as she says, it would be a privilege to join my prayers with yours, friends in real life and friends unmet, except in the hiddenness of cyberspace.

ADDENDUM:  I happily typed out the directions for praying this novena without considering, until I went to start it this morning, exactly how one prayed it fifteen times. I think I must have had this hazy idea of a wacked-out-on-overdrive Liturgy-of-Many-Hours type of thing. What a relief to discover that, no, you can just sit down and pray it fifteen times all at once. I feel like an idiot, but then again, I'm just as happy this way.

I will say, too,  that anyone praying this novena with me could pray for the following intentions:

continued strength and hope for a couple of friends who bear overwhelming family burdens with grace and good cheer

for two friends undergoing cancer treatment right now

for several other friends struggling through the early stages of bereavement and for the souls of their beloved dead

for my eldest daughter as she wades through heaps of college admissions material and thinks about the coming years (and the rest of her life)

for several friends trying to discern their vocations through the babel that is graduate school

for greater love of God, contrition for sin, and perseverance in hope

Again, please feel free to add your petitions. 

We Have a Winner

 So last night after Vespers and dinner and story time, I painstakingly wrote down on a sheet of standard white printer paper  the names of all entrants in the Great Castle Rush-the-Season Giveaway. I tore the paper into uniformly-sized slips and folded them up into indistinguishable little wads.

These I placed in my hat -- I am not, by nature, a hat-wearer, but once in a musical about Noah I played Mrs. Japheth and had to sing a three-line solo in the course of which my hat fell off into the imaginary water. I haven't worn the hat since, and we've had four mailing addresses in the time intervening between the last moment of that play and now, yet somehow it has managed to be hanging on the pegs in the hallway which doubles as my office, a.k.a. the nerve center for this blog. Go figure.

So I shook the hat with the little wads of paper in it. Then I shook it some more. Then I carried it into the dining room, which doubles as Aelred's office when he's at home, and I said, "Could you possibly help me do something?"

So it was Aelred, a man of unimpeachable integrity and high-quality Advent meditations, who shut his eyes, waved his hand around in the air above the hat, and then plunged it in, pulling out the winning name.

And the winner is:  VA.

Email me, VA, and we'll take it from there.

Many thanks to all who entered the drawing -- it's fun to know who's out there reading. Please don't be strangers.

And do please visit the monks and check out their many excellent Christmas specials and sets:  mugs, sampler packs, and subscriptions all make excellent gifts for the coffee lovers in your life. I'd love to say something about a certain stocking in my house being heavy with the bean of the Rockies come Christmas morning, but I don't want to give away the surprise.



And naturally, as my friend The Anchoress puts it, coffee purchases through this site do drop a little change in our tip jar, for which we are, as always, very very grateful.

Vespers Advent I

 Exulta filia Sion



V:  God, come to my assistance.
R:  Lord, make haste to help me.

V. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
R. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen. Alleluia.

Pray the Office. 
(click the "Evening Prayer" tab for Vespers)

A Meditation on the First Sunday of Advent, by Aelred.
Used by his kind permission.

One of the most well-known characters from the Arthurian Legends, is Merlin, the wizard.  There are many unusual things about Merlin, but the fact (in T. H. White’s telling in The Once and Future King) that he lives from the future into the past is an important parable for us.  Again, Merlin lives backwards through time.  He is an old man getting younger.  He is able to bring young Arthur into the knowledge of many important future events.

I seize this image because we Christians have set up our year, the Liturgical year, much like the life of Merlin.

We begin the Christian year today, talking about the end of all history.  That’s strange.  We obviously don’t care much for chronology if this is the way we start our year.  If we don’t exactly live backwards like Merlin, we do proclaim that there is nothing about the end of this coming year that will be any more important than what we expect right here at the beginning:  the return of God to judge, to consummate, to reign.

We hold that what God does outside of time redeems our time, gives it a focus it cannot give itself.  Our time, after all, is passing away, perishing with the personal life of each of us.

You see, we believe that our time can only be used aptly if we continually celebrate what happens in God’s time--so to speak—which is, of course, beyond ours, before ours and more than ours.

Think of Merlin again:  Living backwards, he has a problem getting his tenses right when he talks to people.  Future and past, past and future, collide with each other in the present—and so Merlin gets the reputation of being a prophet—and of being quite a useless person in matters practical and punctual.
Christians, in the same way, have this style of communication and have real difficulty placing their hopes in any kind of linear progress (social or technological),  any kind of “advancement”, any kind of “new world order”, any kind of “global tomorrow”, or even in experience or the wisdom that comes with age.  We, of necessity, must share the odd-ball time-keeping of Merlin.  Backwards might bring no loss at all; Forwards, not necessarily progress.

Clearly we will be at odds in the next four weeks with the time-keeping of our society.  Most everyone around  us is preparing for an infant whose memory will pass away a few days after the holiday.  This kind of  so-called “Christmas” leaves our linear time undisturbed, and its main character judges no one, redeems no one, and simply comes again year by year with dreary regularity.  This pageant has nothing to do, of course, with Jesus Christ, and points out the deep tragedy of the failure to keep Advent as a discrete season in preparation, in anticipation of a time when all Christmases, like all forward march of time, like all death and suffering, will be at an end.

God, on the other hand, is setting up the stage to rule and reign—and already the signs are here:  Prophets come, for instance—“Merlins” with a strange message and an odd character.  One thinks of Elijah, Jeremiah (whom we read this morning), John the Baptist (whom we will meet next Sunday) and the rest.  The Prophets are testing the microphones.  If you can’t hear the sound check, you can’t possibly be ready for the big event.

We wish to warn and admonish everyone around us that what is coming, that what actually came, is the end of our era, and the judgment on our trifling, our banalities, our appetites, and our despair.  “Wake up!” we wish to say.

To ourselves and to all who will listen, we say, ‘Be Ready!”

“Lay aside every weight!” we say.  Confess your sin and be rid of it!  Storm the confessional with your penitence and tears.  Give the light some room to be born in you, so that at the day of His coming you won’t be found to be all Darkness.

“Watch and Pray!” we say--knowing that prayer will be the official language of the Kingdom of God and that it is never too late to learn it.

“Let the King at his coming,” we implore, “find you in the midst of a good work—not an evil or mindless one!  Bear fruit fit for the King’s pleasure!  Please him first, and at his coming you will be pleased!”

All of this is our Advent proclamation—our solemn declaration that the rule of God is on its way to redeem our time.  Everything, simply everything, hangs upon this.

Poised as we are, then, on the brink of a coming—eyes fixed on the front door to see who will burst in—we do not yet notice the thing someone is quietly laying on the back steps.  In a few  days, not yet, we will ponder a thing so weak and small, a mercy so tender that it judges the hard heart of the world completely.  It will be a power beyond mere power.  It will give a fire of love that cleanses exactly, and leaves in men and women only the golden stuff that God created and loves so dearly.

But we do not need to wait, really, for He is here, in this Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, our constant companion in the exploration of all the mysteries that He is.  Already he is a fire of love, and the fire is kindled upon all the altars of the world until that time he bids all Sacraments cease, and his great Kingdom takes us up.

Amen

Come, Thou Redeemer of the Earth

Come, Thou Redeemer of the earth,
And manifest Thy virgin birth:
Let every age adoring fall;
Such birth befits the God of all.

Begotten of no human will,
But of the Spirit, Thou art still
The Word of God in flesh arrayed,
The promised Fruit to man displayed.

The virgin womb that burden gained
With virgin honor all unstained;
The banners there of virtue glow;
God in His temple dwells below.

Forth from His chamber goeth He,
That royal home of purity,
A giant in twofold substance one,
Rejoicing now His course to run.

From God the Father He proceeds,
To God the Father back He speeds;
His course He runs to death and hell,
Returning on God’s throne to dwell.

O equal to the Father, Thou!
Gird on Thy fleshly mantle now;
The weakness of our mortal state
With deathless might invigorate.

Thy cradle here shall glitter bright,
And darkness breathe a newer light,
Where endless faith shall shine serene,
And twilight never intervene.

All laud to God the Father be,
All praise, eternal Son, to Thee;
All glory, as is ever meet,
To God the Holy Paraclete.

Text:  Ambrose of Milan (c.397), tr. John Mason Neale

---

Tune:   Puer Nobis Nascitur, by Michael Praetorius

Last Chance

For the Great Castle Rush-the-Season Coffee-and-Chant Giveaway.

Click the link and leave a comment. We'll draw a name sometime tomorrow. Don't hold your breath, though, because that's still, like, a long time away, and I can tell you from bitter maternal experience that nobody, but nobody, wants to watch you turn blue and pass out.

The Advent Castle: Preparing to Prepare

Around here, we love Advent. That is to say, I love Advent. The children love Christmas. As the tree lots sprout up in parking lots all over town, and the illuminated reindeer do their Rockettes routine on the roof of the World Wide Imports out on the business route, the children dance through the house and sing uproariously, "Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!"

"No," I say, "it's Advent. Advent first. Then Christmas."

"Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!"

Etc.

In years past, I've written many posts about Advent:  simplicity and Saint Nicholas,   the dragging out of decorations, the music stuck in our heads, the music we wish would stay stuck in our heads, on not rushing the season, on gift-giving, which you have to think about even as you don't rush the season, Advent in the domestic church, the refusal of boxes of decorations to declare their whereabouts, the O Antiphons, and more. I've written so much about Advent that it's hard to imagine, at this late date, that I could possibly have any more to say.

And yet I do.

Several years ago, Epiphany made, as a gift for Helier and Crispina, an Advent Castle. (see? Told you I'd written a lot). It was a thing of beauty, a marvel of ingenuity, maybe the most loving gift any child of mine has yet given to any other child (or children) in the same house -- and alas, like so many beautiful things, it was also a thing of fragility and transience. Pieces of it keep turning up, but it's in such a state of disintegration that even its hopeful maker acknowledges the futility of trying to put it back together.

Last year, sometime after Christmas, I went to the Goodwill and came home with a blue-and-white wooden church. I'm not sure why my eye fell on it in the store, but I remember looking at it for several long minutes, wondering what on earth it was for, until it dawned on me that it was covered with numbered doors:  twenty-five of them, in fact. Aha! So I bought it, for a whopping $1.99, which I know because when I pulled it out today, the price tag was still on, and I brought it home and put it away for -- well, for today, right?

So now we've been trying to figure out what to put inside all these little doors. Baby Jesus in the manger for Christmas Day is a given, and I put the corresponding Mary, a plain white china one, in the door marked "8" for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Epiphany and I rounded up a handful of rosary rings, which we've planted behind random doors, so that the finder on each of those days can lead us in one of the Joyful Mysteries. We've got an angel, and I want a tiny Santa figure for the 6th, the feast of Saint Nicholas. Two little worry-doll figures will do for Adam and Eve on Christmas Eve;  I added a medal of the Infant Jesus as well. I'd like a tiny apple to put in someplace, for original sin and for "Jesus Christ the Apple Tree."



And some animal figures would be nice, to be present at the Manger, and to signify Creation and perhaps Noah's Ark.

Beyond that, I haven't had many very clear thoughts:  what else would you put in an Advent calendar? Enquiring minds, &c.

Faure: Requiem (In Paradisum)

With Advent at the door, how better to knit up the old year with the new, than with our hope which transcends all the years?

Giveaway Ends Sunday

Just saying.

Beat Black Friday With a Stick; or, Your One-Stop Advent Preparation: UPDATED

My friend Jennifer, of Family in Feast and Feria, has put together -- well, what can I call this? "Veritable wealth" is such the cliche. A tsunami of Advent plans?

Seriously, it's all here:  books, more books, music, Saint Lucy, links, and more.

Meanwhile, don't panic. Karen Edmisten tells you how.


Get an Advent calendar widget for your blog or website.


I've also uncovered some sweet Etsy finds, which I point out here solely because I think they're nifty, not because I know the sellers (I don't) or am receiving any remuneration for mentioning them (I'm not):


An Advent rosary

A feltboard Advent calender,  far prettier and more durable than the one I made years ago, which has been scattered to the four winds, and which involved what seemed like endless numbers of trees and sheep, as well as a massively pregnant Elizabeth and a teeny, wimpy little Zachariah whom she could have beat up with one hand -- had she had hands -- tied behind her back.


All right, this is mind-blowingly gorgeous:  a wooden puzzle Nativity Advent calendar. Pricey, but wow.


Beeswax Advent candles.


Or, from the same vendor, a kit to help you make your own

What she said.

UPDATE:  Visit our friends -- they are, in truth, our real-life friends -- at Holy Heroes for their Advent Adventure 2009.

Here's what you can expect: 

Beginning Nov 28th (the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent) and thereafter every day, Monday through Saturday (but not on Sunday), we will send you an email which will link to a page that will have everything you need for that particular day in Advent. All you will need to do is click and watch, click and listen, click and print. We'll explain everything to do, step-by-step. Total time on the computer? Probably 5-10 minutes, with activities your children can quietly enjoy, like pages to color, word searches, crosswords, and so on.

Every email will include a short paragraph of daily information which you can read before you click to that day's page of activities, just so you know what to expect that day or in a day soon to come. Usually it will only be a few sentences so that it will not take too much time to read.

The page for each day will begin with a short video explaining something relevant to Advent, to help children of all ages learn more about the richness of our faith. We've used our children as narrators, because I know that my children are always interested in what other children are doing, especially children in videos. I hope it is the same with yours.

“A Decade-a-Day:” Each day Monday through Friday there will be an audio link to just one decade of the Holy Heroes Joyful Mysteries Scriptural Rosary. You can click on it, and your children can pray along each day with other children. The children will hear a short introduction about the decade, then each “Hail, Mary,” is introduced by a verse from the Scriptural record of the mystery, so children's imaginations can be captured line-by-line, meditating on all that is contained in the mystery. We hope this is a good way to develop a love for the rosary and a deeper reflection than simply rushing through the prayers to “get it all in.” By the end of Advent your children will be not only be able to pray the Joyful Mysteries, but understand them, as well, because they will have prayed just these Mysteries several times, will have heard the Scripture repeatedly, and will have reflected on how these very mysteries relate to
preparing for Jesus during Advent. You may find that they have developed habits of mind and heart which can encourage them to pray at least “a decade-a-day” even when Advent is long over.

Beginning very soon after the start of Advent, you will also be able to click another audio link to pray the Angelus along with our children. By the end of Advent, any child can learn to pray the Angelus and even lead the family in this time-honored prayer.

On some feast days, you will hear stories of the saints. You'll also learn of traditions and family practices that you may want to adopt for your own family.

There's more;  visit them for further details. My children enjoyed Advent Adventure last year (also Lent Adventure), and I'm grateful to my friends at the CarolinaCatholicHS yahoo group for the reminder to sign up now. Epiphany's Latin buddy Virginia and her siblings -- Clara, Margaret, Trey, Anna, Therese, Lillian, and little Caroline -- are a charming company with whom to travel through this beautiful season so soon to be upon us.

Happy Thanksgiving

Watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

And have a lovely day.

Live-Blogging the Kitchen; or, Anything Is Better Than the Washing-Up

A quarter to nine, and what have we done today? 

All pies made:  check.

Silver polished by Helier and Crispina, then re-polished by Epiphany, Amicus, and me:  check.

Star Wars Lego Some Kind of Cruiser Thing with Five Thousand Pieces two-thirds assembled:  check.

Tablecloth ironed by Epiphany:  check.

Table set by Epiphany:  check.

Future ownership of china declared by Epiphany:  read my will, darling.

Devilled eggs intended to be made by one-half the Star Wars Lego cruiser-assembly team:  check.

Devilled eggs actually made:  not so check.

House cleaned:  check

Library walked to and home from:  check.

Laundry washed, sorted, folded:  check.

Put away:  are you kidding?

Self-haircut administered:  check.

Necklace not severed by haircutting scissors:  Yes!

Customer satisfaction:  jury still out.

Dog walked:  not long enough, according to dog.

Dinner of some description consumed:  check.

Turkey thawed:  seems to be.

Glass of water spilled all over child's bed at bedtime:  check.

Clean sheets in today's laundry:  as if.

Sleeping bag:  check.

Sweet potatoes to cook tomorrow:  check.

Parsnips to cook tomorrow:  check.

Brussels sprouts to cook tomorrow:  check.

Vegetable steamer reclaimed from child's bedroom:  don't ask. 

Corn-bread dressing to make tomorrow:  check.

Casters which keep falling off rolling chair replaced for moment:  check.

Headache:  check.

Aelred dispatched to Bi-Lo for one more forgotten item:  check.

Day's dishes washed:  in a minute.

Thankful already for pretty much everything:  check.

Live-Blogging the Kitchen: Thanksgiving Preparation 2009, Scene 4

Apple pie: check.
Cherry pie:  check.
Pumpkin pie:  in progress.

Crispina just misheard the phrase "pie recipes" as "viral peas."

I'm thinking there might be such a thing after all as too much coffee with heavy cream.

Meanwhile, Aelred is packing up to go to class. They cancelled all the daytime classes, but not the night ones. Furthermore, it is occurring to me that somehow a dinner has to appear on our table tonight. In fact, it is also occurring to me that I have had this thought about this time on the eve of every feast for which I have ever done major cooking. Oh, yeah, people might get hungry before tomorrow . . . 

It is for this reason, dear children, that God has given us the peanutbutter and jelly, the grilled cheese, and the big box of cornflakes.

Live-Blogging the Kitchen: Thanksgiving Preparation 2009, Scene 3

Why don't people put the can-opener back where it belongs? Why?

UPDATE:  Oh. There it is. Who had it last? Me. 

Live-Blogging the Kitchen: Thanksgiving Preparation 2009, Scene 2

If we were pastry chefs, we'd have the right amount of pie-crust dough, because if we ran out, we could just make more. We're not pastry chefs, however, and in the Bi-Lo last night, while counting out boxes of frozen rolled-out/fold-out dough, we forgot that both apple and cherry pies require top as well as bottom crusts.

I suggested just now that we could make a nice crustless pumpkin souffle, but nothing doing.

Oh, well, we were out of milk, anyway.

Did I Say Blogging Would Be "Light?"

What I meant to say was that blogging today would be live. That's right:  live-blogging from the kitchen, as we begin preparations for Thanksgiving 2009.

It's quiet in the kitchen right now. What we have going on at this moment is Epiphany peeling apples -- very slowly, she says -- while waiting for the frozen pie crust to thaw.

And what's that on the stove? Let's take a closer look. (step step step step step).

Here we are, gathered around the white Whirlpool range with built-in non-stick griddle. There's a crimson substance bubbling away in a white enamel double-handled saucepan/kettle thingy without a lid, because that's how it came from the Goodwill. What could that crimson substance be?

Careful observation reveals it to be two bags of cranberries cooking in orange juice, with maybe some brown sugar dumped on. In fact, the previous sentence more or less sums up the recipe for my orange-cranberry relish. The only steps I left out are

1) pour a cup of coffee
2) realize after the coffee is poured that there's no more milk
3) open one of the pints of heavy cream, remarking to yourself that things are certainly off to an auspicious start

You may, optionally, decide in the middle of these proceedings that you want to blog about events as they unfold. This requires you to shuffle out to the hall where the desk is, carrying your coffee. You put the coffee down on the desk, shuffle back into the kitchen to give the cranberries a stir, and to listen to them go pop pop as they simmer in the orange juice, shuffle back to the desk where you don't see the cup of coffee sitting as you left it, shuffle back into the kitchen where you think you might have left it, then shuffle out to the desk again and smack yourself on the forehead for being such an obvious textbook case of early-onset dementia.

But these steps complicate the recipe, perhaps unnecessarily.

It appears at this time that Epiphany has peeled and diced an entire bag of apples, but pie-crust dough is not thawed. That's right, the pie-crust dough remains as permafrost. How long will it take to defrost? Only time will tell. As it were.

Spending the Day in the Kitchen

So blogging will be light today and tomorrow and all weekend, probably.

Our menu: 

turkey
cornbread stuffing
mashed sweet potatoes*
roast parsnips
brussels sprouts
rolls
giblet gravy
cranberry-orange relish
devilled eggs**
pumpkin pie
cherry pie***

As you can see, we're traditionalists. No lasagne for us on Thanksgiving, thanks, though we love it at any other time. No creative alternatives;  no turducken, no nut loaf, no curry. Just the stuff. We're boring that way.


So, what's everyone else having for dinner? Are you as boring as we are? More boring? Way less boring? So unboring that your dinner involves a skydiving course?


Maybe it's eating turkey that makes us boring.  One of the children, who shall here remain nameless, was ranting on today about how boring people are at Thanksgiving;  all they do after lunch is fall asleep in their chairs. We suggested that this was a consequence of consuming a fowl high in L-tryptophan (though the scientists out there, the ones not emailing each other about global warming, suggest that it's also a consequence of overeating after stressing out for days about the cooking and cleaning and family togetherness).

"Riiiiiiiiiiiight,"  said the child in question. After all, that is the kind of thing we'd make up and try to pass off as empirical fact, because we're that kind of parents.


When we're not the boring kind, that is, snoring away in our chairs after lunch.


Have a lovely, blessed holiday, boring or otherwise. And don't forget the coffee giveaway!



*no marshmallows, just cream, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg &vanilla, and brown sugar on top
**Amicus made devilled eggs the other day, and they were so excellent that we're having them for Thanksgiving dinner, too
***Epiphany is making the cherry pie;  she is also making apple pie for Thanksgiving breakfast

Don't Forget Our Great Rush-the-Season Coffee-and-Chant Giveaway

Details here.

Pre-Thanksgiving Cooking Freak-a-Thon, and More

Relax. Don't freak out. Really. That frozen turkey has two more days to become something other than a bowling ball.  If you must panic,  there's always Thanksgiving 911, at the New York Times, no less.

Related News, For the Last-Minute Planners Among Us, Not That I Would Know Anything About That:  

Farm Bureau: Thanksgiving Food Costs Down

Frugal Foodie's Guide to Thanksgiving

Not frugal enough? Here's more.

And more.

Common sense, and more economy, from the Hillbilly Housewife.

Easy and frugal desserts

To keep the children happy until the Macy's parade comes on: 

Thanksgiving-themed word searches, crossword puzzles, and more  


Thanksgiving coloring pages

Thanksgiving math worksheets -- now, now, some people enjoy this kind of thing.

Printable Thanksgiving games, crafts, activities, and more

MEANWHILE:  Don't forget to enter our  Great Castle Rush-the-Season Giveaway.

The Great Castle Rush-the-Season Giveaway

All righty. It's not really that time. I mean, for crying out loud, Advent doesn't even start until Sunday. But they've put the big light-uppy snowflakes on all the lampposts downtown, and on Christ the King, the Angel Tree in the church social hall was decorated and hung with names already. So I guess if I can go out now and buy warm socks and an educational toy for some needy little girl who really wanted a Bratz doll -- sorry, we don't give prostitutes for Christmas, sweetheart -- then I can give you something, too.

But what, you ask, can I give you? Aha, my friends:  I can give you two of my favorite things, things I would want for myself, because after all, isn't that how I'm supposed to love my neighbor? Of course it is. So, what would I want in this world, what do I love in this world -- in the way of consumer goods, that is --  but coffee and chant?

So, here's the deal. Leave a comment on this post, and you'll be in the running for the Mystical Christmas gift set from our friends the Mystic Monks. You get not only a bag of the monks' Limited Christmas Blend, in your choice of whole bean or medium grind, but also the Mystical Chants of Carmel CD:   a $25 value, absolutely free.

Actually, you could argue that chant isn't a consumer good, but why don't we not right now? Leave me a comment, I'll draw a name on Sunday, Advent 1, and maybe it'll be you sitting at the kitchen table, snow (or rain) falling outside (or maybe you live in Arizona and the sun is perpetually shining, in which case  you can always close your eyes), sipping some rich, fragrant, utterly contemplative coffee, while the unearthly strains of chant hang on the (coffee-scented) air.

Or maybe it'll be you who've done some blessedly frugal Christmas shopping for the coffee-and-chant lover in your life.

Sound good? It sounds good.

Meanwhile, check out the other great Christmas specials and gift sets on offer. Support the monks, and you'll also be helping your favorite castle denizens buy a Mazerati to put up on blocks in the front yard. That's how we do things around here, after all.

P.S.  I should have thought of this before, but in the interest of shipping costs, I think I'd better restrict this giveaway to residents of the continental U.S. Not that I don't love those of you who live elsewhere;  I have a prayer giveaway going on 24/7/365, and shipping is free.

Automotive News

The van is dead. Long live  . . . Steve-Next-Door's 1996 Saturn sedan, which runs great except that the battery spontaneously loses its charge. It only does this about every three weeks, though, so that's all right.

Here's how things fell out. When we came home from church yesterday, Aelred was feeling gloomy. He'd seen a 2001 Chevy Cavalier parked by the roadside with a For Sale sign on it, and he'd been hopeful about this prospect until he learned that the people wanted $2, 900 for it. He had me go online to look up the Blue-Book value of the car, hoping that it would turn out to be more like $500, which is more or less what we have to spend. No luck:  the Blue-Book, as it turned out, said the car was worth . . . uh . . . $2, 900. There went that round of haggling, out the window before it began.

As I sat looking dejectedly at the computer, it came to me that the only way Aelred was going to find a car to buy -- that wasn't already a salvage vehicle, that is -- was that someone we knew, someone nice and disposed to do us a favor, someone out there, somewhere somewhere, would turn out to have a car they wanted to get rid of.

I told this to Aelred, and I also mentioned it to God, who naturally already knew, but always likes us to arrive at the place of asking. And then Aelred and I, resolving to think no more of cars for the time being, took the dog for a walk in the bitter November weather. The wind was bracing, and brought us back to our senses. After that I planted some bloomed-out chrysanthemums, which had been in baskets on my front steps, in a flower bed next to some other bloomed-out chrysanthemums I got last week for 99 cents in front of the Bi-Lo.

When I was finished with that and went to put the shovel away in the garage, I heard voices over the fence, from the direction of Steve-and-Jane-Next-Door's house. There I found my entire family, minus Epiphany, who was spending the afternoon on the phone with a friend. Helier was stalking around aiming Steve's bb gun at things:  it doesn't so much shoot the bbs as drool them, which was fortunate for everyone and everything on the block, especially Jane's flourishing thicket of kale, which Helier is especially fond of trying to take down. Crispina was jumping off the tailgate of Steve's defunct Chevy pickup -- it's there, apparently, for the purpose of giving little children something to jump off. Amicus was in their garage with Jane -- both she and their son are potters, and the garage is really a workshop -- making pottery leaves, which she promised to take up the street to the community workshop to fire. Intermittently, all three children were digging through a big bucket of what looked like gravel, but proved to be fossil rocks and sharks' teeth.

Anyone who thinks small-town life is boring and narrow . . . well, scratch that. Sometimes it is. But anyone who thinks that the inhabitants of a small town like this one -- in the South, too far from anywhere to dream of one day having a Main Street of upscale boutiques -- can be summed up as rednecks, or yahoos, or even especially homogenous, either isn't paying attention or else takes no delight in observing the infinite subtle variations in human nature. So there.

Take what happened Saturday, for example. I was out with the leafblower, blasting leaves off the surface of the front yard and trying to sculpt them into a tidy mound at the curb, for the remora-truck to slurp up this week. Across the street, at the community college, a grounds crew of four or five guys was doing the same. They were a lot better at it than I ever am, being professionals and all, and they finished a lot faster than I did. As I was plugging the extension cord back into the blower for about the zillionth time,  they advanced across the street,  blowing leaves expertly onto the curbs, and up the slope of my yard. It really was a little like an invasion:  guys in hoodies, wielding these big weapon-looking things, aiming them at my boxwoods and my nandinas and along the edges of my driveway. Of course the noise was too great for conversation;  I just stood there holding my own blower with what I hoped was a pleasing, welcoming, and grateful expression on my face, while they dispensed with my leaves. Then I brought them out glasses of water, which was all I could think of to do for them -- I didn't have cookies baked or anything like that, because I'm the leaf-blowing kind of mother, not generally the cookie-baking kind. Actually, I'm the writing kind of mother who says, "Mmm," when people appear beside my desk wanting breakfast for the ninth or eleventh time in the last hour . . .

Anyway, I guess I blow leaves like a girl, but I don't care. That's what life in a small town is like. Also, Aelred's going to drive Steve's '96 Saturn to work today, to see how it does. The Blue Book says this car is worth something like $300, so if we give Steve the $500,  we'll have come at least sort of close to being good neighbors.

Good Reading on Monday Morning

In Which Betty Is Wonderful, Again

Go read her.

Vivo Cristo Rey

On the feast of Christ the King, consider the witness of Blessed Miguel Pro, and of Jose Sanchez del Rio, twentieth-century martyrs of Mexico.

Consider as well these words from Fr. Geoffrey Bliss's spiritual classic for children, My Path to Heaven: A Young Person's Guide to the Faith (yes, yes, if you buy it through this link, I get a kickback;  don't let that stop you), with illustrations  by the acclaimed author-artist Caryll Houselander:

What would you say to the king . . . if he asked you to fight on his side? Suppose he said to you:  "It will be a very stern fight and last a long time, but I promise you victory in the end;  and you will find me always in the front line, fighting along with you. Will you follow me? I need faithful followers." What would you answer? 

 [A]lthough you are still a child, you are old enough to answer and take your solemn vow of fealty ot Jesus Christ. And He is waiting for your answer. If we are not base, dishonorable cowards, there is only one way we can answer the call of Christ the King:  by promising to be loyal followers, ready to fight bravely, at all cost, every evil thing that is an enemy of Jesus. 

. . . But there are some who make an even better answer to the King's call and say, "Jesus, my Lord, let me fight very close beside You and have a special share in all the hard things You Yourself suffered in this fight, even if it means being as poor as you, and as disgraced as You were, and persecuted." . . . [Y]ou will see that the followers of Jesus have not taken swords for the weapons, but crosses. Those who follow Jesus must suffer more or less, and be patient in suffering. Jesus said, "If you will come after me, deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me." 

. . . 

Think well about the answer you mean to make to the call of Jesus Christ the King.  

Three Years Ago Today

We built the castle, and it didn't fall into the swamp.

Farmers' Market Pumpkin Recipes

Aelred, doing a round of grocery shopping this morning, swung by our local farmers' market, which closes for the season after today. He brought home some lovely red tomatoes -- we are still getting lovely emerald ones which refuse to ripen in the chillier weather, plus banana peppers -- and some pumpkin-themed recipes from the North Carolina Agricultural Extension.

Here's the first, for pumpkin soup: 

Four 4-inch-diameter baby pumpkins 
1 TB olive oil
1 TB maple syrup
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 c small diced onion
2 TB butter
2 c smashed pumpkin
1t nutmeg
3 c chicken stock
uh . . . "salt and pepper to taste," it says again
2 TB creme fraiche
pinch cinnamon
pinch nutmeg
pinch allspice
uh . . . "salt and pepper to taste" again
2 slices pumpernickel bread
1 t olive oil
AND "salt and pepper to taste"

1. Boil proofreader until tender

2. Cut tops off baby pumpkins and hollow with spoon, removing seeds but not flesh.

3. Place hollow pumpkins in shallow baking dish and drizzle with olive oil and maple syrup

4. Aha! Season with salt and pepper and bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes, or until tender, then set aside

5. In medium saucepan, brown diced onions in butter over medium heat. Add nutmeg and smashed pumpkin and continue to sweat -- I'm sweating right now, just typing this out. Add chicken stock and season with -- can you guess? Salt and pepper! Simmer 10-15 minutes, adjust seasoning and consistency, and set aside.

6. Combine creme fraiche, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and season with -- get ready. Salt and pepper. Set that aside, too. You might at this point consider installing a second kitchen island, or another table or something.

7. Dice pumpernickel into 1/2-inch pieces and toss with olive oil aaaaaaaaaand . . . salt and pepper. Toast in 350 oven on baking sheet (not bed sheet, sheet of paper, sheetrock, or any other kind of sheet) for 5-7 minutes until toasted and crunchy. Set aside with all that other stuff.

8. Ladle hot soup into hollow roasted pumpkins. Add a dollop of the spiced creme fraiche and top with pumpernickel croutons.

Wah-lah. I'm thinking that I will try this this week, maybe as a first course for Thanksgiving dinner. I'm not a great dealer-with-real-pumpkins, however;  the worst dessert I've ever made was a pumpkin pie for which I boiled and roasted and scraped pumpkins. A lot of work and sweat, a rotten pie, and it's been Libby's for me ever since.

So the serving-in-hollow pumpkins idea is totally cute, but not likely to happen around here. God gave us china bowls, and I don't like to be ungrateful. I am thinking that in the interest of time and sanity, I will substitute canned pumpkin for fresh, and probably some other kind of bread for pumpernickel, which I don't like much.

If I make the soup and it turns out well, I'll try to remember what I did and let you know.

Meanwhile, Aelred also apparently tried the following on graham crackers, and said that it was "yummy." It's the kind of recipe I wouldn't be inclined to try, because for some reason ingredients like "Cool Whip" and  "instant vanilla pudding" turn me off in a way that ingredients like "canned pumpkin" do not. Anyway, Aelred liked it, so if he wants it, I'll make it:

Easy Pumpkin Dip

1 16-oz Cool Whip
1 small instant vanilla pudding
1 15-oz can pumpkin
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice

In large bowl, mix together all ingredients. Chill before serving ("indulging," they say). Serve with cinnamon graham crackers or apple slices.

I'm wondering how well it'd work with real cream and . . . hm. Seems to me that I could just as easily make a pumpkin pie, which I was going to do anyway.

My favorite pumpkin-pie recipe ever ever ever comes from Julia Child's The Way to Cook,



which I received for Christmas several months before we married, and which I have used, and used, and used, and used.

(and if you want to use it, too, and don't have it already, buying it through the link above would of course enable us to purchase our third home on the Riviera and send our daughters to charm school)

I'm thinking I'll make some version of this again this year, but with spinach or chard instead of kale, which nobody in the family but me likes much. That post reminds me that I've got to start taking and uploading pictures again. Right now the camera has something like 981 photos on its memory card, and uploading into iPhoto takes a minimum of three hours, so I just haven't been doing it much.

All righty, time to saddle the mule and head for the trading post before they auction off all the turkeys already.

A Girl and Her Dog Friend

I'm listening right now to an extemporaneous song which goes like this:

I love you, I love you, I love you so much
I'm going to take you to Heaven with me
In a cage.

That's one way to make sure your dog will be there . . .

The Friendship of Girls

When we lived in England, and Epiphany was turning -- seven, I think it was -- her birthday fell on a weekend for once, and she wanted to have her party that very day.

Now, our typical family method of birthday celebration is, and always has been, as follows:  presents at the breakfast table, something nice for supper that night, and whatever approximation of a cake I can manage to scrape together. Ask Amicus sometime about the oversized green donut I made for his eleventh birthday, and you'll see what is meant by "scrape together."

And then at some later weekend-type date, maybe in the same month as the birthday and maybe not, we get around to having friends over. Amicus, for example, turned twelve on All Souls;  his "party," such as it was, involved the more-or-less impromptu roundup of about six other boys at the end of Mass last Sunday and bringing them home to fire the Airsoft gun at a target in the back yard for about four hours straight. There was also a lot of running and yelling, and the dog got loose once and took the block at top speed with the boys in smoking pursuit. The dog, who is way faster than any boy alive, had a grand old time at that party.

That is a boy birthday party. The less planning the better. If somebody asks you what the theme of your son's party is going to be, you should dispense with the pirates and the Star Wars and just say, "Chaos." Or maybe, "Chaos with food."

Girls, on the other hand, have ideas. The year she turned seven, as I said, Epiphany's idea was that she would have her birthday party, with friends, on her actual birthday. She had never had a party on the day of her birth, and this seemed to her a pleasing novelty.

At that time, she was still going to school, and at school she palled around with a group of five or six other  girls. All of them had known each other more or less since birth, but they had welcomed the little American stranger on her arrival, inviting her over often to play at their houses, and we had felt very self-congratulatory about the way things had turned out:  happy little school, happy little friends, happy little -- well, actually, she melted down in tears on the walk home from school every day, which should have told us something but didn't, until much, much later.

Naturally, when I asked her whom she wanted to invite to her party party, she named these girls. And so I started ringing their mothers.

Now, it happened that another little girl in this group had a birthday close to Epiphany's -- the next week, maybe. And I forget whether it was her mother I rang first, or another mother. What I do remember with perfect clarity is that by the end of the first telephone conversation with the first mother, whichever one it was, I had learned that this other little girl was having a party the day of Epiphany's birthday, and that she had invited all the other girls, but not Epiphany.

I put down the phone in a trembling rage. This wasn't entirely reasonable, of course:  the other child couldn't help when her birthday was, they were going to see some show which ran that weekend, tickets were expensive, they couldn't be expected to remember that that was Epiphany's birthday, blah blah blah. What had made me really angry, however, was the mother's glib suggestion that perhaps we'd like to reschedule Epiphany's party, so that all the girls could come to it.

Let me get this straight, I had thought, though I was too chicken to say it:  Child A doesn't want to invite my daughter to her birthday party, and my daughter's supposed to arrange her life to accommodate that? Hello?

All I said aloud was, "Well, Epiphany wants a party on her real birthday. Sorry X-ella can't make it. Goodbye."

Breaking the news to Epiphany is a blur to me now. There were tears, I'm sure;  that's pretty much a given with girls. Homework:  tears. Unaligned sock seams:  tears. Someone else picked to be Mary in church Christmas pageant:  tears. Anything related to planning of birthday party:  well, by now you see the pattern.

From the time Epiphany was three, and we started having birthday parties involving people outside the family, we had maintained a hard-and-fast rule:  the birthday child could invite to her party as many children as she was years old. In our day of children's-birthday extravaganzas, with paid Cinderellas and day-spa makeovers, this is a sensible and economical policy. A three-year-old honestly doesn't need more than three friends to make a party;  invite many more than that, and you have a hysteria theme, which nobody really enjoys.

We have always had tiny, simple birthday parties involving a craft of some kind -- one year children brought their teddy bears for a teddy-bears' picnic, and we decorated little straw hats from the dollar store for them -- and one game, Go-Fish, which we have played at every child's birthday until the child got old enough to be embarrassed and to beg us not to do it again. To play Go-Fish, you hang a sheet in a doorway or across a gate, if it's summertime and you're outside. On one side of the sheet you have a crowd of children and a fishing pole with a clothespin or bulldog clip at the end of the line;  on the other side of the sheet, hidden from view, lurks the fish with a basket of party favors. At our house, the fish has a perverse sense of humor, and is as likely to reward the unsuspecting fisherperson with a dirty sock or a pair of underwear as with a favor -- I have begged him not to do this, because some children take it personally and burst into tears (see above),  and he is very well-intentioned, but sometimes he forgets. Nowadays he's not always the same person, either, and as a perverse sense of humor seems to be an hereditary thing, I try to remember to warn the unsuspecting fisherperson that the fish likes to play tricks, but that he will cough up the goods if the fisherperson is persistent and doesn't cry.

Anyway. The same-number-of-guests-as-your-age rule is a good one, but that year, when Epiphany was seven, we broke it. I had originally restricted her to seven guests, who as she'd planned it would be these five or six girls from school, plus one or two other friends from church. She would have had a whole host of church friends as well as school friends had I not limited her to seven.  And in fact, once we'd received the intelligence concerning the other girl's party, and had had our tears and our hurt feelings, mine as much as hers, I sat her down and said to her, "Now, really. If I told you you could invite as many girls to your party as you wanted, whom would you ask?"

She dried her tears and rattled off a list, and those were the children we invited for the day of her actual birthday. In the week or so which intervened between all this drama and the birthday, the mothers of her school friends approached me several times, as we waited outside the classroom door at the end of the day, to ask whether we'd reconsidered the scheduling of this party, because their daughters were so disappointed not to be able to come. And it was not without a pinch of vindictiveness -- misplaced vindictiveness, since the others hadn't accepted the first invitation to spite Epiphany -- that I said, "Sorry, no, she really wanted to have it on her birthday, and that's what we're doing."

It was a rip-roaring party. Somewhere I've got pictures of children -- more than seven -- sitting in a circle on our sitting-room floor (I don't remember what we did with the furniture) playing some game, Pass-the-Parcel, maybe. We have at times expanded our games repertoire to include that one, and also Amoeba Tag, which we played outside in our walled garden in the cold, early January dark. In Amoeba Tag, when the person who is It tags someone else, they join hands and keep chasing the others, adding more people as they get tagged. This is actually more like amoebic reproduction in reverse, or maybe it's supposed to suggest amoebic dining. I'm not sure. At any rate, it's a fun game, costs nothing, and can be played with children of any age past toddlerdom.

I can look back on these events now without the vengeful feelings in which I indulged myself at the time, and so, I think, can Epiphany, though for all those years her life, and by extension ours, was dominated by things like this. So go the friendships of girls, as I remember from my own childhood. I can remember with painful vividness a third-grade day spent lurking around the school playground by myself, casting ferocious glances towards the jungle gym where my erstwhile best friend was absorbed in some game with another girl. The next day, or the next week, my best friend would be my best friend again;  by middle school, she and I would have drifted apart forever,  and the girl she'd abandoned me for that day on the playground would have taken  her place. Through high school, that friend and I would break up and reunite, with all the sturm und drang  of a long-running teenage romance, again and again and again. It was from that friendship, in fact, that I learned at least in hindsight my own capacity for irrational anger and for  grudge-holding, given which the fact that we remain friends to this day, albeit at a great distance, seems nothing short of a miracle. Likewise, Epiphany remembers these girls, the girls of more than one party, in fact, to which she wasn't invited;  she not only remembers them but keeps up with them via Facebook,  with an avid fondness which far transcends her momentary and long-ago hurt feelings.

Still, at the time, her feelings were hurt, and so were mine, for her. Someone hurts your child, even in the most figurative of senses, and you want to rip their intestines out. This is motherhood at its most primal. At the same time, because you've evolved a little bit beyond the cave and the threat of the Giant Sloth, you have the sort of reflective capability which tells you that ripping out people's intestines a) isn't really done in polite society, and b) won't help your child all that much. You cannot follow her through life,  disembowelling the professor who gives her a C on her paper, the prospective employer who hires the  blonde girl instead, the director who casts her in a walk-on role when she ought to be Lady Macbeth. Besides, in all likelihood, the hurt isn't entirely the other person's fault, in which case a death of Elizabethan gruesomeness would seem an exaggerated and unwarranted response.

I've had fresh occasion to reflect on all this lately, because Epiphany isn't my only daughter. My girls are ten years apart, and ten years gives you time to put a lot out of your mind, only to be surprised all over again by what you knew already to be the nature of girls and their friends. I don't want to say too much now about my second daughter or the circumstances which have caused me, from time to time, to catch her looking murderously from beneath her lashes at another little girl -- a perfectly lovely little girl who might, for all we know, be her best friend in years to come -- as she trails along, my darling and beloved second daughter, a forlorn third in one of those unfortunate triumvirates which girls too often form. In this instance, I'm truly not tempted to disembowel anyone, though I do have to restrain myself from an impulse towards social engineering of some kind.

This, however, would be not only futile but stupid. All I can do is stand by, ready to love her up when she needs it, and say to myself, if not to her, that this moment will pass, and that grievance is no shape for a life. We do live in hope, as I've said often enough before. And in fact the child in question is generally not pining away. She is the cheerful sort, and her brothers and sister shore her up a lot. The sun doesn't rise and set on these friendships in quite the same way that it did for Epiphany ten years ago. Still, those moments happen, and they're painful for the primal mother to watch when there's nothing she can do.

Besides praying, that is. If you'd like to join the primal mother in praying that a little girl, maybe four or just-turned five or a little bit not-quite-as-close-to-six as the child in her house, would move close enough  to be part of her daily life, and to turn the imbalanced trio into a quartet, do please feel free.

Friday Poetry on Thursday Night

Because I am the impatient sort. Besides, we have to get up early tomorrow to cart Aelred and Epiphany off to campus. Still no second car.

Anyway, here are three poems for my grandparents, written years ago. In this month of saints and souls and prayers for beloved dead, it seems right to resurrect them -- the poems, that is, being all that's in my power to resurrect.


Grandmother Rising


She raised the window, heard the sycamore
breathing darkness, cool invisible strands
of air that seemed to lift her by the hands,
stand her, turn her, loose her pinned-up hair,

slip her through the screen. The blue wind bore
her wingless body over fields and ponds
till, skimming chimneys, clotheslines, ravelled ends
of cedar woods, she came to where the shore

bared its one white shoulder. There, the moon
drew a thumbnail-line as though to trace
a road where the sea pushed back the land.

Leaving her yellow nightgown on the sand,
her image in the water's wrinkled face,
she waved like drying laundry and was gone.



Commemorative Model


    Glass and chrome, like a diner.
Like a Chrysler. Like the Chrysler building,
    its own personal skyline. In shelf-
life vernacular, the Waring blender
    can be said to endure. The yellow-lit
night of my grandmother's kitchen
    endures after its own fashion: cat's
fishy bowl beside the door, tall window
    above the sink filled with black dark
which moved, spoke, pressed against the house
    which withstood it less and less.
One by one the old clocks stopped.
    They remained on shelves as decoration.
You couldn't point out that it wasn't
    3:47;  you'd hurt their feelings.
Press any of the upright piano's
    ivories, yellowed as dentures,
and you'd get a wet sponge of a note,
    mushrooms growing in felt.
At the kitchen ceiling's ground-zero,
    the bare bulb depending from its wire
washed everything 40-watt clean:
    flecked linoleum peeling itself back
from the doorway like a letter steamed half-
    open, electric oven she poked with tongs
as if it were a fire, as if the Tater Tots
    might at any time go up in flames.
You never know what might befall you
    in the kitchen, all its minor conveniences
conspiring not to warn you that sooner
    or later you'll confront obsolescence.
Eating time. Making everything sooner.
    Microwaves, she muttered darkly. Some such nonsense.
She wouldn't have one. But inside
    the Geneva cabinets' fuselage, her Waring
blender hunkered, furred with neglect.
    Had she bought it? Did someone give it to her?
If you plugged it in, pressed a button, what
    would happen? Would it whip? grind? liquefy?
explode? What price milkshakes, after all?
    Or would its functions be reduced to one click,
like a match not striking, the dull small
    voice of futility, like the Chrysler's
pushbutton starter sparking nothing
    for weeks after the wren's nest in the grille
had emptied? She was someone, my grandmother,
    who possessed the dubious gift of charming
the inanimate world into silence
    and disuse. In the end, she flew away
clean, without grief, prepared
    to beat egg whites into stiff peaks
using nothing but a fork and her hand.






 Reunion


My grandfather stands on the front porch
watching the dogs come back, reassembled

from hair, grit, eyeteeth. Again
the twin mares browse by the fence

in their brown-dust coats. Nobody asks
what they mean, appearing so suddenly.

In the back yard, the old dead --
great-grandmothers in spectator pumps,

a lost baby, never named --
stay buried. It's not their overshoes

lost in the grass behind the smokehouse.
Not their faces alive in anyone's

memory. But my mother waits
in the pecan tree's fingered shadow:

a girl, still. A second daughter,
straight hair braided tight.

Barefoot on the bare earth.
Holding a broken milk jug full

of daylilies. Hesitating,
needing someone to say, this once,

it's all right to be born now,
now is as good a time as any.

Next month we'll find my grandfather's glasses
in their case beneath the front seat

of his car. Oh goodness, my aunt will say,
as if it were a matter of his

forgetting them. As if we ought to
want to give them back, as if

we'd missed our shot at absolution.
Suppose, though, the soul pauses

as it undoes its last buttons.
Looks back at us, framed in light

inside the screen door. And we
who are left step out into

this death, to be remembered




Grateful acknowledgment is due the editors of Willow Springs, The Sonora Review, and  The New Yorker, in whose pages these poems first appeared.

The Anglicanorum Cœtibus, Playing Out on the Ground Already

An ordinand friend from our Cambridge days, now a Church of England vicar, writes that he has received with joy the news of the creation of Anglican Ordinariates within the Catholic Church. Seems that his congregation has tripled in the five years since his arrival and institution of Anglo-Catholic practice, and that many, if not all of them, are prepared to follow him and his family into Roman Catholicism.

This is precisely the sort of situation for which the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus was conceived:  people who practice as Catholics, in both liturgy and piety, including fidelity to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, within Anglicanism. Clearly they exist. They're the sort of people who might very likely have found their way into the Catholic Church at some point, if for no other reason than that it becomes very lonely after a while to be a serious Anglo-Catholic;  they're the sort of people who have hung on this long because they've had the insulation of a good parish and priest, who has also hung on this long because cutting yourself and your family adrift from your livelihood is not to be undertaken frivolously or overnight.

The opening of a door like this means that this congregation can go together, not be scattered abroad to find their way, and that they will be welcomed. In our own lengthy process of conversion, the impression we often received, especially in talking to priests, was that while they found us interesting, they would rather have had their toenails pulled out than consider receiving us, or than call the Bishop, even, to ask what to do with a Ph.d in theology with fourteen years' pastoral experience who had turned up on their doorstep with a family in tow. The Anglicanorum Coetibus will spare lay people what often seems to amount to out-and-out resistance on the part of Catholic clergy and parishes to their conversions;  it also spells out to Anglican clergy the terms by which they can actively hope to take up orders and resume a priestly function. All this is of immense value to those who, like us some years ago, have arrived at a place at which it simply no longer makes sense not to be Catholic.

More on Anglicanorum Coetibus from around the web: 

The Western Confucian considers the prophecy of St. Edward the Confessor 


Mulier Fortis voices my own thoughts (though it hadn't occurred to me to want de-lousing after my brief tour of RCIA)

More unpacking of RCIA at Saint Mary Magdalen

An Anglican-Use parish rejoices.

The Ochlophobist:  an Orthodox discusses the "courting" of Anglicans

Meet the Mystic Monks

For some time now, we've been receiving mailings from a community of Carmelite monks, who have chosen as their place apart the bleak windy grandeur of northern Wyoming. They are cloistered contemplatives, seeking God in silence and solitude and -- lest anyone think that this pursuit constitutes the waste of a man's life -- upholding the rest of us, distracted denizens of the active world, with their prayer.

Here, if you're curious, you will find a moving description of their daily life;  here, an explanation of the habit which is the monk's lifelong clothing;  here, their vocation to "spiritual fatherhood." It's with profound gratitude that I consider these men who, though they don't know me by name, are praying for me even now.

Not surprisingly, given the current vigor of traditional, habited women's orders, the Wyoming Carmelites are also attracting many young vocations to the contemplative life which, as you will see from the photos, is not all silence and solitude.

They also -- and this is maybe a little more surprising --  roast a mean coffee bean. Now, over the years, we've helped various monasteries to support themselves by buying their bread, creamed honey, and other comestibles. This has all been very good;  anything for the cause, what what.

But coffee! The staff of life! The elixir, if not of immortality, at least of extended wakefulness!  Even as I type this, the apple chai tea which Amicus made for me forty-five minutes ago, and which has gone cold at my elbow -- well, it tastes even more like cold chai tea than ever as I recall the coffee I drank this morning, which was strong and dark and fragrant and thoroughly sustaining. Our youth group has been selling coffee roasted by these very monks as a fund-raiser for their mission trip next summer, and after tasting it, I can testify that it really is very, very good coffee.

And fortunately for you, to get this coffee you don't have to be hit up by the Saint Dymphna's Youth, and you don't have to go to Wyoming, either. Personally, I wouldn't mind going to Wyoming. But it's so much easier just to click on a banner like, oh, I don't know, this one, maybe:



Give it a try:  you'll be supporting the monks first and foremost, which is what I really care about. I want to see them thrive in that beautiful, lonely place and in their work of prayer. Of course, you'll also be supporting this site a little bit, too, for which naturally I am always grateful, particularly as Christmas approaches. Now that I think of it, I pray for a number of you, too . . .

And I'll get back to doing that, just as soon as I've made another pot of coffee.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like

. . . a Teutonic neo-pagan Nightmare Before Christmas?

Yeesh. Even the egregious fact that the Daily Mail is rushing the season by printing a "Christmas" story in mid-November pales beside the subject of the story.


via the always-excellent Light on Dark Water

Chant Mystery Solved

My indispensable friend Linda writes, "What you've described is the chant I grew up with for the Nunc Dimittis - #671 in the 1940 Episcopal Hymnal. It's by J. Barnby, whoever he/she was."

He was Sir Joseph Barnby,  as I have only now discovered, a composer-organist in Victorian England, and the author of many hymn tunes to which it's very easy to find audio links. His Nunc Dimittis, not so much. I found a brief clip at Amazon:



This CD, apparently, is discontinued, but if you click on the "samples" link and scroll down to the Nunc Dimittis (it says "Anonymous," but it's Barnby), you can hear the Gloria Patri. This is a full choir, and they take it much more slowly than we do, but you can get an idea of the tune.

(And yes, if you buy something via this link, I do get paid a percentage, with which I intend to rush right out and buy a yacht. Go away, FTC).

Linda also notes that I've dropped it half a step, to a more comfortable place for altos and other non-soprano types, especially if they're going to add a descant. Our choir sings it in two parts, with descant, and if Aelred's around to keep everyone on track with the melody, I sing it (sometimes joined by Epiphany and Crispina) during prayers. In our more Trapp Family moments, that is.


Meanwhile, via Desperate Irish Housewife, the beautiful Nunc Dimittis at the closing credits for the 1979 BBC television series, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: 

Cool Science: Surface Tension

via Lissa at Bonny Glen

Chanting the Office

Melanie asks me about chanting the Daily Office, as I described doing earlier today. In all honesty, I'm the wrong person to ask for any kind of authoritative advice regarding chant:  I'm an enthusiast, not a musician, though I have a decent-ish ear and a feel for language which stands me in pretty good stead. What I've done with our Morning and Night Prayer, which we pray together as a family, is to sight-point the psalm verses to a sort of Anglican-Chant-ish tone which we use at church for the introit and communion antiphons. It's quite, quite simple, and if I had a way to record myself singing it, it's the kind of thing a baby could pick up by ear, the evidence for which is that I picked it up myself.

I've been hunting around on the net for something set to that tone, because once you get it in your ear, you can very easily sing just about anything to it. I haven't run across it yet, but here are some chant resources, with audio, which I'm not sure I've featured here before:

Chantblog:  a beautiful site with lots of helpful links and mp3 audio. Do take the time to listen to St. Paul's Cathedral Choir singing Psalm 121.

A  useful  congregational-chant tutorial  from a Biblical-theology perspective.

A Lutheran introduction to Psalmody and Chant

A MusicaSacra Forum Discussion about Anglican Chant, with possibly-helpful links.

OK, I can't find any audio of the kind of tone that we use. It's the kind of thing that's so basic that probably nobody would bother to record it. It's more basic than what musicians typically regard as basic. But if you have a piano, or access to one, you could pick out these notes, to get them in your ear. We start on A (above middle C). The tone goes A-F#-A-G/F#-E-G-F#-E-D (I think this is right -- we have the inept leading the inept here).

So first you just get this little tune in your head -- dee dum dee da, dum doom da dum doom dome.

Then you take your Psalm -- let's say you want, as I did this morning, to chant Antiphon 1 for Tuesday Week I Morning Prayer in the Shorter Christian Prayer. The antiphon reads as follows:

The man whose deeds are blameless and whose heart is pure will climb the mountain of the Lord.

 When I look at this verse, I mentally divide it into two lines, like so:

The man whose deeds are blameless and whose heart is pure/will climb the mountain of the Lord.

Then I sing it, holding that first A until I get to heart. I sing heart is pure on the F#-A-G.

I sing the second line, from will, on the F#. On the first syllable of mountain, I move to the E, so that I'm singing mountain of the Lord on E-G-F#-E-D.

Those are easy lines to point, because you can line up notes and syllables without having to think about how things are going to fit.

I don't know whether this makes sense or not -- it's much easier to sing than to explain. If anyone else can explain it better than I can, do please be my guest. At any rate, it might be easiest to start out chanting the antiphons to the psalms and speaking the psalms, and then as the chanter gains confidence, try doing the psalm verses as well. I'll try to say more about how I handle longer segments of text some other time.

"Utopia" Is Probably Not the Word . . .

. . . for our homeschooling morning. In utopia, I imagine that people do not tell their brothers that they will spontaneously combust if they have to listen to a particular Phish song, which the brother in question likes to listen to while he works, one more stinking time.

Be that as it may, here are some things we've done today which are fairly indicative of the way things work around here.

1) Breakfast. A leisurely affair, beginning around 6:30 and ending, sort of, around 9.

2) Chores, though I use that term loosely. My goal was to have all toys cleared off the back porch, which in warm weather serves as a playroom, and put away in the study, which I should really stop calling the "study" and start calling the "playroom." My actual goal, to be honest, was to accomplish this task without my having to lift a finger. In the end it got done, but I had to lift more than one finger, and the study floor is still strewn with Lincoln Logs, which does not, in my estimation, exactly qualify as "put away." Still, I can close the door and not look at them, and this is an improvement.

3. We chanted Morning Prayer. This was less impressive than it sounds;  the tone we use is very, very simple and easy to apply to pretty much any body of text. I could chant the U. S. Constitution using this tone, though I don't especially want to right this minute. Somebody, if we ever get podcasting capability, maybe I'll share this experience with the world, complete with my extra-psalmodic chanting of phrases like, "Sit down in your seat," "Keep your hands to yourself," "We don't eat toast during prayers;  that is what breakfast time is for," etc. In the meantime, if you want to pray the Office with somebody, go and visit my friend The Anchoress, who does this stuff so well that I'm off the hook, I think (N.B.: she's gearing up right now to pray the Liturgy of the Hours through Advent, so do join her for that if you've a mind to).

4. The big kids, both of whom are home today, went off to work on their own. Epiphany began her day at the computer with Teaching Textbooks Geometry -- the only math that's really worked for her, and totally worth the smackerolies you shell out for it -- then went upstairs to read her English and history and do her Latin homework. Amicus is in the study with the aforementioned music, except now it's Nickel Creek;  I'm standing by to talk about his science review questions. We've been doing cells for several weeks now, reading about them,  diagramming them, labeling their parts, defining cell-related vocabulary, answering questions about cellular functions, and so on. He is beyond ready to move on to something else, but to my mind, the cell is like the addition facts of life science:  if you don't know your cell-stuff, nothing else will make much sense.

5. While the big kids worked alone, I worked with Helier and Crispina together for a while at the kitchen table, where I have the big whiteboard. We reviewed Latin vocabulary -- nouns and being verbs -- and made up some simple Latin sentences:  Italy is a peninsula. Britain is an island. I am a girl. I am not a peninsula. And so on. Then, though my German is surpassing limited, we worked on German. We happen to have a pack of "First German Words" flashcards from Usborne and, at Crispina's request, have been going through them;  today we worked on colors and counting to ten, and if we can manage to remember, we'll put on a little show tonight for Aelred, who is a fluent German-speaker and can correct our pronunciation. Fortunately I have been paying attention at least a little bit all these years, and I'm a reasonable mimic, so I hope I'm not leading the innocents too far astray.

Then we added another element to our fill-in Periodic Table:  today's was manganese, which makes all the glass in our windows clear instead of green-tinted, as it would be if it were composed purely of silicates. Thank you again, Mary Daly.

6. I sent Helier off to read by himself -- we went to the library yesterday, and he brought home not only his own spanking-new library card, but an armload of Henry and Mudge books as well -- while I did some workbook work with Crispina, who loves workbook work. We did a couple of shape-identifying and -drawing exercises by way of math, then identified Q-words and wrote big and small Q's. Then I sent her off to play and called in Helier, who did five minutes' worth of two-digit addition and wrote some nouns (in English, this time -- we have been very tri-lingually nominative this week).

He's mastered the basics of multi-digit addition very quickly, though we  haven't gotten into carrying -- or "regrouping, " as it's known in this decade's math language -- yet. The Charlotte-Mason principle of short lessons works well for us here:  rather than giving him ten or fifteen or twenty problems at a go, by way of practice, I might give him three. The next day I give him three or four more, my aim being to determine whether he's retained what he did the day before. We go on in this fashion for several days, until the concept  comes to him automatically, then we move on. I don't plan to belabor this two-digit business for much longer, as we'll soon be doing bigger numbers, and the concept and skills are the same. He learns, he remembers, he begins to rattle off problems quickly and accurately -- and he's not bogged down in insurmountable exercise sessions.

7. After we finished our workbook stuff, Helier went off to read the Usborne Visitors' Guide to the Ancient World, Crispina went upstairs to play alone, Epiphany took a work break to practice the violin (I'm listening to her play the soprano line of "Wachet Auf" right now, in preparation for Advent), and Amicus did math and religion. We're about to have lunch;  after that, I've promised to take Helier and Crispina to the park.

About that "about to have lunch" -- guess I need to go make it happen. I'm the only one available to reach the peanutbutter.

OH, I ALMOST FORGOT THE NECESSARY TIRESOME BORING FTC DISCLAIMER:

Dear FTC, I hope you are are tired of hearing from me as I am of speaking to you. Please be advised that Mary Daly and the Teaching Textbook people are not remunerating me in any way, shape, form or fashion for recommending their products. I happen to own these items, having bought them with my husband's hard-earned money for my personal use, and I like them. Frankly, if the personages in question WANTED to send me some kind of freebie, I would not exactly chase the mailman off with a shotgun, but so far they haven't, and that's okay with me, too.

On the other hand, I do sell Usborne Books. Click those links, you get my shopping site. Buy a book from that site, and I do make something like thirty cents on the dollar. In fact, I'd LOVE for everyone to click that link and buy LOTS of books, because Christmas is coming and all. I make-a you happy, you make-a me happy.

And now we're all on the up-and-up, and I'm not bilking you unawares. Or whatever.