More Conversion Stories

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From basil…

…to pesto

 

Pesto Recipe

4 -5 garlic cloves

3 cups firmly packed fresh basil leaves

1 cup Parmesan cheese *

1/2 cup pine nuts * (when pine nuts cost the equivalent of gold nuggets, I use 1/3 cup)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil *

 

Mince garlic in food processor.

Add basil and process.

Add cheese, nuts and salt.

Add olive oil in a stream.

 

I used to freeze basil in ice cube trays. Now I prefer snack-sized ziplock bags. A friend freezes hers in baby food jars. Unless you have a reason to use this all today, you must freeze pesto. You can keep it in the fridge in a container with a layer of olive oil on top. Air is the bad boyfriend to charming Pesto; she turns dark and ugly after long embraces with that bad boy.

Add pesto to pasta for a perfect side.

Add pesto to pizza sauce for a perfect sauce.

Add pesto to poultry for a savory main course.

Spread on crackers with sun-dried tomatoes and cream cheese.

(From Sheri’s comment, below: Add a dab of pesto to soup to make it amazing.)

Or just Google pesto recipes.

 

[Side bar: I learned the first year of marriage to always have the ingredients of a quick meal handy. Something easy to put together if you had unexpected guests for dinner. Back in the day, I shudder to say, tuna casserole was my go to dish. Maybe that’s why friends often had “other plans.” Pesto and pasta is an elegant dish to make on the spot.]

 * I buy these at Costco or Trader Joe’s. I store the Parm in the freezer, pine nuts in the fridge.

 

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from oats (and friends and relations)…

 

 …to granola

 

Granola Recipe

12 cups rolled oats (whole or quick, your preference)

1 cup each, your choice:

Wheat Germ

Sesame Seeds

Sunflower Seeds

Walnuts, chopped

Cashews, chopped

Sliced Almonds

(other grains per your taste. See note on fruit below.)

 

Mix:

1 1/2 cup canola oil

1 1/2 cup honey

a glug of milk

a glug of vanilla

 

Microwave oil/honey mixture for three minutes.

Give it a swirl, and pour it over the oats.

Mix well. Then mix it again. And again.

 

Turn out onto Jelly-roll pan (a cookie sheet with lip) or onto Silpat. I line cookie sheets with parchment paper, but that is optional.

Bake in oven until deeply tanned, stirring every 15 minutes.

 

I buy oats in 25 pound bags; I get nuts at Costco or Trader Joe’s.

I just found a 2 pound bag of sliced almonds at Costco. Nice!

Opt: add dried fruit (raisins, Craisins, dried blueberries) AFTER baking. Trust me—after.

Opt: reduce oil and honey to 1 cup each. Just keep the proportion 1:1.

 

My greatest challenge with granola is baking it to perfection.

My original recipe said Bake 275° for 30 minutes. Eating raw oats does things to you.

Depending on my schedule and my patience, I’ll either bake it at 350° with a close eye or I’ll bake it at 250° until I can smell it, then start stirring in 15 minute intervals. The edges cook faster than the middle, so mix the granola around the cookie sheet. What I’ve found is that you wait and wait and wait…and when it turns perfect you have a 5 minute window. Then it burns. I’m pretty much an expert in how to burn granola. Step 1: Check your Facebook…

 Sheri, in the comments section, makes granola in the crockpot.

DUH!

Of course!

That’s how I’m making it from now on.

 

Palimpsest

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Our beloved Latin teacher gave us so much more than Latin lessons. His knowledge base was so great that art, music, cultural analysis, poetry and word-perfect quotes co-mingled with Latin grammar and vocabulary. But the words. Oh, the words. Inevitably, in dulcet tones, he prefaced his remarks, “Now here’s a word you will need to know.” And I, silly girl who thought she had, ahem, an advanced vocabulary, would hear him pronounce a word I had never read, heard, seen, smelt or tasted.  Never ever.

It’s a wonder my eyes don’t permanently face backward, with all the mental eye-rolling I performed.  Hah! How could it be such an important word? I’ve never even heard of it!  Ah, the arrogance, the pure high-octane arrogance. <blushes>

You know what would follow: that word would crop up here, there and everywhere within days and weeks of my learning it.  But now I owned that word. It was mine.

And to this day it is a sweet delight to read a word taught to me by my beloved Latin scholar.

Palimpsest is one of those words. It means ‘a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next.’  Imagine a monk in a scriptorium with no skins to write on, but a vast library close by. He finds something he believes is obscure, scrapes the hide, and carries on with his copying.

Last night I found my old friend palimpsest in relation to a DOG (!) in Alexander McCall Smith’s novel Love Over Scotland.

…Cyril [Angus’s dog] was rapidly diverted from this agreeable fantasy to the real world of smells for a dog, and Drummond Place, though familiar territory, was rich in possibilities; each passer-by left a trail that spoke to where he had been and what he had been doing — a whole history might lie on the pavement, like song-lines across the Australian Outback, detectable only to those with the necessary nose. Other smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below.

 

 

Unbroken

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Even though I knew that Louis Zamperini survived insupportable agonies (this can’t be considered a spoiler: the word survival is in the subtitle), Laura Hillenbrand’s taut pacing of the narrative created and sustained tension as I read along. When I came to the point where—after having been officially declared dead then later confirmed alive, the war having been concluded, his fragile health jacked up above survival levels—Zamperini is escorted home by his brother Pete, the dam of my emotions gave way; spasms of sobs shook my frame.

Over Long Beach, they sank back into the rain and landed. There, bursting from army cars, were their father and mother, and Sylvia and Virginia. The moment the plane stopped, Louie jumped down, ran to his sobbing mother, and folded himself into her. “Cara mamma mia,” he whispered. It was a long time before they let go.

Unbroken is the story of a series of rescues in Louie Zamperini’s life: how running rescued him from a mutinous youth careening with crime, the rescue from 47 days on a raft, how he was rescued from sadistic focus of a brutal war criminal, and the ultimate rescue of a tortured post-war veteran. 

Zamperini’s story is worthy of an epic poem of Homerian proportions. Hillenbrand’s prose, however, is magnificent. Here are a few of her phrases which delighted my ear:

a festival of rapid-fire diarrhea

(prisoners) gathered in drifts against the buildings

this warren of captive men

men’s bodies slowly winnowed

the sea began to arch its back under the raft

a laughing equanimity

Resilience is hard to detect in a body well nourished, well rested, and well kept. Resilience needs adversity, agony, and misery to have something to rebound from. Zamperini’s story is replete with deprivation, danger and destruction. Sharks, both human and piscine, seek to devour him. He offers bodily resistance as long as he is able. His indomitable spirit resists when his body is incapable.  

In the midst of despair in an inflated raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is a day so exquisitely described which completely changed my idea about the doldrums.

It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When a fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness.

For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren’t hungry or thirsty. There were unaware of the approach of death.

As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation in color, their slide through the sea…Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.

Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

Louis Zamperini’s story continues to the present (he is still alive and recently spoke at my friend’s church). It’s easier to end a book when the subject has died; there is a clearly defined finish. When the main character is still alive it takes more skill to bring the story to a conclusion. Laura Hillenbrand wraps this remarkable man’s story with one final scene. The significance of it escaped me at first. I went back and reread a paragraph. Oh!  Again, emotions pressed down hard to the overflowing point. The beauty, the profound and glorious beauty of this scene was the satin ribbon that tied this story together into a perfect bow. The final sentence undid me.

 

 

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Words, Words, Words

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The request to swap Margaret Ernst’s charming book In a Word put me into a panic. I loved this book and didn’t agree with my former self who had decided to list it on Paperbackswap. But I resolved to be brave, and also to quickly read it through—one more time—before I sent it off.

The flow of language, the roots of words, the vicissitudes of meaning: I find all these fascinating.

The ability to see the secrets behind the letters of words, their nuances, their humble beginnings, is one compelling reason to study a foreign language.

Companion is one of my favorite words. It comes from the Latin com (together) + panis (bread).  Thus, a companion is a person you share meals with. I know it. I love it. But I didn’t know that pantry is a place where bread was made or kept.

I could bore you with a list of stuff I learned. I could tell you that mistletoe is from an Old German word for dung, because it was believed that the plant grew from bird droppings.  I could go on with the word vogue which means to sail forth and comes from the swaying motion of a ship. Your eyelids could close listening to how calm comes from the Greek, burning heat, and how gossamer literally means goose summer. You could nod off to my voice noticing the relationship between climate, from the Greek word slope, and climax, from the Greek word ladder.  Then you would bolt upright in shock when you heard the origin of the word testify, and how the King James Version euphemistically says that an oath is taken by placing the hand on the thigh.

Let’s just stop one minute and focus.

Focus – straight over from the Latin meaning hearth, fireplace. I quote Margaret Ernst: In the days before we became nomads in the apartment-house era, the hearth was the focus of the home and home life. Now, like poor photography, we are out of focus. The word was first used in a mathematical sense in 1604 by Kepler, who likened the focus of a curve to the burning-point of a lens.

There are online sources to give you a joyful understanding of words.  Douglas Harper writes:

Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant 600 or 2,000 years ago. Think of it as looking at pictures of your friends’ parents when they were your age. People will continue to use words as they will, finding wider meanings for old words and coining new ones to fit new situations. In fact, this list is a testimony to that process.

One advantage print books have over online resources is that they are easy to browse. This is a perfect, ahem, bathroom book, given you are one that keeps books in bathrooms. Perhaps it is a perfect bedside book, one you can spend a few pages with before sleep. Although this is a fun little book, it is not nearly as extensive as the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.

Fine Art Friday – Google’s Art Project

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I had two instances of yearning this week.

My nephew’s Facebook status was “Off to Top of the Rock and MOMA”  His days as a resident of New York City are almost complete; he’s playing the tourist before he goes off to grad school. MOMA is the Museum of Modern Art, home of van Gogh’s famous piece The Starry Night. Oh. (sigh) Wouldn’t it be grand to stand in front of that painting and absorb it? To see the brush strokes and shades of blue?

 


I lunched with a friend back from a visit to Scandinavia and northern Europe. She spoke of the glory of seeing several Rembrandts at the Hermitage. The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg is one of the oldest and largest museums in the world. Thank you very much, Catherine the Great! [Saint Petersburg is quickly inching its way up into my top cities I want to visit.  Florence is first. Then it’s a scramble between Budapest, Paris, London, NYC, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Athens, Dubrovnik, Ephesus, Cape Town…and, of course,…Saint Petersburg.] I sat there, sipping iced tea, and imagining a day at the Hermitage, the leisure to linger in front of Return of the Prodigal Son examining details like the bottom of the prodigal son’s feet. I yearned.

Then, mirabile!, thanks to Meghan at Pink Peppers I learned about Google’s Art Project. Start by watching the Visitor’s Guide.

Oh, people! Do you see the possibilities?  The challenge is that there is so much to see.  It’s like getting a set of Harvard Classics delivered to your door; it’s easier to look at them than to begin reading. I’ve been wanting to revive Fine Art Friday and this seems like the perfect vehicle. Next week I will start a visit to The Hermitage. I have a focus. 

Life is beautiful. 

My Second Son

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What about second sons?

When they figure out their older brother has secured the patent on proper, compliant behavior (or, shall we say, the appearance of proper, compliant behavior), they know—by instinct it seems—that to gain a purchase in the attention-grabbing game they will have to be creative. There is a gleam/spark in a second son’s eye, a certain kind of jaunty grin on a second son’s face. I saw that grin on Prince Harry’s face during the Royal wedding. Yeah! That grin! I think the jockeying for position gives second sons dexterity, elasticity, jocularity.

You, Carson, my beloved son, are a second son.

I wish now that I had been given a manual tucked into the swaddling clothes when they laid you in my arms.  “This one is different. You need to be different with this one.”  That I didn’t adapt my parenting, that I didn’t change is my regret. And, shame, I can’t get a do-over, can I? silly

You come from some solid second-son stock. Grandpa, whom you resemble, is a second son. Your Uncle Scott, part of the SS Society, was always rooting for you, sort of a co-belligerent against your dad. He would boom, “I understand that boy!” 

And now your nephew. The one whose mom called you up and asked, “How did I get your son?”  Oh my, how we delight in that kiddo. It is pure fun to recognize his personality as it emerges. We know Preston; we can predict what he will do, the looks he will give, the shrugs, the determination, the focus. Because he is you.  And—glory!—you now have your own little Levi, that boy who knows what he wants and can’t sit still. 

You probably don’t know that your other grandpa, my dad, was also a second son. I hear he gave his mom a run for her money. Especially since his dad was gone all the time. Here’s one story: he spouted off in the car and his mom responded, “Johnny, we are going to stop for ice cream cones, but you will not be having any.”  As they continued driving, they almost passed the Red Robin. Little Johnny piped up, “Oh Mother! Do make sure you stop for ice cream for everyone else!”

God surely likes second sons. That would be an interesting study, wouldn’t it? Isaac, Jacob, Ephraim, Solomon.

It is a mercy that our troubles are behind us. That I can look at our differences with wonder and delight. That you can see our similarities…and smile. That we love each other and love to hang out with each other. That your dad enjoys you immensely. We like to talk about you, you know.

Oh my son, you are truly blessed.

What I see in you are the same characteristics you had as a lad. Back then, your stubbornness was frustrating; now it looks more like persistence. Back when I disciplined the Stoic you, nothing made you flinch. Or blink.  But a few weeks ago, you allowed yourself one yelp when you hurt your hand, and then determined to not make another peep about the pain.

You notice details.

You like systems.

You don’t complain.

You are generous.

You take risks.

You are fun to be with.

You take charge of your sons.

You bring flowers to your wife.

And life is so full of surprises.  You—the kid whom I had to force to read a book—regularly read to your son.

Happy Birthday, Carson. I love you more than all the books in the world.

 

Drooling Over Libraries

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20 Celebrities with Stunning Home Libraries

Pictures of books make me sit up and pay attention.

I can critique libraries as enthusiastically as any fashionista can pan and praise the red carpet dresses.

Here are my favorites:

 

Nigella Lawson’s library is definitely used.

It could use a little order, but this picture makes me comfortable.

I understand the stacks.

 

The books look read. I like this. I like the guitar playing too.

Well done, Keith Richards!

 

Jimmy Stewart’s – I loved the books, but not the furniture.

Too much chintz, it that’s what it is.

 

Julianne Moore’s – Light and inviting space.  Good chairs.

 

Tory Burch’s – Comfortable. I could see some serious reading

at the table, and casual reading in the chairs.

 

Michael Jackson’s – Polished wood, fireplace, chairs.

What’s not to like?

 

 

I did not like:

 

Oprah’s – I know Oprah reads.

But, a designer did this library based on color.

So many linear feet of red books.

While I like the idea of books as decoration,

I don’t like it when they are *solely* for decoration.

Meh.

 

Jane Fonda’s – The books do look read, but the space

is sterile and barren.

 

Sting’s – I love the idea of a two-floor library.

But. This looks like it is strictly for show.  No thanks.

 

A Week at the Airport

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a-week-at-the-airport

The airport and the DMV are the two best places in the world for the sport of people-watching. For diversity, there is no better place in the world than London’s Heathrow airport.

Alain de Botton was hired by British Airways to spend a week at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and write a book about his experience. It is an engaging read, easy enough to complete in one sitting, but worthy of a slower pace. It examines why we fly, the intersection between art and commerce, the choreography of an ediface that took 20 years to build. You might think of it as “light plus” reading. There are photos on every page (that’s the light). With the book classified as Travel/Philosophy, there is more commentary on life than on luggage (that’s the plus!).

The book reminded me of reading The Geography of Nowhere. Of course it did! There’s a full-circle connection: LaurieLH remarked that Geography of Nowhere was similar to a book she was reading by Alain de Botton, <a href="http://www.xanga.com/private/“>The Architecture of Happiness. It was in looking for The Architecture of Happiness at my public library, that I found A Week at the Airport!

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From the management required to keep airline employees congenial
 to the elegance of the steel columns supporting the 18,000 ton roof
 to the devastation of parting lovers
 to the way a domestic squabble so quickly erodes the joy of a vacation
 to the expectations of travelers arriving at the reception zone,
I found it delightful. Not earth-shattering, nor life-changing, but a mixture of trivia and truth.

Some quotes:

Despite its seeming mundanity, the ritual of flying remains indelibly linked, even in secular times, to the momentous themes of existence—and their refractions in the stores of the world’s religions. We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angels and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of traveling by train. 62

Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation had never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. 79

The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an essential element of the religious pilgrimage, defined as an excursion through the outer world undertaken in an effort to promote and reinforce an inner revolution. Christian theorists were not in the least troubled by the dangers, discomforts or expense posed by pilgrimages, for they regarded these and other apparent disadvantages as mechanisms whereby the underlying spiritual intent of the trip could be rendered more vivid. 104

I appreciated de Botton’s thoughts about setting up a desk smack dab in the middle of the terminal:

Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way—towards a busy street or terminal—before they run out of their burrows. 42

Three Children’s Classics

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The Prince’s name—Dolor, which means grief—sets the tone. When his nurse was carrying the infant she dropped him, causing him to be lame. Here is a tale with a fairy godmother, a wicked king and a magic cloak. There are no instant fixes. The godmother tells Prince Dolor “I cannot alter your lot in any way, but I can help you to bear it.”. Many children’s books from the Victorian era can be sickly sweet and cloying—treacle—or tediously preachy. This book, thankfully, was light on both counts.

The sense of the inevitable, as the grown-up people call it—that we cannot have things as we want them to be, but as they are, and that we must learn to bear them and make the best of them—this lesson, which everybody has to learn soon or late—came, alas! sadly soon, to the poor boy. He fought against it for a while, and then, quite overcome, turned and sobbed bitterly in this godmother’s arms.

Where Dinah Mulock sees the inevitable (Fate), I see divine providence. If I were reading this to a child, we would talk about the difference between fate and providence and how those differences would affect our responses.
 
When we see people suffering or unfortunate, we feel very sorry for them; but when we see them bravely bearing their sufferings, and making the best of their misfortunes, it is quite a different feeling. We respect, we admire them. One can respect and admire even a little child.

[My edition had two other stories by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. I found The Adventures of a Brownie, (a foot high old man who can only be seen by children) bland and blah. The lack of conflict or tension provided no hooks to hold my interest. Poor Prin was perhaps the ghastliest children’s story I have ever read. In those days an annual tax was levied on pet owners which the parents couldn’t pay. When a girl is instructed to take the dog to the landlord, she drowned the dog she loved to prevent him from going to a questionable home.  End of story. Ghastly, I tell you.]

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Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? The answer, Huck Finn tells us, is no. Instead of a good float down the Mississippi, Jim, Huck and Tom glide in hot air balloon across the Atlantic and over Africa. It’s a fun romp—it is supposedly a parody of Around the World in 80 Days—with laugh out loud humor. Don’t get your knickers all knotted because Twain puts tigers in Africa or the balloon’s fuel and food are never replenished. Some sections are dicey for younger ones: the mad (in all senses) inventor is pushed out of the balloon over the Atlantic; they come across dead bodies in the desert.

Jim begun to snore — soft and blubbery at first, then a long rasp, then a stronger one, then a half a dozen horrible ones, like the last water sucking down the plug-hole of a bath-tub, then the same with more power to it, and some big coughs and snorts flung in, the way a cow does that is choking to death; and when the person has got to that point he is at his level best, and can wake up a man that is in the next block with a dipperful of loddanum in him, but can’t wake himself up although all that awful noise of his’n ain’t but three inches from his own ears.

Me and Jim went all to pieces with joy, and begun to shout whoopjamboreehoo…

“My goodness,” I says, “we’ll be as rich as Creosote, won’t we, Tom?”

They was all Moslems, Tom said, and when I asked him what a Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn’t a Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri, though I didn’t know it before.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne retells six Greek myths [The Gorgon’s Head, The Golden Touch, The Paradise for Children, The Three Golden Apples, The Miraculous Pitcher and The Chimæra] in A Wonder Book for Girls & Boys. Eustace Bright, the gifted poetry-writing college-aged narrator who calls his cousins Primrose, Periwinkle, Cowslip, Clover, Sweet Fern, etc. tells the myths with humor, intelligence and grace.

Sit down, then, every soul of you and be all as still as so many mice. At the slightest interruption, whether from the great, naughty Primrose, little Dandelion, or any other, I shall bite the story short off between my teeth, and swallow the untold part.

Hawthorne writes an interlude chapter before and after each myth that responds to the previous story and introduces the next.  There isn’t enough material in these interludes to give me a sense of each child’s personality (it would have been easier for me if their given names—Susan, Peter, David and Sally—were used); nevertheless, I enjoyed these chapters as much as I did the myths.

Ninety-nine people out of a hundred, I suppose, would have been frightened out of their wits by the very first of his ugly shapes, and would have taken to their heels at once. For, one of the hardest things in this world is, to see the difference between real dangers and imaginary ones.

Oh, how heavily passes the time, while an adventurous youth is yearning to do his part in life, and to gather in the harvest of his renown! How hard a lesson it is to wait! Our life is brief, and how much of it is spent in teaching us only this!

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