Darling Clementine

My cranky orange sweetie died today. Yesterday she could jump up on a chair; this morning she could barely walk. I took her to the emergency vet and there wasn’t anything to be done except to put her to sleep.

I sang “The Golden Harp*,” and I remembered the wonderful little book (a favorite of my father’s, too), The Cat and the Coffee Drinkers, by Max Steele. It’s about a rather eccentric kindergarten in South Carolina seventy or eighty years ago. “Only the five-year-old children who were sent to the kindergarten of Miss Effie Barr had any idea what they were learning in that one-room schoolhouse, and they seldom told anyone, and certainly not grown people.” Miss Effie teaches very important practical and moral lessons, and the last lesson we hear about is — well, Miss Effie says: “‘When I dismiss you, you’re to go straight down the drive and straight home. And if they want to know why you’re home early’ — she stopped and studied the ground as though she had lost there her cameo or her words — ‘tell them the only thing Miss Effie had to teach you today was how to kill a cat.’”

*From the First Ireland Convention, 2011:

New header, April 2012

The new lilacs are borrowed from flickr user lakewentworth.  The lilacs are coming into bloom in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where I saw them on Tuesday. 

Reading: Edward St. Aubyn, At Last — update with first chapter link

At Last is the last (apparently) of a series of five novels carrying the life of Patrick Melrose through a rich, brutal childhood and a disastrously messy maturation to whatever point he has reached on the day of his mother’s funeral.  This passage I fear does not do St Aubyn justice.  Try the opening pages, a witty and horrible old friend of the family accosting Patrick on his entry into the funeral home; you’ll know whether this book is for you.  (I was dazzled.)

(I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to see if the publisher had offered the first chapter, but I find that they did, so it’s linked now.)

Patrick is in the funeral home basement, inspecting the surroundings as well as viewing the body of his mother, Eleanor.

ELEANOR had expected to meet Jesus at the end of a tunnel after she died.  The poor man was a slave to his fans, waiting to show crowds of eager dead the neon countryside that lay beyond the rebirth canal of earthly annihilation.  It must be hard to be chosen as optimism’s Master Cliché, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, ruling over a glittering array of half-full glasses and silver-lined clouds.

Patrick let the curtains drop reluctantly, acknowledging that he had run out of distractions, He edged toward the coffin, like a man approaching a cliff.  At least he knew that this coffin contained his mother’s corpse.  Twenty years ago, when he had been to see his father’s remains in New York, he was shown into the wrong room.

At Last, Edward St. Aubyn, p 42.

Haruspex Day 2012

Eileen Willis has found my link for me.  Beware!

The fall from gold to silver was, alas, the mere beginning of a continuing downward slope of degradation that saw a steady metallic descent through Ages of Bronze and Iron.  Fortunately the classical period ended before things could get much worse, which they have continued to do ever since.  Though no poet has shouldered the task—How could one?  We have no epic poets any more—the materials are there awaiting.  The world has had its Ages of Ceramic, of Wood, and of Papier-Mâché.  I think we are now in a transitional period between the Age of Cardboard and the Age of Bubblewrap.

– John Fleming, at his blog, here.

Pilgrim time.

The lights were off in the bus, and my traveling companions and I all seated separately in the dark, and the roadside landscape hardly visible or worth seeing, and suddenly it was a good time to cry. Wait, I asked myself, is my sorrow valid? Yes, I said, it is.

The soundtrack: 275t, Loving-Kindness. My call at the Keystone Convention, from which I was traveling home. It was a great day, don’t get me wrong. More about that here. (The recording is from an unidentified Southern singing, and uses verses one & two; I called one & three, but I liked the slow pace of this version [and of mine].)

Baking: chocolate walnut sherry cake redux; dark gingerbread

For Lisa V’s (and her mother’s) Christmas Eve party, I made the same excellent and festive loaf cake I’d made last year. And it was just as good. It went well with the homely luxury of Lisa’s Polish bigos and guest Natasha’s Georgian bean dish — delicious though hideous. I’m still puzzled by the call to put the baking soda in the coffee-date mixture. Zach suggested that it might be to get the power of the acid, but you don’t want to exhaust your leavening while your bowl of coffee & dates waits to be added to the batter. In any case I used baking powder by accident and it foamed like mad when I put it into the mixture — the coffee was still warm. I added another pinch of b.p. and one of baking soda to the dry ingredients and the cake rose like a champion.

For Nick & Carlos’s New Year’s Eve party, I made Heidi Swanson’s black sticky gingerbread, which was also very successful although neither black nor sticky, I don’t know why. I made changes to the recipe, but not ones that would have decreased the stickiness. (See my comments dated January 1. I didn’t mention that I also used half white and half whole wheat flour, and that my milk was partly sour.) It was good enough, in fact, that I made another loaf to take to Aldo’s for a house singing on Sunday, where it was received with expressions of pleasure. I’m so happy to have recovered my ability to make a reasonably well-structured cake, perhaps merely by buying a new container of baking powder.

And now I have rugelach dough softening on the counter, so I’d better get on to rolling and spreading.

New Year’s Eve, 2011

162 Plenary. “Still walking downward to the tomb / And yet prepared no more.” Sacred Harp’s paradoxical blend of cheer and despair. Happy 2012, everyone.

(From the first New Haven All-Day Singing, Oct. 2, 2011; courtesy BostonSing.org.)

Haircut.

At Today’s Cut, a nearly invisible three-chair spot on East Fifth Street, where Mourad cut my hair in the summer. It’s not as spectacular as this summer’s cut — but then there wasn’t five years of seaweed to cut off. Nice, though. To conclude, an Algerian Muslim rubbed “Moroccan Oil” (argan) made in Israel into a New York Jew’s hair, as we both laughed.

New header image, Dec 2011

I borrowed those beautiful cabbages from a handsome local food blog called Figs, Bay & Wine which is even slower to update than I have been. (Dear FB&W proprietor, I love your pictures, but if you don’t want me to use this clip, just let me know.)