Another Marvelous Thing

Posted on December 27, 2022 by Kathy

Laurie Colwin wrote memorable, funny novels (Happy All the Time, Family Happiness); ironic, pithy short stories (The Lone Pilgrim and other collections); and two volumes of essays about food: Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen and More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, derived from her long-running column in Gourmet magazine. She died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 48 in 1992.

Lots of readers came to Laurie Colwin through her food writing. I discovered her food writing in the opposite direction, loving her fiction first. My copy of Home Cooking, a 1990 birthday gift, is now tattered and stained, mostly because of “How to Make Gingerbread,” which I reread every Christmas season. Colwin is writing about actual cake, not gingerbread cookies, as this introductory paragraph makes clear.

I love gingerbread in its true cake form—moist, spongy, and spicy. It is strictly home food, but no one makes it anymore. . .Gingerbread made from scratch takes very little time and gives back tenfold what you put into it. Baking gingerbread perfumes a house as nothing else. It is good eaten warm or cool, iced or plain. It improves with age, should you be lucky or restrained enough to keep any around.

A simple dessert that perfumes your house and improves with age? A generous tablespoon of ground ginger in a nine-inch cake? I had to try it, and now Colwin’s gingerbread is a regular part of our holidays.

I have not yet included the molasses she recommends, Steen’s Pure Ribbon Cane Syrup, which is available online. I will try to acquire by next fall. “You do not need Steen’s to make gingerbread,” Colwin writes, “but I see it as one of life’s greatest delights, a cheap luxury.” Looking forward to next year.

Here is the bare-bones recipe, shorn of Colwin’s delicious description, as shared in the New York Times, but do yourself a favor and check out Home Cooking from the library. Whether you cook or not, you’ll have a delightful reading experience. And then pick up her fiction.

The lovely bow on my gingerbread above is courtesy of Martha Stewart, who tells us how to do it, as she does with so many things. My stencil on a cake or brownies doesn’t exactly impress my friends and family. It makes them smile, because it doesn’t seem like something I would (could) actually do. If I can do it, anyone can!

The holidays aren’t over yet! What are your favorite kitchen creations?

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Honoring the Bleak Midwinter

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Kathy
Photo by David Beale on Unsplash

One of my favorite Christmas carols is “In the Bleak Midwinter.” The verses are by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), an English poet. They were set to music by Gustav Holst in 1906. The Pre-Raphaelites, of whom Rossetti was a part, strove for the simplicity and directness characteristic of artists before the Renaissance (therefore before the artist Raphael). Rossetti’s poem illustrates that simplicity.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan.
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
 
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
 
Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.
 
Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.
 
What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

In her day, Rossetti was compared to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, because, of course, they were both girls. Critics disputed who was the superior lady poet. In the 20th century, she was still considered subordinate to her older brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who earned more space in the textbooks. My old Norton Anthology opines, “England, the birthplace of poets, has produced few women poets of note, but of these few Christina Rossetti is perhaps the finest.” Nice of them to say so.

Others have lavished less attenuated praise. In the 1930s, for example, the essayist Basil de Sélincourt called her “probably in the first twelve of the masters of English verse.” Since the 70s or so, Rossetti has undergone an even greater revival, like a lot of women artists. I suspect this renaissance might have encouraged Annie Lennox and Cyndi Lauper (in a lovely straightforward rendition) to record the song.

Here is a more traditional, very beautiful version, by a small chorus called Tenebrae.

What’s your favorite Christmas music?

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The Day the Sun Stands Still

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Kathy
Photo by Hert Niks on Unsplash

Today is the day the sun stops.

Ever since September, as the sun gradually moved south in the sky, the daylight has ineluctably become briefer and the darkness has lengthened. In the culmination of that journey, the night lingers for almost fifteen hours for us in the northern hemisphere.

Finally, on this shortest day, the sun hesitates in its journey south and begins heading in the opposite direction. The solstice marks that moment. The Latin word sol named the sun. Solstice’s second syllable derives from the verb stare, meaning “to stand,” as in status, statue, and stationary. Ancient people, attuned to the sky, noticed that the sun was up to something.

And the sun’s hesitation is something to celebrate, because increasing darkness is ominous, as we in Cleveland well know. Short days don’t bode well for the olive groves or the vineyards. So when we see the sun changing its mind and lengthening the days, we say (if we’re Roman), ”Io Saturnalia!” for the festival of Saturn, an agricultural deity.

 “Yay!” Romans said at this time of year. “Bring out the lights and the greenery! Saturn’s coming back!”

When early Christians wanted to celebrate the birth of Christ, they shouted “Yay!” under cover of the Saturnalia. Scripture doesn’t say when Jesus was born, so the wily Christians incorporated the Saturnalia’s decorating, gift giving, and feasting into their own celebration. What the Roman authorities didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

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Baking Cookies, Remembering Dee

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Kathy

Christmas is a time for joy, but also a time for grief.

Holiday preparations remind me of my mother-in-law, Dee Ewing, who died in 1993. My childhood Christmases were fine, certainly not traumatic, but sometimes strained and stressful. My Christmas nostalgia dates instead from the ‘80s, when I was newly married, and then a new parent, when I spent part of Christmas with the Ewing family.

I’ve written before about a sweater Dee gave me when John and I were dating. That year, she bestowed on all her kids and husband a patchwork sweater. Including me seemed to make me a part of the family. I still keep that worn and torn sweater in a dresser drawer as a memento of her welcoming.

Every November thereafter, Dee would hand me catalogues from L.L. Bean and Land’s End (two companies I had never heard of in my pre-Ewing life) and tell me to pick out what I wanted. The first year or two I checked off three or four items in each book, thinking I was giving Dee a choice. Instead, she’d buy them all. I was more circumspect in my selecting after that, but she never became more circumspect in her buying.

When we had kids, she’d spend a few days before Christmas with us and take the kids to our local big-box toy store. We’d walk up and down the aisles with the kids pointing out what they liked and wanted, which Dee would jot down on a piece of paper. Then she’d go back and purchase them all.

Her Christmas gift wrapping took hours and hours.

Was it too much? Too materialistic? Yes, and yes. Was Dee fortunate to have the money to spend on so many gifts? For sure. But I see Christmas as an outlet for Dee Ewing’s prodigious love and generosity, expressed also in a fully decorated house, dozens of Christmas cookies, and a delicious Christmas dinner.

Dee’s love was a tremendous gift. I wasn’t her daughter. (She already had a beloved daughter.) I was more like a friend and adopted orphan. She loved me and took care of me, and I hope she understood, a little, how much her caring meant to me.

The other day, baking chocolate drop cookies and listening to my favorite cookie-baking music (Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances) brought me to tears. When John walked into the kitchen, I said, “Once again I’m trying to channel Dee Ewing.”

Taking a bite of a cookie, my husband said, “Yours are very good. Not quite the same as my mom’s, though.” I’m going to keep working on it.

Share your holiday griefs and joys below.

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Learning from Chaser

Posted on December 17, 2022 by Kathy
Chaser and Dr. Pilley

I used to introduce my Latin students to fundamental grammar by telling them about Chaser, the dog who knew a thousand words. Chaser, I would explain, learned the meaning of verbs such as fetch, paw (as in pawing her toys), and nose (as in poking her toys with her nose). She understood the direct objects of those verbs by correctly fetching, pawing, and nosing her toys, including frisbees and stuffed creatures of all kinds. In addition, she distinguished between common nouns and proper nouns.

That is, if her friend and master, John W. Pilley, a retired psychology professor at Wofford College in South Carolina, told her to fetch a mouse, she would fetch any old cloth mouse, but if he told her to fetch Mickey, she reliably fetched Mickey.

“She could understand syntax,” as the magazine Bark put it. I would tell my newbie Latin students that if Chaser could distinguish verbs and nouns and grasp (literally) a sentence’s direct object, then surely they could, too.

Pilley’s book, Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words (2013), written with Hilary Hinzman, describes how the diligent professor helped his energetic dog to amass a vocabulary roughly comparable to a four-year-old human child. Chaser also exhibited reasoning skills that most scientists would not have predicted. If Pilley asked her to find an unfamiliar toy with an unfamiliar name, for example, Chaser identified it by the process of elimination.

Pilley and Chaser were featured on 60 Minutes and other news shows. Here, for example, she demonstrates her skills for Anderson Cooper. She was called the smartest dog in the world, and as a border collie, bred to be exquisitely attuned to human speech, Chaser had special gifts. But Pilley always insisted that all dogs have tremendous potential for learning.

Pilley’s book about Chaser is also about him, a sweet, determined, single-minded, disciplined man. A former Presbyterian minister, Pilley seemed to employ the same positive techniques with his psych students at Wofford as he did with his dogs. Long before Chaser, he brought his dogs into the classroom and assigned his students to teach them things. Some of them trained his dog Grindle to answer the phone, which he and his wife Sally had to unteach him at home. His dog Yasha learned “to pretend to jump over an invisible hurdle, balance a book on his back while walking, climb a ladder, and obey commands delivered by walkie-talkie.” Most of the student lessons, Pilley admits, evoke David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks, but in the process of teaching dogs, the students learned about learning.

Professor Pilley died in 2018 at the age of 89. Chaser died a year later, at age fifteen, memorialized with an obit in the New York Times. She taught the world that dogs are smarter than we think.

I bet you’ve learned a thing or two from your cats and dogs. Comment below: Are they smarter than we think?

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Caveat Emptor

Posted on December 14, 2022 by Kathy
Photo by Stefan Rodriguez on Unsplash

My sister reports Latin-related Jeopardy questions (oops, I mean “answers”) to me, the former Latin teacher. She told me that Monday’s show ended with the category “Latin Phrases.” Here’s the clue: “Originally, this 3-word phrase referred to when a doctor or apothecary substituted one medicine for another.”

And here’s a hint. This same three-word Latin phrase was in the news in late 2019 during President Trump’s first impeachment trial. In that case, the phrase was used in its modern, non-medical sense. You’ve probably guessed the correct Jeopardy answer is quid pro quo. (Okay, “What is quid pro quo?) It means “this for that” or “something given in exchange for something else.” The impeachment argument, lest you’ve forgotten, was that Trump tried leveraging US aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into Joe Biden and Biden’s son Hunter.

The situation was unprecedented, but it used quid pro quo in more or less its common modern sense. I give the barista five bucks, and she gives me coffee. It’s a swap, although sometimes the connotations are shadier than my Starbucks transaction, as we saw with the “perfect phone call” between Trump and Zelensky.

In ancient times, the phrase applied in a more literal sense. Physicians or apothecaries (old-time pharmacies) sometimes substituted similar herbs or medications, prescribing this for that, or quid pro quo. The ancient physician Galen (129-216 AD) writes of substituting one herbal remedy for an unavailable one and thereby saving a woman’s life. In a shiftier context, apothecaries sometimes switched medications to save money or by mistake. I had never heard of this earlier usage, common as late as the 16th century, before this week.

Take care, readers, when you approach the counter at your neighborhood CVS. Note that our word pharmacy, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from Greek pharmakeia, “a healing or harmful medicine, a healing or poisonous herb; a drug, poisonous potion.”

Yikes.

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Kid Lit

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Kathy

Note to subscribers: You receive my posts in your email. I see your comments on my blog page at my website (www.kathyewing.com/blog). That’s also where my replies to your comments appear. I reply to most of your comments, but you won’t see these replies unless you check in at my website occasionally. Also, the format doesn’t show whom I’m responding to, so sometimes there has appeared a random-seeming “That’s interesting!” from me, with no indication whom I’m calling interesting. From now on, I’m trying to begin my replies with your first name, so you can all see whose comment it’s a response to. This issue has presumably not been keeping you up at night, but I wanted you to know I’m reading your comments and (usually) responding.

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Someone I know refers to well-loved books and easy reads as “palate cleansers” between more challenging works. Along those lines, I’ve been enjoying some children’s literature in recent days.

My friend Kathie recommended The Midnight Fox (1970) by Betsy Byars after we read the recent memoir Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, by Catherine Raven, in our book group. Like Raven in real life, Byars’s young protagonist Tom gets acquainted with a wild black fox on his relatives’ farm. (His fox friendship, I have to say, struck me as more realistic than Raven’s, whose account seemed a little implausible.) The book deals with some darkly serious themes about how we treat animals and nature, but it also has joy and humor. By the end, it reminded me of Charlotte’s Web, which is very high praise.

Now I’m reading local writer Tricia Springstubb’s new book Looking for True. Her two main characters deal with a lot of pain and upheaval in their lives but come together to help (another) canine, a sweet and scraggly dog they call True. It’s full of humor, quirky dialogue, and occasional heartbreak. This book is going to my great-niece for Christmas, but I’m sneaking in a read before relinquishing it to her, as I’ve done (also with Tricia’s books) a few times in the past. Last time, she was excited to see her book was signed by the author! As is this copy!

A children’s series also helped me get through the pandemic lockdown, the Swallows and Amazons stories by Arthur Ransome. My local libraries don’t own all twelve, so I stopped after, I think, the first four. Published in the 1930s, these books follow the adventures of some adventurous young Brits, who spend summers on the coast and sail, and pretend, and get into scrapes of various sorts. I had never heard of them until Robert Gottlieb, a renowned editor, praised them in his memoir Avid Reader.

I recommend all of the above for the young and not-so-young readers on your gift list. What favorite children’s books have you given (or would you give) to school-age kids?

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A Christogram

Posted on December 7, 2022 by Kathy
Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

I promised a while back to explain why Xmas is not “taking the Christ out of Christmas.” This spelling doesn’t need to be controversial or offensive.

The X may look as though it’s eliminating Christ. People may think that modern, secular, supposedly anti-Christmas folk don’t even want to say or spell Christ. In fact, the X is not eliminating Christ. It means “Christ.”

The Greek alphabet represented “ch” with the letter chi, pronounced kye and shaped like an X, as in fraternity names such as Sigma Chi (ΣΧ). As early as 1021, a scribe used the letter to represent the first syllable of Christmas to save space on expensive parchment. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used it in a letter in 1801, and so did Lord Byron in 1811. It was in common use by the Catholic Church from about the 16th century on.

You may have seen the symbol pictured above, the chi rho, which puts two Greek letters together to represent Christ. The chi, or X, is superimposed on the rho, which looks like our P. These are the first two sounds of Christ. Emperor Constantine popularized the chi rho by waving the image on military banners. (I know. Eeeww.) That was in the 4th century.

Everyone has a right to her or his feelings and may continue to be offended by Xmas. Bear in mind, however, the term’s long, respectable history. It’s worth explaining to someone who’s offended, but then maybe stop arguing about a letter. As one of my sources points out, we probably should just follow the holiday’s namesake and turn the other XIK.

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Hummus, ATK Style

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Kathy

I like watching America’s Test Kitchen videos on PBS or YouTube. Sometimes the recipes are too fussy, with lots of steps I can’t be bothered with. But when Becky, one of the chefs, tells me to do something, I’m willing to try it, because she’s so cheerful and sincere and the dishes usually turn out well.

Her extra smooth hummus is an example. You have to boil the canned chickpeas for 20 minutes with a little baking soda in the water and then skim off the skins. When you process them, you add lemon juice and garlic and water and tahini in stages.

I can make pretty good hummus by dumping all the ingredients into the food processor at one time, no boiling required. But this hummus was extra good, I thought, and extra smooth, and worth the trouble. I had no pita bread but laid out some veggies and regular bread to accompany the hummus. Tonight I finished off the leftover hummus.

Here’s a hint about finding America’s Test Kitchen recipes. If you don’t want to subscribe to ATK, you can usually find their recipe filched by another YouTuber or website. When the recipe is featured in a YouTube video, of course, you can get it directly. Watch here to see Becky prepare the hummus and cut her vegetables into oh-so-attractive wedges.

What’s your favorite hummus? Canned beans or dried?

To review: Monday posts are about food, Wednesday posts are about language and word history, and Friday/weekend posts concern books or reading. Monday Meals, Wednesday Words, Weekend Editions. Subscribe and share!

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Truth or Consequences?

Posted on December 3, 2022 by Kathy
Photo by Nitish Kadam on Unsplash

How true to life should a memoir be? Is bending the facts or changing chronology allowed? How about just making stuff up?

Many of us remember the controversy arising from James Frey’s 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces, which, after being celebrated and Oprah-fied, was found to contain exaggerations and outright fabrications. The Smoking Gun titled its Frey expose A Million Little Lies. Oprah, the media, and the publishing industry excoriated Frey, and he was cancelled. (For a while. He’s since published more than ten books.)

Other purported memoirs, stacked among the non-fiction, also tamper with the literal truth. An acquaintance of mine swore off Henry David Thoreau and Walden when she learned that Thoreau’s mother is rumored to have done his laundry during his supposedly solitary sojourn in the woods. Fiction writer Judy Blume admitted she invented parts of her 2002 memoir Breaking Clean. Bob Dylan is notorious for making stuff up about his past, including much of his memoir Chronicles.

When should we care, and how much?

About thirty years ago, I heard writer Annie Dillard address an Oberlin English class. Dillard’s 1974 memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is one of my favorite books. It recounts her sojourn, a la Thoreau, living alone for a year near Tinker Creek in Virginia. Her book explores nature, spirituality, good and evil, and the search for meaning.

The earnest Oberlin students peppered Dillard with literalistic questions. What was it like living alone? Weren’t you afraid? Did you get very lonely? How did you acquire food and other necessities? After a while, the author shocked her audience by saying, “You know, I was high most of the time I was writing that book.”

She went on to refer to the work as “a document,” something crafted, a creation, a work of art. “It’s not me,” she said. “It’s something I made.” She was telling them it wasn’t true. I could feel the confusion and disillusionment in the room, because I, in part, shared it. But I was intrigued, and I have always remembered that word “document” and the gesture that accompanied it, as though she was holding something in her hands.

In fact, Dillard wrote half of the book from her home, a regular house, with her then-husband, Richard Dillard, and the other half in the Hollins College Library. She spent many hours at Tinker Creek and kept a lengthy journal about her walks there, but she now describes herself as a suburban housewife during the writing. The book begins and ends with her cat, an “old fighting tom,” jumping through her window onto her chest, leaving bloody pawprints. This was a story she heard from someone else.

Calling Pilgrim a “memoir” is inaccurate. (1987’s An American Childhood is a memoir.) It’s a meditation on “mystery, death, beauty, (and) violence,” as the back cover of my paperback says. Did Annie Dillard have a responsibility to tell readers that her book wasn’t “true”? Should she and others who fictionalize nonfiction be held to account like James Frey? How angry or disappointed are you when you learn that dollops of fiction have been mixed into your nonfiction book?

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