Waiting on the World

Over Thanksgiving we traveled to New York City, which was a great joy but also a continual exercise in patience: waiting for airport security lines, waiting for planes to board and deplane, waiting for crowds to move, waiting for buses and subway trains, for restaurant tables, for Stop lights and Don't Walk signs. 

When packing for the trip and without a thought to the need for patience that such a trip would envitably exact, I had thrown in my backpack the unopened book Patience: How We Wait Upon the World by David Baily Harned. Reading a few pages in my hotel room each night, I barely made a start at the book but got far enough to appreciate Harned's contrast between patience as a civic virtue and patience as a spiritual virtue. 

Pilot: There's another plane parked at our gate, so it will be a few minutes until we can deplane. We appreciate your patience.

Harned writes, "Perhaps impatience is not the original human sin--though some would argue that it is--but there has been consistent agreement within the Christian tradition that impatience does not signify merely the absence of a single virtue but the erosion of them all." Quoting William Lynch, Harned suggests that "the decision to wait is one of the great human acts." 

A breakfast of gratitude

The post that follows below (after the dividing line) is a repeat post from 2004, the first year of this blog. I'm repeating it here primarily because I want to add something to it. The tradition below still survives, but because sons grow up the table isn't always set for four anymore, nor is the table always the one in our home. What I want to add is that this year, while I'm thankful for many things, I'm so thankful for a very specific thing. Not a thing, but a person. A future daughter-in-law. Before Thanksgiving 2011 rolls around this lovely young woman and my oldest son will be married, and I couldn't be happier. That's what I'll say on my first turn around the table this year.

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My favorite Thanksgiving meal is not the dinner with turkey and stuffing. My favorite Thanksgiving meal is  breakfast. When my children were little we started the practice of having a formal breakfast on Thanksgiving morning. The table is set with our good china and goblets. Candles. Fire in the fireplace. The menu varies and has included items such as waffles, Swedish pancakes, French toast, or some variation of a baked egg breakfast casserole. There is always juice and coffee with cream and sugar (for this meal, only sugar cubes will do). Over the years there have been broken goblets and spilled juice and the timing for the preparation of this meal has interfered with getting the potatoes peeled on time for the "real" Thanksgiving meal. But this is the meal I wouldn't trade for any other. The value of the meal isn't in the food of course. The value is in the ritual of thankfulness that takes place while we eat the meal. As we eat, we go around and around the table, each of us taking repeated turns to name things for which we are grateful. Many declarations of thankfulness follow a similar pattern from year to year: thanks for each other, for members of our extended family, for friends, for special people in our lives, for health and safety, for employment, for our church, for our schools, for a miraculous recovery, for various kinds of rescue, for the love and presence of God in our lives. Some declarations of thankfulness are specific to the year. This year there will be thanks for...and 'round and 'round the table we'll go.  

This is how blue the sky

This weekend my husband and I spent an afternoon at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. We sought its quiet, space, and natural beauty as a balm for a disappointment the week had delivered. In a mown field, alongside progressively bare Russian Pea Shrubs and just across the road from Ponderosa Pines, we spread a blanket and sat. Earlier we had taken a ride on the tram, which runs a three-mile circuit through the property. The tram driver doubles as a tour guide and calls his riders' attention to this and that along the way.

That day, through his microphone, he kept returning to some mention of the roses. In the Arboretum's rose garden, the traditional rose bushes were now being tied up and tipped, using the "Minnesota Tip Method," in preparation for the winter. Volunteers tie each bush with twine into a single narrow stalk as if they were going to slide a tube over it. Then they dig a trench, with a length equivalent to the bush's height, extending perpendicular to the bush, and bend the bush at its roots into the trench. Finally, they cover the bush, now laid flat, with dirt and leaves to wait for Spring when volunteers will then untip the roses, reversing the process.

In contrast, the driver/tour guide told us, were the shrub roses. These roses, developed by the University, had no need for protection but would bloom until Fall's bitter end, fuchsia and scarlet petals nearly daring the cold to come and cover them. In the Spring they would revive on their own, still standing.

Not being a botanist or even a good gardener, the reason for these different postures of waiting and withstanding among roses is unknowable to me, yet blooms come again regardless. This picture is how blue the sky was when viewed from the field looking up.

Things That Fall and Things That Stand

Leslie Leyland Fields has edited a gorgeous anthology of essays about food, The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting toward God. I'm honored to have a piece included with such notable writers as Luci Shaw, Wendell Berry, Lauren Winner, Suzanne Wolfe, Robert Farrar Capon, Andre Dubus, Jeanne Murray Walker, and Gina Ochsner and other amazing contributors including Brian Volck, Alissa Herbaly Coons, Denise Frame Harlan, Chef Fred Raynaud, Hannah Faith Notess, Kelton Cobb, Jacqueline Rhodes, Deborah Leiter Nyabuti, Laura Good, Vinita Hampton Wright, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, Jeremy Clive Huggins, Stephen and Karen Baldwin, Ann Voskamp, Amy Frykholm, Thomas Maltman, and Margaret Hathaway. I'm sure I've missed someone. 

In addition to essays, the book is also a collection of recipes, one from each contributor. Among the recipes: tangy, glazed pork roast; sweet raisin challah; Jacmel jambalaya; cilantro citrus Hollandaise; one-pot paprikas chicken; Swedish pancakes with lingonberry sauce; chicken wat; and mac & cheese for grown-ups. 

My essay is called "Things That Fall and Things That Stand" and is about making my grandmother's Swedish pancakes and the aftermath of the fall of the Interstate 35 bridge here in Minneapolis in 2007. 

Rethinking Willy Loman

"We’ve spent more than 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, the character artfully sketched by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman. Willy is, perhaps, America’s consummate loser, a failure to his family. But if you can bear with me for one moment, imagine he lived in current times, not amid the postwar prosperity of 1949. Sure, his career was ebbing, but Willy kept a job for 38 years, he owned his house—he had just made the last mortgage payment—and had a wife and two children. Today he’d be a survivor. "

Julie Baird via www.newsweek.com

In the September 12 issue of Newsweek, Julia Baird reassesses our definition of failure in the light of the recent recession: "Redefining Failure–Maybe Willy Loman wasn’t a loser." Worthwhile reading if you are starting to question whether an upward trajectory is the only definition of success. 

Through the Veil: Lisa Ohlen Harris's memoir-in-essays

Friend Lisa Ohlen Harris came out with her first book this summer. I've been slow to post about it here, as I've been slow to post about much of anything this summer. Work has barreled on despite the sultry summer days, leaving little time for extracurricular writing. I would be remiss, however, to go any longer without making mention of it, highlighting it in bold, on this page.

Through the Veil is a memoir-in-essays. I love that term and what it stands for. A memoir not as in first this happened, and then that happened, but a memoir that comes together as a whole from the many parts Lisa lovingly studied, and shaped, and brought into being. The essays are about her time living in Syria and Jordan in the 1990s and received editorial stamps of approval long before Canon Press gave it theirs. On the copyright page you'll see that a number of these essays have appeared in literary journals, including Under the Sun, Relief Journal, The Laurel Review, The Potomac Review, The Journal, Jabberwock Review, and more, and have received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Essays, and Best Spiritual Writing.

I've not read the book cover to cover yet, although I've read many of its beautiful essays. I'm looking forward to a warm Fall day when the sun still shines on a patch of grass in my yard where I can park my chair and read it at length. My congratulations to Lisa on this remarkable book, and a heads-up to interested readers that her second manuscript will soon be on its way to lucky potential editors.

Right book, right time

Sitting on the shore of Lake Superior several weeks ago, watching my husband skip rocks on the water, I thought about the book in my lap. I'd put it on my reading list many years ago, bought it two years ago when I saw it at a used bookstore, but was only reading it then for the first time. It was the right book at the right time, and my gratitude for it and the image of Dave's rocks on the water, triggered this [not completely thought out] metaphor. It seems to me that if you read a book before the time is right for you to read it, the message meant for you skips across your brain like a flat stone across the water. It's not wasted because the ripples go on and on to who knows where, but you don't immediately absorb it. When the time is right, however, the message is a heavy rock that sinks down deep. A book into the hand and into the brain at the exact right time is a divine gift.