MOMMENTARY |
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Friday, December 26, 2003 ( 1:58 PM ) Elinor Dashwood By the way, I've discovered that Florida avocados taste pretty much the same as the California ones. California growers produce Hass avocados, which are smallish and have a dark green, pebbly-textured skin. The Florida ones are much larger, shinier, and brighter green, and have a larger pit. I used to steer clear of them, but Cacciaguida brought some home from the store the other day, and I put them in a salad. They taste the same to me, although I daresay I'll get some emails proving, to the writers' satisfaction at least, that I wouldn't know the difference between a pineapple and a pomegranate. (I do, though - pineapples taste good, and pomegranates have nasty little seeds.) Perhaps the pits of the Florida avocados may prove easier to sprout; I succeeded in germinating two Hass pits this summer, but they both keeled over. # ( 1:48 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Merry Christmas, all. I'm exhausted. The first day of Christmas passed off very well. Dinner was excellent, in part because I have at length learned to make rare roast beef (ten minues a pound - say it with me, "ten minutes a pound"), and also because of a Honeybaked Ham sent by Cacciaguida's widowed uncle. This ham should remind me yet again not to give up on people. This uncle, a psychiatrist, is a funny and affable individual who was not, however, the member of Cacc's Jewish family who went in for celebrating Christmas. In fact he was always a bit scornful of it - not that he shouldn't be, because he doesn't believe in it - and I furthermore had the notion that he wouldn't lightly forgive Cacc for becoming a Catholic and marrying a Catholic. (He may be under the impression, naturally enough, that Cacc converted in order to marry me. Not so, but far otherwise. He converted before I reverted, and then we got married.) Cacc's much-loved aunt died of cancer last year, but both Christmases since then, his uncle has remembered us on Christmas. As a card-carrying member of Pigheaded Anonymous myself, I'm very much impressed by his giving up what seemed a determined disapproval. I wonder if he likes fruitcake. (Insert shrink joke here.) # Monday, December 22, 2003 ( 5:38 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I nearly forgot! Today is the first anniversary of Mommentary. For those of you who weren't here, I'll republish the Santa Claus post from a year ago today. THE SANTA QUESTION If you've read Cacciaguida recently, you've seen that we never did the Santa business with our children. That is, we read them "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and told them about the saintly bishop's character for doing charity by stealth, but we made it clear that the "miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer" were a charming fairy story and not to be believed as fact. Here's what I want to know about parents who tell their children about Santa as if it were true, to add wonder and specialness to Christmas: have they thought this through? At Christmas we celebrate the beginning of our Redemption, when God's own Son came into a cold and exhausted world to work our salvation. If you want wonder and specialness, try this: go somewhere alone - in church, perhaps, or anywhere quiet - and try to understand what was done for you, and at what cost; how the history of all Heaven and the fate of all Earth were changed, so that God might not lose you to the fire. I'm inclined to think that if that isn't enough wonder for you, a guy in a red suit jumping down the chimney won't be a satisfactory substitute. A merry Christmas, a blessed Nativity to you. # ( 12:04 PM ) Elinor Dashwood My wish for the Holy Father has always been that he should live forever. With his increasing frailty I begin to doubt, however, if that wish is entirely charitable, and if it's selfish of me to hope to keep him longer from his eternal reward. Well, God will take him when he's ready to go, and we will have to do without him. (Quote from my mother, shortly after JPII's election: "First, you start to see policemen who are younger than you are; then it's priests and doctors; then senators and even the President are younger than you. But when the Pope is younger than you are, that's when you really start to feel old.") My great prayer for the Church is that the next Holy Father should come from Asia, or Africa, or perhaps the Middle East. This Pope came to the throne knowing from personal experience what it is to live as a Catholic under political and religious oppression. May it please God that the next should know what it is to shepherd a church during persecution. There are some very good cardinals in the Far East, I believe, and I know there are in Africa. Cacciaguida will know - is there a Sudanese cardinal? What we need is personal toughness and a sense of the Church Suffering, an understanding of sacrifice and even martyrdom. What we absolutely do not need is an American or Western European bon vivant in Birkenstocks, a comfortably assimilated company man who goes along to get along. This world, and many parts of the Church, need to learn that the way of the Faith is one of dying to self and living anew in Christ. A man who has led his people through suffering will, I trust, be able to "teach with authority", and build on the great work of his formidable predecessor. But God will decide. # Thursday, December 18, 2003 ( 11:33 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Okay, okay, so I caved. I took the children to see Return of the King this evening. The sound was pretty loud, but not too bad, and otherwise it was very good. I'll have to think it over some more before I make up my mind about some parts. I kept my eyes shut during the Shelob scene, and sent silent telepathic messages to my thirteen-year-old to the effect that if he scampered his hand spider-fashion across my knee, the remainder of his existence would be brief but exciting. I still regret the exclusion of the Voice of Saruman scene, in which Theoden rejects Saruman's wooing offer of peace. It's very important to the story that Theoden, a reluctant combatant until this point, should make up his mind that there can be no peace with Saruman and his kind. In fact it's all highly reminiscent of the Punic Wars, and Rome's determination to die at the sword's point rather than to live under the sway of the Carthaginians. It's all there, right down to the elephants. I had an idea today about Eowyn, a much more complex and interesting figure than Arwen when all's said and done. I think she may have a great deal in her of female undergraduates whom Tolkien had taught at Oxford. Women hadn't been attending the Universities for very long, and a woman who did had made a conscious choice to direct her life in a different way than, perhaps, her mother and even her sisters had done. A good many of them may have hoped for an academic or professional life, and have gotten to Oxford after strenuously resisting pressure on them to do more conventional things. Eowyn's great conflict, her desire to fight instead of marrying somebody suitable and spending her energies on babies and household cares, may have been derived from the ambitions of young women who also resisted being thrust into a domestic life that seemed to them less worthy. I think she was wrong in considering motherhood less important than battle, but I can see where she's coming from. # ( 11:49 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Happy Anniversary to Cacciaguida! He was received into the Church twenty-one years ago today. # Wednesday, December 17, 2003 ( 8:34 PM ) Elinor Dashwood A picture linked on The Inn at the End of the World shows some Irish pipers. The man in the center is a dead ringer for my late father,who would have been eighty-six tomorrow. A word to the wise - do your best to get along with your relatives. You don't know how long you have with them on this side of the veil, and if you indulge grudges, you may not make peace with them in time, and have to put it off until eternity. On a more cheerful note, Cacciaguida will have been a Catholic twenty-one years tomorrow. Let's hear it for the man! # Monday, December 15, 2003 ( 12:34 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Saddam saw the dentist yesterday. At his age he should probably also see the proctologist, and I'd recommend a prostate exam as well. That'll do for starters. # Sunday, December 14, 2003 ( 8:53 PM ) Elinor Dashwood The first batch of fruitcakes is out of the oven, since in spite of all my fine talk of getting this task done well ahead of time I only began it yesterday. Anyway, they look very nice, and I have great hopes of this year's innovation of baking them with covers on. It seems to have circumvented to a certain extent the problem of the top part being dry and the raisins and cranberries at the outer edges being burnt. The second batch goes into the oven tomorrow, and I plan to mail them out on the 26th or 27th. Like Mark Shea, we're big on celebrating the whole Christmas season, and don't feel that Christmas is more than well begun on the 25th. On a related note, I'm slightly alarmed that the Giving Tree at our parish still has unclaimed tags on it. If yours has, too, let me urge you to take a few and buy the gifts, before it's too late. I particularly draw your attention to Angel Tree, an arm of Charles Colson's organization Prison Fellowship. Angel Tree collects gifts for inmates' children, who might well be described as the other crime victims. In addition to its well-known Christmas efforts, Angel Tree works during the year to support inmates' relationships with their children, a very important aspect of prison ministry and an essential part of preparing the inmate to readjust successfully when released. If you can't find an Angel Tree, stop by their website (linked above) to make a donation to this really worthwhile organization. "We choose this time because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices." - Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol publ. 1843. # Friday, December 12, 2003 ( 2:04 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I'll be blogging as much as possible between now and Christmas Eve, but it may not be much. The shopping is done, but I still need to make some presents, chiefly dolly's things and some Lord of the Rings costumes for my youngest two. Cacciaguida and I would wish our daughter to be more like Eowyn than Arwen, but there's no getting away from it that Arwen dresses better, so Cacciadelia's dress-up clothes will be a little of each. They'll both get elvish cloaks, and Cacciadelia will also have a midnight-blue cape of polar fleece with silver stars around the hem. Tolkien rather minutely describes the cloak Faramir's mother once made, and which he puts round Eowyn in Minas Tirith when they're both confined to the houses of healing. It was unusual for him to expend so many words on a woman's garment, but since he did I couldn't resist making one for my little shield-maiden. It'll do for a dressy coat to wear over her Sunday dress during the winter. Anyway, I expect I'll be busy. # Tuesday, December 09, 2003 ( 10:46 AM ) Elinor Dashwood I've been saying for years that I'm middle-aged; now I'm beginning to feel it. The other day in the car I became aware of a disagreeably cold breeze at the back of my neck, and suddenly realized, I'm starting to feel drafts. Perhaps I ought to get the full Mr. Woodhousean flavor by spelling it draughts. Will somebody please bring me my shawl? # Monday, December 08, 2003 ( 4:04 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I'm in a good mood today. We went to the 8:30 Mass, and even though it was the school Mass, we sang Immaculate Mary and Hail, Holy Queen Enthroned Above. The schoolchildren, mercifully, neither acted as lectors nor led the singing. I did have to administer salutary correction to an eighth-grader who was sitting behind me, and making fun of an old man at the end of the row who had a very odd speaking voice and was constantly a few seconds behind the rest of us. His antics were much amusing a very pretty girl whom he evidently wished to impress, so I trust I inflicted the most painful and persistent kind of embarrassment on the little creep. Memo to employed mothers: You can't civilize a child between 6:00 pickup at the daycare center and bedtime, and the underpaid wretches who work there won't do it for you. If you didn't want me to humiliate your young savage during Mass, perhaps you might have taken the trouble yourself in the past thirteen years to make him understand that decent people don't laugh at old men. # Sunday, December 07, 2003 ( 5:07 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I keep meaning to blog about this but I keep forgetting. After much experimentation, I've discovered that one thing only reliably takes food grease stains - butter, oil, spatters from frying, and so on - out of clothing. You want to wet the area with warm water (hot if the fabric will stand it) and rub bar soap - that's right, plain old Ivory or what have you - into the grease stain. Rub it in well, until the material is thoroughly permeated with soap, and then wash as usual. This works much better than the liquid dish detergent my mother used to use for the same purpose. I rescued a light zip-up jacket of Cacciaguida's in this way, and there isn't much that will take grease out of a polyester-blend fabric, polyester being a petroleum derivative and having an affinity for other oleaginous molecules. (This is one of many reasons I far prefer cotton, linen, and wool to synthetics, but it's hard to find a light jacket of this sort - we used to call them windbreakers - in all-cotton, even at a natural-fiber mecca like L. L. Bean.) Anyway, I thought I'd pass along this helpful idea born of my long wrestle with domesticity. When I first got married and began having children, I was astounded at the number of really necessary things they don't teach you at Yale, and I've been finding out about them on my own ever since. # Friday, December 05, 2003 ( 10:01 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Among the Christmas music I've been listening to is the Irish Tenors' Home For Christmas. It was made before the laicized priest joined the party (I see the management are downplaying that phase of his career, and who shall blame them), and it recalls for me a time before Ronan Tynan, a great favorite of mine, had developed a lamentable habit of singing at Yankee Stadium. (I regret his taste, but he's from over the sea, and can't be expected to understand that in America the respectable do not hobnob with George Steinbrenner.) The selections really are outstanding, and include my favorite alternate setting of It Came Upon A Midnight Clear, two Ave Marias, and What Child Is This? with all the proper second parts of the verses. They use the goofy English translation of O Holy Night, unfortunately: little as I wish to encourage the French, the original is really much more moving. I learned it off our Pavarotti Christmas album, which also contains another favorite, Gesu Bambino. Another selection on this album, Niedermayer's Pieta, Signore, goes on for about twenty minutes of "Giammai sia dannato nel fuoco eterno dal suo rigor," and is known to la famiglia Cacciaguida under the English title Lord, Please Don't Fry Me In a Wok. I'm sort of an accidental Irish Tenors fan. When they first appeared on PBS I didn't want to watch, because Irish tenors of the John McCormack type had always given me a pain. Cacc, who has always thought it a pity that I'm not more self-consciously Irish (you don't need to be, when you're pure-blooded), put it on, at the unfortunate moment when Ronan Tynan was singing I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, which I don't much like. However, I liked most of the rest (only cringing when they sang When Irish Eyes Are Smiling), and the story of Tynan's triumph over his disability quite won me over. It isn't the sweetest voice I've ever heard, but close, and I'm a fool for courage, especially in personal matters, where people so often indulge themselves in self-pity. # ( 8:41 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I'm having one of those days that depressives get occasionally, even those, like me, whose depression is under good control. As a rule it doesn't bother me that I don't fit in anywhere, but every now and then it does. I'm way too argumentative to get along with women, which is rather a pity seeing as I am one. I wouldn't be anything but a Catholic, and I don't feel at home amongst most Catholics. I love Yale, but the majority of Yalies are a pain in the kiester. Oh, well, it will go away. I cleaned out from under the sofa today, and I'm making Cacciadelia and Son #4 some Christmas presents. It helps to be busy. Also warm. Also to have cheerful music. I can't agree with the people who disapprove of Christmas music during Advent. It takes me a while to work up to Christmas, which was usually the occasion of something extra-special in the way of family rows when I was a teenager, and the music helps considerably. I've also been clearing up my side of the room, and I see that, in addition to the books already mentioned, I have on my bedside table (on the lower shelf, which accounts for my having missed them before) Booth Tarkington, Penrod Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy I'll turn on the electric blanket and take up one of the more amusing of these, and be better in the morning. # Thursday, December 04, 2003 ( 10:49 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Terry over at Summa Mamas wants to know what books we have stacked up on our bedside tables. I've got Georgette Heyer, Footsteps In the Dark E. F. Benson, David Blaize Booth Tarkington, Seventeen Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Jane Austen, Emma As a rule I don't read new books in bed, since the purpose is to set the mind comfortably at rest. Consequently these are all books I practically know by heart. New acquisitions, and such nonfiction as I ever do take in, I read during the daytime. # Tuesday, December 02, 2003 ( 1:08 PM ) Elinor Dashwood From the Summas, a link to an NRO story about Abercrombie and Fitch's decision, in the face of a threatened boycott, to cease selling its obnoxiously pornographic "Christmas Field Guide" in its stores. As I mentioned in TLS's comment box, that's the free market at work. I hope the Catholic Fascists I've too often encountered on the Internet, who dream of a Catholic dictatorship which would establish peace and sanctity forever, and eliminate wicked things like sin, representative democracy, refined sugar, and freedom of the press, will take note and consider the wisdom of working within the system instead of scrapping it. Somebody with whom I was arguing on Jeff Culbreath's blog made an alarming suggestion of exactly the sort of Catholic government that would become a tyranny in record time. What is it about Catholics that makes them think they can start up a community of like-minded people who will live together in charity and harmony? These proposals give me the creeps. The supposition is always that Catholics will buy property, start businesses, live in close association, and adhere to the provisions of a covenant document. The reality is usually that neighbors are encouraged to spy on one another, independent thought and action are discouraged, and the leaders of the enterprise get rich. Whenever one of these communities starts up, I find myself wishing we could cut straight to the lawsuits and the expose in the newspaper, and save everyone a lot of heartbreak. There's no way around it: original sin is not alienable. Where you have power you'll have corruption, and I prefer not to live under the dominion of any authority which considers itself to have a divine mandate to violate my privacy, confiscate my goods, and trample on my freedoms. It isn't that we haven't yet found the right person to lead such a community, it's that there is, and can be no such person. People keep thinking that there is, and that they've found him or her, and the end of it will be that one day they'll seem to be right, and that will be the Antichrist. In the meantime, Catholics will do well to consider the benefits to the Faith of being protected from government involvement in religious affairs, rather than restricted by it. # |
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