Sunday, April 12, 2020

Three Beautiful Things 04/11/20: Ham Soup, Easter Carolers, Mike Wallace and Vera BONUS: A Limerick by Stu

1. In early August of 2019, I joined friends up the river for our Still Alive at 65 birthday party. On Saturday, we all brought food for a potluck. I prepared a bone-in ham and took slices to the party. I made ham stock the week after the party. Today, I brought two quarts of that stock up from the freezer, thawed a couple of ham hocks, chopped an onion, some celery, and about four carrots, opened and drained a couple cans of white beans, combined it all in the crock pot and slow cooked Debbie and me a ham and white bean soup.

That ham stock was perfect and provided the foundation for a delicious soup. Oh, I might have added another can of beans and possibly made the soup a little thicker by mashing some beans, but no matter. The soup tasted great. It was, to me, a great comfort.  It made me want to buy another small bone-in ham one day, not so much for the ham, but for the stock I could make from it.

2. Carol, Paul, Zoe, and Jason piled in Mom's old Malibu and drove around the area, rapped on doors of friends, family, and people from Carol and Paul's church, and sang Easter carols and delivered a bag of cookies. They arrived at our house in the middle of the afternoon and, at at time I'm feeling a hole in my life because I live in a town and a valley where there's no Episcopal Church. I know that even if there were one here, the church would be closed -- no in person Easter Vigil, no flowering of the cross, no Easter Sunday Eucharist. So, hearing the hymns they sang moved me. I enjoyed Debbie grabbing her ukulele and accompanying the Roberts in singing "This Little Light of Mine".  The cookies were really good, too, especially with a little brandy.

Carol figured they'd been to about fifteen houses before coming to our house and then visiting Christy and Everett.

Easter is my favorite holiday for many reasons, the main one being that, to me, it's the high point in the church calendar. Worship during Lent, Holy Week, and on Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday are, again, for me, the main focus of the season and the holiday. Especially in my adulthood, Easter has been the quietest holiday, involved the fewest distractions from experiencing its spiritual significance, and has afforded me, over the years, hours of contemplation, prayer, and gratitude, not only through worship, but out in nature where I've enjoyed the resurrected life of flowers and other other growing things returning after the cold and darkness of winter.

While gladly sheltering in place this Sunday, my experience with Easter will be even more solitary and private than usual. I'll figure out ways to create a meaningful Easter Day. Right now, I'm remembering the years when I was single, living in Eugene, worshiped at St. Mary's, and then drove up to Hendricks Park, found a bench among the rhododendrons and sat quietly, enjoyed the happiness of others walking through the gardens, and was still. I can experience within our home and within myself today what I might normally experience out in the world by remembering, imagining, and envisioning new life and the many resurrections we live with daily.

3. Debbie and I had a good time late this afternoon watching the documentary movie, Mike Wallace is Here, a movie reviewing Wallace's career in television and how he came to be one of the most hard-hitting interviewers in the news media. I not only enjoyed learning more about Mike Wallace himself, but I also enjoyed revisiting so many of the events and people who have shaped the years of my lifetime. I didn't enjoy revisiting these events because they were pleasant. I enjoyed seeing them from the perspective of being in my sixties, of remembering what I was doing and how I experienced these things when I was younger. In a way, in made me think, yet again, that, in a way, there's no such things as the past. Everything keeps on happening in an ever expanding present. History doesn't repeat itself. It keeps living. We are what we were.

I topped off the evening by watching another episode from the first season of Vera. For me, the pleasure of watching episodes of Vera rarely comes from her solving the case at hand and finding out who committed the crimes. No, I love, first of all, the brilliant character actors who work in these episodes, not just the recurring characters of the Northumberland police force, but the actors playing the onetime roles of the different characters Vera confronts and interrogates in the course of her investigations. The stories of these characters emerge.

In tonight's episode there was a bereaved mother whose very young son went missing and has never been found. We meet two male characters estranged from their families. One of the men is suddenly thrust into the role of caretaker for his infirm father, with whom he shares a bitter past.  The episode features an environmental surveyor who enters into a potentially compromising love affair as well as an estranged daughter and a second bereaved mother suffering from grief and depression. Each of the actors playing these roles completely occupies the characters and it's these characters and each episode's various subplots and explorations of secondary characters that arrest my attention and rouse my feeling. Likewise, tensions surface between Vera and her subordinates in the police force. Vera and the other detectives struggle with personal difficulties within themselves. Combined, these stories that are concurrent with the criminal investigation and the way they are presented makes the show Vera one I love to return to regularly.

Here's Stu's limerick for, well, you'll see:

Young girls wore white glove with their dress.
Boys' hair combed not usual mess.
Then to Church or with fam,
Sit down meal with ham.
A Celebration of what? You can guess!



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