Light and Momentary

Quick, Easy, Frugal, Tasty

When I wanted to make a quick and easy Christmas gift for some guests, I went to the bookshelf in search of Tightwad Gazette. Alas, I had given it away. I don't expect to miss it very much aside from this one recipe, so I'm recording the recipe here for the future. If you too need a quick easy tasty frugal gift (perhaps a hostess gift for New Year's Eve?), give it a whirl.

Line an 8-inch square pan with foil and hit it with non-stick spray. Sprinkle about a cup of chopped walnuts over the bottom. Boil together a stick of butter and three-quarters of a cup of dark brown sugar (packed, although it pains me to be advising people to pack down brown sugar with a spoon here in the year of Our Lord 2019-almost-2020, when kitchen scales are cheap and easy to obtain). Stir faithfully. Do not use a plastic spoon, no matter how sturdy it may seem; I once melted a seemingly durable long-handled plastic spoon making this recipe. Stir carefully, recalling that there is a reason boiling fat was once used to deter besieging armies at the castle gates. Allow it to boil briskly until it darkens and just barely starts to smoke. Tightwad Gazette says to boil it for seven minutes, but my stove seems to have a little more oomph than hers and I would have burned it if I'd left it boiling for seven minutes.

Once it's ready, pour it over the nuts. As soon as it is slightly firm (we're talking minutes, not longer -- it's going to get really hard), lift the foil out of the pan, set it on a heatproof surface, and score it into 16 pieces with a heavy knife. Plunk back into the pan for the next step. Pour a half-cup of good quality chocolate chips over the toffee, and cover with a dinner plate for a few minutes to let them soften. Spread the melted chocolate into pretty swirls. If you want to, you can sprinkle finely minced nuts over the top of the soft chocolate. Once the chocolate has solidified, go back over your score marks with that same heavy knife. Enjoy!

 

Placebo? Life-changing magic? You decide.

About two weeks ago we emerged at last from a grim and horrible stretch of gray days. I had been watching the weather like it was my job, eager for any glimpse of "partly sunny" in the forecast. But there was no "partly sunny": we'd been pinned under this unrelenting carpet of cloud, and it was getting me down in a big way. Finally, mercifully, gloriously, the sun came out, and as I walked to my office I found myself having a powerful, visceral response to the sunshine.

I turned my face to the sun and I felt like Lazarus trailing his grave clothes, or at least like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. It was like I was famished and someone gave me a ham sandwich, or like I'd been walking in the desert and someone handed me a quart of cold water.

It was weird, frankly.

"Ah," I thought to myself, "isn't it evocative when the Bible says 'the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light'? Isn't it interesting that we are put together to crave sunlight and seek it out? Maybe I will blog about that."

And then a day or two later I thought to myself, "No, don't spiritualize that. That was your body, expressing a physical need." You have to imagine the gears inside my brain grinding...grinding...grinding-- and then meshing at last. Vitamin D, that's why we have a physical need for sunshine. Vitamin D, levels of which are suboptimal in about 40% of the population. Vitamin D, which they sell at my neighborhood CVS.

So I hied me to the neighborhood CVS, where I bought the Vitamin D supplements I have been taking faithfully since then. And I am feeling weirdly good for this time of year, you guys. I am not counting the days until the solstice. I am not paralyzed by the weight of the finals grading and the letters of recommendation. I am not battling the never-quite-awake feeling that always plagues me in December.

I did not go to the doctor and request bloodwork, so I can neither confirm that I was feeling crummy because of Vitamin D deficiency nor assert that I am feeling so much better because of my recent Vitamin D intake. I'm just telling you: even though the whole thing is weird, I am finding it persuasive.

So if you too have found yourself stumbling toward the sun like everything would be okay if you could just wrap up a little piece of it to take home for later, here is a tip from me to you: they probably sell Vitamin D at your CVS too.

In which I am keeping it weird

I feel that I must have told you at some point, in one of the thousands of posts I have written across 15 years of blogging, about being bad at face recognition. But neither Google nor Typepad is turning up anything along those lines, at least not with a quick search, so I am just going to tell you again: I am bad at face recognition. There are online quizzes you can take to assess your face recognition ability, if you suspect that you are also bad at faces. I have failed on multiple occasions to recognize Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey in these quizzes, which continues to surprise me. I function reasonably well in everyday life despite my subpar face recognition skills -- I rely a lot on cues like hair / glasses / gait. Gait is huge, actually. But every now and again it trips me up, and tonight was one of those nights.

I have a friend I don't see very often, and her daughter takes ballet at the same studio where my daughter takes ballet. This friend has appeared in these pages before as Good Cop Jill, and that early running group experience left me with warm fuzzy feelings toward her that persist lo these many years later. Now. The thing about being bad at faces is not just that you fail to recognize people who expect to be recognized; it is also that you think you recognize people you've actually never seen before. My brain has a tendency to latch onto a single feature and attempt to rely on it for identification. Unfortunately, this trick only works some of the time.

One day in the early part of this year I was stopped at a traffic light near the ballet studio. I thought I saw Good Cop Jill on the other side of the intersection, and I waved enthusiastically at her. When I parked and went inside, I realized that I had erred. The woman in the other car bears a resemblance to Good Cop Jill, but she...is not Good Cop Jill. I could see the confusion on her face there in the waiting room. "Why did this woman just wave at me like I was her long-lost pal?" she was clearly thinking.

Ah, well, I thought to myself. We all make mistakes. I will offer a friendly nod from here on out, and perhaps she will think that we met at some point and she forgot about it. 

This week, though, our three daughters are getting ready for the big December ballet performance -- mine, Good Cop Jill's, and Mystery Lookalike Woman’s. I keep seeing this Mystery Lookalike Woman in the dressing room, and she keeps looking enough like Good Cop Jill to confuse me. "That is not Good Cop Jill," I tell myself. "Friendly nod." But then I turn around and Good Cop Jill is there, I think, only I have to ponder it to be sure and it would help to get a good long look to be certain but I don't want to make it even weirder. So! I'll just be the one in the corner of the dressing room whose face is busy flexing from enthusiastic smile to friendly nod and back again, hoping she aims it at the right person at the right time.

I think I'm at about the 15th percentile for face recognition, based on results from the quizzes I've taken. Oliver Sacks wrote a fascinating New Yorker article about serious face-blindness, and it reminds me to count my blessings. My struggles are not disabling. But occasionally (today) they are annoying.

Have you ever taken a face recognition quiz? Have you ever failed to recognize Tom Cruise and/or Oprah Winfrey? Have you ever waved enthusiastically at someone you didn't actually know? Tell me I'm not the only one making things weird.

Rhoticity Checkin'

I went to see Knives Out over the weekend, mostly because Mrs. Darwin liked it, and I have some Thoughts about Daniel Craig's accent.

One useful tool for identifying accents is listening for what people do with the r sound, or checking on rhoticity. (Can you tell the title of this post is supposed to be a pun on rotisserie chicken, or is it too much of a stretch?) It's not much of a train ride from Edinburgh to York, but most Edinburgh natives will pronounce the r in "York" and most York natives will not. A Yorkshire accent is (usually) non-rhotic. If someone in Gladlyville directs you to the "fawth flaw" instead of the "fourth floor," you'll probably say, "Thanks, and where are you from?" -- because the Gladlyville dialect is rhotic.

So when Daniel Craig offered up a non-rhotic accent in Knives Out, it caused me to have an extended what-the-heck reaction. As some of you might recall, I spent about half of my childhood in the deep South and about half of my childhood in the upper South. As some of you might suppose given my enduring geekiness about language, I was intrigued by accents early on. I used to play a game with myself as a teenager, seeing if I could guess where a speaker was from. But then I moved to the Midwest for college/grad school/adult life, and in the intervening 30+ years accents everywhere have become more homogenized. Result: I am not confident about my guess-the-accent skills these days. But I was a little spluttery when I left the theater. "What was that about?" I asked Elwood in the parking lot. "That's only, like, deeeeeeep South. Like, coastal. Not Kentucky.*"

I came home and looked it up, and lo: non-rhotic Southern accents are indeed associated with the deeeeeep South and the coastal South. That blog post also talks about change across time in non-rhotic Southern accents, which is a connection I hadn't made on my own but which immediately rang true: non-rhotic Southern accents are much, much less common than they used to be. I discovered that Daniel Craig based his accent on Shelby Foote, and that's exactly why it sounded so implausible to me. Craig was born in 1968 -- so he's just a couple of years older than I am -- but it's mostly great-grandpas who sound like that these days. I have dozens of friends with some degree of twang in their speech, and yet I know no one under 60 with a non-rhotic Southern accent.** 

Another thing that stood out to me was his choice to front velar nasals consistently, by which I mean that he kept turning -ing into in'. Climbin' the trellis, injectin' the medication, readin' the will, etc. Now this is an observation that my googling didn't corroborate, but I have the sense that Southern speakers only do that in informal situations. I might be talkin' to my kids or spendin' time with my siblings, but those verbs will turn back into talking and spending in a hot second if I'm a formal setting. (There's no such thing as a formal settin' in my idiolect.) A detective would not be conductin' an investigation, I don't think, because that's a more casual mode of speech and life doesn't get much more serious than a murder investigation. But I am curious about whether other speakers with Southern roots have the same feeling. I have only the faintest dregs of a Southern twang, and it only ever surfaces en famille. 

*There are a couple of Kentucky references in the film, which is why the utterly un-Kentucky accent annoyed me. Only after I got home did I wonder if the family's slighting references to Kentucky were akin to their Uruguay / Paraguay / Brazil / Ecuador confusion -- a similar flavor of scorn for people who don't hail from these parts. Maybe we'll find out in a sequel that Benoit Blanc is actually from Savannah.

**My friend group is not a random sample, of course, and includes more people from the upper South than from the deep South.

Poured Out

This morning it was almost time for the Eucharistic ministers to disperse to their stations when I heard a patter and a gasp. Something went wrong when the priest tried to hand off the next-to-last ciborium, and hosts rained down on the floor. 

I've posted before about the logistical challenges it creates for Catholics to take John 6 literally. To believe that the Eucharist is the body of Christ is to accept an immense responsibility.

The pastor and a couple of the ministers knelt quickly and began to pick up the hosts. The associate left his spot and came over to help. I wasn't sure if I should help too, or if I would just be in the way. The associate touched my elbow. "Maybe just stay put, Jamie," he said. He pointed to a host right next to my shoe. I hadn't seen it against the pale marble floor. 

In just a few minutes we had a pile of dropped hosts on the altar and none on the floor. You could see from the look on his face that the Eucharistic minister involved felt terrible. On another day I might have thought to myself, "I'm SO GLAD that wasn't me," but today I felt only a surge of tenderness toward him. He was the oldest of us, and I thought about all the years through which his brain has faithfully signaled his hands so he could use them to work and play and serve. I wondered if he might have a diagnosis that made it harder for his brain to send those signals or for his hands to receive them, and I caught a quick and flaming glimpse of God's compassionate love for this aging man.

I thought about all the spills I have mopped up in my home over the years, as preschoolers learned about gravity and bigger kids learned that distractions make puddles. In my better moments I can respond with kindness and efficiency: it's okay, sweetheart; run and grab some dish towels quickly. To be human is to make messes and break things, to cause hurts and frustrations. 

It's especially fitting, I think, that today happened to be the first Sunday of Advent. Our pastor had just exhorted us in his homily to spend some time contemplating Our Lord's willingness to be vulnerable, to entrust himself to a race that cannot manage to stop making messes and breaking things, causing hurts and frustrations. I thought about Philippians 2, and its description of the Redeemer who poured himself out for us. I thought about the hosts spilled on the floor, a vivid reminder that Jesus still pours himself out for us, still loves us with unimaginable generosity through the messes and the breakages, the hurts and frustrations.

And I distributed Holy Communion with more tenderness and more urgency than usual, praying that we might all have eyes to see this December: the glory set aside, the love enfleshed.