Light and Momentary

Things I have been making

Hurray for a pleasant restful day, in which I chatted with friends and 2 out of 3 faraway kids.

I finished the purple socks and cast on a new pair immediately in a different Zauberball yarn, softer but also a little splittier.

Pete asked if I would bake a Madeira cake. I wasn't sure how much the kids would like it, because it's a little old-fashioned. I tend to make cakes that are fluffier. And this one didn't even rise very high. It's a Nigella Lawson recipe and I think it's under-leavened. I'm not sure how she got the picture in the cookbook with the amount of leavening in the recipe, but life is full of mysteries. In any case, I was not serving it to Paul Hollywood, and so no one but me commented on its un-domed top. The kids thought it was perfect.

I went in search of American recipes to see if my leavening suspicions were warranted, and I found another of life's small mysteries. Converting British baking recipes is a bit of an art because their baking powder is different from ours. "Martha Stewart," said I to myself. "Sounds like a trustworthy source for an American version. I'll check out her recipe."

"Huh," I said to myself, "there is no leavening at all in her recipe. That sounds disastrous!"

And lo, there are a number of angry reviewers saying, "This was disgusting! This was an expensive buttery brick! If I had smacked my neighbor upside the head with this cake it would have ended our years-long feud over the overgrown property-line forsythia!" Much to my surprise, there was also a contingent of happy reviewers, saying, "What's the matter with you whiners that you couldn't bake this easy-peasy cake? It was delicious and perfect!"

So...were the reviewers in group B using self-raising flour by mistake? If so, wouldn't it have been too salty, since the recipe calls for a half-teaspoon of salt? Or...is unleavened cake a thing? I am usually a to-each-her-own kind of baker, but I have to say that would be a weird and penitential kind of cake. Way back in 2002 I made my second child a third birthday cake in which I failed to notice that I was using all-purpose flour where the recipe called for self-raising flour. So I can tell you from sad experience: cake is better with leavening.

Keeping it real around here

This was a really hard week.

I was not expecting so many teary interruptions, piling up in spite of my attempts at pre-planning to accommodate kid needs. I was not expecting so much kid anxiety. I was not expecting such a relentless quantity of teacher email.

The transition to junior high is always tricky. There's a huge jump in the executive function requirements, and most kids experience some degree of overwhelm, in my experience. In person the teachers have always been great about acknowledging that difficulty.

"Great" is not the descriptor that springs to mind for this week. It makes sense that if you haven't taught brand-new sixth-graders online before, you might not be able to predict where there will be gaps between what they actually know and what you expect them to know.

I've always been fairly hands-off with my kids' education, because they need to learn to be in charge of their own stuff while the stakes are low. I'm all about learning from cheap mistakes. But I do not know how to translate that philosophy into pandemic education. And I do not really know how to make week #2 of online learning better than week #1.

I do not have a "tie-it-up-with-a-bow" ending for this post.

Grumble

So! Online learning is not off to a great start. These are the things I hate:

1. The kids are required to use district-issued laptops. Which are terrible: laggy, unpredictable, massively frustrating.
2. The district is using Google Classroom, which seems to be creaking and groaning under its current load: more lags, more frustration.
3. Google Classroom is spewing out enough automated email to overwhelm my sixth-grader, but the teachers are not providing much guidance as they require her to do stuff she's never done before. It's not hard to make a video and embed it in a PowerPoint slide, but it's also not a skill anybody is born with. And at the risk of sounding bitchy and entitled I'm going to say, here at the end of our third very long online learning day, that I don't think it should be my job to walk her through each one of those steps during the workday on a sub-par machine in an overloaded course management system.
4. The teachers are scrambling, and I can't fault them for that. The district did not give them much notice here; they're not to blame for that. But at the same time I'm already weary of the fallout. If you tell an 11-year-old rule-follower that she's required to use a particular app, but the terms of service say it's only available to kids 12 and up, I am going to be the one smoothing down her ruffled conscience. Oh, and can we talk about missing class for a dentist appointment? and the teacher who, when emailed about makeup assignments, said Stella would need to watch the recording of the entire synchronous class session? Would it surprise you to learn that this was not in fact a good use of her time?
5. The kids are lonely, and it is hard to build community over online video. I do not envy the teachers and administrators their tasks. Maybe, though, the kids could talk to each other sometimes? Maybe a little more communication with classmates, a little less reliance on parents?

In this moment I am feeling very grumpy, very flounce-y. It could be so much worse, I know: we have reliable internet service, my job is the most flexible that it will ever be, I have smart kids who are trying hard to be independent, and when they can't be independent I can (mostly) answer their questions about embedding videos and solving pre-calculus problems.

Counting my blessings is not actually helping me feel any better right this minute.

Let's talk about something else now

I have had the happiest knitting project on the go for the past two weeks. I took Pete to the friendly local yarn shop and we had ourselves an efficient and socially-distant but also thoroughly enjoyable browse through the German sock yarn. (German sock yarn = the BEST sock yarn.) He chose one I'd never seen before, a Schoppel-Wolle Jeans Ball. It's great to work with, it wouldn't dream of splitting, the color ranges from fully saturated to pleasingly speckled, and it's substantial but not scratchy. All the thumbs up on this yarn. Look, I am almost done with his socks, which are a nicer purple than this picture suggests:

I am a recent convert to toe-up socks. I'd made them before, but only recently did they become my go-to pattern-free pattern. Would you like a toe-up sock recipe? We aim to please around here. This recipe assumes you are using magic loop or two circs, but you can certainly adapt for DPNs if you prefer.

Using Judy's Magic Cast-On, start with 20 stitches divided across two needles. Increase every other round, one stitch in from each edge of each needle, until you have 60 stitches divided across two needles. Work in stockinette until this fetal sock is about three inches shorter than the foot for which you are knitting it. This is the part that used to worry me, but fear not-- it is not an exact science. Now make your gusset. Is there a side that is less pleasing to you? Make that the sole side and increase every other round on that needle, one stitch in from each edge of the needle. For an average-sized woman's sock, keep going until that needle has 48 stitches (78 in total across both needles). If you're working an average-sized men's sock you'll want about 54 stitches on the gusset needle, or 84 in total across both needles. 

Next comes the only fiddly part, the heel. You're going to work a little tongue of fabric on the middle 16 stitches (or the middle 18 stitches for a men's sock; that's what all the parenthetical numbers in this paragraph and the next one are for). So knit 32 (or 36), turn, slip 1 and purl 15 (or 17), turn, slip 1 and knit 15 (or 17), and keep going just like that on the middle segment for 8 (or 10) total rows. Now for the curved bit: knit until you have two stitches left on the needle, then wrap and turn, slipping the stitch right next to the wrapped one before you start purling your way back to the last two stitches. Here again you will wrap and turn, and again you will slip the stitch right next to the wrapped one. You'll keep going in this fashion, each time wrapping the stitch right next to the one you slipped last time, until you have 3 (or 4) wraps in each direction. Knit across, working each wrapped stitch together with its wrap. Pick up and knit 5 (or 6) stitches in the slipped stitches at the edge of your fabric tongue. Slip 1 and purl back, working each wrapped stitch together with its wrap. Pick up and purl 5 (or 6) stitches at the opposite edge of your fabric tongue. Phew! That's the end of the hard part!*

Now you'll make your heel flap, working back and forth across the middle 26 (or 30) stitches and gobbling up gusset stitches as you go. Alternate slip 1, knit 1 across all of those middle stitches until you get to the last stitch before the gap, and SSK across the gap. Slip 1 and purl across to the last stitch before the gap; p2tog across the gap. Repeat these two rows until your decreases have consumed all of your gusset stitches. I like to scoot a stitch from each end of the other needle over to this needle and work one last pair of heel flap rows, because gusset holes make me sad.

And now! Tra-la-la! You're back in the round. Work one plain round and then work the ribbing of your choosing until the length is right for you. Bind off and wave your sock around for all to admire. Bind-off note: for my big kids I use JSSBO and I go up a needle size. For my own socks I just use the stretchy bind-off. Bigger feet seem to require a looser BO.

*If my instructions are confusing, it may help to read the pattern from which I learned to knit a toe-up flap heel. If you're still confused, I've also had success with this toe-up short-row heel.

In which the wheels fall off

Last month I drafted an email to the director of the women's retreat team. Our parish had planned a women's retreat for September, and I had agreed enthusiastically to be a part of the team back in the early days of lockdown, when it seemed like we could muster the collective resolve to smack COVID down and keep it smacked down or at least smacked down-ish.

I felt like an alarmist sending the email, which said in essence that it seemed unwise to schedule an event a month after the students returned. But holy MACKEREL, my alarmist email wildly underestimated the impact of bringing this many 18- to 22-year-olds back to our small city. HOLY MACKEREL. Our case counts have exploded. Today was yet another record for one-day growth in new cases, and more than 90% of those newly infected were 18-29 years old. Which is good in one sense, because most of them will be fine. But it is not great in another sense, because I am skeptical that the people who couldn't stay away from parties will be able to keep themselves adequately quarantined.

I can tell that students are trying. We are hardly hearing any parties here in our student-dense neighborhood. But the evidence is clear: full compliance is not realistic. Partial compliance is not sufficient.

The retreat is on hold indefinitely. We are waiting uneasily to see what happens here in Petri Dish-ville.

Happy new year

My two college-aged kids headed out this morning. I don't know how long they'll be gone, given the COVID numbers in the county where they'll be living, and it's a little dumb that they're moving out in order to attend online classes (across my two full-time students, there will be one hour per week spent in in-person classes). But I guess we'll see.

Tonight for the first time in a while I will have more children sleeping elsewhere than children sleeping under my roof. I had been feeling pretty peaceful about their departure, but I think it will always make me sad when my children go away. 

Loud Pants

When I was younger I loved loud pants. I had some flowered pairs, and some plaid pairs, and some striped pairs. My MIL gave me a pair that will sound ridiculous if I describe them (sort of a small animal print, in black and gold), and I wore them all the time. Here, I'll show you a picture.

(Look at baby Pete! 2005 was a long time ago!)

And then the loud pants began to go the way of all flesh, and for some reason I stopped replacing them. Was it because I started teaching and felt pressure to look more polished in the classroom? I can't really remember. But a month ago Elwood was attempting to describe my taste in clothes and he said, "Likes flowered pants." I thought to myself, "That used to be true. No, that's still true!" When someone on Twitter linked to a pair of Old Navy striped pants on clearance, I bought myself a pair, and then I bought myself a pair of sale flowered pants too. 

They came in the mail today and I put the striped ones on right away. You guys, it must have been a while since last I wore loud pants. My three youngest children were like, "Mom, those are some...interesting pants." Stella came in from playing outside and she whispered, "Mom, did you wear those out in PUBLIC?" as if her middle-aged mother had donned the kind of short-shorts where the pockets are longer than the inseam.

It turns out she is worried people will think I have left home in my pajamas. But I am not worried about that -- the fabric is all wrong for pajamas. Don't they look comfortable? If you have been wishing for some comfy loud pants of your very own, with a forgiving waistband and adequate pockets, I can recommend these. If you happen to be the person who shared the link on Twitter originally, my thanks to you! Life is too short to wear boring pants.

Knees

This morning I was reading a blog post that mentioned the massive mess small children make with rice, and I said to myself, "...huh, I'd forgotten about that." If you are in the trenches with small messy eaters, I promise it gets better. Gradually, gradually, so gradually that you may think you are just doomed to a life of couscous-covered carpet, it will get better. One day it will be the aberration and not the norm when someone knocks over a glass at dinner.

Here is my #1 tip for cutting down on the amount of food on the floor at the end of a meal: knees. If their knees are under the table, their faces are probably over the table. And if your face is over the table when food falls out of your spoon on the way to your mouth, or falls out of your mouth because you are laughing so hard at your hilarious brother, it will mostly hit the table (maybe even the plate, if the stars align) and not splatter all across the floor.

Kids don't have to sit perfectly still. Most young kids can't sit perfectly still. It's developmentally appropriate for them to jiggle a little bit, or even a lot, while they're sitting at the dinner table. But if the jiggling is happening with their faces over the table, it's less likely to be messy jiggling. Once you get a little practice in with "sit-on-your-bottom-knees-under-the-table," you can shorten it pretty quickly to "knees!" -- a brief, cheerful reminder that's much less likely to disrupt the flow of dinner conversation than "how many stinking times do I have to tell you to be more careful not to spill food all over the floor?" Kids who can eat with their knees under the table are easier to take to friends' houses and restaurants, because it's much easier to brush off a messy table quickly and inconspicuously than it is to tidy up a messy floor. 

Here are two bonus tips. Number 1: if you make it the norm to drink water with meals, the inevitable overturned glasses will cause less wear and tear on everybody. If I were still in that phase of life, with a crowded table and children with developing fine motor skills, I think I would add dish towels to the table-setting crew's list of requirements. That way, every time we sat down together, we'd have a couple of dish towels handy for when someone's glass got knocked over. Another advantage is that across the years you will save money on restaurant meals if everybody knows in advance that the answer to "may I order a drink?" is pretty much always "no, we'll stick with water tonight."

Tip number 2: teaching kids to clean up is such an unpleasant job but also so worth it. If the 4-year-old who is careless about spills learns that he can't build with Legos until aaaalllll the crumbs are out of the carpet, he will learn the rules a little more quickly: the muffin goes on a plate, the plate goes on the table, the knees go under the table, and then I eat the muffin.

Hang in there! It gets better! It's such a pain but it gets better!

Sabbatical, Day 1

Today is the first day since 2015 that I haven't kicked off the fall semester with an 8:00 class. It's the first August since 2010 that I haven't been teaching at all. It's weird. But in a good way.

Instead I sat down at 8:02 and revised a manuscript for two uninterrupted hours, and then I took an hour to unfog my brain. I walked around the neighborhood with Stella and we read a chapter of Anne of Avonlea aloud together. Then I sat down for ninety uninterrupted minutes and worked on a different manuscript, the one with the highest DDQ (Dread and Dissatisfaction Quotient). I am pleased with those 3.5 hours, in which I did not open up a single distracting tab or even peek at my phone. 

Sabbatical is supposed to be a time to focus on research, and I have plenty of research goals. But I am also going to try to put in a little time each workday to prep for spring semester teaching. I will be teaching one of my classes for the first time, and all three of the classes I'm teaching will be online. Today I opened up Evernote and the materials that another instructor shared with me and wallowed in the I-don't-wannas for a few minutes. Unexpectedly, giving myself permission to indulge in a brief wallow uncorked a flood of ideas about what I do want to do with this class. 

We're living in this weird era where people from across the political spectrum complain about higher ed. It's too expensive, it's too progressive, it's inhabited by people who only wanted to teach because they couldn't get real jobs, blah blah blah. In that landscape, sabbaticals are sometimes regarded suspiciously, as if they're extended paid vacations for people who ought to have been working harder in the first place. I am trying to be cognizant of the privilege and diligent about protecting the time.

Back in the spring one of the kids made me a pipe cleaner crown to wear when I was working on something that required particular concentration, because sometimes scowling at the laptop screen means I'm thinking very hard about a difficult question and sometimes scowling at the laptop screen means I'm scrolling through a particularly scowl-inducing swath of Twitter. When the crown is on, no one is supposed to interrupt me. It's been pretty useful. Maybe I will ask them to decorate it for me: Jamie Gladly, Sabbatical Queen.

Another gardening post

For a long time I'd had the idea that I wanted a little butterfly garden, and last summer I finally turned over some soil and bought some plants. We have a lemonbalm plant that is the last survivor of our former vegetable garden. (We gave up on vegetable gardening after the neighbors' house fire, which resulted in a lot of house fire waste in the spot where our vegetables used to grow. It did get cleaned up, but I was not able to get good answers about the impact of melted vinyl siding on soil safety.) We put in lobelia and milkweed next to the lemonbalm, and the lobelia came back this year. (Win some, lose some -- that's my gardening philosophy.)

This year I turned over more dirt, and we planted some fun stuff from our garden shop's pollinator-friendly section: catmint, and hyssop, and yarrow, and another milkweed plant.

We see butterflies there every day, along with all kinds of other pollinators. It's a delight. And it wasn't hard or expensive. I used to be intimidated by the idea of digging a new garden bed, but I find it pleasingly contemplative to get out there with the big spade. The earthworms do not find it to be a contemplative exercise, but you can't please all the earthworms all the time, just like Abraham Lincoln always said. 

Pete was fascinated by the bumblebee he saw enjoying the hyssop flowers yesterday. If you click to enlarge you too can admire its fat orange pollen sacs!

Every year we deal with aggressive weeds in the narrow space between the back of the garage and the neighbor's fence. While I was at church this afternoon Pete waged a mighty battle: he went out there with a hand saw and dispatched the woodier transgressors, and put down a fresh layer of gravel. It looks so much better.

This morning we put our new perennials into the shady playhouse bed: two astilbe and one silvery brunnera. (I am writing these names down because otherwise I will forget them in a hot second.) Pete has a five-year plan in which every square foot of our property will eventually have herbs or flowers growing in it. I told him that we should have modest expectations for the playhouse bed, because the soil there is rockier than most of our soil. If the weeds didn't go bananas after we took the playhouse down, the new perennials might not go bananas either.

Pete's gardening motto might best be summed up as TO INFINITY AND BEYOND, which is a worthy motto. Toy Story would have been less interesting if Buzz Lightyear had been a "win some, lose some" kind of guy. We shall have to see whether these are TO INFINITY AND BEYOND perennials or "win some, lose some" perennials. I'll report back next year.

Good things about today

Pete and I walked to the garden shop this morning and came back with some perennials for our new garden bed. We took down the battered old playhouse earlier this summer, and cleared out the weeds and bricked in the space. We added a couple of hostas, and now we have a few taller plants to put behind them. I'll post pictures after we get them in. I should also post a picture of our little butterfly garden, which is thriving.

Pete and Joe asked me to climb with them this afternoon. It's really nice that they're always so happy for me to come along with them. I can certainly imagine a world in which they found it painfully embarrassing for their middle-aged mother to attempt to rock-climb with them, but they are welcoming and encouraging 100% of the time. We were bouldering today, climbing without ropes or harnesses. I've been stuck for a while at the V2 level, but today I got my first V3 indoors. The outdoor routes are harder because they tend to have a lot of overhang. But today I got my first V2 on the outdoor structure. After that I rested on my laurels in the lovely breezy shade, and read about the life of Chiara Corbello Petrillo.

Before we left I got dinner started. I boiled up a bunch of tiny CSA beets and put a pork loin in the Instant Pot with gochujang and soy sauce and garlic. After we came home I used the food processor to slice a small onion and a pile of cabbage and to shred some nice fat carrots. I steeped the veggies in a dressing based on a Nigella Lawson recipe: 1.5 T. each of vegetable oil, fish sauce, and lime juice, 1.5 t. of rice vinegar, 1 t. sugar, a minced clove of garlic and half of a minced jalapeño, along with a handful of chopped mint and another of cilantro. We had quinoa bowls for dinner, which lets everybody choose their preferred proportions of grain/meat/slaw. Three out of four kids were enthusiastic and the fourth did not complain. And we had the nicest wide-ranging dinner conversation-- about 90s dietary recommendations and pancreatic function and epigenetics and unexpected lessons from our long-ago NFP class and ways one might improve coaching for high school athletes, among other things. 

After dinner Stella and I walked downtown together. I wanted to return library books to the dropbox; she wanted to get out of the house. We swung by CVS on the way home and bought a box of ice cream bars. The students are back, filling our little downtown after five weirdly quiet months. I don't know how long they'll be here, but they're back for now.

Maybe heaven will be a little like a GBBO finale

The kids and I have been watching Great British Bake-off together, the season with Richard and Nancy and Martha and Chetna and Luis. The seasons are numbered weirdly in the Amazon menu, but when we first encountered GBBO this was season 5, the one that aired in the UK in 2014. (It's the best season.)

We watched the final tonight, and I was a little embarrassed when it made me cry. But you know, there are a bunch of reasons it made me cry, and the biggest one is that it made me think about what heaven might be like.

My favorite thing about season 5 is the mix of bakers. I love their camaraderie; I love the way they treat each other. It's easy to imagine a version of the show with cutthroat competition, but instead they help each other out where they can. The fourth-place baker, the last person to leave the show before the final, jumps up and and down when the winner is announced. One of the runners-up says with obvious sincerity that the right person won. I wouldn't normally think of GBBO as a font of enduring truth but this is a true fact: hard things are easier and more joyful when we do them in community.

I think that heaven will be full of people who have been cheering us on from afar, people who wanted to see us victorious, people who are delighted that we have fought the good fight and finished the race. I got a little teary when the competitors' family members were talking about them, because they spoke with such love and pride. I think that the saints who welcome us into heaven will know how much we have labored to complete the tasks set before us, and what it has cost us to persevere.

I think that one element of becoming the best versions of ourselves, the versions God made us to be, is throwing ourselves into hard things that bring us joy. I am thinking about the way that the bakers wove their own stories into the things they made, to present something that not only showcased their technical skill but also showed us something about who they were and where they had come from. I believe that when God asks us to do hard things for our sanctification, he delights when we do them in a way that is distinctively ours.

I am still thinking about those three bakers -- the way they laid down their spatulas and piping bags for the last time, their hard work behind them, and stepped out of the tent into beautiful summer sunshine on those lovely grounds. I am thinking about the feast they shared with their families, and their reunions with the departed bakers, because of course heaven will also be a feast and a reunion.

(P.S. I am also thinking about making a prinsesstårta. Just in case you wondered whether I was going to spiritualize the whole season.)

Maybe not what the Boy Scouts had in mind

In May of last year I wrote a post about driving older cars as a form of voluntary poverty. It must have been around that same time that our van started making bad noises. The power steering system had developed a leak, and fixing it would cost something like a thousand dollars. We were not about to put a thousand dollars into a 2008 van in the interest of keeping it quiet, so instead we have been topping up the power steering fluid as needed.

We had thought we would replace the van last fall, but then came The Troubles. We have pretty much left The Troubles behind us, we hope, but they were expensive. We could have bought a much nicer van with the money we sank into The Troubles, it turns out. Instead here we are, limping along with the 2008 van that requires continued infusions of power steering fluid and patience.

Yesterday I was driving the van down the main drag when there was an awful BANG underneath me. I assumed it was a tire blowout and I turned off onto a side street immediately. But all four tires were intact, and under the hood nothing was on fire or showing obvious signs of demonic possession, and there were no warning lights on the dash. Still, I turned around immediately and drove home very gingerly. Google suggested that the van had backfired, perhaps because its catalytic converter had failed. 

This does not seem optimal to me. Have you ever been in a backfiring vehicle? I mean, we've all heard them at some point, but I am here to tell you that it is a most alarming noise when you are right on top of it. Also the rear doors only close if you remind them very firmly that closing when they are open is one of the two things they are required to do. They're not always enthusiastic about opening when they are closed, either, which puts them at 0 for 2. AND, as if that weren't annoying enough, the tailgate latch has decided that early retirement sounds like a good idea, with the result that the tailgate sometimes opens spontaneously while I am driving.

We hardly ever drove the van while Elwood was working at home, but now that he has returned to the office we are using both vehicles again. And the van is not long for this world.

Tonight Pete was working on his Personal Management badge for Boy Scouts and he asked us about a major purchase our family might like to make in the next 3 months. "A van!!!" I said, with every one of those exclamation points clearly audible.

"How can we save enough money to make this purchase?" he read from his workbook.

"I can SET THE OLD VAN ON FIRE IN THE DRIVEWAY," I said. "I'm not sure how that would actually generate money in our savings account, but it would make me feel so much better that it ought to count for something." (Teaching our children financial and environmental responsibility, that's me!)

"Oh!" Elwood said brightly. "Insurance fraud!"

I do not know if these pixels on this page can convey how funny it was for my Eagle Scout husband to faux-counsel his would-be-Eagle-Scout son that insurance fraud was a winning strategy he could share with his merit badge counselor, but oh, did we all burst out laughing.

Now with less grumpy

Over the weekend I was so crabby. Everything was rubbing me the wrong way. Elwood and I went out for a bit yesterday afternoon and I was trying to figure out why.

Last week was the final week of my class, so I had a ton of work to do.

Last week was also the first week since March in which only one parent was home during the workday: Elwood is back in the office. The kids didn't interrupt Elwood very often while he was working at home, I don't think, but they could go to him when I was obviously busy.

Last week the school district announced that the option we had oh-so-carefully selected would not be available to us, which caused some flailing and uncertainty.

I had been looking forward to making music at Mass on Saturday afternoon, but this week there was a new person nearby with little regard for the mask requirements. Usually I love my corner next to the amp because I am miles away from everybody. This weekend I felt stuck there, sharing the air with someone whose approach to COVID risk management aligns very poorly with mine. It did not feel restorative.

(Side note: I'm feeling more comfortable with COVID conversations when people are either friends or total strangers. On the running trail I can say politely, "Six feet, please!" to someone who is taking her half out of the middle, as my grandmother used to say. I am more at ease now saying, "Could you pull your mask up, please?" But acquaintances inhabit a strange middle ground, where it feels uncomfortable to speak and uncomfortable to let it slide. It's a weird time -- have I mentioned that recently?)

But I'm feeling more optimistic today. I submitted grades (and, like clockwork, got an email complaint within 15 minutes) and finished up the associated admin tasks. I have some loose ends to tie up this week, but it's almost sabbatical time. We made a decision about our second-choice school plan and I know (or I think I know) what I need to do to make it happen.

I don't know quite what to do about the church situation. There's been a small reconfiguration along with a personnel switch, and the combination is making me wonder again about how much aerosolization happens with singing and how much of a risk it might pose. I suppose I don't have to figure it out tonight, though.

160,000

My friend Amy texted me on March 2 to say "Hi. I need to talk to you. Extremely important." I called her back as soon as I could, of course, and she said, "I'm so sorry to have to tell you that--" Her voice broke. "I'm sorry," she said, "I thought I was more in control of myself than that. I'm so horribly sorry to have to tell you that David died last night."

It was the weirdest thing, or so it seemed at the beginning of March. He had been feeling a little crummy, like maybe he was coming down with a cold or something. But suddenly that evening the situation deteriorated rapidly. He couldn't breathe. His wife called 911. The EMTs came. His heart stopped. He was dead at 51.

In hindsight it seems most likely that the culprit was COVID-19. This is a pattern we're familiar with now: some people compensate surprisingly well for dangerously low oxygen saturation levels, until suddenly they don't. Some people's hearts are hit hard by the virus, for reasons we don't entirely understand. But on March 2 it was still astonishing for a healthy middle-aged man to be felled like that, to go from mildly under the weather to dead in a 12-hour period. 

I think about David all the time. Almost every day he flits across my mind: I remember something we did together in college, or a funny thing he said, or a book he liked. And then the reality jolts me again: David is gone. He won't make any more jokes. He won't read any more books.

We weren't close friends after college, but he was Amy's husband's best friend and so we stayed in touch. I don't want you to read this post as if I myself am suffering deeply, because it's not a post about me. But when I think of him I try to pray for the people who were closer to him: his widow, his mother, his sisters, Amy's husband. I think about how much more often they feel that same jolt, how frequently they have had to say to themselves, "David is gone. He won't make any more jokes. He won't read any more books."

We are getting numb to the COVID-19 death toll these days. It's not just the folks who said blatantly callous things, like, "Those nursing home folks didn't have much time left anyway," or "We all have to die sometime." It's all of us, I think; we can't really wrap our minds around that number. As of today more than 160,000 people are gone. All of them, like David, leave behind people who loved them. How many people are living with that jolt day after day, struck again and again by the magnitude of their loss?

Lazy ratatouille is the best ratatouille

I had never made or even eaten ratatouille until Elwood gave me a copy of Nigella Lawson's How To Eat for Christmas in 1998. I found it tasty but also slow-- all that chopping, all that stirring. Today I was doing a quick fridge inventory and I pulled out two baby zucchini and a toddler-sized eggplant. "You know," I said to myself, "I bet the internet will tell you how to make this in the Instant Pot."

AND LO: ratatouille is much easier than it used to be.

I cranked up the Instant Pot in saute mode and poured in a generous glug of olive oil. I put the thin slicer blade in my food processor, and an onion yielded up a pile of translucent half-moon slices. I chucked them into the hot oil, sprinkled them with salt, and turned the eggplant into effortless half-moons. I chucked the eggplant into the hot oil and sliced the zucchini. The zucchini sailed into the pot along with a chopped yellow pepper, a can of petite diced tomatoes, 4 chopped cloves of garlic, and a half-teaspoon of ground coriander. I gave them 8 minutes under high pressure. Once the pressure came down I added a handful of chopped basil, a squeeze of lemon, and salt.

Would a Provençal grandmère approve? Je ne sais pas. But my family approved, which is what counts. If you are looking for a fairly painless way to use up some August bounty, I can recommend this approach. It made a slightly soupier ratatouille than the stovetop versions, so we served it over rice, with sausages. (I have a horror of scorching the contents of my Instant Pot, so I did not drain my tomatoes.)

I also made a cucumber salad with spicy tahini dressing. Once I had the ratatouille underway, I gave the food processor a quick rinse and then turned a handful of small CSA cucumbers into thin-sliced rounds. For the dressing I stirred together a quarter-cup of tahini, a tablespoonful of sambal oelek, a healthy shake of sesame seeds, a bit of lemon juice, a tiny sprinkle of fish sauce, a slightly larger sprinkle of salt, and enough water to make it pourable. It had a pleasant kick and an appealing creaminess. I am thinking happily about what I might do with the leftovers. Maybe they will dress a lunchtime rice bowl, with shredded carrots and cabbage and scrambled egg? I'll figure something out.

A Paean to Pesto

One of the nicest things about summer? Pesto! So many pesto possibilities! It's quick, it's easy, and it's versatile. But I think many people tend to view it as a pasta sauce and nothing more. I was talking to my college roommates yesterday and the conversation reminded me of how many purposes pesto serves in my kitchen in the summer.

Probably my favorite is Pesto + Protein. A smear of pesto on scrambled eggs gives you a lovely color contrast and a flavor bump too. Salmon with pesto! Burgers with pesto! A spoonful of pesto will save your pork tenderloin from its drab and flavorless self.

But there are also a million zillion possibilities that involve Pesto + Starch, other than the obvious pesto with pasta. If you spread pesto on a slice of good bread, cover it with thick-sliced August tomatoes and a good grinding of pepper and then run it through the toaster oven, you will have a speedy and delicious lunch. If you are making grilled cheese sandwiches you can spread the inside of your bread with pesto and proceed as usual. If you stir pesto into mayo you will be all set to make fabulous potato salad. (This probably belongs in the previous protein paragraph but OH pesto deviled eggs are some of the best deviled eggs.) If you ever make yourself a summer side dish of cubed beets and crumbled feta, you must promise me that you will add a big dollop of pesto next time. So yummy.

Since beans lie at the intersection of protein and starch, perhaps it's not surprising that pesto is excellent in legume dishes. Do you ever make yourself a summer lunch of white beans and cubed tomato and marinated red onion and maybe a can of tuna? That salad is CRYING OUT for an invigorating spoonful of pesto. Do you ever make yourself a nice lentil salad, with minced garlic and lemon and olives and maybe some diced cucumber? Pesto FTW! When the weather gets cooler and you are making the soup versions of those meals, you will want to serve a nice dish of pesto on the side and let everyone add some to taste. Kale-sausage-white bean soup is so much better with a little pesto stirred in. Lentil-spinach-Parmesan soup, ditto!

I used to think that making pesto required precision, but I was wrong about that. Here is an approximate recipe, but you should bend it to your will. Put a clove of garlic and one bunch of herbs in the food processor or blender. Don't restrict yourself to basil -- try cilantro pesto, or arugula pesto, or parsley pesto/chimichurri, or I hear that some people like dill pesto even though I personally would rather eat couch cushion pesto. If the stems are tough and woody, rip the leaves off. If the stems are soft, chuck them right in. Add a handful of nuts -- pine nuts if you're feeling flush, walnuts or almonds or pumpkin seeds if not. If you want pesto with kick, add a stemmed hot pepper. If you want pesto with a little extra brightness and zing, add a healthy squeeze of lemon or lime juice. Measure a scant half-teaspoon of salt, even though it will look like too much. Pour in a quarter-cup of oil -- good-quality olive oil if you're making basil pesto, something more neutral (like peanut or sunflower oil) if you're making cilantro pesto. Blend to a magical green paste. Herb bunches vary in size, so you might need to add a little more oil to get a nice spreadable texture. Most basil pesto recipes call for Parmesan cheese, but I don't know that I can reliably detect its presence or absence amid all those other flavors and so I usually leave it out. If you want Parmesan, you should dial back the salt a little bit. If you want a recipe for classic pesto that is not so loosey-goosey, try this one.

When you eat it, sing yourself this little ditty to the tune of I've Got Rhythm: 
I've got pesto
Adds some zest, yo
It's the best-o
Who could ask for anything more?

A gardening post

Seven years ago I planted an herb garden along the front walk.

The boy on the left is going to be a sophomore in high school; the boy on the right is going to college. And Stella, who was 4 then, is heading to junior high. Time doesn't just fly; it tessers.

On the left-hand side of the walk we've always grown parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. The right-hand side is more variable, but there are always a bunch of basil plants. 

About every other year I extend the bed by a little bit. This year I also moved the bricks outward to widen the beds. This is the view from my front porch today:

When I was a kid the cookbooks said that cilantro could also be called "Chinese parsley," so we always start out the season with some cilantro at the south end of the parsley-sage-rosemary-thyme bed. The idea is that the shadow of the house will shield the cilantro and keep it from bolting, but it bolts in about 35 seconds anyway. This year we put the chervil at the south end of the right-hand bed, where it also bolted.

Several of the plants have taken up permanent residence at this point. The big sage plant on the left, the one that's taking over the sidewalk, comes back every year. We always have at least one surviving thyme plant as well. The tarragon on the right has been there for a few years, as has the marjoregano. (We don't know whether it's marjoram or oregano, but they serve approximately the same purpose so we're not too worried about it.) We also have an established lavender plant that is hiding underneath the more boisterous lemongrass and lovage right now. But in November, the lemongrass and lovage will both die and the lavender will not.

Champ loved the lemongrass when he was here. Every morning on his first trip outside he would nibble on it delightedly. "Oh, Jamie," he would say with his wildly wagging tail, "the sun is up and the sky is blue and I do not have to pee any more and we are TOGETHER AGAIN and OH the lemongrass is delicious so delicious." He left all of the other herbs alone, but he ate lemongrass every single day. Weird, right? We miss Champ.

We are also missing the swallowtail caterpillars. We always plant extra parsley so that we have enough to make chimichurri for ourselves and also feed the swallowtail caterpillars. It's a rite of late summer, watching the tiny caterpillars get bigger and fatter day by day. This year we had a few tiny guys early in the season, but they all vanished overnight. Probably a hungry bird, right? Kind of a bummer.

Pete is not convinced that the herb garden is the most beautiful element of our landscaping. He would like it better if we had more blooming things beside the front walk, and more symmetry. But I love to walk through the varied and fragrant herbs. It makes me happy every single time. If we live here long enough I might turn the whole front yard into an herb garden, one spadeful of rich Midwestern soil at a time.

With all your skill

I didn't find out until this morning that the couple in charge of parish music is out of town today, and that they wanted me to play bass for their sub. Their sub is one of the best musicians in our parish, and I have kind of a complex about her.

If you performed as a kid, ever at all in any context, you doubtless encountered the pecking-order performers -- the kids who wanted you to know that they were better than you. Or maybe they weren't better than you themselves, but had you noticed that Rhonda was definitely better than you? Maybe in your choir/band/theater troupe/dance class the pecking-order performers were tripping over themselves to tell you that Rhonda had done an especially awesome job with her moment in the spotlight. I remember having to say very firmly to my teenaged self: Talent is not a zero-sum game. Your voice is not worse because hers is beautiful.

This particular musician at my parish brings up many memories, many many memories, of days when I spoke firmly to my teenaged self. In general the culture in our music ministry is the very opposite of a pecking-order culture. It's one of my favorite things about the ministry, actually, the way that the directors balance the need for technical skill with the joy of making music for the glory of God. 

That particular joy has been feeding my soul in these uncertain weeks. The world is on fire, COVID-19 cases are exploding, the president is displaying troubling authoritarian tendencies. But for 45 minutes on Saturday afternoons I can sit next to the giant amp with my bass and create a gently percussive musical floor for my musician friends, as the eternal word of God is proclaimed and the people of my parish receive our faithful God in holy communion. This is not what I thought August would look like six months ago, or even three months ago, but the Mass remains an undeserved gift and comfort and also there is something deeply right about a I-IV-V chord progression. I was created to perceive beauty, and to learn to create beauty, in order that I might know more fully the Source of all beauty. In the midst of the unknown, beauty is a powerful solace.

I thought about canceling when I saw the schedule for today, but instead I showed up with my bass. To my surprise, the lead musician showed up late and a little frazzled, and in need of a quick check-in. I had asked Elwood to pray over me before I left home, and in the car on the way to Mass I had said, "Okay, Jesus, I need some IMMEDIATE BRAINWEASEL HELP here." And do you know, the brainweasels were quiet, and the music went smoothly, and I felt prompted afterward to send off a little extra kindness via text.

Today was the feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori, who is one of my particular heavenly friends because he struggled so with scrupulosity. I ask him to pray for me when the NOT GOOD ENOUGH thoughts are getting me down. Maybe it's a little easier when I'm playing the bass than when I'm singing or playing the flute or guitar, because the psalmist's mandate to play "with all your skill" sets the bar pretty low: I haven't played the bass long enough to have much skill. Even so, I played those I-IV-Vs (with some occasional IIs and VIs thrown in) to the best of my ability.

And I have to say: I'm glad I didn't cancel.