Light and Momentary

Adjustments

I am completely incapable of cooking a normal amount of food for 3 people. When I first started making Yellow Carpet of Deliciousness, I doubled the My Heart Beets recipe. In the spring of 2020 two teenagers and one young adult were living here, but they have all moved out. We do not need a double recipe of Yellow Carpet these days and yet somehow I can't do the math to halve it. 

Yesterday I made a pleasant little pasta dish with summer squash and cherry tomatoes, only someone must have pulled a Big Anthony while I wasn't looking. There was so much pasta in the pot when we were done.

Pete baked sourdough bread regularly over the past year or so, and I tried to make a loaf today. It was the saddest flattest lumpiest thing you ever saw. It doesn't taste bad and the crumb is nice and open, but you have to close your eyes when you slice it because it's so ugly.

I am not used to this.

The bananas thermostat, and more about Sandy

Last week was Hot Bananas season in Gladlyville (by which I mean it was the beginning of a new academic year), and it wasn't only the bananas that were hot. We spent the week under an Excessive Heat Warning. Between the new dog and the new classes, I had a lot of walking to do -- more than 76,000 steps between Monday morning and Friday evening -- and the combination of hot weather and hot bananas meant that I generated a fair amount of smelly laundry.

But now the smelly laundry is clean, the hectic first week is in the books, the unpleasant heat wave has broken, and by the way our sweet new dog is THE BEST.

Sandy has been here for two weeks now and is settling in nicely. She is affectionate and snuggly and well-behaved, delighted to see us when we've been away but well-mannered while we're gone. (When I'm out she likes to take one of my shoes and bring it to the living room-- I suppose because it smells like me. Not to gnaw on, just to have nearby. She seems to think smelly feet are a feature, not a bug.)

For the most part she does fine with the people and the animals we encounter on walks, observing them with quiet curiosity and the occasional attempt to outrace a squirrel or a bunny. I think she may have some unpleasant crud in her history, though, because she gets nervous sometimes with men in spaces she considers hers. When the refrigerator repairman came, for instance, she was very firmly of the opinion that he did not belong in the kitchen; when our next-door neighbor was working in his usually empty yard, she invited him to reconsider. She will position herself so that I am between her and the suspicious man, and then growl as if to say "I don't like this, Jamie; I don't like it at all." She has even growled at Elwood when he tried to hold her while I was leaving. She's never the least bit aggressive, but she does make it clear that she is having some Thoughts about the situation.

She has excellent Jamie-is-leaving radar, and she will race to the back door when she realizes I'm heading out. It's a little strange to me that she has it figured out already: if I'm picking up the knitting bag, it's not a problem; if I'm picking up the very similar bag that holds my wallet and keys, it's time for ACTION. She stands by the door with pleading eyes and tail, saying, "You are going somewhere! I like going places! I am such a good girl, Jamie; please take me with you!"

She has been the perfect distraction for Stella and me. I think without her we would have felt totally adrift after Pete's departure; instead we are only somewhat adrift. When I am tempted to send Pete an over-the-top text full of exclamation points ("Hi!! I MISS YOU SO MUCH!!! what did you eat for breakfast tell me more about your roommate when are you coming home?!?!") I just pat the couch next to me and Sandy hops up to accept some belly rubs. When she is snoring gently, resting her nose on my leg, I send a calmer text.

Work is fine. The new prep is a giant time suck, as expected, but I genuinely love the material and I hope that is more obvious to the students than the annoying logistical stuff (library e-book licenses are so mysterious, and the usual course reserves guy is out on medical leave). I'm looking forward to a cooler week, in both a meteorological and a metaphorical sense.

There will be a stink

Stella and I subbed in the vigil Mass choir yesterday, and everything was perfectly normal at first. Familiar readings, minor musical glitches, a slightly scattered homily -- normal normal normal. And then in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer there was an awful noise.

I can't really describe it to you. It was like a retch but it went on longer than any retch should go. It was a sound full of distress and agony. It was a wrong sound, a terrible sound, an uncontrollable emanation from a body in desperate need of help. 

"That doesn't sound good," murmured the nurse who sings in the choir, as she slipped over to the person in the pew. She was joined there by two other nurses and an EMT. I learned later that he had a pulse and was breathing, but his open eyes stared unseeing out of a gray face. "Can someone call 911?" Father asked from the altar in the calmest of calm voices. One of the nurses nodded vigorously, her phone already held to her ear. 

"Okay," said Father, in a voice that sent calm rippling through the whole tense place, "while we wait for help to come, I'm going to keep doing what I do up here. Can someone bring me the oil from the sacristy so I can anoint him?"

He finished the Eucharistic Prayer with some very minor modifications -- "please be seated," he said when we got to the Our Father, perhaps to cut down on gawking -- and when he elevated the Host I thought about the evanescence and fragility of our lives, their inevitable end, and the hidden Presence among us.

Agnus Dei, we chanted together, and the truth rang out from the words: our God who has redeemed us through suffering abides with us in our suffering, makes a path to eternal life through suffering. Dona nobis pacem, we implored: grant us peace.

At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer Father walked down the aisle and anointed the man. "Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit."

Clearly we needed to wait before we filled the aisle with communicants. "Ed," said Father to a church employee sitting near the ambo, "lead us in a decade of the rosary." Stella was crying quietly as we said the words together: pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. We heard the welcome sound of sirens, and the ambulance crew strode in. They clustered around him, working briskly against the backdrop of the rosary. They loaded him onto the gurney, his face pinker now but still a deeply wrong color, and sped back down the aisle.

We always say the St. Michael prayer after communion, and Father invited us to pray it specifically for the man and his family: be our protection, we prayed together for them, as we thought collectively about that ambulance speeding toward the hospital. After Mass my friend Veronica stepped up to the microphone and invited us all to stay and pray the Divine Mercy chaplet for them. The church was more than half-full at that point, and almost everyone stuck around.

Stella was crying in the car afterward. "I'm not sure why I'm crying," she said, "I don't even know them." "Oh, sweetheart," I told her, "it's normal to be distressed about distressing things. The world needs people who feel sad about sad things. Death is so sad and ugly that even Jesus cried about it."

I thought about Jesus before the tomb of Lazarus. "There will be a stink," Martha cautioned him, but Jesus was undeterred. He is willing to be in the middle of messy painful stuff with us, I am reminding myself, if we only invite him. "It's so strange that it happened in the middle of Mass," Stella observed pensively, and I said, "You know, if you're going to experience a serious medical event, there are worse places for it to happen. Because (a) Real Presence, right there with you, (b) medical personnel rushing to your side, (c) fire station down the block sending an ambulance immediately. What if he'd been at home, alone in his recliner?"

I don't know this family but they are weighing on my heart today, the words of the chaplet still echoing in my mind:

Holy God,
Holy mighty one,
Holy immortal one,
Have mercy on us and on the whole world.

Introducing...

This is Sandy.

She belongs to us now.

She is about 3, a beagle mix, and a total sweetheart.

I have dithered more over the question of adopting a permanent dog than I ever dithered over the idea of adding another human to the family, but the dog question has been answered now and the answer is Sandy.

I had been joking with Pete that maybe I would adopt a dog and name it Peter so I wouldn't miss him quite as much -- ha ha ha, I'm so hilarious -- but it was a joke. I surprised myself on Saturday morning by asking Elwood and Stella if they were interested in going to the weekly adoption event hosted by the organization we used to foster for. Okay, they said, and off we went.

Neither of the dogs I'd been interested in had been able to come. I moseyed down the aisle and said hello to someone I knew. We chatted about his foster dog briefly, and I became aware of a particularly intense stare emanating from the crate next door. 

Sandy had tucked herself in the corner of her crate. She was huddled up there, a little trembly, with enormous beseeching eyes.

Now you guys, I'm not very sentimental about rescue dogs. I've cleaned up a lot of foster dog messes; I've dealt with a lot of foster dog misbehavior. I've agreed to bring dogs into my house based on their adorable pictures and then I have been positively elated when they got adopted. You can't judge a dog by its temporarily adorable face; you have to wait and see how many shoes it will try to eat and how annoying its counter-surfing will be.

I did not think I would be stirred by a pair of beseeching eyes, but I was mistaken about that.

I have to admit that for three years now I have read the glowing adoption posts in the rescue's Facebook group with a measure of skepticism. And yet here I am, thinking, "Maybe I'll call this post 'Besotted.'" 

Tonight I went outside to mow the grass. After she saw me walk out the door Sandy nosed into our bedroom and hopped up on the bed, where I had left the dress I wore to Mass earlier today. She curled herself up on top of it, and declined to move until I came back in. "Oh, Jamie," her tail said when I returned, "now it is time to sit on the couch together! And I will stretch my whole self out against you, because full-body contact is the best kind of contact, and then you may give me skritches."

Eloquent tail, eloquent eyes, with 20-odd pounds of snuggly in between. She's the best.

Feast or Famine

I did manage to blog every day in July, and then vanished -- poof! We were traveling, visiting my family and going to the single nerdiest place I have ever been, and the two options felt equally weird: either to tell you that my house was empty, or to blog about unrelated stuff when I was mostly thinking about traveling.

But we are back, and thinking about what comes next. 

Part of what comes next is that Pete is leaving for college on Thursday, which I cannot think about without getting a little weepy. You'd think it would get easier to send them off by the time you got to the fourth sendoff, but you'd be wrong about that.

After a long stretch of not-knitting, I took a knitting bag with me on our trip and cranked out some socks. Check out the pair I finished this morning. (I am calling them a pair, but they are fraternal twins, not identical.) 

These are made from a Zauberball: spun from high-quality materials, dyed in gorgeous saturated colors. The yarn is a delight to knit. I am not 100% sold on their degree of matchiness, though. If you see the whole pair you can tell that one sock is approximately the inverse of the other, but when I wear them with pants it will just look like I am wearing mismatched socks. 

It had been so long since I had done much knitting that my enjoyment of the process took me by surprise: the pleasure of cranking out tidy rows of even stitches, the magic of a heel turn, the satisfaction of a perfect fit.