Light and Momentary

April 30

Thirty days, thirty posts, the end! See you soon, friends!

#28 on the 28th

Last night I finished my 28th Trollope novel, Nina Balatka. It is set in Prague, and it is about a young Christian woman who is engaged to a Jewish man.

I suspect that Trollope's treatment of Jewish characters is akin to his treatment of Irish characters: it seems pretty grim to present-day readers even though he is making an effort, at least some of the time, to push back against stereotypes. Ezekiel Breghert, in The Way We Live Now, faces down overt antisemitism. He is so much more gentlemanly than the ostensible gentlefolk of the Longstaffe family.

Nina Balatka is surrounded by people in a hurry to tell her that her engagement is a terrible idea. Like a lot of Trollope novels, this one focuses on decisions about marriage: why do people get married? What are the most important factors in their decisions? Should those be the most important factors? Can we make any reliable predictions about happiness in marriage?

Nina's fiancé Anton is driven to suspicion by the lies of Nina's extended family and their trusted servants, and Nina tells herself she should have known that he, being Jewish, would eventually be suspicious. Trollope seems to be asking an interesting question: how much of a stereotype is self-fulfilling prophecy? And how is it that Christians can behave badly, in ways that clearly violate their own moral code, and still view themselves as superior? This book includes the second Catholic priest I've encountered in a Trollope novel, and he is -- unexpectedly -- much more gentle with Nina than any of her Christian relatives have been.

Spoilers for a book from 1867: Nina and Anton marry and resettle themselves in Frankfurt, which was reputedly more accepting than Prague. The internet tells me that in the 1930s about 5% of Frankfurt's population had Jewish heritage, so let's hope the happy couple and their children found a welcome there. (Let's also hope their great-grandchildren left before things went south, since otherwise their outlook might have been bleak.)

One last interesting note about this book: Trollope published it anonymously. He had written a bunch of novels by the mid-1860s, and he didn't want to rest on his laurels. Would people read it if they didn't know it had been written by Anthony Trollope? The answer, alas, was no. 

Distractions

Joe introduced us to pipes puzzles some time ago, and I've been doing them again recently. The big daily puzzle takes me some time to figure out, but a small one can be a sub-30-second diversion once you get the idea.

I am fond of the Washington Post Keyword puzzle, which is another quick one.

Joe also shared the One Up puzzle with the family group chat. There's only one puzzle a day, and it might be a 2-minute undertaking or a 30-minute undertaking.

I'm sure you already know about NYT Connections, but did you know that the stats will now tell you the number of times you cracked the purple category first? 

What are your favorite online puzzles?

Birthday in the life

7: I sleep a little later than usual and enjoy a quiet first hour of the day, with my Bible, journal, iBreviary, coffee, and then puzzles.

8:15 or so: I prod some sleeping children gently, greeting the birthday guy with jazz hands and warm good wishes. I take the dog out and have a quick shower.

8:45: Gentle chivvying, moving people toward the car. We all pile in at 8:50.

9: Lovely Mass, with 5 of us in the pew.

10:15: Pete has requested oven pancake as his birthday breakfast, and I assemble it quickly with the goal of being ready for my weekly Zoom call with my college roommates at 10:30. (I will have to link the oven pancake recipe tomorrow -- I have set up too many bedtime restrictions to do it tonight.) (Monday update: here's the link to the oven pancake recipe. I never turn down the oven temp these days -- just keep it at 450.)

10:35: Close enough. All 5 roommates are going to be on the call today, so I wanted to be sure to pop in. 

11: I slip away for a minute to grab a slice of oven pancake. Turns out to be the last slice -- oven pancake is always a hit.

11:30: I duck out of the roommate call. Feels a little soon to start our next meal, but it's going to be a full day and I know i should get busy. Maybe...I will just slouch on the couch for a wee minute.

12:15: Time to get moving. I need to make palak paneer and chocolate chip cookies for the birthday guy. Elwood plays a round of Splendor with the kids. I clean up the breakfast dishes and start cooking.

1:45: We are eating at a weird time to fit everything in, and after a bit of a scramble we all sit down. The new palak paneer recipe is good. Everybody makes happy contented food noises. Pete opens presents after we eat.

2:20: Joe and I say goodbye (he will leave while I am gone) and I zip off to church, where I am supposed to meet a pianist at 2:30 to sing for the 3:00 Divine Mercy service. Sandy is sure she should go in the car with me, but I'm not convinced she can sing Tantum Ergo.

2:30: No pianist?

2:35: Still no pianist? I have a moment of anxiety about whether I actually know O Salutaris Hostia well enough to chant it in Latin.

2:38: Pianist texts to say she'll be there at 2:50. I start setting up the daunting sound system but it has so many stupid buttons.

2:52: Pianist scurries in, visibly stressed. We organize ourselves briskly.

3: The Divine Mercy service is so lovely. People are lined up out the door for confession. The music proceeds smoothly. 

4:10: My Sunday afternoon hour in the adoration chapel gets a late start because I was wrapping up music. I read the first half of Joshua and surprise myself by enjoying it. Be strong and courageous!

5:10: Back home! Joe is gone but Pete is still here, which is a welcome surprise. I do the Monday crossword puzzle. We say goodbye to Pete, a little sadly. I miss that boy when he is gone. Sandy gets an evening walk.

6: I sit down at the piano and Stella joins me. We have been singing Easter music together this weekend. We have an animated discussion about the unexpected C-sharp major chord in a particularly earworm-y song. 

6:45: Some snacking happens in here somewhere. We decide to make a Target run. Stella's gym shoes have holes in them.

7:15: Huh, Target doesn't let you use the fitting rooms after 7pm, which puts a damper on Stella's hopes to buy a summery dress. (Stella is a fan of the puffed sleeve/tiered skirt look, but I feel like 1975 was enough of a puffed sleeve/tiered skirt season for me.) We do find shoes for Stella in a sea of weirdly blingy shoes. I find Target a little overwhelming these days (so! much! stuff!) but we make it out in one piece.

7:30: We stop at the ice cream shop across the street for a little Divine Mercy treat.

8:15: Home again. I check blogs and think to myself that I am pretty much out of blog post ideas. Does anyone want to hear about Trollope? Probably not.

9:15: I send Stella upstairs and start this post. Elwood cleans up the kitchen. I wonder whether any children are planning to come home for Mothers' Day. It's so good to have them here. Can you even believe Pete is 20? 

10:15: I scoot myself off to bed. Good night!

Time flies when you're getting old

Turning five in 2010:

Doesn't seem like that long ago.

And then there was one

Pete is coming home tonight to celebrate his birthday: he is turning 20 on Sunday. For the first time since 2012, I will only have one teenager.

I was so worried about having teens, but it turns out that teens are usually pretty great to have around. Now I will have four 20-somethings, who are still pretty great but who are much less likely to live in Gladlyville.

In particular for the intentions of the--

Like a lot of Catholics, I start every day with a prayer called the morning offering. In the last line we pray for the intentions of the Holy Father. I'm trying to remember -- did I notice in 2005 and 2013 that the final line doesn't exactly make sense in an interregnum? Deceased Holy Father? Future Holy Father? 

Hashtag rigid person problems, I suppose.

Currently Reading

I am about a quarter of the way through Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, and I am enjoying it so much. I might be the ideal reader for this book, which looks at the emergence of written language in antiquity, the usual development of reading in young children, and the differences observed in kids with dyslexia. It is chock full of interesting nuggets about neuroscience and history, including some surprising bits about written language learning among Sumerian and Chinese women. (It does cite Hart & RIsley uncritically, which is not my fave.) You might not share my enthusiasm for languages from antiquity or the processes by which kids' brains acquire language skills, but I bet you'll find it interesting too.

I...think...I...can

This semester is feeling very long. That is all.

At the helm

I don't think I would have believed you if you'd told me ten years ago what the next decade would bring. Two Trump presidencies, a global pandemic, and a slow-motion cataclysm in the Church, in which "more Catholic than the Pope" became, for a subset of US Catholics, a badge of honor rather than a joke. I just could not have imagined the Pope-bashing that would become widespread in the corners of the US Church where I used to feel at home.

Tonight I am thinking about the uncertain expression on the face of Pope Francis when he first appeared on the balcony after his election, looking down at the crowds in St. Peter's Square. I am remembering his Urbi et Orbi address in March 2020, when COVID was ravaging Italy-- the monstrance held high over the empty square. I appreciated his willingness to proclaim unpopular truths to the powerful, challenging JD Vance to do better and even meeting with him on the last day of his life. 

I am grateful for his leadership across these tumultuous years. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Tiramisu is so yummy

This year we traveled instead of hosting, but we took food along. We made a version of the lamb and bean braise I told you about last year, and tiramisu.

I was looking for a tiramisu recipe with cooked egg yolks because food safety seemed like a bigger concern if we were transporting food. I was going to share the link but I can't find it, strangely, so I will just tell you about what I did instead.

In a double boiler heat six egg yolks with a half-cup of brown sugar. (It was supposed to be white sugar, but we did not have a half-cup of white sugar.) With an electric mixer, beat them together until they reach 160 degrees. Whip in 8oz. of room temperature mascarpone and a spoonful of vanilla. Beat 3 cups of whipping cream until you are a smidge past the soft peaks stage. Fold it all together gently.

For assembly you will need 24 ladyfingers and about 2 cups of strong black coffee. If you are using a trifle bowl, dip 5 whole ladyfingers quickly in the coffee and lay them in the bottom. Break a sixth ladyfinger into thirds, which you will also dunk briefly in the coffee, and put the pieces in the empty spaces. Spread about a quarter of the cream mixture on top. Repeat this process three more times, until you have used all 24 ladyfingers and all of the cream mixture. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and pop it in the fridge overnight. Before serving, put a spoonful of cocoa in a tea strainer. Tap the tea strainer gently with a spoon to dust the top of the tiramisu with cocoa.

I wondered if it would be too simple -- no rum, no egg whites, commercial ladyfingers. But it was a hit.

Briefly, on Holy Saturday

Resurrection: celebrated
Bass: played
Ice cream: eaten
Bed: awaiting 

Possibly too much fun for Good Friday

I am playing the electric bass at the Vigil tomorrow night with a little ensemble, and our rehearsal was tonight.

The music directors asked me to start playing bass in the summer of 2020, when there were COVID restrictions on church music. It was surprisingly fun, and for a while I was playing almost every weekend. But I stopped when the directors stepped down. I hadn't taken my bass out of its corner in many months -- long enough for the case to get dusty.

I had forgotten about the pleasing chunkiness of the strings, and the brain-tickling pleasure of playing way down at the bottom of the staff while sitting next to the big bass amp. We are going to sing Matt Maher's song Christ is Risen, which I had never played on bass before. I have to think about it a little bit, because it's in E-flat, but only a little bit, because it's mostly the same four chords.

I left the rehearsal thinking, "Hm, I wonder where I could play bass more often?"

Seen on Instagram

This image is from the @marzipantzshop Instagram account; her website is here.

In case you missed it, the vice-president of El Salvador told Senator Chris Van Hollen today that the Trump administration is paying them to imprison people deported from the US.

Angry Daffodils

One day in the fall of 2023 I came home from work overflowing with grumpiness. My boss had told me he wanted me to prep a new class and I did not want to teach it. I decided to go to the garden store and get a big bag of daffodil bulbs. It was chilly that evening and the light was fading, but I dug holes in my yard until I felt better. 

Almost all of those daffodils are blooming right now, and they are reminding me that it's usually a good idea to turn frustration into productive action. I could have slumped on the couch that evening, drifting around the internet in search of consolation. But instead I did something that brought me joy last spring, and is bringing me joy this spring, and may very well be bringing me joy in ten years or more.

Note to Fall Jamie: always plant more bulbs. You never regret planting bulbs.

And another note to Future Jamie: you didn’t have to teach that class after all. Dread is always useless. 

Christmas nostalgia in Holy Week

Even though it is almost Easter I am thinking about Christmas this evening. That's because I'm going to tell you about some scraps of paper that I have been keeping since December.

I've posted before about our gift-opening traditions. We open presents in rounds, with breaks in between. The sequence of the rounds is determined by contests, and the nature of the contests is always hotly debated. They used to be tame and ordinary, and then somehow they turned weird. During the polar vortex Christmas we had a contest to see who could hold his/her hand in the snow the longest. One year we competed to see who could stay upright the longest in a one-legged jumping contest on the trampoline. Once we raced to see who could loop around our downstairs the fastest while balancing a couch cushion on their head. 

I started to say "you get the idea," but it might be weirder than you think. 

I proposed a contest in December, and everybody liked the idea. I said, "What if everybody suggests a contest on a slip of paper, and then we each rank the proposed contests? We'll tally the points and open presents in that order." This was the result:

I don't know how readable that will be, and Typepad has not been rendering pictures reliably lately, so I'll describe it for you. Imagine a collection of a dozen Post-it notes, suggesting and ranking a variety of activities. Make anagrams with Scrabble tiles. See who can scream the loudest. My contribution: eat the largest quantity of Sandy's kibble.

It was a joke, you guys. I thought I would read it out loud and everyone would burst out laughing (yes) and then we would be done talking about it (surprisingly, no). One of my children actually ranked it as the best idea of all. "Kibble!" he said, whenever it was time to think of a new contest.

We had the nicest Christmas this year, with all seven of us here and only the seven of us here. I don't know how often we'll have Christmases like that. It's always good to have company and I'm delighted when our kids want to bring their friends and romantic partners home for the holidays. And at the same time I've kept this little pile of Post-it notes since December, thinking nostalgically about our shared traditions and our shared sense of humor.

(Kids, if you're reading this, there are no circumstances in which I will ever eat Sandy's kibble. Nostalgia, yes; kibble, no.)

Favorites

Suzanne asked me which Dickens novel is my favorite, and that is a harder question than you might think. 

When I finished the Dickens novels in 2010, I would have grouped the books like this:

Short, very good	Excellent, long	Good, long	Bleh
Great Expectations Tale of Two Cities Oliver Twist	Pickwick Papers David Copperfield Bleak House	Our Mutual Friend Nicholas Nickleby Little Dorritt Barnaby Rudge	Dombey & Son Martin Chuzzlewit Old Curiosity Shop Hard Times

My ratings have changed over the course of the AMDRALs. I loved Our Mutual Friend the second time around, but the second time through I found the young women in both Bleak House and David Copperfield pretty grating. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed Martin Chuzzlewit in 2017. 

One of the trends I have observed is that my life circumstances often influence my enjoyment of a Dickens novel. When I went back to Pickwick for the 2018 AMDRAL, I had trouble enjoying it. It's the most playful of the novels, but I was teaching a fully online summer class for the first time and it wasn't going well. I wasn't feeling very playful. 

That's the reason I am very curious to revisit Dombey & Son. I read it for the first time in August/September of 2008, and my plate has rarely been fuller than it was then. I was being investigated by CPS, I was pregnant with my fifth child (and still throwing up in my third trimester), I was drafting the first half of my dissertation in preparation for a fall-semester prelim, and I had an absurdly long list of household tasks I wanted to complete before the baby arrived, like getting a new roof for the garage. Oh! And! in the first part of that window I was still closing out my early intervention caseload!

Not long after I finished Dombey & Son (grumpily, so grumpily), I read an article asserting that Dombey & Son is the Dickens novel most likely to be appreciated by people who think they don't like Dickens novels. At the time, I thought, "Are you kidding me? DOMBEY & SON?!" (I thought I remembered that this was Adam Gopnik writing in the New Yorker, but I can't find it in their archives and Google isn't turning it up elsewhere.) For that specific reason I am very curious about what it will be like to go back to that one -- it seems like an interesting place to land after so many years and so many re-assessments.

If pressed to pick a favorite-- wait, no, I can't pick just one.

Best short novel: Great Expectations
Most fun: Pickwick
Most skillfully crafted: Bleak House
The one I am most likely to pull of the shelf and read a chunk of, just because: Our Mutual Friend

TAMDRAL season approaches

This year will be the Twelfth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, which means that we are nearing the end of the list of Dickens novels. Here's where we've been:

2024 Hard Times
2023 Great Expectations
2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House

We have three left: Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dombey & Son. I think I want to save Dombey & Son for last, and I'm leaning toward Old Curiosity Shoppe for this year and Barnaby Rudge in 2026. Any opinions? We'll start a month from today, after I submit spring semester grades. 

Nous prévoyons un voyage

At the end of last summer I was feeling burned out. I've been on the teaching schedule consistently in recent summers, and summer teaching is intense. The promotion process had made for a stressful year. My run-ins with generative AI-fueled cheating in April and May had been demoralizing. 

As soon as I submitted summer grades I emailed my chair and told him I would not be available to teach in summer 2025. "Maybe," I said to my college roommates, "maybe I'll go to France for a month. Rent a small spare apartment in Nice and walk on the beach every day and never look at my email, not even once."

Alex and I were going to go to France in the summer of 2020 because I was turning 50 that year, but we all know about summer travel plans from 2020. 

Let us hope that summer travel plans for 2025 are more likely to materialize, because as of today we have plane tickets. Elwood and Stella and I will be gone for most of July. Pete, who does not love to travel, will mostly be here in Gladlyville and has agreed to take care of Sandy while we're gone.

Wow! Also eek! But mostly wow!

The reluctant landlady begins eviction proceedings

We've had occasional garter snake sightings at the back door for years now, but I was still not delighted when I came home today to find this guy--

--and his camera-shy friend--

--both basking in the sunshine right in front of my back door.

I texted the picture to the family group chat, and my children were Not Helpful. Pete said, "Friends!" Alex said, "Bring them to Easter and we will play Dodgy Snake with the cousins." (Dodgy Snake is a Boy Scout camp game in which you find a snake and toss it at your friends. Or perhaps at your enemies? We did not play Dodgy Snake at Girl Scout camp and I must say I prefer the orienteering and lanyard-making version of summer camp to the snake-projectile version.)

I had just popped home to eat lunch and let Sandy out, and I had to get back to the office for a meeting with a student. On my way out, the bigger snake was there again, curled up right next to the back door. "I don't think so," I told him, and I grabbed a nearby stick. I scooped him up and flung him into a garden bed. where I found another stick and pitched him still further from the house. (I did not see exactly where he landed. It is possible that I tossed him over the fence and into the neighbors' yard. Perhaps not my most neighborly moment.) 

What do you know about the habits of garter snakes? Is this one likely to slither back to  his sun-warmed spot at the back door, or will he shake himself off and say, "I guess I live in the neighbors' yard now"? I have never seen the snake that used to ease himself in and out of a tiny hole in our foundation since the day that I launched him, croquet-style to meet his destiny. I do hope the back-door snake does not think he lives in the garden bed now, because it is full of lovely baby brunnera and astilbe and new little hosta leaves, and it would be a bummer if I had to set them all on fire.

I have so many snake posts in my archives, you guys. Every link in this post is about a different snake encounter. I never thought I would be a snake blogger but here we are.