Thanksgiving

(listening to Franck's Chorale #3 in A Minor)
I have much to be thankful for. Generally speaking, I have more than I deserve in life. In particular, I'm thinking of this weekend (all four days of it). I left Sauron's Corporate Pit of Toil on Wednesday afternoon, and I bent all my thought and will toward Thanksgiving dinner. My back had been steadily improving since last week's lumbar sprain, so I was able to do the cooking (I work with a roomful of pharmacists. I gleaned enough information to decide to interrupt my muscle relaxer for a day, allowing me to drink Beaujolais while safely using a knife).

Thanksgiving is a day of cooking and gluttony; it is therefore my favorite holiday. I picked up a few things at the mobbed grocery store on the way home. I was greeted by my wife and her parents, who stayed with us for the holiday. I love having them around. Lindz and her Mom had already made two fine pies: one pumpkin and one cranberry-pear.

(Karg-Elert's "Marche Triomphale: Nun Danket alle Gott")

I got up early on Thanksgiving morning. Lindsey's father and I procured a few more forgotten items at the store, and I started poring over timelines and steps in The New Best Recipe. I was pleased to have been allowed to cook everything (I like being in control of my kitchen), but much work stood between me and six sated diners (Lindz's aunt and a guest were to join us). I had prepared the cranberry-onion confit, a jamlike, flavorful delight, two days earlier. I had already dried a mountain of bread cubes for the stuffing. I began sipping a Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale at 11 am. I started chopping onions, carrots, celery, apples and bacon. This was the menu:

Roast Turkey (a 13.5 pound Kosher bird)
Bread Stuffing with Granny Smith Apples, Sage and Bacon
Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Gravy (made from scratch with vegetables, roux and turkey drippings)
Cranberry-Onion Confit
Green Bean Casserole (brought by Lindz's aunt)
Several bottles of Georges DuBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau 2005
Pumpkin Pie and Cranberry-Pear Pie with Frangelico-spiked Whipped Cream

I spent a total of five blissful hours in the kitchen. Lindz's folks tidied up the house, went for a stroll, played Scrabble and offered me help several hundred times. They know I love to cook, but they were convinced that I was working too hard. Chopping and sweating four pounds of onions is profoundly relaxing to a weirdo like me. I had a lovely time. I accepted the gracious offers of help when it came time to turn the sizzling bird over. Other than that, I monopolized the kitchen entirely. I even made some pita chips for an appetizer while all this was going on. My back felt pretty good, even though I knew I would pay for it later. The beer and wine helped things, most assuredly.

The turkey was resting on a carving board on top of the clothes dryer (every horizontal surface in the kitchen's vicinity was occupied by some part of the preparations), and I was bringing everything else together: mashing the potatoes, adjusting the thickness of the gravy and putting the bread, stuffing and green bean casserole into the vacated oven. The house was full of conversation and laughter. I put all the food on the kitchen counters, and the guests filed in to fill their plates. We sat down, Lindsey said a blessing, and we ate. All was right with the world. The food turned out to my satisfaction, and everyone enjoyed themselves. We ate heartily and spent a good while chatting over after-dinner drinks and pie, bobbing gauzily on a sea of Frangelico and tryptophan.

My guests admonished me to stay seated while they cleaned up. It's fairly difficult to fit five people into my little kitchen, but they did it. Fortunately, I was stuffed and slightly drunk, and that allowed me to relinquish control of my precious little realm over which I had held dominion all day. The most impressive feat was fitting the leftovers into the fridge. I chatted with my brother and my friend Charlotte on the phone while this was going on. They spent Thanksgiving together, sipping champagne and nibbling all sorts of good things. They had been the core of my Thanksgiving ritual for years in San Diego, and we had soared to dizzying heights of gluttony and epicurean gratification. We had always cooked lots of non-traditional things and gorged ourselves with whatever conglomeration of transplanted individuals we could assemble. In some ways, it was always the opposite of the traditional, family-oriented thing I did this year. In many ways, it was the same day of good food and good company that one would hope for. I miss the San Diego style Thanksgiving, but I certainly love the Raleigh version as well.

Lindz's aunt and her friend expressed their thanks and said their farewells. The rest of us stumbled off to bed. We spent the next day loafing around, not shopping with the rest of the world. My father-in-law wanted to take us out to dinner. It seemed, however, that all of us were enjoying the quiet of the house. After taking thought, I decided that we would light a fire in the fireplace, get a bunch of take-out Chinese food, and open the bottle of Mumm's Blanc de Noirs which I had purchased a few days earlier. It was perfect. A good sparkling wine goes with anything, but sitting around the table with good company and a variety of Chinese food is as good as it gets. We had some pie afterwards, played a game of Scrabble (I won!) and sipped Frangelico by the fire. Lovely.

So here we are, staring down the barrel of another Christmas. The in-laws have gone home. Lindz and I have enough leftovers to sustain us for weeks. The turkey carcass and a bunch of rice from the Chinese take-out have been reborn as a huge batch of soup. The weather is becoming bleaker. My gift shopping is not done yet. I should bake Christmas cookies. When did I start trying to impersonate a grownup?
(Boellmann's "Suite Gothique," Op. 25)

I need help standing up

Yippee! Good times.

I was making some chicken soup Thursday evening. I was digging around in the fridge, and I felt a twinge. As soon as the words "Fuck Fuck Fuck, not again, Pig Fuckin' Whore, Fuckass Fuck Fuck Fuck!" passed my lips, an electric cattleprod was firmly pushed into my lower back. I was moving slowly that evening, and a couple of beers helped (particularly Bell's Batch 7000, thanks Tim), but the next morning was when I really knew the good times were a-rollin.' I couldn't sit up, get up or roll over without spasms that took my breath away with their intensity.

I don't like to miss work, despite the fact that I don't enjoy it. However, in the light of the fact that I was incapable of even the first of many activities that getting to work required, I called in.

Lindz got out of work early and helped me out of bed (where I had been lying motionless for six hours or so). We looked up a doctor online (I hadn't needed my current employer's benefits yet) and before long, Flexeril was coursing through my veins. I'm still pretty much useless, but it's fractionally better.

It's humbling. It's frustrating.

1)Mere seconds and one wrong move are all that separate me from being an invalid.
2)I've had a richly blessed, healthy life. When pain does show up, I'm unprepared for it.
3)Who the hell turned up the gravity?
4)Now that it hurts to even stand up, I'm filled with a desire to clean, fix or improve all sorts of things around the house. When I felt fine, I had no recollection that I even have gutters, much less that they are full of leaves.
5)I do not like being waited on in my own home. I appreciate it, but I prefer to be doing the serving.
6)If I'm still crippled on Thanksgiving (my favorite holiday, when I spend all day in the kitchen cooking and sipping Beaujolais Nouveau), I will be very pissed off indeed.

But hey, what the hell. I'm alive, this will get better, and, after all, God doesn't owe me shit. I've got it easy.

No Sweet without Bitter

(listening to J.S. Bach's "Wir glauben all an einen Gott," BWV 680)
For many weeks I have felt unmotivated and uncreative with regards to this blog. I have had nothing to say, or at least nothing I felt was worth saying. I have cooked things, I have taken walks, Lindz and I have discussed what we want to give each other for Christmas as well as why the hell we're living in Raleigh. My mother drove down to visit us.
("Dieu parmi Nous", Olivier Messiaen)
Work has gone through varying degrees of tolerability and awfulness. I had been craving the opportunity to get away for some time on my own, perhaps a road trip. My wish was granted, but not in the fashion I would have wished. My grandmother, the mother of my late father, died on November 5th.
("Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, Op.7, No.3", Marcel Dupre)
Perhaps it was a bit sooner than we expected, but she had wanted to leave this world for years. She had been predeceased by my grandfather and her only son, my dad. She was 93.
I got in my car and drove the 800-plus miles to join my family in Michigan. Here are some pictures which I hastily snapped from the road:
Pilot Mountain, close to the Virginia/North Carolina Border:
 

The West Virginia State Capitol:
 

Of course, it is only when it is too late that a thick-headed fool like myself appreciates the history seen and made by such a person. She was married during the Great Depression, and she lived on a farm. My soft, deedless life does not allow me to comprehend decades of subsistence without the choices, escapes and self-gratification to which subsequent generations feel entitled. My brother, brother-in-law and I were pallbearers. We carried her to her grave which is next to my father's, his father's, and his father's. I pointed out to my young nephew that he was standing in the presence of the remains of two men after whom he was named.
("Fantasia and Fugue in G minor," BWV 542, J.S. Bach)
I'm feeling a bit contemplative and nostalgic, obviously. My thoughts really haven't been on Grandma so much as on my past and my family. I was compelled to ruefully notice how sparse the funeral attendance was. It wasn't because my grandmother wasn't a well-known and well-loved person; it was because so many of the people who knew and loved her had already passed away. However, I was comforted by that which endured: the church which she had attended and in which the pastor officiated her into the hereafter was virtually unchanged since the last time I was there (my grandfather's funeral, over sixteen years ago). The high, vaulted ceiling, the stained glass windows, the narthex's fieldstone floor and the organ were all reassuringly unaltered. The surrounding flat farmland, patches of woods and corn silos are much as they had been for decades. German Lutherans in Michigan are not overly anxious to change things. The funeral luncheon consisted of comforting, Midwestern food: scalloped potatoes, ham, cole slaw, pasta salad, lots of cookies, and stollen, made by my sister in remembrance of Grandma (she had always made it at Christmastime).
We drank beer and talked afterwards. It was good to be home with the family, spending time on the soil which I had taken for granted before I moved away. My nephews and niece are a delight, the silver lining to the cloud of my brooding.
("Toccata, Symphony V," Charles-Marie Widor)
Naturally, I availed myself of things which are available nowhere else. I bought some tasty Michigan beers, and some meat products:

I also drove up to Mount Pleasant to visit, for the first time in ten years, the campus of my alma mater, CMU. Young, beautiful people with their whole life ahead of them were everywhere. They were toting their bookbags over the same sidewalks I had trodden ten years and twenty-odd pounds ago. I strolled by the coffee house where I did a lot of French homework, The University Cup: 

I also had a lovely pint of Two Hearted Ale at a favorite old bar downtown, The Bird.
After a bracing stroll, I headed back to my old home in Saginaw. I headed back to Raleigh the next morning. I had spent three full, satisfying days in my home town.