Oatmeal

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When I was a pixie-haired kid, oatmeal was a gelatinous mass of gray putrescence in a shiny stainless steel serving tray in the breakfast line at camp. I have no memory of eating oatmeal at home. I watched as a smiling, steamed lady behind the counter served up a wedge of gray mush-matter onto the food tray of the camper ahead of me in line. Shudder. Thankfully there were scrambled eggs, triangles of toast and colorful honeycombs of juice glasses filled with orange, grape or apple liquid. Oh, and those one serving size boxes of cereal that you could cut open and eat from the box if you wanted. The oatmeal shudder has colored my memory darkly of that pretty log dining hall with a huge fireplace that crackled us awake while it rained outside. Dark room. Dark memory in an otherwise bright camp.

Leap forward like a grasshopper to now, when oatmeal with dried or fresh fruit, walnuts and vanilla almond milk is one of my most pleasurable meals. Before deciding something is putrid, a person really ought to taste it, in a well prepared and presented state. Steel cut oats are less milled than rolled oats, so they are a better source of fiber. For years we had brought steel cut oats to a boil on the stove the night before, boiled one minute, covered, let sit overnight, then simmered in the morning for 10 minutes, stirring all the while. This method kept me from just going to my overstuffed red leather chair and waking up with a cup of coffee, which is what I really wanted to do. (See those precarious stacks of books in the top left photo below? That's my table, next to said chair, in the family room next to the kitchen.) My sister-in-law Wilma taught us a new quick easy method for cooking steel cut oats. With this slow cooker method, because it isn't cooked on the stove, we even eat it in the summer. In fact, we eat this almost every single day and never tire of it. The amount we make provides leftovers for the two of us for a couple of days. We refrigerate what's left right in the Pyrex bowl, plastic wrapped, then we reheat it in a double boiler.

By the way (post script), we find steel cut oats at the health food store, and at Whole Foods. Those of you outside the U.S., you're on your own! But you can ask for this, and see if they laugh (at my literal translations via an online translator): Spanish: avena de corte de acero; Portuguese: aveia de aço de corte; French: l'avoine en acier de coupure; British English: porridge?)

You’ll need a slow cooker. Ours is a big one.

And a Pyrex-type (heat-proof) bowl. Ours is 2 ½ quarts (2.5 liters).

Before going to bed at night, set the bowl in the slow cooker. Fill the slow cooker, not the bowl, with about 2 inches of water.

Into the Pyrex bowl, pour 2 cups steel cut oats, 6 cups water (any 1-3 ratio), a handful of dried fruit if you wish (we do dried Michigan cherries), and a little salt. Stir.

Cover the slow cooker, and turn it to Low. (Don't forget to plug it in.)

Next morning, you’ll awaken to a house filled with a warm, nutty fragrance, and your delicious oatmeal is ready to serve and eat, though I usually turn it down to Warm and drink two cups of coffee first. Ahhh, time to read the NYTimes Op Eds Nicholas Kristoff and Gail Collins, and some blogs . . .

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On a lighter note . . .

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After NY's Spring 2011 fashion shows (it's just walking art, people), I have sifted through the outrageous and the silly and chosen something I would like to wear next spring.

Is it this one, by Marchesa?

Or maybe this, #2, by Monique Lhullier:

Perhaps this one, #3, by Donna Karan:

Or this ensemble, by Karen Walker:

CLUE: It isn't the top or the bottom one. Are you kidding me? 

TOP: Your worst enemy asked you to be her Maid of Honor.
You said NO.

TWO: Wear it to your son-in-law's
PhD commencement ceremony in May, YES.

THREE: A beee-utiful garden party on the Amalfi Coast,
on a terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea? YES!

BOTTOM: Um. Didn't I make that in eighth grade Home Economics sewing class? NO.

And here is what some people have thought of fashion:

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.” 
~ Thomas Jefferson
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“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

“Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.” 
~ Francis Bacon, Sr.
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“Fashion condemns us to many follies; the greatest is to make ourselves its slave” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

“Above all, remember that the most important thing you can take anywhere is not a Gucci bag or French-cut jeans; it's an open mind.”

~ Gail Ruben Bereny

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common - this is my symphony."
~ William Ellery Channing

Fashion quotes found here.

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synchronicity

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Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity for "meaningful coincidences," or acausal connection of two or more psycho-physic phenomena. Here is the most famous of the stories from his book Synchronicity:

"A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer, which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."

Carl Jung Resources explains that Dr. Jung developed a treatment for this patient, ". . . this coincidence is not senseless, a simple coincidence. By using the amplification method, Jung associates in connection with the scarab and comes to the concept of death and rebirth from the esoteric philosophy of antiquity, a process that, in a symbolic way, the patient should experience for a renewal and vitalization of her unilateral personality, the cause of the neurosis she was suffering from."

Some are skeptical that coincidences are ever meaningful, and others are ecstatic when events seem to collide with sparks and intrigue. If they aren't meaningful, then so be it. If they are meaningful, what difference does it make?

When my brother Bennett died suddenly in 1996 at the age of 47 of severe arteriosclerosis (all four arteries were blocked), a series of events unfolded in the following weeks and months that could be mere coincidence, but for my family and me, were stunning occasions of conjunction. I want to tell them to you, and I am guessing you want to hear them. I know I have a human curiosity to hear stories that touch on magic and miracle, with a chink of light from beyond the veil of the unknown. The half dozen or so other occasions are eerie and chilling, but I'd like to share two of the quieter, less macabre and dramatic ones, to honor Bennett, who sometimes teased me while he laughed, "Ruthie, I just love how dramatic you are!" Moo, hee? (my mother's exclamation, for Who, me?)

One such moment was when we went to a high school play my nephew was in. The week before the play, a dozen of us were cleaning out my parents' house where Dad had passed away the year before and where Mom no longer lived, having moved to an assisted living home with Alzheimer's. At lunch we calculated that we were going to be one ticket shy of the number needed for our family members attending my nephew's play the following week. Bennett, who went by "Ben" with all his friends, said, I don't need a seat, I'll be video-taping it from the back of the auditorium anyway. That night, in my parents' empty home, Bennett died. Without a lick of furniture to lean on, we mourned and paced and lay on the rose-carpeted floor, in shock. The following weekend, as we sat in the high school auditorium waiting for my nephew's play to start, some sitting, some standing, we were chatting, and I leaned over the as yet unoccupied seat in front of me. I looked down at the dark green cracked leather, worn from decades of student assemblies, and there, scratched in the leather, was I ♥ Ben.

One other of many more such stories (which swell in their cumulative effect) is this. As the executor of my brother's estate, I made arrangements to sell the beautiful country acres he owned, where he had built a log garage and had just received all the materials to build a custom log home, by himself. He had laid out his gardens on grid paper, meticulous to a delicious fault. After Don and I left the property sale closing in September of 1996 with the new owners, and after we'd had a beer with them and raised our glasses to Ben, Don and I knew we had to drive out to the property one last time. It was the place where Don, our kids, Bennett and I had lain under the stars one March night, watching for a meteor shower that never materialized. Bennett was an avid amateur astronomer. I've told you before that he was also a brilliant amateur photographer, and his avatar was this grasshopper he shot somewhere. Don and I walked the property, peeked in the windows of the garage where his memorial service had been held on a very cold February day earlier that year, and we climbed back into the van to leave, windows down on that warm September evening. As Don inched along, both of us reluctant to leave, I happened to look down at the ground. Just at the edge of the tall grass by the drive, on one stalk of timothy grass, perched a lone grasshopper, swaying in the breeze. We stopped then, for a while longer. What are the chances of a grasshopper sitting on a blade of grass in the country on a September night? Probably astronomical. But maybe the chances of me looking right there, right then are a bit less.

What does it mean? I suppose it doesn't have to mean anything. But because we were heavy with shock and loss, all of our attention was riding close to the asphalt of what happened around us. We saw the connections, which felt as if they were more than the average, and more intense. But really, aren't we always connected to everything? If we were but to pay closer attention, and feel the wonder of the miracles in a blade of grass that stands up straight though it's as light as a feather, and bends when a breeze blows, not breaking, would we be amazed? And a grasshopper. Have you seen how far and how high a grasshopper can jump, and land on that exact stalk of grass that just happens to be in the perfect spot, and hold on? Is that not magic?

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The air down here

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When the air is clear and dry, I don’t notice it, the air I mean. In September I notice instead the light, the way it falls shadowed on the drive next to the catalpa tree, or the way light inhabits leaves, along with their veins and squatters. I notice also the steady rasp that floats in currents and waves from the poplars by the pond. I stop, for that. I hear the screech of blue jays at Bishop the farm queen for being who she is, for they are who they are. I note the sun, the way it butters the meadow in its season of goldenrod and lace. I see white moths flaking the air, and countless, nameless flyers barely visible to me. I take note of the wind, the sensation of hair rising and falling on my neck and forehead as I watch sumac leaves rise and fall around swallows spiraling up. Sometimes I notice a stench, when a dead raccoon has begun decaying, and turkey buzzards circle down to commence their beautiful role, out of hunger, then preen for thirty minutes, later excreting what has been cleansed in them before delivering it back to their Earth.

But air? When it is July and humid I notice it, for then I lag under the oppression of moisture. But this substance I breathe in September, that would kill a glinty, sunny fish, what is it to me? Am I mindful that it is Life? When someone asks, If you were stranded on a desert island and could have just three things . . . do I think of air? The toupee of smog that hovers over Los Angeles where we lived when the children were born is a visible reminder that I live free and unhindered in a sheer garment that alters itself to my movements without scissors, stitches or darts. Without its molecules carrying vibrations to me, I would not hear the sounds of leaves, cicadas, birds, a stick snapping under my foot, a loved one speaking, or the strings and winds of Fauré's Sicilienne. I sleep, I breathe. I chop, cook, eat, I breathe. I read, write and speak, I breathe. I touch, smell, hear, listen, and I breathe. I walk and run, I breathe. I feel, I love, I breathe. I fall and ache and cry, I breathe. I think. I breathe.

And what do I give to this air that gives me the infinite and portable floor, walls and ceiling of my life? An exhalation: Thanks.

Post script: Today I messed around with GarageBand and recorded myself reading this piece. If you're interested in hearing me read "The air down here", go here. I prefer my voice with headphones.

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The walk . . . and Happy Birthday, Mary Oliver

                      . . . for the roses

Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

- from Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot

Ever since my poetry teacher told me that she thought Four Quartets was the best, most important poem in the English language, I've intended to read it. One day I found it on the free book table in the big old dark hall outside my office at the university. It was strange, I thought, finding a discarded copy of the best poem in the English language. What English professor would cast it off that way? Oh well, my luck. Maybe they had an extra copy. The tiny black paperback volume sat for years on a small stack of books next to my telephone. Every morning when I listened to voice messages, I looked at the cover. It sat there, like my dad's tiny wooden screwdriver, photographs of my family, and a white piece of the refurbished Pont-neuf. The poem-book was something treasured, not for any personal reason yet, except that someone I thought highly of treasured it. At last, one lunch hour I picked it up and began to read, getting as far as the third page. I stopped reading because of the quote, above, on the second page, and another on the third. These were enough, I thought, for a while. This, my friends, is why I rarely finish books.

Then George posted about the poem Four Quartets, and because I like George and how he walks the world, I found my small black book, which had shifted from the desk next to my work phone to the dresser stack of books at home. I read it through (!). I went back and commented on George's post that I too was hooked. The poem would be a life-long friend.

About the quote, " . . . for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at . . . ," it's been working in my psyche all this time since first cracking the book open years ago. I was thinking about beauty in our culture, of the cost of it, the extent to which we will go to be looked at and admired. What hadn't occurred to me was that Eliot's little black poem-book had the look of flowers that are looked at, for me anyway. I didn't open it, read it and pull the words into my own flesh and blood, and maybe I wasn't ready. The quote on the third page that also paused me? "Garlic and sapphires in the mud". Catchy, a good title for a blog, I thought. But that line has also haunted my mind. It is the opener of a stanza that is like a free-standing poem in the bigger poem, an opaque passage, with too many words I don't understand. I don't know what Eliot meant by it. But today, after all this time and after reading the poem through now, these two lines together mean something like this to me: The stuff of life is what we walk through, what gets us dirty, what we wear out from frequent use, the things we treasure because we know them so well and soften up with our oily fingers. As Nanao Sakaki said, "Keep your feet muddy."

OK. So then, what? Help me get this from my head to real life. What are sapphires and garlic doing in the mud, and what does it mean to keep your feet muddy? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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That's where the post was going to end, and I was going to wait a couple of days to post it. After all, I don't post every day! Yikes. Lately it just seems there has been so much wanting to come out. But since writing the above, and then reading LoriKim's beautiful response (What about thorns?) at her blog A Year's Risings with Mary Oliver to a poem by Mary Oliver about roses, and because today is Mary Oliver's birthday, and because she is . . . is in the world, in me, expressing what floods from my heart every moment, I must post this today.
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Rowboat

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Rowboat

There is a life that was not meant for me,
of sailboats, and Nantucket shingles

of white shorts, white sails, white teeth, white gulls, the wind of the Cape,
the salt in the crab, the spit of the white bow piercing teal water,
of teak and polish and legs of sempiternal tan

I am not of pencil-thin
masts and marinas
clubbed, decked and chromed,
morning wedge of glint and beacon

But oh I am white
and privileged, without a doubt
peachy, the white of Lake Michigan sand,
of shells on that sand, striated with necklaces
of fine-grained earthery,
of peeling sun-blazed birch bark tree
organza diaphany,
skirt of light,
easy

I am of one rowboat
on one small lake, but infinite,
the rowboat of the patchwork paint,
of one broken oarlock,
of oars painted dove gray, one corner
of one oar missing,
with its splitting feathers
raised in the air

Water streaming down the oar-wing
onto my hand, paused
in one moment of many moments
and even more
and yes more
of airy moments
of leisure
of one coasting kind
or another

~ Ruth M.

Here me read the poem here.

Happy Birthday, Dee Dee.

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Back to School Lessons

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"I'm going to go lay down."

"Just what are you going to lay down?"

"Oh. I mean I'm going to go lie down."

Having a mom who was at times a substitute English teacher (among many other talents and training as a music teacher) meant that eventually, grammatically correct words fell from our lips as easily as maple leaves floating from black branches in September. To this day my three sisters like to hash out grammar questions and pet peeves. It's fun to listen. Lay and Lie are among their bugaboos. Not too many people get confused and say a chicken lies an egg. But when it comes to going to the couch for a nap, a lot of people say they're going to go lay down. Fingernails on a chalk board!

The fall semester has taken off in the English department like a big booming (and creaky) barge, and no doubt professors will be honking their grammar horns along the way, at lays that should be lies, thats that ought to be whiches, and infers, which should most emphatically be implies. The latter was one I had to learn from a professor honking at my term paper in which I wrote that I had implied such-and-such from the passage. He happens to be my boss now. (Embarrassing implication.)

But there is a far more important lesson with lay and lie for me to remember as the semester commences.  This barge will pick up cargo as it lumbers down the river. I need to load up my backpack and get off on the riverbank every now and then, lay down the big heavy load of the day, and lie down in the September grass. When I'm stressed, it helps at the end of the day when I've lain down (and laid down), to close my eyes, and practice this visualization:

There is a free-flowing stream running from my head down through the center of my body, and out my toes into the Earth. As I feel my muscles relax (especially my shoulders), I scan my mind for the burdens weighing me down. One by one, I place these worrisome morsels in the flow of my stream and watch them float away, down my body, and into the Earth's soft loam. When I've donated all my burdens to the Earth, I visualize Her transforming them back into something alive and nurturing, back up the stream in me. (Ohh, I thank Her.) If I haven't already drifted off in the stream of sleep, I am at least relaxed.

Won't you lie down, in this September grass? What about the ants, you ask? No worries. They don't mind working while we lay around, I mean lie around. There's plenty of room: Lay your burden down, and lie here in the grass with me, Bishop and James Taylor. I mean, with Bishop, James Taylor and me. We're so small and the world's so vast . . .

Scoot over, Bish.

I shot these photos of Bishop two years ago;

the leaves have only just begun to fall and are not this far along

September Grass

by James Taylor

Well, the sun's not so hot in the sky today

And you know I can see summertime slipping on away

A few more geese are gone, a few more leaves turning red

But the grass is as soft as a feather in a featherbed

So I'll be king and you'll be queen

Our kingdom's gonna be this little patch of green

Won't you lie down here right now

In this September grass

Won't you lie down with me now

September grass

Oh the memory is like the sweetest pain

Yeah, I kissed the girl at a football game

I can still smell the sweat and the grass stains

We walked home together. I was never the same.

But that was a long time ago

And where is she now? I don't know

Won't you lie down here right now

In this September grass

Won't you lie down with me now

September grass

Oh, September grass is the sweetest kind

It goes down easy like apple wine

Hope you don't mind if I pour you some

Made that much sweeter by the winter to come

Do you see those ants dancing on a blade of grass?

Do you know what I know? that's you and me, baby

We're so small and the world's so vast

We found each other down in the grass

Won't you lie down with me right here

September grass

Won't you lie down with me now

In this September grass

Lie down

Lie down

Lie down

Lie down

(repeat)

Won't you lie down here right now

In this September grass

Won't you lie down here now

In this September grass

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