Tag Archives: Books

Green Beans & Good Deeds

19 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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Weeks of Lenten pondering has led to an Easter-tide realization…that nothing I can do will ever rise to the lofty standard of being good.  Certainly, my thinking roots back to that biblical text of God calling His creation good… against those pointed words memorialized in Luke, where Jesus disassociates himself from goodness with a theoretical ten-foot pole cross, by saying

“Why do you call me good. Nobody is good except for God.”

I once confused the standard of ‘good” with being ‘good enough.”  Where now I know that good is better than I know.  Better than I am.  And that only on my better days, can I offer up ‘good enough.’

Upon that landscape, I’ll still confess that if someone (or something) calls out for assistance, I do what I can to help — even when I know I’ll fall short of doing the good others deserve.  Some weeks I pour time out and spread myself thin, while others, like the last two, not so much. I’ve no need to recount details, but my “good enough” deeds usually connect me to one of my four children.   Sometimes to Sis or Aunt Jane.  But rarely beyond these.  Which may be why I wish to record this one that took place during the dark days of Lent, that had me fulfilling a strange promise to a stranger living out west that I’d earlier tracked down via Facebook’s email system.

Yes, I’m back on Facebook — for the moment, anyway — because of some good-deeding  committed to last autumn.  A pastor friend of mine is writing a book and he wished to more easily facilitate comments within a digital writing support group on Facebook… and since I was the only holdout, and wished to help…

Facebook has its place and its uses.  One, I’ve learned, is this:  For the bargain price of one dollar, I can contact anyone in Facebook’s planetary system, including a lady whose one-of-a-kind name appeared at the top of an ultrasound photo taken of her unborn child….hmm.. seven years ago, I think.  Or was it eleven?  Funny how I can no longer recall and that the number of years no longer matters.

The image had fallen out of a used paperback I was reading, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which I had purchased online from a vendor near Seattle.  It’s a fine tale, one that weaves together three stories of three women living in separate times and states, more or less connected together by another novel…. this one, Virginia Woolf’s, Mrs. Dalloway.  I read The Hours during Advent….and I suppose the stranger who first owned it read the book during her pregnancy.  Perhaps she marked her progress in the paperback with an ultrasound photo, before losing track of both.

Rather than tossing the picture out, I set it aside, only to let it gather dust till I ran across it again a few days after Ash Wednesday, buried in my unread stacks of books.  I decided to spare a few minutes to the internet, which led me to Facebook and its lost mother… which led me to draft a strange email that began…. “I hope you’ll not find this too weird, but….”

Now sitting more than two months removed from this event, I wish to say that if that Lenten good-enough deed of mine was weird, how I wish to see more like it in the world, and more of it from me.  So much so, that it would not seem weird at all.  Because… who am I kidding?  Isn’t life, at its best, wonderfully weird?  And isn’t it when we try to keep life in the bounds of the middle of the bell curve, so that we don’t stand out, that life falls strangely flat? You’ll not be surprised, I imagine, to hear that the mother, still unknown to me, still a stranger to me on Facebook (since we are not friends), was overjoyed at my boldness in my reaching out to her past from my present.

Perhaps the weirdest part of all these lines… is that I had not intended to share this strange story between strangers when I began this post.  Instead, I’d planned to share a different one about a landscape design for a prayer garden I’d created for another pastor friend of mine who serves an inner-city Methodist church.  But here we are, with a header photo strangely out of place with the print surrounding it.

That the execution of that landscape design calls for many “good” deeds and ornamental plant material — but no green beans or other edibles — leads me the other original goal of the post: To share a trio of recipes involving green beans that connect me back to three women I love who live or lived in different times and places. It seems right to at least make good on this one.  Because in one way or another, as noted within the recipes below, these green beans have each been synonymous with good deeds.  And there is nothing flat tasting about these.

#1 ~~ Greek Green Beans

Thanks to Aunt Jane, who first preserved my grandfather’s recipe in word…

IMG_0515

2 15 oz cans of green beans, drained
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 minced garlic cloves
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp salt (more or less)
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp allspice
1 8oz can tomato sauce
1 15 oz can petite tomatoes
1 cup of water
 
In a large sauce pan over medium to medium-low heat, saute onion in olive oil for 3 to 4 minutes.  Add garlic and spices and stir for a minute, before adding tomato sauce, tomatoes and water.  Simmer uncovered over low heat for 30 minutes.  Add drained green beans and simmer another 20 to 30 minutes.  Serve with slices of crusty bread, as a meal in itself or as a side, with my grandfather’s roasted chicken or fried pork chops.
 

Amy’s Asian Green Beans

 
Thanks to Amy for sharing her mother’s best friend’s recipe… and for serving them up with a Christmas dinner prepared a few days after my mother-in-law’s passing;  I hope to never forget such kindness, nor that lovely dinner.
 
Amy's Green Beans photo
Add the following ingredients to an oven-safe casserole dish and bake 20-30 minutes at 350 degrees.
 
2 strips of crumbed crisp bacon
1/2 cup of chopped onion, sauteed in 2 Tbsp olive oil.
1 12 oz bag frozen green beans
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup, scant 1 Tbsp, Soy Sauce (original recipe called for Teriyaki Sauce)
1 – 2 Tbsp water
 

Everyday Green Beans

 
greenbeans
 
Thanks to Kate, who told Kara, who told me about the wonders of using broth instead of water… to Mom for the bacon… and Aunt Jo for the chopped onions, that she used to season most vegetables cooked upon her stove top.  This is a true hither and yon family combination….
 
2 strips of crumbled crisp bacon
1/2 cup of chopped onion, sauteed in bacon fat or olive oil
2 cans of drained green beans
2 cups of beef broth
 
Bring to a boil and simmer for a few minutes before serving.
 

Winter Mulling

23 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Good Reads, Life at Home, Soul Care

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IMG_0481“”It’s not good to complain about your flock,” she advised.  “A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.””

— Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

 

It happens rarely, but sometimes, words I’ve read from a novel will linger within me.  To be sure, it is never the exact line of prose that I remember, the one rendered so beautifully by the author.  Instead, it’s something all together better since the author’s lines point to a living truth.

It happens something like this:  I’m going along reading, reading, reading, really involved in the story, words flying and zooming past my eyes before I realize, a few sentences too late, that I’ve passed an important turn or perhaps a yellow blinking light that was cautioning me to slow down and take note.  I have no choice but to pull over and take myself out of the story.  I know from experience that I cannot proceed without circling back up the page to reread the unmarked but blinking passage.  I return long enough to pause over it.  Not too.   But long enough that some bit of truth flies off the page to live within me.

Usually, the words, like those above written by Barbara Kingsolver, seem too small to fuss over.  I don’t know what deeper meaning, if any, they are suppose to possess.  Or what I am to make or do with them.  But two days ago, more than a week after finishing Flight Behavior, I saw that if I substituted the word ‘flock’ for ‘life,’ how the meaning of Kingsolver’s two lines came close to thoughts I’ve been mulling over since …. well, whenever I last wrote a post in this blog.

IMG_0485I’ve been reading more than mulling here of late.  Lots and lots of good books —  not good enough to keep but good enough to donate to the local library for the good of a larger reading circle.  Or so I thought, until today’s lunch, when I decided I’d been too hasty or perhaps moving on autopilot, when it came to my most recently stacked book, Amor Towles novel, Rules of Civility.

Six chapters into my latest read — E.L Doctorow’s award-winning Ragtime — I kept on thinking about Towels novel.  Not the story, as good as it was, but two blinking passages I decided important enough to turn around for, to pick up, like hitchhikers off the side of the road.

The first passage reminds me never to give up on my dreams… and really, some things in life are too good not to share…

“You look back with the benefit of age upon the dreams of most children and what makes them seem so endearing is their unattainability–this one wanted to be a pirate, this one a princess, this one president.  But from the way Tinker talked you got the sense that his starry-eyed dreams were still within his reach; maybe closer than ever.” (p. 300)

The second speaks around the same truth I tripped over in Kingsolver’s two simple lines.  But since the passage is followed by a one sentence paragraph that reads — “Maybe that sounds bleaker than I intended — I’ll stop here.  The second slice is good  enough to keep for another day.  My memory, unfortunately, is not.  So note to self:  the second can be found hiding on page 323.

 
 

The Moviegoer

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Life at Home

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IMG_0416Had it not been for the controversy stirred up by that small panel of judges who decided the winner of the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, I would have devoted most of my November reading time to another novel.  Those now classics that were heavily favored to win — J.D. Salinger’s Franny & Zooey and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 — were bested by an almost unknown novelist, Walker Percy, who received the award for his slim debut novel, The Moviegoer.

I like this story behind the story.  I like it very much, in fact, since surprise keeps us on our toes and helps us not sleepwalk through life.  The latter, in fact, is one of the central themes of the book.  But in spite of the wake-up call offered between its covers, reading Walker Percy’s story sometimes left me limp with sadness.  I don’t know why; but the fault may lie with the lurking villains of despair and malaise that cast long shadows upon the story.  So with that, I’ll confess that it helps to read the novel on sunny days.  And too, that it can’t hurt to linger on that epigraph, from Søren Kierkegaard, rather than rush past it as I did the first time:

“….the specific character of despair is precisely this:  it is unaware of being despair.”

The back cover summarizes the story as a “portrait of a boyish New Orleans stockbroker wavering between ennui and the longing for redemption… on the eve of his thirtieth birthday.”  Inside the covers lies Percy’s beautiful prose and the deep thoughts he serves up like some trifle.  There are too many to share.  So I’ll move on by saying how I like that the story was a time capsule of the early sixties South.  It was interesting to contrast life then and now, and ponder places where we’ve changed and where we have not.  But it was meeting the unforgettable protagonist, Jack “Binx” Bollings, who narrates the tale in a colorful first-person voice, that hooked me from the first paragraph:

“This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch.  I know what this means.  Since I go there every Sunday for dinner and today is Wednesday, it can mean only one thing:  she wants to have one of her serious talks.  It will be extremely grave, either a piece of bad news about her stepdaughter Kate or else a serious talk about me, about the future and what I ought to do.  It is enough to scare the wits out of anyone, yet I confess I do not find the prospect altogether unpleasant.”

I’ve read that Percy admired Tolstoy.  He mentions War and Peace in the text.  And like Tolstoy, Percy possesses the courage and willingness to touch upon weighty matters affecting the human spirit.  Over and over, I learned of some loved one Jack had lost.  His brother on page one or two.  His father, a few more pages in.  Others, later on.   But physical death aside, Percy touches upon the illusory curing power of money and sex and drugs and religion and even war.   And since this story is set in the sixties South,  there was plenty of discrimination to bump up against:  Women and racial and not just between blacks and whites.  Sometimes, Binx stepped on my toes with his truth.  In one passage, it happened to my particular truth du jour:

“Once I thought of going into law or medicine or even pure science.  I even dreamed of doing something great.  But there is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds and mutual funds; quitting work at five o’clock like everyone else…”

I’ve been thinking a lot on how sweet life would be if I were not trying to realize that dream of fictionalizing my father’s story, who coincidentally, also happened to be a moviegoer by the name of Jack.  It would be easy to coast through days if my biggest challenge turned on the decision of what to fix for dinner.  How easy and lovely to while away hours in the garden or painting the exterior of my house or my dining room for the fifth time.  What joy to simply feast upon the artistic endeavors of others …while enjoying the taste of a few bonbons on my tongue.

Too bad the The Moviegoer is not a bonbon eating sort of book.  Instead, it’s the sort some keep company with every Lent.  Its existential subject is made for mulling over.  And its New Orleans setting into time makes it perfect for Lent, since the story takes place the week leading up to Mardi Gras.  But writing this hits me hard, since Lent is not about feasting and bonbons at all — and more about fasting in the wilderness and facing up to personal demons — for forty days and nights — which biblically speaking, translates to a helluva lot of time.

So do forgive me… if I leave those ends a little loose, to keep the noose from growing tight, in order to travel down a different line of thought.  Having spent a lot of time with this cagey old novel, I know that good ‘ole Binx would agree that it’s easier to be a spectator than a doer.  It’s much more enjoyable to read (or see) a good story than to try and write one.  And if my year boils down to any thoughts on writing, it’s that it takes a lot of desire and hard work to write fiction.  And that I’ve learned I lack what it takes in both departments.  Which is not all bad, since this year spent working on my father’s story has shattered whatever false illusions I once had about story-making.

I part ways with The Moviegoer with a lot to wonder over.  For one, if I can’t imagine writing at a publishable quality, how difficult was it for the newly published author Walker Percy to think his writing ‘good enough’ for some prestigious award.  His own publisher didn’t support his nomination; it came by unconventional channels, which a surprised Percy didn’t learn of until a few days after the ceremony.

I also wonder over those other ten finalists who lost that year.  How did they feel after coming so close — after all that hard work — with all those expectations of taking the prize?

I’d like to think that maybe a few of them pick up The Moviegoer to see what Percy had to say.  It’s not a bad notion to think upon… for some sunny day…or over forty days of some upcoming Lent.  If the idea grows to reality in my life, it would make my third time to read it.  I don’t mind saying that there’s something holy and complete about that number three that I’ve always found difficult to resist.  Much harder than a mere box of bonbons.