(My wife was away for a week or so not long ago. Before going, she walked me through several culinary how-tos, including how to use the rice cooker. This is exactly how I wrote it in my journal):
Rinse the rice
Make it nice,
Use two scoops
Call in the troops
The same, of water
It’s what you oughter
Then half a cup more
You’re ready to soar
Turn on the cooker
Slam down the lid
You soon will have rice
You cool, lucky kid.
I found myself playing with words yesterday after reading about OBL’s death and its aftermath. What started as a wordplay, ended as a meditation on life and hate.
First, the word play…
I hate hate.
I hate hatred.
I hate the hate that hate begets.
Sometimes I mess around with words, doodling, looking for combinations that sound nice or rhyme or are intriguing, like in the above example when one word can be both a verb and a noun. In spite of the ugliness of the word hate, I like the last line’s lilt (I like this sentence’s, too!)
…then the meditation.
Though I’ll probably never write an essay entitled “When Justice Deserves Death,” I realize there are times when someone does something so bad, he or she deserves to die. This certainly seems to be one of those moments.
Hate doesn’t win just because hateful people do very bad things. Hate wins when we hate in return. Hate wins when we celebrate even a just death. Revenge debilitates whoever craves and nurtures it. Continue reading
In town late last week I saw the results of an act of man-made destruction. I was shocked and appalled, completely powerless to do anything to alter what I saw or ignore what the act represented.
City workers or possibly tree removal experts hired by the city had cut down three very large trees that had been growing along Constitution Avenue. It had happened along the west end of that well known street across from a wooded portion of the National Mall, along the sidewalk in front of one of the lovely white granite buildings that inhabit this alabaster city.
All that was left
Bob
(I wrote this last year but it suits for this one too, though the cast of characters is a little different: fewer and later planted peas, less bok choi, added broccoli.)
A Colorful Library of Life
Early May 2010
Saturday at the market and I am buying only eggs and a sweet roll, two things we don’t make ourselves. I see lots of spring lettuce today, plus bok choi, radishes, herbs, and spring onions, but I’m growing all of that myself so I don’t buy any. Jones is full of perfect heads of sweet, red, leaf lettuce, buttery-smooth, green, bib lettuce, crisp, light green head lettuce, and several dozen radishes, their bright red bulbs peeking above the top of the soil, beckoning me to grab their green tops and pull them up. I’ve got green onions, too. I don’t see peas for sale, but I wouldn’t buy those either, knowing my lush scores of pea plants are rocketing skyward, preparing to set and bear pods upon pods of those sweet, green pearls.
Hello from Jerusalem,
Surrounded by waves of fervor, I stood amazed and delighted at the 450 gold robed, fur-hatted, side-curled Hasidic men and boys welcoming in and relishing their Queen: lovely, precious Shabbos.
On a Friday night not long ago I had the amazing experience of witnessing a Tisch at a local Hasidic (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) synagogue. Tisch means table in Yiddish, the mother tongue of these conservative communities. (How can Hebrew, the official language of Israel yet also the language of God be used to say things like, “Son, take out the garbage,” or” How much is the gefillte fish?” or worse yet, “Honey, I have a stomach ache.”) The event is called a Tisch because it takes place around a very large table (ten smaller ones pushed together) on which a meal, sometimes symbolic, sometimes full, is served. The 300 year old Tisch tradition is one opportunity for the holy, mysterious Hasidim to celebrate Shabbos (the Sabbath) together and reaffirm their unity as a community. Perhaps you can imagine how out of place I felt at first, wondering if this holy throng minded an outsider’s presence. As my host and guide, one of Katie’s teachers with an interest in religious expressions, theology, and the bewildering, delightful array of human behavior assured me, they were so intent on the event, they hardly knew or cared I was there. Continue reading
…I would risk getting struck by lightning just to have some.
Well…not quite but this evening when I returned home from work we were going to walk to Jones for lettuce for a salad to eat with grilled steak, but alas, the dark clouds hove into view, crowding the western and southwestern skies with their menace. I checked the weather radar on my desktop and saw the major storm headed our way. Nothing else to do but strip off my work shell, throw on a kilt and a tee-shirt while Nita picked spinach from The Lorelei and fetched a couple bags and then, vroom!, we roared away in the van, hopefully in front of the front we both saw increasingly blackening the sky, and heard, ponderously booming in the distance, each minute less of a distance, soon, downright close. Continue reading
Dylan Thomas
I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors’ continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
From there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night’s ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death’s feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.
A real quackpot
