So what do we do with the missing of those who have passed away and those still living who are not present in our lives the way they once were?
Go on missing them, of course.
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Wednesday, May 15, 2019
So what do we do with the missing of those who have passed away and those still living who are not present in our lives the way they once were?
Go on missing them, of course.
So in reference to the post on Mother’s Day in which was pointed out that many of us share the heartaches of lost mothers, Kati L wrote this:
Good Morning,
I've been thinking about your latest posts. Mother's Day can be hard for many reasons which leads me to ask you this question...
what do we do with the missing of those who have passed away and those still living who are not present in our lives the way they once were?
Does time make the pain less? are their rituals that lessen the burden?
Please let us know :)
Kali
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WebMeister Responds:
I thought I’d take some time to think about this but I got a rush of thoughts and decided to post immediately.
Here’s the first and most important: do not want to forget those whom we have loved and are now separated out of our lives.
We loved them then and we love them still because they enriched our lives, even if only to enhance our daydreams.
Where are we, who are we without having felt love?
Near spiritually dead, really.
Cherish the love you feel, independent of whether it is returned.
Certainly don’t spend time on remedies to rid ourselves of it.
But maybe we don’t have to nurture that empty feeling.
Nor wallow in it like pigs in mud.
Nor wrap it around ourselves to block out the sunshine.
Nor mute our headphones to block out the melodies.
Maybe we want to confine the pain of the absence.
A friend announces an engagement.
Block your own pain. Elbow it aside.
Permit your friend her special moment.
Lord knows we have so few of them.
Be happy for her. Wish her the best.
Compliment her choice of groom; compliment the groom.
Likely she knows your pain.
She knows her joy will of necessity contrast with your own loss.
She or another may even mention itt.
Express condolence or understanding.
But confine your empty by rebuffing any reference to your own condition.
Smile and return the conversation to the moment at hand.
Yes, time does heal past wounds.
But you will disappoint yourself for casting gloom over your friend’s joy.
This disappointment is a new wound.
Time is already overworking on your pre-existing wounds.
By allowing your sadness to break its confinement, to escape the reservation and give yourself another wound, you assign an impossible task to time.
And today’s last piece on learning to live hurt, an advanced step, no doubt, is to remember the joys waiting for us to experience.
Exclusively remember.
The loveliness of a flower, of a bird.
Of a person.
The weather.
A good meal.
The kindness you do for another.
Clean teeth.
So what do we do with the missing of those who have passed away and those still living who are not present in our lives the way they once were?
Go on missing them, of course.
The days following are a substantial improvement over what we’ve experienced these last few. Warmer with more sun. And warmer. Did I say that?
Let’s notice and appreciate this fine weather.
Get outdoors as much as possible.
Minimize our use of a car.
Maximize our time.
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
Enjoy the week.
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Postings Count, Weather Brief, and Dinner
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Our 404th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 404 posts we’re at the 8.08 percentile of our commitment, the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Time is 12.01am.
On Wednesday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 57* with a feels-like of 55* with a mix of clouds and sun.
Dinner tonight is Turkey Tetrazzini.
Turkey tetrazzini
CityMama --Stefania Pomponi Butler - originally posted to Flickr as Turkey Tetrazzini from Saveur
Tetrazzini is an American dish made with diced poultry or seafood and mushroom in a butter/cream and cheese sauce flavored with wine or sherry.
It is served hot over linguine, spaghetti, egg noodles, or some other types of pasta, garnished with parsley, and sometimes topped with breadcrumbs, almonds, canned fried onions, or cheese (or a combination).
Tetrazzini can be prepared as a baked noodle casserole, sometimes with steps taken to give it a browned crust.
Shortcut recipes for home cooking sometimes use canned cream of mushroom soup or other cream soups.
The dish is named after the Italian opera star Luisa Tetrazzini.
It is widely believed to have been invented circa 1908–1910 by Ernest Arbogast, the chef at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California, where Tetrazzini was a long-time resident.
However, other sources attribute the origin to the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City.
Good Housekeeping published the first reference to turkey tetrazzini in October 1908, saying readers could find the dish of cooked turkey in a cream sauce, with spaghetti, grated cheese, sliced mushrooms, and bread crumbs on top, at "the restaurant on Forty-second street."
The chicken tetrazzini was made famous by chef Louis Paquet.
No universal standard for the dish exists, so various parts are missing or substituted in various recipes, for example, another kind of nut, crumbs, or different cheeses. The name is often expanded to describe the specific meat used (e.g., chicken tetrazzini, or tuna tetrazzini).
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Chuckle for Wednesday, May 15, 2019
During an argument, the husband asked the wife why she married him.
"Because you can be very funny."
"I thought you said it was because I was good in bed”
"You see? Hilarious."
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Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Love your notes.
Contact me at domcapossela@hotmail.com
This from Sally C, continuing the discussion of ‘regular’ as that pertains to people:
Hi, Dom,
Here's an answer to Howard D.'s question back to me, "Please tell me why you were moved to ask [is there any such thing as "a regular person?"].
You tickle me, Howard!
In my sojourn through this life, I find unending delight in meeting and befriending individuals who are each most different from each other. This makes me think of Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" or the half-dozen variations compiled into one piece of music of the Scottish tune "Over the Water to Charlie" shortly after poor Bonnie Prince Charlie's staggering defeat at Culloden in 1745 (the tune exploding in popularity as Charles declined into obscurity in France). We are similar in physical structure, yes, and in such desires as wanting the security of shelter, food, and love within our spheres of family and friends. And although the Bible tells us that to look on the face of God would kill us because His beauty and perfection is more than we faulty mortals could handle, I believe that the face of every person living on this earth, in all its variations, is that of God. His image is everywhere and infinite and unique to each one who carries it.
Even among groups with like interests or vocations (writing, living history, engineering, etc.), each person has a different take on the world, a perception that broadens my own perception. I find this in everyone, from toddlers to nonagenarians. No one is "regular" or "average." A mathematical average or median can be determined, but it has no real bearing on the individuals.
So, that is why I hope there is no such thing as "a regular person." How dull!
Sally
WebMeister reponds: Nicely put, Sally.
And Howard responds: both to Sally and to Tommie Toner.
I’m not surprised Tommie never heard the expression, “like a regular person,” because it is, to my understanding, very much, rhetorically, a bit of specialized vernacular of the Jewish-American community. But as I said, you’d have to know my friend Jack R., to recognize the connection.
There are plenty of examples, but this was the easiest to extract things from. That is, it’s a review of a book called Hide and Seek: Jewish Women and Hair Covering. There is always the risk of over-simplification, but to start to explain, the reviewer points out, near the beginning of the narrative, “Traditional Judaism considers the hair of a married woman erotic. As a result, married Jewish women are generally expected to cover their hair, except in front of their husbands, and sometimes in the company of other women. For most of Jewish history this practice was not disputed - mainly because society at large also considered it immodest for women to let their hair down in its city streets.”
And, as is explained, the book goes on to examine a variety of facets of how this dilemma plays out in daily life, and what the underlying feelings may be in conforming to the “law” and the community standards that have the force of law among the devout.
The one I liked, mainly because of the spontaneous and natural use (that I and Jack R. deployed) of the expression under examination, is this one, and I’ll only give a smidgen, and is one of many excerpts from the book under review that the reviewer has included:
A Regular Person
If she could, Bellischa Mendelsohn, who lives in Oak Park with her husband and year-old son, would wear a shaitel [a wig] all the time.
"I like wearing a shaitel," she says, "but I get headaches." During the week Mendelsohn wears a beret and on Shabbat wears a three-quarter fall -- whose headband covers the front of her hair. "I feel better in a shaitel," she says, "because then I look like a regular person."
According to [editor Lynne] Schreiber, "looking like a regular person" is an issue for many of the women who are committed to covering their hair and yet are loathe to appear too different, whether in their own community or in the community at large.
While a shaitel can help with the "fit in" factor, one is bound to ask, "Mightn't a shaitel be so beautiful that it attracts attention?"
Some Sephardic communities do not permit shaitels for just this reason. Married women in these communities use scarves instead.
[these comments and the rest of the review may be found here:
http://www.urimpublications.com/hide-and-seek-jewish-women-and-hair-covering.html ]
In other words, the whole notion, a prevailing one, and I’ll go out on a limb and suggest it applies to all, but, possibly, the latest two or three generations of American Jews (that is, the assimilated ones, not the devout or orthodox kind), and that is, to be “like a regular person” means simply, not to stand out. Not in any way.
In the past several centuries too many Jews (not to mention innumerable other ethnicities, possibly in greater aggregate numbers) were made to suffer, or paid a greater sacrifice, because they were judged to “stand out” in unacceptable ways. They are not afraid of being Jewish, but they are wary of appearing to be anything but “regular,” that is, to look like anybody else to the extent that he or she doesn’t stand out.
Now this, obviously, puts a sharp edge on the thesis of Sally’s “answer” to me, in which she celebrates, if I may borrow, in turn, from not too exalted a source, “What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!” not to mention (but by mentioning it), as Sally (indirectly) and Will Shakespeare do also, though he is speaking of a single woman, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety…” What a concept: in one person, infinite variety. Wish I thought of it.
We are a nation that extols individuality and celebrates the integrity of each human, and yet we, as a society, are disposed to put at jeopardy within any one single community (and there thousands across the country) anyone who is perceived to threaten what the community would like to believe is its tranquility and stability. Be an individual. Have a signature. Have a brand. Stand out. But don’t stand out too much. Just enough.
Let me say this, Sally. I have always found the same delight in the infinite variety of humans, and seek the loveliness of the visages in a crowd. When I was driven out of my house in Ipswich by divorce, back in the late 70s, and took an apartment in the North End, I would actually go to the newly restored Faneuil Hall area and particularly the “new” Quincy Market, which on weekends in the summer was always teeming with people, jostling and crowded against one another, and forming two streams running coextensively through the building, one from the eastern end of the building, nearer the harbor, and the other from the opposite direction. Often as not, I was within what I’ll call another realm of consciousness—what can I say? I was 32, a child of the 60s, an “artist,” and newly divorced and so tending to be self-indulgent. I would stand near the base of one of the many structural pillars in the building, apart from the swirling, bumptious flow of humanity, and would look, sometimes for a half-hour at a time, sometimes longer, just observing closely and unobserved myself, the faces of the vast number of people moving past me. And I was, every time, overcome by the beauty of their ordinary, unself-conscious, faces.
If there was a modernist poem that it brings to mind, it was by another great American poet of the 20th century poet, who did as much as Stevens (at least) to shape the canon of work that was written during those hundred years. I’m talking about Ezra Pound, and a very much shorter poem, though also a hokku (or as some like to say it, haiku), like several of the stanzas in spirit of the Stevens poem. It’s called “In a Station of the Metro,” and I’ve known it by heart since the first time I read it.
The apparition of these faces
in a crowd
Petals on a wet black bough
There’s more, much more I could say, but I don’t want to leave off, as I will after the next paragraph, without saying, I appreciate the opportunity to riff as I did the other day on Sally’s original question about “a regular person,” on this apologia of hers on why she “hopes” (for which I read, “believes”) there is no such thing. It didn’t answer my question. But as any teacher knows, or any student of human behavior, it’s our nature to answer not the question asked, but the one we prefer to answer. And no harm done in that. So I’ll wait for the other question to have an answer, and I’ll finish with what she really inspired me to present here.
More, very much more than the attempts at writing in a similar vein to Pound (though I’m not done yet), I’ve spent my life with my fascination for faces, along with my penchant for capturing them photographically. I take what I hope are insightful portraits every chance I get. Random encounters, close friends, the loves of my life, children, the old, the in-between. Humans. The best subjects in the world. I’ve quickly put this collection, which is a tiny sampling from about the last 20 years, together just for Sally and the rest of your readers, Dom.
Faces in a crowd
WebMeister reponds: And we all thank you, Howard. Not only for the photo collage but the words, inimitably written. Nothing unusual for you.
My description of the perfect man is in here.
Believe me, it doesn’t relate to the regular.
Good Morning on this Wednesday, the fifteenth day of May, 2019
Our homily posts Kali’s question and talks about confining empty feelings as a step to overcoming them.
We posted the weather and date and tracked the number of postings.
We included a poto of Turkey Terazzini and a description of it.
And we posted Sally’s letter continuing the conversation with Tommie and Howard on a regular person. And Howard’s response to those.
And now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your love.