Rice Pudding and Metaphors for Abundance

Yesterday I made rice pudding.  We had an extra pan of rice we never got around to using for a meal, rice that was a bit crusty on the top.  We had milk and cream that were just past their pull dates, but not spoiled.  We had enough eggs, surely a metaphor for abundance in these days of avian flu.  I even had real vanilla extract to spare, another metaphor for abundance.

I tasted the custard and thought it tasted odd.  Could the milk and cream be closer to spoiled than I thought?  Did the extract add a metallic alcohol taste, an astringency?  

I put the pan in the oven, hoping it would taste better when warm.  After 15 minutes, I stirred it and tasted it again, and that's when I realized--I hadn't put in sugar.

Happily, it was easily fixed.  I pulled the pan out of the oven, sprinkled sugar over it, stirred it again, and tasted it.  Finally, the taste I wanted!

The rice pudding is one of the best I've ever made, and I'm sure that a large part of that is the added milk fat.  I more often make rice pudding with skim milk, which is not a metaphor for abundance.

I have all these metaphors.  Now to compose a poem that goes a bit deeper than these surface level significances.

Confirmation Bread Baking

Yesterday, I made this Facebook post:  "I have been down to Spartanburg, SC to teach, and now we're about to leave Arden, NC to got to Bristol, TN to help Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church with tonight's fish fry. If we cross the line into Virginia, I'll have been in 4 states today. If you're in the Bristol area from 5-7, come on by to get the best meal deal: $10 buys a great dinner along with delicious desserts and a beverage. All proceeds go to fund local charities. It's so many wins I can scarcely count them."

That post sums up my Friday; we did not drive into Virginia.  The post doesn't talk about the bread dough creating that was part of the fish fry.  I had this vision that the confirmands and I would make bread dough during the slow moments of the fish fry, from the proofing of the yeast to the mixing of the dough.  I calculated that there would be plenty of time for the bread to rise.

My plan did not take into account that two of them would have their horseback riding lessons rearranged.  I proofed the yeast and hoped they would show up, but no luck.  So, as the minutes ticked by, I decided to go ahead and mix up the dough without them.

The one confirmand who was there watched, but she didn't want to mix the dough.  The older teen who was confirmed two years ago watched even more intensely than the confirmand.  The adults divided their attention between bread dough and the baby that one of them has.  One of them said, "You really love doing this, don't you?"  Imagine it said in a kind way, not a sneering way.

We ended up with five chunks of bread dough.  I had four paper pans, four plastic bags, and baking directions--one for each confirmand and one I gave to the parishioner who first asked, "Would it be possible to have homemade bread like we did at my church in Wisconsin?"  I took one home with me.

This morning as the bread baked, I thought back to my own beginnings in bread baking.  My grandmother baked rolls every day for the big meal which was usually in the middle of the day, but the first person I knew who baked loaves of bread was an intern who came to our church in my 7th grade year.  Her name was also Kristin, and she seemed like the coolest person I'd ever met.  She was my confirmation teacher, and she brought bread for snack time, which she ate, while we ate the candy that we bought from the convenience store across the street.

I didn't start baking bread, though, until high school, when my mom suggested we try it for the seminarians who were coming over for dinner.  Kristin the intern had moved on by then, but we still had her recipe for Milk and Honey Whole Wheat Bread from the cookbook Recipes from a Small Planet by Ellen Buchman Ewald.  I don't have access to my copy, but I found someone else's photograph online:

The recipe used whole wheat flour and dry milk, with honey, oil, salt, warm water, and yeast.  I no longer make that recipe, but I bake variations of it, sometimes with liquid milk, sometimes without, often with butter instead of oil and brown sugar instead of honey, and oats.

I hope that the bread baking experiences that I've brought to Faith Lutheran Church take root.  I think of the intern who first expanded my notion of what bread could be, and I hope I'm doing that for the youth who are there.  At the very least, I hope I'm giving them good memories, even if they don't do bread baking of their own.

Friday Frazzled Fragments from a Hellish Commuting Week

What a week it has been, the kind of week where I have a bit of a meltdown because I'm feeling overwhelmed.  Luckily, I can have a bit of a meltdown and keep going with my brain coming up with alternative approaches even while I'm feeling sorry for myself.  Let me make a list of some bits and pieces from the past week so that I don't forget.

--One reason why I've been off schedule is the medical appointments.  Happily, my health is fine, but I had an appointment on Monday morning and on Tuesday morning, which wiped out morning writing and walking time.  

--It's been incredibly windy this week--and all of March.  Last night, the winds were 25 mph with gusts even higher; today the winds are 15 mph.  I hesitate to walk in the morning darkness when it's windy the way it has been.  We still have a lot of tree branches dangling overhead, and it feels dangerous when it's windy and dark.

--Of course, that's a bit of a rationalization.  It's cold and dark and windy, and I could deal with two of those elements, but I don't like all three together.  I also want to get my sermon written.

--It's been a hellish commuting week.  In fact, it's the worst commuting week since I started working at Spartanburg Methodist College.  On Monday, I 26 was shut down.  I thought I might be late because of my gastro appointment, but I got out earlier than expected, only to be rerouted because of interstate shut down. It was a lovely drive through country roads, but aggravating.  Each day after that, traffic has slowed to a crawl and then a stop because of tree trimming.  Yesterday there was a brush fire on both sides of I 26 near Spartanburg; I was able to drive by, but the interstate was later shut down.

--Happily, I took my laptop to work yesterday so I could get my homework for last night's class turned in before I left.  I usually turn in my work a day before it is due, or last ditch, the morning of.  I don't like waiting until hours before the due date time, but that's the week I'm having this week.

--Last night's class was marvelously amazing.  I feel so lucky to take 2 marvelously amazing classes here as I finish seminary.  

--I feel even more fortunate as I looked at the schedule of seminary classes for the fall.  The schedule may be incomplete, but if nothing else is added, it's a bit skeletal, especially for people who need to take classes from a distance.

Sonny's Blues and All Our Blues

Yesterday was a strange-ish day, an up and down day, but mostly up.  I got to the imaging center early for my follow-up ultrasound after the 3D mammogram showed something that they thought was a lymph node, but they wanted to be sure.  Happily, it was a lymph node; I am always deeply aware that for other women, it will not be good news.  For me, for now, it was good news.

I stopped at the Fresh Market, as I did last year.  In fact, when my radiographer asked me if I had anything fun planned after the scan, I said, "Well, I'll stop at the Fresh Market to pick up some treats, then I'll go to work, then I'll come back home and eat the treats.  That sounds like fun to me."  The radiographer said, "That does sound like fun."  The unspoken part:  fun for a day when one must work, fun for a day if the test results are good.

Then I went on to work.  It was a good work day.  I had a coffee with the mentor who was assigned to me as a new faculty member; we've been trying to schedule a coffee for almost nine months now, and it was good to connect in that way, good for me to move out of my comfort zone.

My nonfiction writing class is watching a movie this week so that we can write a review of it.  We had a bit of glitchiness finding Grave of the Fireflies for free, but my tech savvy students did it by using Internet Archive.  Why have I not known about this resource?

The movie is beautiful and profoundly moving, and also resonant in ways that I didn't expect, on a day when Israel breaks the ceasefire in Gaza and Trump is trying to broker peace in Ukraine.  I hope that he brokers a strong peace that deters Putin, but I don't think that Trump is able to do that.  I don't think anyone can do that.

Then I went to my American Lit survey class.  We did a deep dive into James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues."  What an amazing story that is.  As always, I hope I did it justice, but I am aware that to do it justice, we'd need to devote a month to it.  One can't do justice to the literature in a survey class.  But I loved talking about why it is important.

I haven't taught the short story in such a long time.  Did I include it in the American Lit survey classes that I taught at the University of Miami in the early part of this century?  Maybe.  If not, I haven't taught the story in 30 years.  It holds up well, perhaps even better than it did in 1995.  Back then, it might have seemed that we had vanquished heroin.  Now, once again, we have work to do.

I drove home feeling wonderful, a feeling which fizzled as traffic slowed to a stop.  I'm glad that they are doing tree clearing by the side of the road, but I don't know why it has to be done in peak traffic time.  It took me almost an extra hour to get home.

My spouse had made amazing nachos, so we ate dinner and looked for something to watch.  We happened upon a documentary on the Avett Brothers which was much better than I thought it might be.  It's the classic kind of documentary that explores the creative process along with the history of the group.  I did some sketching and some writing to my senators and congressperson, asking to save NOAA.  Today it's NOAA, and later this week--well, I'll figure that out later.  Social Security?  Voice of America?  Some other institution that is decimated between now and Thursday?

We live in strange times, strange times that seem tilted towards evil.  But James Baldwin shows us that all times are this way, and we cope as best we can, whether that be with the blues, with our family love, with heroin, with our other connections.

Preventative Care

I feel like I have been spending much of my free time at doctors' offices, and I'm not even sick.  Preventative care seems to now require a pre-procedure visit, the procedure itself, and then, often a follow up.  And let us not forget the time on the phone, doing pre-procedure intake and checking of information.  In some ways, it makes me feel like I'm getting better care than I once did.  In other ways, it's so exhausting that I just want to forget about it all.

Yesterday I met with the doctor who will do a colonoscopy on me at some point, and this morning, I have a follow up scan to my mammogram, exactly the same as last year.  I don't want to believe it's about getting more money out of insurance companies.  I also know that the quality of the scans is better, which means more might be seen and need to be checked, just to be sure that it's not cancer.

Let me remind myself that I'm also feeling lack of free time because I've been at retreats two week-ends in a row, and they've been nourishing.  For both Wild Women Week-ends at Lutheridge, I've offered an optional afternoon activity, a writing workshop.  Instead of talking in general about writing, but I walked us through several writing exercises designed to get us to a deeper level more quickly (writing letters to ourselves, from the point of view of ourselves 50 years from now and/or from our younger selves) and designed to help us make interesting connections we wouldn't have made otherwise (starting with an object and freewriting).

Saturday's workshop went so well that people who didn't attend came to me and asked for my handout which I was happy to give them.  On Friday night, I went to the opening Bible study and felt so overwhelmed:  all these people, so few of them known to me.   By Saturday, I felt a bit sad to leave.

I knew this would be an intense stretch of the semester, with the two retreats, the fish fry at Faith Lutheran this Friday, and all the commitments which haven't lessened.  Let me take a deep breath and keep working through the things that must be done.

Coracles of Hope on St. Patrick's Day

On Sunday afternoons, we often watch recordings of livestreamed church services from churches where we have been members.  Once we've done that, we often go to the recording of the Sunday service at the National Cathedral.  

Usually, each pastor is preaching on the day's Gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary.  But yesterday, the sermon at the National Cathedral was delivered by The Most Reverend John McDowell, Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland and Metropolitan, Church of Ireland.  His stole and cope did not match the purple of the others.  No, his had gold shamrocks.  He preached about Saint Patrick and Jesus, and what we can learn.  I had not realized that Patrick and Augustine were alive at the same time.  

The sermon made me think of a poem that I wrote long ago, "Coracle of Hope."  Yesterday I went to look it up, and happily, having much of my writing online makes it easy.  I think it holds up well, and I'll post it below.

The poem was inspired by Dave Bonta's experience with coracles in Wales, which I wrote about in this blog post years ago:  "I found myself captivated by this post of Dave Bonta's about his experience with coracles on his recent trip to Wales. He reminded us of the ancient Celtic monks, some of whom set off without even an oar. Somehow, my brain made some connections to the modern workplace, and I was off, composing a poem."

This poem is part of my latest chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction .  It seems like a good choice for March 17--happy St. Patrick's Day!

Coracle of Prayer


As my computer dings
its constant reminders
of meetings and appointments,
I think of those ancient
Celtic monks and their coracles,
their faith in fragile canoes and currents
and a God who will steer
them where they need to go.

Having given over my free will
to Microsoft Office, I allow
the calendar to steer
me. I rely on my e-mails as a rudder,
although I often feel adrift
on this sea of constant communication.

Perhaps it is time to ransom my soul
which has been sold to this empire
of the modern workplace.
I look to the monks
and their rigorous schedule of prayer.
Feeling like a true subversive,
I insert appointments for my spirit
into the calendar. I code
them in a secret language
so my boss won’t know I’m speaking
in a different tongue. I launch
my coracle of prayer
into this unknown ocean,
the shore unseen, my hopes
rising like incense across a chapel.

The Ides of March

It is March 15, a date that might not have much meaning, had it not been the date that Julius Caesar was assassinated, stabbed multiple times on the Senate floor, an act justified as a necessary defense of the Republic.  It set Rome on a different trajectory, but of course, Rome might have headed down a different path had Caesar lived.  I will resist the temptation to make modern correlations.

I was in high school when I first heard people say, "Beware the Ides of March," but as I reflect, mid to late March has always been good for me.  OK, not always, but my mind is on two recent events.  

The first is my phone interview with the department chair of the English department at Spartanburg Methodist College.  For the purposes of this blog post, it would have been convenient had it happened closer to mid-March, but the actual interview was April 1; I got the e-mail asking about a phone conversation a few days earlier.  I'm so glad that phone interview went well, and I'm so glad I said yes to the job.

A year ago, I'd have spent the last few days interviewing for the one year lectureship.  I did a teaching demonstration on Tuesday, a day of interviews on Wednesday, and on Thursday, the Provost offered me the job.  Again, I'm glad I said yes.  There are days when I'm tired:  extra days of driving back and forth take their toll.  It's easier teaching 2-3 classes than 5.  But I'm still glad to have the job and all the opportunities.

It's been a good teaching week:  I got caught up on grading, and most of my teaching went well.  On Thursday, I didn't have much of a plan for my Nonfiction Writing class of 4 students.  We're talking about writing reviews, so we're going to watch a movie together next week.  I had each one choose three possible movies and write mini-reviews to try to persuade their classmates to choose one of their movies.  I had thought about bringing in professional reviews, but then I had them go to various sites and look up reviews about 12 movies under consideration.  They did that, and then I had them write their top 3 choices on the board.

Happily, one movie made it to everyone's list, the animated film Grave of the Fireflies.  From there, we had a great conversation about animation, about film, about documentaries, with a side detour of talking about Paris Is Burning.  It was the kind of conversation that I always hope will happen, a conversation both deep and wide ranging, a conversation that made me think, yes, this is what college should be.

I told my students that I would bring them treats:  popcorn and movie candy, and yesterday, I did just that.  My spouse said, "You'll have record enrollment the next time you offer this course."  I said, "That would be wonderful!"

Last night my spouse and I talked about my sermon, which he edited and revised.  We talked about all the ways that I may be trying to do too much, thoughts that I've been having too.  My spouse said, "At least all of your activities are things you like to do."

Indeed.  I am also thinking of another March, 5 years ago, when my work life was about to take a turn for the worse, when I would be training people in all sorts of areas that were new to them, like how to take an onground course and take it online.  I would be training myself in all sorts of disease mitigation.  I would be thinking about how to survive if things got even more dire.  Living in a hurricane zone was good training for that, but also a sobering reminder of how interconnected we all are, how hard it will be if the power grid goes out, if supply chains are disrupted.

I hope future months of March are less like that one and more like this current one.