We know from talking to many of you that this is your "don't miss" place in the Digest, so we endeavor to make it fun and informative for you every month. This month we want the theme to be that of a Christmas Card, so we’re including some of our favorite scenes of Christmas time. May you and yours have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
This month was packed with activities for both me and Del. It started off with an Italian dinner by Emily at my Dad’s house, followed by an enthusiastic Pedro card game in which Buster, my Dad, and I took on Del and Emily and managed to eke out a victory this time. Thursdays are getting to be our favorite day of the week when Del is off and we can go together to early morning Mass at Holy Family Church with Buster and Emily, fold bulletins for the church with them, play Pedro, and then have lunch. Dad has thrown away his cane and is walking normally again since recovering from his minor stroke a couple of months ago. And Emily’s companionship has been a big boon for his morale.
Saturday the 2nd was my club’s No Reason At All breakfast and I picked up Dad and we enjoyed a traditional New Orleans breakfast of grillades and grits and good fellowship with the club members. That night Del and I went to the Warren Easton 40th Reunion at the Hampton Inn. Del’s former Flag Team buddies were there and I was busy taking photos of the whole wingding, plus dancing with Del when I could pry her away from the girls. The purple and gold balloons at the entrance to the dance floor brought home to me that Del and I both chose high schools with purple and gold as their colors, and I chose a college, LSU, with those colors. What’s the chances of that happening anywhere else in the country? Btw, LSU had an open date and that’s how this night was chosen for the Reunion.
Sunday the 3rd was a Saints Open Date and our favorite orchestra, the New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra was celebrating its 30th anniversary of its founding with a Tea Dance at the new Hotel Monaco. Situated in an old Masonic Lodge building downtown, the interior looks like it should be in Egypt with gold-gilded walls, arabesques, arches, and mosaic tiles on floors and walls. A fitting venue for an oriental foxtrot orchestra that doesn’t play any songs written after 1933. Named after the SS Leviathan that sailed from New Orleans to Turkey during the 1920s when the oriental foxtrot was all the rage and
was played on its bandstand every night of the passage, the orchestra was founded by Jack Stewart and George Schmidt in 1972 and was originally mostly Tulane students. With violins, cello, piano, tuba, trombones, trumpets, banjos, saxophones, and a wild drummer among other things, their theme song goes like this, “Oh, don’t be angry – ‘cause we’re the boys from New Orleeeans.” Our friend Tenaj is a violinist and singer in the band and it’s always a treat for me and Del to talk to her between numbers.
Okay, the month wasn’t all fun and games. I had this massive upgrade to my computer system to get lined up. A new Laptop to get ready for our trip at the end of the month to Toronto. I had to be able to upload photos to my Laptop while away from home and then bring them home and download into my desktop. This kept me busy a large portion of the month and I was ready to go on time, confident that the whole system would work together. As I’m writing this I can report that every thing performed as expected.
I’ve been reading “The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations” by Rudolf Steiner and it’s taking me a long time because so many thoughts well up and offer themselves as poems. Here’s one from November 7 that was inspired by a marvelous passage on page 38 that talked of a heroes death in battle:
The Death of Love
The hero falls in battle
He has no love of death
He has the love of countrymen
He has the love of friends
He has the love of his
comrades in arms.
He has the love of whom
his battle harms.
He meets his death in glory
He leaves us with a story
He leaves us with a death of love.
Saturday was a big day. Our twin sons Jim and John were in town for a wedding of a relative. I watched the LSU-Kentucky football game until it was time for me to dress for a charity ball at the St. Alphonsus Center in the Irish Channel section of New Orleans. Non-football fans can skip this next paragraph about the end of the game.
I watched the whole game. With 8 seconds left the Tigers were down 30-27 and Kentucky was kicking off to them. Henderson caught the kickoff and ran out of bounds. First past was a 15 yder or so to the middle of the field which was empty and a time out was called with 2 seconds left. I spied the UK players carrying a Gatorade cooler and dumping the icy water on their coach. The UK fans lined the sides of the field to begin tearing down the goal posts in a few seconds. Marcus Randall sent three wide receivers down the right side of the field, stepped back, planted his foot hard, leaned back as far as he could go to cock his arm and flung a high-arced rocket into the pile of 7 UK defenders and two LSU receivers, Michael Clayton and Devrey Henderson. The ball came towards Clayton and his defenders about the 20 yd line, he tipped the ball over three blue jerseys and Henderson stretched his arms, stretched them again, the ball was going off the distant tips of his outstretched hands, so he stretched one last time, pulled in the ball and ran past two blue jerseys on either side of him the last 7 yds into the end zone! The TIGERS WIN! THE TIGERS WIN ! ! ! What an incredible drive and play. It will make every highlight reel for many years to come when LSU and Kentucky play. Jim and John had left to go with their mom. She was driving John to the downtown hotel where he and Kristin and Collin will be spending the night. I ran out the house just as she backed the Maxima to the edge of our driveway. I ran out with both arms in the air and shouting at the top of my lungs. We WON! We WON! Was it a Hail Mary pass completion or what? The headlines of the Times-Picayune said it best: “HAIL YEAH!”
Sometime during the month I made a decision which may excite the cooks among you, dear Readers, and the palettes of those who just like to eat good tasting food. I will be publishing in this Digest in coming issues a favorite recipe of mine. I began last month with the Burkhardt Bread recipe which I hope those of you who try this recipe will let me know of your success with it. I will include actual dishes that Del and I eat in our home, not any fancy stuff, just our everyday fare mostly. This month I will start modestly with a recipe for wild rice and long grain rice which will serve as base for future dishes in coming months, so give it a try.
On the 14th I presented Father Finn of Holy Family Church with a framed print of the Holy Family that I had bought almost 15 years earlier when the original church was just being built. I wanted him to have something that he could take with him when he retires from the priesthood at some distant date. I also fixed the lunch for the Pedro game on this Thursday: shrimp stuffed merlitons and crawfish leeks tarts. You can expect a recipe for them in coming months.
The latest Harry Potter movie, book 2, “The Chamber of Secrets” was out and it was great. Moaning Myrtle, the Basilisk, Gilderoy Lockhart, and Lucius Malfoy played by a bad guy from films. He made Snape look mild-mannered by comparison.
In the end Dumbledorf tells Harry that Valdemorte gave Harry some of his power when he tried to kill Harry as a baby. The insight came to me that when we get angry at someone, we give them our power. Del pointed out that equanimity has the direct benefit to us of keeping this from happening. Thus I received the answer to my unanswered question as to why one might wish to contain one’s joy within instead of exuberantly yelling it out: it keeps our power within us instead of spreading it into the world where it might be misused by others. This was an issue I was pondering for a long time and suddenly it began to make sense to me. Would throw a damper on football fans if this news got out.
Our Toronto trip went exactly as planned. First day we drove to our son Rob’s house in Bloomington and got to visit with our three grandkids a couple of hours before bedtime. Next day we drove to Toronto and made it right on time, except for one detail. All the other large cities we drove through we did it outside of rush hour, but for Toronto, our final destination, there was no way to avoid it: we came in at rush hour. Took us an hour to go thirty blocks. The closer we got to the Delta Chelsea, the slower we went, till we could have walked faster than we were driving.
We had a wonderful conference. Del conferred with Jo Anne over the best places to shop and in Toronto that’s no easy chore as there are so many great places to shop. Ed Smith and I attended sessions on Platonism and Neoplatonism, Mysticism, and I caught one on the Centennial of William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”. Del and I ate on Captain John’s Restaurant, a large ship docked next to the Westin Harbour Castle. We heard Ghandi’s grandson talk about growing up with his famous grandfather, Mahatma Ghandi. I got to see Francis Barboza dance native India dances to Lord Shiva and to Lord Jesus. We met this lovely Newfoundland lady, Ruby, who was our shuttle bus coordinator. She was a delight to talk to and made waiting for the next bus to the Convention Center fun.
On the last day we left for our 25th Anniversary honeymoon trip to Viagara Falls, oops, I meant Niagara Falls. A short hour and a half trip from Toronto, we got there in time to walk along the Falls to the Table Rock Inn where we decided to return later for dinner overlooking the Falls. Food was great and we had a romantic dinner together. As we left, the snow was beginning to fall in earnest and we drove along a wintry Christmas scene with animated light displays in Niagara Falls’ Victoria Park.
The next morning we headed for Port Huron, Michigan and encountered some light to medium snow showers along the way and I got some great winter photos. We made it back to Bloomington and my son Rob’s house in time for me to tuck Sierra (girl, 6) and Walden (boy, 4) into bed. The next day we celebrated Thanksgiving Day with a traditional dinner of turkey and trimmings, made all the more tastier because for the first time in years, I didn’t have to prepare any of the meal. It’s good to be the Grandpa, to paraphrase Mel Brooks.
On Friday, we walked up and over the ridge to chop down a Christmas tree with Rob. He chose a 15' high pine tree which we hauled back and constructed a safe and sturdy stand to hold it. On Saturday we started our drive home, but stopped off to have breakfast with some friends in Louisville on the way.
It’s Tuesday night, Dec. 3 as I’m typing these final words for Personal Notes which explains why you didn’t receive your Digest on the first of the month as usual.
May the peace and joy of this season fill your hearts and carry you happily into the New Year.
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When a woman decides to reprise her 1700 mile trek alone across the desert on the western edge of Australia in the desert on western edge of India, one would expect the experience to be similar and one would be wrong. For one thing being alone in India as a foreigner is a very foreign experience to Indians and they would not allow it. In a country where one rupee can hire a dozen helpers whose help it’s hard to say no to, it’s equally hard to ever be alone. And yet, surrounded by people who talked incessantly in many languages, none of which she understood, Robyn Davidson was very much alone much of the time, even in the midst suffocating masses of people.
Ever considered chucking it all and moving to India to get away from it all. Read this review first and you may find that what you’re getting away to ain’t all that great. Sometimes you can have more fun thinking about going than actually going.
One cannot read the funeral oration of Pericles without having a sense of deja vu even if one had never read or heard of the speeches before. Here's apassage that affected me that way. It is the very opening words of his funeralspeech. Read it and see if you have a similar sense:
The best source at the best price is to order your copies on-line is from the publisher Random House/Xlibris's website above.
“Hart’s War” – somewhere I had heard this was not one of Bruce Willis’ best movies and I avoided it. The problem for Willis fans is that he is not the leading character of the movie, rather the young actor playing Lt. Hart is. A Senator’s son, kept away from the battlefields of WWII, Hart ends up in a German prisoner of war camp over which Willis presides as the highest ranking American officer emprisoned there. With some hints of “Stalag 17", Hart endures one shabby treatment by the Colonel: relegated to the enlisted men’s barracks, forced to add two black flyers to an already full barracks, and forced to defend one of the flyers from a murder charge during a Court Martial in the camp. The tension in the camp is so thick, the movie is like in slow motion until the denouement at the end when all is revealed and the Colonel finally takes an order from the Lieutenant. This is a good movie. Don’t pass it up.
“The Birthday Girl” — no relation to the “The Goodbye Girl” — this was the “Hello, Girl” from Russia with love, a new “Bond” movie, not James Bond, but John in Bonds. A combination of Mail Order Bride, Bonnie and Clyde, and Portnoy’s Complaint — John thinks he’s living the stories in his bondage magazines come true with Nicole Kidman as the “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” girl of his dreams. Ben Chaplin is no Antonio Banderas — he’s got the charisma of a codfish on Valium, but there’s a very nice aspect to this movie: you don’t have the vaguest idea of how it’s going to turn out until the end — and then some. This ain’t no Arnold movie.
“Showtime” – a movie with Robert DeNiro and Eddie Murphy that almost made it. Never got close to the chemistry of Nolte and Murphy nor to that of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. We definitely won't see "Showtime II." Even Rene Russo’s presence couldn’t save the movie. Maybe because she kept her clothes on. Or the fact the script sucked. Or that they tried to do too many things and did none of them well.
Ingredients
Every birth is a virgin birth
