MOMMENTARY |
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Monday, July 19, 2004 ( 11:05 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Aiieee! Son #2 goes off to boot camp in the wee hours of tomorrow morning. (What the heck is the deal with this font? It seems to me Blogger's gotten awfully funky all of a sudden.) We've been tensely occupied for weeks now in getting to this point. There was the Diploma Crisis, followed by the MOS Debate, followed by the Antibiotic Anxiety, followed by the long-running Pull-Ups Drama, followed by the Doctor's Letter Kerfuffle and winding up with the Departure Date Perplexity. I've been thinking through it all that it would be a relief to see him on his way with all such questions resolved, and it will. I'll miss him awfully, however. I wish to goodness he'd want something I could give him or do for him, but aside from providing beef jerky and fruit there doesn't seem to be anything he needs from me. # Thursday, July 15, 2004 ( 11:28 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Shameless maternal boast alert! Our third son is a kitchen crew leader (at seventeen) at a nearby buffet restaurant, where the fryer caught fire the other day. Cacciamichele got behind it to shut off the gas valve, which made it possible for him and the other young men to put out the fire with extinguishers. Attaboy! # Monday, July 12, 2004 ( 9:16 AM ) Elinor Dashwood We're so happy! Saturday's local paper had an article about the way the new Bishop of Richmond is shaking up the diocese. Check out Cacciaguida's and the Paladin's posts on the subject. Cacc wants me to step into the place on the Women's Commission left vacant by the bishop's removal of a member, one Nancy Johnson, who also served as secretary to the Women's Ordination Conference. Mrs. Johnson griped to the press about her private meeting with the bishop to discuss the situation. The bishop, when asked to comment, countered with a sting I could hardly have hoped to better myself. According to a spokesman, βHe said, 'A gentleman does not reveal the contents of a private conversation.ββ Well, of course, neither does a . . . hey, wait a minute! Well done, Excellency! # Thursday, July 08, 2004 ( 1:35 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Go take the quiz and find out: Which Theologian Are You? I'm John Calvin. Is anybody really surprised? Thanks to Cacciaguida for the link. # Monday, July 05, 2004 ( 1:25 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Kiss your spouse. Make him a nice dinner, or, conversely, bring home ice cream or flowers or wine. You're lucky to have someone whose vocation it is to encourage you and keep you company and put up with your oddities. I've just read the cover story in the July/August issue of Crisis, about the increasing rate of divorces among faithful Catholics. You ought to read it, too, but it will give you a chill. How in the world is one supposed to tell if an intended spouse truly desires the trials and rewards of the married state, or is just escaping from the dreariness of singlehood? How is one to know that a person's seeming maturity isn't merely a factitious effect produced by a bossy disposition? How is one to distinguish between someone who is really determined to fight through the inevitable troubles of married life, and somebody who just likes to fight? It seems very difficult. What I keep coming back to is that, according to all the best Catholic advice about matrimony, anybody with the sense to come in out of the rain would have begged, threatened, and cajoled Cacciaguida and me not to marry. (In fact only one person did so, and his hostility to the Church was such that no serious Catholic would be likely to take his advice about anything.) I daresay nobody in my family liked to tackle me on the subject, but I'm sure there were some in Dwight Chapel that day who never expected to see this union pass the fifth anniversary, let alone the twentieth. What troubled the marriages mentioned in the article seems to have been varying degrees of my bete noir, romance. Some just thought married life would be all roses; some went in for the spiritual-pride version of romance, and thought that their bond would be "like the Marriage Feast of the Lamb." It seems fairly safe to say that none of them actually anticipated a leaky roof, cranky children, or a backed-up toilet on the first evening of a four-day weekend with one's in-laws coming over. The article referred several times to marriage preparation, to teach the theology of marriage, and that's an excellent thing, of course. It isn't enough - one of the defaulting spouses was a theology major at a faithful Catholic college - but it would help. And yet so many marriages of serious Catholics thrive. I incline to the view that the most important factor after a well-formed Catholic conscience is grit. Anyone who can read a book or listen attentively to a lecture tape can learn in several hours what the Church teaches about marriage, its laws, and the graces available to the married state. It's another thing to have the discipline to remain faithful and calm when the teaching seems harsh and grace looks to be thin on the ground. All the knowledge in the world won't help if you're a spoiled princess who can't bear any kind of hardship, or a self-indulgent bum who feels aggrieved at being expected to postpone any pleasure. Knowledge is excellent and faith is superb, but they will fall without the self-command to look a problem in the eye and say that, whatever it is, it must be conquered, and giving up is not an option. # Saturday, July 03, 2004 ( 5:01 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Ducklings! I can hardly believe it. I just saw a mallard duck leading a brood of six or seven very small, very new ducklings down to the water. In July! I've never seen any this late around here by a good month. She won't have any difficulty in brooding them: the weather is not as hot as it often is in July, but it's quite warm enough for there to be no concern that the babies will get cold. I suppose she failed in an earlier attempt at nesting, but, nothing daunted, tried again. What a delightful surprise! # Friday, July 02, 2004 ( 9:44 PM ) Elinor Dashwood We were talking this evening about Norman Rockwell. I have a big soft spot for his work. None of it could in any way be considered transcendant art, but I don't know of another painter who captured so well the large and small moments of ordinary life, and the things Americans hoped and worked for. I like a great many of them as scenes from daily life, but my two favorites, Freedom of Speech and Hasten the Homecoming, were war bonds posters. "Hasten the Homecoming" shows a young man in uniform returning to his large and ecstatic family (probably Irish - lots of redheads) in a rather rundown city apartment building, the sort where my grandparents on both sides lived. It's the kind of building in which a lot of socializing goes on up and down the fire escape, and much conversation is exchanged between windows across the alley. The soldier's cheerful, somewhat blowsy mother is bursting through the back door to greet him, all the neighbors are hanging out of their windows, and a young girl stands bashfully just around the corner, perhaps hoping he will see her. It's a happy, affecting scene, very American in the best way, and a rebuttal of the common criticism that Rockwell was a painter of the bourgeoisie. My favorite of all, however, is one of a series known as the Four Freedoms. (The famous Thanksgiving picture, "Freedom from Want", is another in this series.) "Freedom of Speech" features a man in his thirties, risen to speak at a meeting held in what seems to be a schoolroom. Some of the attendees hold copies of a report in blue covers, on which one can partially read that it's the annual government report of a town in Vermont. The man speaking is obviously poor, perhaps a farmer or a mechanic, dressed in old work clothes worn for use and not for style, and a rolled-up copy of the report is in the pocket of his jacket. He either is married or lives with his mother, as the pocket is torn at the corner and skillfully mended. He puts his point of view with composure, and isn't abashed by the men in suits (one with a natty collar bar) who sit near him. They listen to him seriously, possibly disagreeing but as equals, with no touch of contempt for his shabby clothes. What I love about this picture is that it speaks of a poverty that is neither surly nor abject. The speaker exemplifies a self-reliant, industrious poverty which is perfectly compatible with his active citizenship and his unassuming dignity. This is the kind of man who turns up again and again in Rockwell's pictures. He's the farmer waiting at the railroad siding with his college-bound son in "Breaking Home Ties"; the bus driver and the counterman at the diner in "After the Prom"; the indulgent waiter in "Boy in a Dining Car". He's the American working man of years ago, poor but self-respecting, in a time before wealth was politicized into class war. We lost a lot of our national character when he was taxed and Great-Societied out of existence. # Wednesday, June 30, 2004 ( 11:14 AM ) Elinor Dashwood All right. I am willing to be convinced, if somebody can give me a good reason why it's so terribly important to keep, or to get people in the Church who plainly do not intend to follow the rules, or to act and believe as Catholics are expected to act and believe. I've been having a combox argument over at Catholic Ragemonkey about possible reunion with the Eastern Heterodox. Father Tharp is interested in this, in part on account of the potential for cooperation in resisting Islam. For my part, I don't see why there should not be cooperation even without reunion; I would also be somewhat surprised to find that the E.H. looked on the prospect of submitting to Rome with much less loathing than that with which they regard their Moslem majorities. That's not the point. I would be delighted if such a reunion were to take place, provided it was a real rejoining and not a capitulation on the Church's part to childish Heterodox demands. The problem that has always stood in the way of reunion has been that the E.H. churches won't accept a situation in which they would be under Roman authority. Why isn't that the end of the discussion? The primacy of Rome is non-negotiable. It is, in common parlance, a deal-breaker. If you aren't subject to Rome, you aren't a Catholic. We can leave aside the vexed question of adjusting the fact that the Heterodox churches are wrong about filioque, and that they permit divorce and contraception. If the Roman obstacle can't be overcome, there, I should suppose, is an end of the matter. The Holy Father, who takes far more interest in these churches than seems to me at all necessary, is willing to keep talking to them. So be it: he's the Pope and I'm not, so he gets plenty of slack when he does things I think injudicious, like bringing the altar girl fiasco down on our heads. Part of my objection to this persistence is a distaste for seeing the Vicar of Christ going cap in hand to a lot of peevish schismatics. Mostly, however, I think it encourages them in the idea that, if they hold out long enough, they'll get their way. I further resent being cast for even the tiniest and most ancillary role in this psychodrama that appears to afford them such gratification, in which we come crawling to them, begging to have them back, and they deny us this longed-for boon. (I have occasionally been told by E.H.s, with sleek complacency, that the Holy Father is desperate for reunion. I invariably answer that that we're willing to take them in if they'll toe the line, but if they won't commit to accepting Roman authority we don't want them. Now there's a conversation killer.) Not for nothing do I call them the Church's neurotic ex-girlfriend: they love to think we're simply pining away for them, and that they're able to keep us dangling in hungry frustration. I'm no more inclined to indulge already-established Catholics who want to hassle the Church into relaxing the rules about cohabitation, contraception, abortion, divorce, or homosexual relations. (Do you see a trend here? Whatever organ dissenters think with, it isn't their brain.) Why is the threat to leave the Church such a sure-fire weapon to induce capitulation? So we come back to my original question. Can anybody give me a good reason why it's so necessary to bring in, or to retain, people who have no notion of admitting the authority of the Church? It stumps me, and it always has. # Tuesday, June 29, 2004 ( 8:32 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I am definitely too old to have any more children. This week Cacciaguida is away, so we've undertaken a huge housecleaning. The usual conditions are that we clean house all day and then go out to dinner. Son #4, age 14, woke me from a nap at 7:30 to say we were ready to go because the kitchen had been cleaned. I've been round this mulberry bush before, so I asked if the counters had been cleaned. Well, he'd scrubbed off the place where the dishwasher detergent gets spilled and makes a crusted spot. How about the rest of the counters? Deep silence. Did he leave them because he forgot, or as a special treat for me, because he knows how much I love to see part of a job done and the rest abandoned? There were several minutes of knocking noises in the kitchen, followed by another announcement that it was done, and we were ready to leave. When I got out there, one other counter had been done, the sink was full of grotty dishes, and the dishwasher full of clean ones. What goes on here? Is he totally hallucinatory, and thinks he has done everything required of him? Does he think I won't notice? Does he think it's worth chancing it? I am too old to undertake the grueling labor of hauling anybody else through toilet training, grammar, sanitation, table manners, truthfulness, and adolescence. To a certain extent I'm too old to deal with the ones I've already got. There. It's done now - though anybody might be forgiven for assuming that a boy who has known me all his life would by now have quit trying to get away with this kind of crap. Really, I'm fed up. # Sunday, June 27, 2004 ( 11:17 PM ) Elinor Dashwood These are apparently the top-earning movies in history. I wonder, does the compiler correct for inflation, and for an absolute shift in movie ticket prices? The ones I've seen are in bold; the ones I own are starred. 1. Titanic 2. Star Wars * 3. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 4. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 5. Spider-Man 6. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King * 7. Passion of the Christ 8. Jurassic Park * 9. Shrek 2 10. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers * 11. Finding Nemo 12. Forrest Gump * 13. Lion King, The 14. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 15. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring * 16. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones 17. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi * 18. Independence Day 19. Pirates of the Caribbean 20. Sixth Sense, The (1999) 21. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back * 22. Home Alone 23. Matrix Reloaded, The 24. Shrek 25. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 26. How the Grinch Stole Christmas 27. Jaws 28. Monsters, Inc. * 29. Batman 30. Men in Black 31. Toy Story 2 32. Bruce Almighty 33. Raiders of the Lost Ark 34. Twister 35. My Big Fat Greek Wedding * 36. Ghost Busters 37. Beverly Hills Cop 38. Cast Away 39. Lost World: Jurassic Park, The 40. Signs 41. Rush Hour 2 42. Mrs. Doubtfire 43. Ghost (1990) 44. Aladdin 45. Saving Private Ryan 46. Mission: Impossible II 47. X2 48. Austin Powers in Goldmember 49. Back to the Future 50. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me 51. Terminator 2: Judgment Day 52. Exorcist, The 53. Mummy Returns, The 54. Armageddon 55. Gone with the Wind 56. Pearl Harbor 57. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 58. Toy Story (1995) * 59. Men in Black II 60. Gladiator 61. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 62. Dances with Wolves 63. Batman Forever 64. Fugitive, The 65. Ocean's Eleven 66. What Women Want 67. Perfect Storm, The 68. Liar Liar 69. Grease 70. Jurassic Park III 71. Mission: Impossible 72. Planet of the Apes 73. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom 74. Pretty Woman 75. Tootsie 76. Top Gun 77. There's Something About Mary 78. Ice Age 79. Crocodile Dundee 80. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York 81. Elf 82. Air Force One 83. Rain Man 84. Apollo 13 85. Matrix, The 86. Beauty and the Beast 87. Tarzan (1999) 88. Beautiful Mind, A 89. Chicago 90. Three Men and a Baby 91. Meet the Parents 92. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves 93. Hannibal 94. Catch Me If You Can 95. Big Daddy 96. Sound of Music, The 97. Batman Returns 98. Bug's Life, A 99. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 100. Waterboy, The I'm not much of a movie fan, I guess, or at least, not a fan of new movies. Sometime when it isn't late and I'm not committed to a 6:30 AM Mass next morning, I'll list some of my favorites. # Saturday, June 26, 2004 ( 1:24 PM ) Elinor Dashwood The Army has lost its blinking mind. The Army will no longer assist a private nonprofit organization to send medallions bearing the legend "A FALLEN FRIEND" to the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty. Why not? Because the reverse of the medallion, which has on its obverse a picture of the Liberty Bell, also carries the words "John 15:13". Thank Heaven my boy is going into the Marines. Thanks to Mark Shea for the link. # ( 12:12 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Go on over to this site and pick the five movies that most make you proud to be Catholic. My favorites, in order, are A Man For All Seasons, Brideshead Revisited (you knew that was coming), Henry V (1989), On The Waterfront, and Marty. It was a bit of a toss-up between On The Waterfront and I Confess. The priest accused of murder, and desperately doing his duty to the sanctity of the confessional, is certainly excellent, but I found myself utterly unable to believe in a priest played by Mongomery Clift with a full complement of Method grimaces and twitches. (The diocesan doctor would probably have put him on a small dose of phenobarb. They didn't have many medications for nervous disorders in the Fifties.) In the end it was the popular piety of the Catholic stevedores, and Terry Molloy's struggle to reclaim his character and self-respect, that did it for me. I see, in looking over the entries again, that I didn't pick one single picture that was principally about a female character. (Brideshead is more or less equally about Julia's reversion and Charles' conversion, which are very much bound up with each other.) I've always said that, if I'd been given a choice between having four sons and one daughter, or four daughters and one son, I'd have unhesitatingly plumped for the former. I like girls, but I don't really understand them. Boys I understand. Thanks to Barb Nicolosi and the Monkey for the link, and for the reminder to vote now, before the ballotting ends on Monday. # Friday, June 25, 2004 ( 11:31 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Cheney indulges in some plain speaking and the Democrats suddenly become terribly sensitive. They're not angry, no, not angry, just a little . . . well, hurt. All they were doing was accusing the vice-president of having his hand in the till, and then . . .and then . . . this! Oh, how could he? Watch out, though: Tom Daschle is calling for an end to "partisan retaliation". Whenever a Democrat talks about bipartisanship, I like to make sure I have a wall at my back. # ( 12:08 PM ) Elinor Dashwood NOW HEAR THIS! To whom it may concern: 1. I don't like or approve of the Harry Potter books. I'm not trying to have them banned, I just don't like them. I believe that's still lawful. 2. I don't care who does like or approve of them. It's no use constantly urging that this critic or that cleric thinks they're swell. I, I myself, don't like them. I trust I make myself obscure. 3. It's no skin off my nose what anybody thinks of my reasons for not liking them. If I were the sort of woman who gets her knickers in a twist over the nightmarish possibility that somebody, somewhere, might not quite approve of her, you wouldn't be reading this blog now. If you think my opinion irrational, go ahead; I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. This is my final word on the subject. # ( 10:33 AM ) Elinor Dashwood On my daily swing round the blogs this morning, I spotted a few questions along the lines of "How do you get a small child to (wear a sun hat)(be quiet in church)(or something)? These questions always underscore for me the way in which I don't fit in. I don't recall that I ever persuaded a small child to do anything, or tried to. I told him to do it, and he just did it. If there was any nonsense about not doing it, he got a swat on the bottom and a recommendation to do as he was told unless he wanted another. By the time they were six or seven, I hardly ever had to spank them at all. I can't see that they've grown up broken-spirited or fearful in the least. I'm perfectly certain I'd have died of exhaustion if I'd had to chase them round and talk them into doing what was required of them, instead of being able to say one word and get instant obedience. Everybody must decide for themselves how to discipline their children. I wish that so many of them didn't decide that just occasionally pleading with them not to burn the house down or throw things at the visitors was sufficient. And here's another thing, for the benefit of those readers who haven't yet started their families: see if you can't get it into your little ones' heads that they're not to interrupt grownup conversation unless the house is burning down. I got so sick of trying to talk to somebody and having her suddenly cut me off because Precious wanted to impart the stunning news that he'd found a bug on the sidewalk. It put me off visiting, I can tell you. (When it happened at our house, I generally told Precious, calmly but firmly, "Grownups are talking," and that effectually put his mother off visiting me.) I no longer know many people with small children, but I've made up my mind to this: grandchildren will be expected to do as they're told. If I say, "Don't kick Granny's seat, please," I'm going to expect it to stop, even if I have to pull over, stop the car, turn around, and say "I said, DON'T KICK GRANNY'S SEAT." If they don't like it, they can stay home. By the time they're born, I'll be far too old to stand for getting attitude from toddlers. # Wednesday, June 23, 2004 ( 1:39 PM ) Elinor Dashwood It gets me every time I see it. I take a book of needlework patterns out of the public library, and find that one or more of the pages has been torn out. Sometimes a razor blade has been used, which at once conceals the theft from casual observation, and rules out the possibility that the page perished by accident, or by the natural senescence of organic materials. Why do people do it? It seems so unnecessary, so wantonly destructive. It also knocks another of my illusions - namely, that needleworkers are likely to be law-abiding middle-aged women like me - into a cocked hat, but that's nothing. I could understand the phenomenon better if the book were openly written for people who are quite comfortable with stealing, destroying property, and generally defying the law. Murder Made Easy, or The Counterfeiters' Club, or perhaps The Kings of Crack: America's Top Drug Lords Show You How To Start Your Own Curbside Empire, would have a ready-made page-ripping audience. What amazes me is that placid matrons, who have presumably spent their early adulthood in teaching their children to tell right from wrong, have no problem with tearing bits out of knitting or embroidery books to save themselves the dime they could have spent making a photocopy of the desired pattern. Is this a female weakness, or do my men friends find pages yanked out of library books about woodworking, stereo components, and lawn maintenance? # Tuesday, June 22, 2004 ( 12:50 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I was poking around in Bartlett's today and happened on a footnote to a quote from Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World". May the grass grow at your door and the fox build his nest on your hearthstone. May the light fade from your eyes, so that you never see what you love. May your own blood rise against you, and the sweetest drink you take be the bitterest cup of sorrow. May you die without benefit of clergy; may there be none to shed a tear at your grave, and may the hearthstone of Hell be your best bed forever. - Traditional Wexford curse. Whoa, Nelly! They don't kid around in Wexford. It must have been the labor of Sisyphus to try to explain to the souls in one's cure that a person who says this sort of thing and means it has to expect to bunk on Hell's hearthstone himself, with or without the company of the one accursed. I suppose the fact of the matter is that catechesis and evangelization are always struggles against paganism and superstition: druids in Germany, curses in Wexford, voodoo in Haiti, and the great god Material Progress in the United States. # Monday, June 21, 2004 ( 9:17 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Follow-up to using sour milk in bread, which I'll post on the front page, as it's too long for Haloscan. Sour milk can be substituted in yeast bread with no problems, although you might not want its slightly sourdough-y taste if you were making a sweet yeast bread. Banana bread and all quick (baking powder) breads are a good deal more complex than yeast breads, and substitutions need to be made more carefully. Baking powder, which is called saleratus in the old books, is a combination of a base, baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) and an acid, cream of tartar (potassium hydrogen tartrate, a by-product of winemaking). When I use sour milk in a quick bread recipe I increase the amount of baking soda to a teaspoon or so, or add it even if the recipe only calls for baking powder, to compensate for the additional acid present in the sour milk. (This is for a recipe which makes two loaves, it being of no earthly use to make one loaf of anything in a house with four big boys in it.) The thing to watch for in that case is to have everything ready, the pans prepared and the oven heated, before you add the liquid: once the soda and the sour milk get together, the batter will start to rise, and you'll need to get it into the pan and the hot oven without letting it sit around. Sour milk is perfectly safe to bake with. I've been using it for years, and recipes which call for it are common in old-fashioned cookbooks. One thing you discover when you learn about social history - the history of domestic and community life, as opposed to political history - is that it's only comparatively recently that food ceased to be the most crushing expense in nearly everybody's budget. Agricultural improvements and advances in food sanitation and storage have brought way down the cost of being adequately nourished. Cookbooks from even a hundred years ago reflect this in directions for cooking animal offal - hearts, brains, necks, stomachs, knuckles, and so on - which we don't see much these days, but which couldn't be neglected at butchering-time in an age when food was at a premium. These old manuals also featured recipes for soured milk and other ingredients, like stale bread and cider vinegar, which had lost a lot of their appeal, but which the prudent householder couldn't afford to throw away. It sheds an interesting light on hospitality, among other things. Think what it meant to call at somebody's house and be pressed to share his meal, when it was a universal fact of life that food was not abundant. Animals snarled and squabbled over food; human beings shared it as a mark of civilization. It also makes clearer the significance of the Eucharist being given under the appearance of food. Food was a precious and scanty requisite for life. In His days of preaching, Our Lord multiplied ordinary food so that it fed everyone who came to Him, and there was much more left over for others. The night before His sacrifice on the Cross, He gave His body to the Apostles to eat, in a form which must have made plainer to them than to us today, that He was the food that was absolutely necessary to them if they were to live in Him. He gave them, and the successors they would ordain, the power to multiply this Food so that it would feed His flock forever, and never run short. # Sunday, June 20, 2004 ( 3:23 PM ) Elinor Dashwood The next time you bake bread, think about using sour milk instead of the milk or water called for in the recipe. There's something about the conjunction of flour, yeast, and sour milk that makes a little miracle. The texture and taste of the bread made with regular old sour, gone-bad milk is unreproducible in my experience by any other means. Try it, and see if you agree. # |
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