The Privilege Of Pies

On November 20 my daughter-in-law emailed me to ask if I could get pies from that “wonderful bakery”—she meant The Pantry—to bring to Nantucket for Thanksgiving.

Oh dear! The Pantry, I knew, would no longer take orders for Thanksgiving food, but I phoned anyway—just on a chance— and was advised that if I queued by 7:00 AM on Tuesday I might be able to get my hands on a pie or two. Hmm…

I called Isabel and Vincent—a good bakery—and found that, yes, I could still order up to Sunday before Thanksgiving, but that they were making pumpkin and apple tarts.

“Tarts?” I queried? That isn’t the same thing as a pie and my daughter-in-law had specifically asked for pies.

I emailed her with The Pantry news and the tart news and she replied, “Don’t stress. Get the tarts if that is easier.”

OK. So later in the day I am walking with my young and resourceful walking partner, and I tell her about the pie problem. She, bless her heart, offers to be at The Pantry at 7:00 AM on Tuesday for me. “I get up early anyway, “ she tells me.

We agree that I will buy the two tarts at Isabel’s on Tuesday and if my friend can make it to The Pantry on that same morning by 7:00 AM and successfully snare two pies there, I will give her the Isabel tarts for her family to devour and she will give me the pies.

A plan is hatched, a bit scruffy, but a plan nonetheless.

However, later in the day, to my amazement, my friend emails me with the name, phone number and email address of a bakery in Nantucket, which she found online and which, she says, is still accepting orders for pies for Thanksgiving. She knows this because she has already called them!

I immediately text my daughter-in-law for approval of this bakery. (Anyone who is a mother-in-law will understand this move.) Approval is secured. I call the Nantucket bakery—Petticoat Row--and order the pies which will be picked up by a local friend who is joining us for Thanksgiving.

Whew!

Did you make it all the way through this? Have you been wondering why I am taking up so much of your precious time with what my older son would rightly call “a white girl problem?”

  Here's the "why." It suddenly  occurred to me how very blessed I am to have my only fret this week be about something as simple as pies.

Thanksgiving is a family holiday often honored by attending our places of worship. Although we have serious gun control issues to resolve in this country, in America we will not be anxious that we might be slaughtered in our pews as we pray.

We are so fortunate. Americans are spared the anxiety of wondering if, at any moment, a bomb will explode near or on our houses. We do not live in the omnipresent terror that suddenly our front door will be bashed in and our loved ones dragged away. We do not have to hear the cries of our babies grow thin and weak as they die of starvation. We have no foreign tanks churning at our borders.

  At this moment I am filled with gratitude for the privilege it is to be able to live in a country free from constant fear. Instead, on our Thanksgiving holiday, we can joyfully focus on family, turkeys, gravy and pies.

***

Thank you American readers of this blog. I wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving.

 To those readers from foreign countries to whom I am very grateful, I wish you peace. I wish you borders that are secure and free of threat. I wish you and your children long lives, safe and protected within your own cultures.

A Quiet Moment

Sun-lit leaves swirl downward,

Twirling, 

Spinning through the air like dancers,

 Sliding sideways,

 Twisting upwards in the breeze,

A silent graceful journey toward the earth.

Standing still to watch, I yearn to be light as a leaf,

Letting go to the stark, bare branches of winter.

 Falling gently to nestle into a soft pile,

Surrendered to the sudden chill of autumn.

The Rosetta Mission? OK. So I Am A Crank

I want to be excited about the Rosetta Mission and the Lander Philae connecting with a comet moving at 40,000 miles per hour, but I’m not.

 I torment myself: I am not a good citizen, not adventurous enough; I have no worldview. I don’t care about the RIGHT THINGS.  Conceivably I am just an old crank. All of the above may be true.

I understand why the international scientists of the ESA—European Space Agency--who have been working on this project since November of 1993, were jubilant over yesterday’s landing, some of them in tears. It has been a lot of work.

The Rosetta Mission was created to help us to understand the origin and evolution of the solar system. The ESA, according to online sources, is “convinced that comets played a key role in the evolution of the planets,” bringing much of the water into today’s oceans, for example. The ESA has been and continues to be a collaborative effort involving eight countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States.

I’m all for international collaboration; it really gets things done. So does a budget of some 1.4 billion euros. The American cost that I could find—and it wasn’t so easy—was approximately 275 million dollars. (It’s possible that that figure was just for the Lander Philae itself.)

So why am I complaining? As interesting as it is—and I cop to that--I have a negative attitude about space exploration. Remember how we were going to the moon—hooray!-- and going to cure cancer? What did we do? We went to the moon. Cancer still eats us alive or should I say, dead?

 My priorities are different. What I want is an ESA- quality budget and at least an eight-country collaborative focus on how to feed the millions of starving people all over the world.

 I want a highly trained scientific group devoted to the development of clean water systems for those who have none. The solar system can wait. It has waited this long hasn’t it?

Does it have to be either/ or? It would seem so. The Rosetta Mission has glamour. Yesterday’s successful landing offered us an opportunity to say, “Look how clever we are!”

While feeding the poor? What is that? So ordinary, so mundane that we just don’t do it?

OK. I’m a crank.

Meanwhile, according to today’s Telegraph, “Scientists say full contact has been reestablished with the Rosetta probe, but it is stuck in a crater where it cannot get enough sunlight for its solar panels.” 

Not nearly enough sunlight. 

And so? We will see.

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I usually post on Mondays but this could not wait. 

Be Careful What You Wish For

Be careful what you wish for.  You might get it.  So much more to be revealed.

As of now we can begin to blame the Republicans instead of the Democrats for everything that goes wrong, including ebola. Ebola is on the list these days, along with ISIS and Afghanistan, Syria and Palestine/ Israel. Correct?

It no longer matters to me which party we blame. Cynicism has turned me as crusty as the rust on a junk-piled fender.

What does matter to me is the inability of both political parties to compromise in order to solve problems.

Don’t they know what we all know? No one gets it all! Not ever.

There is a technique, tried and true, in conjoint therapy, in which the disagreeing husband and wife have to take turns expressing the other’s point of view with sufficient detail and feeling until each person is convinced that the other completely understands his or her viewpoint and the reasons behind it.

Following that exercise of having to wear “the other’s moccasins” it is quite astonishing how quickly a creative compromise can be achieved.

Of course, unlike politicians, the husband and wife in therapy are not running for election every time they open their mouths. Besides, it would appear that for a politician to publically compromise with an other-side-of-the-aisle opposing view would be tantamount to having a raging case of impetigo on your face. No one would want to come near you.

Exerting leadership is also totally suspect.

Friends and I have been discussing Ken Burns’ recent outstanding film, The Roosevelts. Even long- time, ardent republican friends have expressed admiration for former President Roosevelt’s courage and ability to lead, to put himself on the line for what he believed was right—re elected or not. Has that kind of leadership disappeared along with the 1940s hair slick, Brylcreem? “A little dab will do ya!” (So the slogan went.)

It’s no “little dab” of leadership that we need.  Instead, right now our country-- the world-- needs political leadership with the heart and stamina of Seabiscuit, driven by the creative wisdom of the best minds of our nation.

I wish I had more hope.

Drawn Toward The "Great Perhaps"

As I mentioned in a recent blog, the protagonist in John Green’s Looking For Alaska, Miles Cavalry, nicknamed “Pudge,” is a brilliant, friendless, nerdy guy who dislikes his school and wants out. Obsessed with biographies and last words, Pudge, in explaining to his parents why he wants to go to boarding school, quotes Francois Rabelais. “'I go to seek a “Great Perhaps.’”

I have not been able to get that line out of my head.

Read Jon Kabat-Zinn, Be Where You Are, read Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. Read any Buddhist writer: Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh and you will be taught that all the power, all reality, exists only NOW. The past is gone. True. The future isn’t here yet. Also true. Therefore we need to be very alert and awake right now, living each moment to the fullest, noticing everything—as if we could, but I get the merit of the idea—and always, always, in order to bring ourselves into the present, we are to come back to our physical senses and to our breath.

Excellent. I’m all for it. I meditate.

But wait. What about the “Great Perhaps?" Doesn't that fit in, too? 

The “Great Perhaps” implies a future, doesn’t it? The “Great Perhaps” is a someday thing, something imagined, even if not precisely; it suggests hope, the possibility of something better, something fresh and new, something vibrating with potential. That’s what Pudge is hoping for and that is how he describes it. And that something, the “Great Perhaps,” is a concept that lurks within us all, pulling us forward into we know not what, but forward, nonetheless.

I recall in the TV series West Wing when, at the end of each segment, the President of the United States had wrestled the current problem to the ground, he invariably turned to his Chief of Staff with a determined, yet slightly wide-eyed look, and asked, “What’s next?”

Doesn’t the “Great Perhaps” imply that there could be, in fact there will be a “What’s next?” in our lives and furthermore, that we are inexorably drawn to it?

Perhaps our dreams and fantasies constitute our “Great Perhaps.” I’ve always wanted to spend a summer living in a lighthouse. I imagined doing this alone: alone, with the sea crashing around me, throwing up spray, roaring, swirling and foaming against rocks, and me, sitting there, surrounded by turbulent water, every day, watching and listening, scribbling onto a pad what the water was saying to me.

I have lived both on and also very near water, but have never gotten myself into a lighthouse. This summer while visiting s friend in Maine I picked up a magazine called Maine and found a picture of a gorgeous lighthouse situated on a small rocky island off of Boothbay. It has been turned into a tiny B and B. I tore out the page.

Done! I will spend two nights and three days in that lighthouse this coming August. Not alone, but there, surrounded by rocks and surging water.

I know. It’s not my youthful dream fully realized. (I suspect I am too old for that now.) It doesn’t matter. I am thrilled. At last I will be staying in a lighthouse. A “Great Perhaps” that never ceased to beckon.

And there are more to come, I am certain. The “Great Perhaps” continues to entice me, lead me further into God knows what—and I mean that literally. So--as much as I want to be actively present and awake moment to moment in my life, at the same time, I love this concept, the tease of the “Great Perhaps” and honestly? I figure, when the “Great Perhaps” is no longer tweaking me with future possibilities, I will consider myself to be nearly dead . . . and even then I’ll be looking for the “Great Perhaps” in some form of life after death. After all, isn’t that the ultimate “Great Perhaps?”

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Check out Unleash Potential, offering personal growth groups in Fairfield every third Thursday. Caroline J. Temple and Lisa Jacoby are the compassionate leaders of Unleash Potential and my companions on this journey of reflection and self-discovery. Call Caroline: 203 866 9331for the details of the workshops. Click here for general information:

http://www.unleashpotential.us/events/