Saturday, July 20, 2024

Pancakes for the Brunch Bunch

 This started from the Better Homes & Gardens plaid cover, loose leaf cookbook. We prefer the buttermilk variant made with 1/3 whole wheat flour and cinnamon. And for the Brunch Bunch, we normally make this larger batch, which comes to about 8 or 9 cups of batter. Make the batter the night before you need it so that the gently stirred flour can fully hydrate.

Sift together the dry ingredients:

  • 2½ cups white all-purpose flour
  • 1¼ cups whole wheat flour
  • 6 Tbsp sugar
  • 1 Tbsp baking powder
  • ½ Tbsp baking soda
  • ½ Tbsp salt
  • 1½ Tbsp cinnamon

Beat together:

  • 3 eggs
  • 4 cups (1 qt.) buttermilk
  • 3 Tbsp oil

Gently stir or whisk the liquid into the dry ingredients. (It’s OK to leave a few dry lumps; the stuff is going to sit overnight in the ’fridge, so those dry bits will soak up some wetness.)

Stick it into the refrigerator in a covered container.

The next morning, give it gentle whisk to check that all the dry lumps have been absorbed and to see if it is as thin or as thick as you want. Feel free to whisk in a bit of milk if you want it a bit thinner.

Cook the pancakes or waffles as you normally do.

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Advent is Fulfilled

24 December is the last day of Advent and the day to which the Great O Antiphons have been pointing.


Each antiphon has addressed the coming Christ by a different title and begged Him to come and help His people:
    December 17: O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
    December 18: O Adonai (O Lord)
    December 19: O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
    December 20: O Clavis David (O Key of David)
    December 21: O Oriens (O Dayspring)
    December 22: O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations)
    December 23: O Emmanuel (O With Us is God)

Those names form a reverse acrostic containing his answer, which is not unlike the answer he gives at the conclusion of Christian Scriptures.

    Sapientia
    Adonai
    Radix Jesse
    Clavis David
    Oriens
    Rex Gentium
    Emmanuel

SARCORE <——> Ero cras (I will be [with you] tomorrow.)

The Church begs Him to come; He replies that His coming is imminent. Tomorrow, 25 December, is the first day of Christmas.

“The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘come!’…. The One Who testifies says, ‘indeed, I am coming quickly.’ Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”

O Emmanuel

23 December is the seventh and last day of the Great O Antiphons:


O Emmanuel (chant with neumes)

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,

exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:

veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster. 


Literally:

   O Emmanuel, our King and lawgiver.

   longing of nations and their Savior,

   come to save us, Lord our God.


in the Household Book of Blessings and Prayers:

   O Emmanuel, our King and Giver of the Law:

   come to save us, Lord our God!


in “Veni Emmanuel”:

   Veni, veni Emmanuel!

   Captivum solve Israel!

   Qui gemit in exilio,

   Privatus Dei Filio.

   Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel

   nascetur pro te, Israel.


in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”:

   O come, O come, Emmanuel,

   And ransom captive Israel,

   That mourns in lonely exile here,

   Until the Son of God appear.

   Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

   Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O Rex Gentium

 22 December is the sixth day of the Great #OAntiphons:


O Rex Gentium (chant with neumes)

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,

lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:

veni, et salva hominem,

quem de limo formasti. 


Literally:

   O King of the nations, and their desire,

   and cornerstone who make each [into] one,

   come, and save humanity

   whom you have fashioned from mud.


in the Household Book of Blessings and Prayers:

   O King of all nations and keystone of the Church:

   come and save man, whom you formed from the dust!


in “Veni Emmanuel”:

   Veni, Veni, Rex Gentium,

   Veni, Redemptor omnium,

   Ut salves tuos famulos

   Peccati sibi conscios.

   Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel

   nascetur pro te, Israel.


in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”:

   O come, Desire of nations, bind

   All peoples in one heart and mind;

   Bid envy, strife and quarrels cease;

   Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.

   Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

   Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O Oriens

 21 December is the fifth day of the Great O Antiphons:


O Oriens (chant with neumes)

O Oriens,

splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:

veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.


Literally:

   O Rising Sun,

   splendor of eternal light and sun of justice,

   come, and illuminate those sitting in gloom and the shadow of death.


in the Household Book of Blessings and Prayers:

   O Radiant Dawn,

   splendor of eternal light and sun of justice:

   come and shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death!


in “Veni Emmanuel”:

   Veni, veni o oriens!

   Solare nos adveniens,

   Noctis depelle nebulas,

   Dirasque noctis tenebras.

   Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel

   nascetur pro te, Israel.


in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”:

   O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,

   And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;

   Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

   And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

   Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

   Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O Clavis David

 20 December is the fourth day of the Great  #OAntiphons:


O Clavis David (chant with neumes)

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;

qui aperis, et nemo claudit;

claudis, et nemo aperit:

veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,

sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis. 


Literally:

   O Key of David and scepter of the house of Israel,

   you who open and no one closes

   who close and no one opens,

   come, and lead the bound one from the prison house,

   the one sitting in gloom and the shadow of death.


in the Household Book of Blessings and Prayers:

   O Key of David,

   opening the gates of God’s eternal Kingdom:

   come and free the prisoners of darkness!


in “Veni Emmanuel”:

   Veni clavis Davidica!

   Regna reclude coelica,

   Fac iter Tutum superum,

   Et claude vias Inferum.

   Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel

   nascetur pro te, Israel.


in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”:

   O come, Thou Key of David, come

   And open wide our heav’nly home;

   Make safe the way that leads on high,

   And close the path to misery.

   Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

   Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O Radix Iesse

19 December is the third day of the Great O Antiphons:


O Radix Iesse (chant with neumes)

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,

super quem continebunt reges os suum,

quem Gentes deprecabuntur:

veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.


Literally:

   O Root of Jesse, who stand as the peoples’ sign,

   because of whom kings hold their tongue,

   to whom the Nations pray,

   come to set us free; do not now delay.


in the Household Book of Blessings and Prayers:

   O Root of Jesse’s stem,

   sign of God’s love for all His people:

   come to save us without delay!


in “Veni Emmanuel”:

   Veni o Jesse virgula!

   Ex hostis tuos ungula,

   De specu tuos tartari

   Educ, et antro barathri.

   Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel

   nascetur pro te, Israel.


in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”:

   O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free

   Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;

   From depths of hell Thy people save,

   And give them victory o’er the grave.

   Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

   Shall come to thee, O Israel. 

O Adonai

18 December is the second day of the Great O Antiphons


O Adonai (chant with neumes)

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,

qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,

et ei in Sina legem dedisti:

veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.


Literally:

   O Adonai, and ruler of the House of Israel,

   who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush

   and gave him the law on Sinai,

   come to redeem us with outstretched arm.


in the Household Book of Blessings and Prayers:

   O Leader of the House of Israel,

   giver of the Law to Moses on Sinai:

   come to rescue us with your mighty power!


in “Veni Emmanuel”:

   Veni, veni Adonai!

   Qui populo in Sinai

   Legem dedisti vertice,

   In maiestate gloriae.

   Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel

   nascetur pro te, Israel.


in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”:

   O come, Adonai, Lord of might,

   Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,

   In ancient times didst give the law

   In cloud and majesty and awe.

   Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

   Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O Sapientia

 17 December is the first day of the Great O Antiphons:


O Sapientia (chant with neumes)

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,

attingens a fine usque ad finem,

fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:

veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.


Literally:

   O Wisdom, who have gone forth from the mouth of the Most High

   touching from end all the way to end

   mightily and sweetly ordering all things,

   come to teach us the way of prudence.


in the Household Book of Blessings and Prayers:

   O Wisdom of our God Most High

   guiding creation with power and love:

   come to teach us the path of knowledge!


in “Veni Emmanuel”:

   Veni, O Sapientia,

   Quae hic disponis omnia,

   Veni, viam prudentiae

   Ut doceas et gloriae.

   Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel

   nascetur pro te, Israel.


in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”:

   O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,

   And order all things, far and nigh;

   To us the path of knowledge show,

   And cause us in her ways to go.

   Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

   Shall come to thee, O Israel.

Friday, January 13, 2023

Lost my Cherry to Reagan

This one was originally written in the first days of November, 1996, and posted to the OOG list. It has since been posted various places on the internet over the years (a Xoom page, a Facebook note, &c), but those places have all disappeared. So now it is being posted here. I still agree with most of this.


Lost My Cherry to Reagan


“Because the Church is pledged to the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, it must maintain a critical distance from all kingdoms of the world, whether actual or proposed.  Christians betray their Lord if, in theory or in practice, they equate the Kingdom of God with any political, social, or economic order of this passing time.  At best, such orders permit the proclamation of the Gospel of the Kingdom and approximate, in small part, the freedom, peace, and justice for which we hope.  At worst, such orders attempt to suppress the good news of the Kingdom and oppress human beings who are the object of divine love and promise.”  --“Christianity and Democracy,” Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1981

    

    This quote comes near the beginning of its document.  There are things in the article with which I do not agree, and some clarifications that need to be made, for instance the distinction between Communism and Totalitarianism (neither of which I can embrace in this fallen world).  But when the article first came out, a few months after I graduated from a large high school in an extremely conservative Texas suburb, I would have agreed with far less of it.  In those days I could not have understood how any Christian could not be a Republican, let alone how a Christian could choose to be a Democrat.  Now I wonder, along with the article (reprinted in the October issue of First Things), how a Christian can claim, on exclusively religious grounds, to belong to any party.


    In my high school days I was an unapologetically hard-right fundamentalist.  By my sophomore year, I had already received special permission to take some evening continuing education courses at Dallas Theological Seminary, an institution whose theology struck me, at the time, as leaning a bit to the liberal side.  I had purged my music collection of anything not specifically written to glorify God.  I had even taken the extra step of cleansing my collection of Christian rock on the bases that 1) many of my coreligionists who believed that rock and roll could not in any way glorify God were caused grief by my enjoyment of such pagan rhythms and 2) according to Romans 14  and 1 Corinthians 8 (the “meat offered to idols” passages) I was required, as the stronger brother, to give up what causes my weaker brothers to sin.  I was a bona fide, washed-in-the-blood, Bible-thumping, fightin’ fundy.  So it was only natural that, as I morally approached my majority at the close of the seventies, I actively campaigned for the stand-tough, on-God’s-side candidate of Fallwell’s choice, Ronald Wilson Reagan (despite the ominous fact that his three names have six letters each).  In fact, I campaigned so diligently that, at barely more than eighteen years of age, I was asked to be my precinct’s Republican Party chairman.


    Time passed.  On the music front, I heard Jimmy Swaggart (whose own music had been condemned as honky-tonk-Satanic by an earlier generation of conservative brethren) condemn the evils of Christian rock and the opulent life-styles of its performers.  He mentioned one of the hardest-rocking groups of those days, Resurrection Band, by name.  I happened to know that these people live in one of the few successful communes of the Jesus Movement, a commune that still works and ministers in the toughest part of Chicago; a commune where the members live in poverty by choice, using their limited resources to help those living in even greater poverty, both physical and spiritual; a commune from whose clearly-reasoned and well-documented periodical, Cornerstone, I had, as a young man, first heard of Roe-v-Wade and apartheid.  I also happened to know, thanks to photo essay in Life magazine, that Swaggart himself lived in a mansion of baronial proportions, and none of the rooms were being used to house the poor.  (Of course, we would all later learn that Swaggart had a problem keeping, in the words of the Church Lady, Little Jimmy in his pulpit.)  My music selection began to grow again.


    On the political front, changes also began to happen.  I worked as an independent contractor through much of the Reagan administration.  I was a small businessman, one of those described by the Gipper as “the backbone of America”; it felt to me like America was trying to break its own back.  But we prayed, read our Bibles, and ate our government surplus cheese and butter with humble thanks.  Then came Iran-Contra.

    Now, for those of you who have forgotten, let me remind you of a little crisis that helped propel Reagan forward in the 1980 polls: the Iran hostage crisis.  A small Texan with large ears and an even larger business had mounted a daring commando raid and gotten his own people out.  President Carter crashed helicopters in a failed attempt called “the Debacle in the Desert.”  Bumper stickers asked “Ross Perot, where are you when we need you?” and another macho hombre, who had greeted a younger America from Death Valley every week and had forced some sort of conservative order on the Babylon of California, shot forward in the polls; Reagan would know how to deal with those God-less ragheads.  People talked openly and longingly of turning vast stretches of desert into nuclear pools of glass; the slaughter of anonymous thousands was a source of grim humor.

    Later I would learn that America had decided to sell weapons to these same desert dwellers; in the name of fighting the evils of drugs and God-less commies, America had given into the hands of our sworn enemies more tools of death.  And what had we done with the proceeds?  Provided the tools of death to other thugs who claimed to share some of our beliefs.  I stopped remembering that euphemisms like “collateral damage” meant families huddled around graves of the innocent.  I heard stories of American-bankrolled despots whose underlings were good at removing fingernails and rejoiced that the righteous war was being fought.  Villages were strafed nearly daily--men, women and children dying at the wrong end of efficient death from the air, the might of American technology turned against the supposed hiding places of evil men.  It was like handing military equipment to the Crips and saying, “Now you boys be sure you get them drugs off our streets.”  We armed thugs to fight thugs, and the innocent died.  For these and other crimes, more than 100 highly placed Reagan-Bush administrators would be investigated, some charged, fewer jailed.  This from the candidate of the Moral Majority, my candidate, the man who was militantly Pro-Life.

    

    Now here I am at the end of the nineties.  Another election.  The Character Issue is hot, but focuses on the people around the president, not as much on the president himself; I suppose that the direct charges of adultery ring a bit hollow when cast by a Republican leadership who are on their second or third wives.  But when I look at the charges against the thirty-odd members of the Clinton administration, I see mainly good old American greed.  The sort of capitalistic infractions that are, ironically, usually the trademark of Republican businessmen.  And then I have to remind myself of the bloody victories of the Reagan-Bush administrations.

    Character Issue indeed.  And how is it that you can tell when a politician is lying?  All have sinned; all are corrupt.  I can not, like the good people mentioned in this morning’s paper, vote on character alone.  Our nation’s kindly uncle Reagan, a man whose words were turned into a tract for witnessing to the unsaved, supported policies of mechanized death.

    But if the results of Reaganite infractions were more directly deadly, the results of capitalistic greed are still to be abhorred.  I lived through the Texas S&L bust.  I know that the first things to go when times are tight are exactly the sorts of things James calls “true religion,” the sorts of things that Matthew’s Kingdom Discourse says will separate the sheep from the goats.  Prisons get worse; schools “make do”; people without incomes (in whose houses and apartments I’ve spent many years) have to get by on less and less; children without fathers, orphans, eat less and wear thinner hand-me-downs; as Bono put it, “the rich stay wealthy, and the sick stay poor.”  These things, the results of the sins of the Clintonians, are what I normally associate with Republican policies, policies that define themselves in opposition to “tax-and-spend liberals.”  And now they are the result of the sins of tax-and-spend liberals.

    On the other hand, the party of compassion has their own sort of evil.  For me it is epitomized in Clinton’s veto of the partial birth abortion ban.  Medical literature agrees that, whatever the fetus is, it feels pain.  And here is a form of torture so vile that banning it passes both houses with relatively little fight, and Clinton vetoes the bill.

    So my choice seems to be this: vote for the party that will kill the unborn in various nasty, if relatively swift, ways.  Or vote for the party that will slowly crush and kill the spirits of the sick, the imprisoned, the widows and orphans.  It is an intolerable decision.  And despite the diverse claims of some members of the Moral Majority and the Catholic Workers, God is on neither side.  To quote DA, “Everyone seems to think You’re on their side, but I don’t think You’re that small.”  At best, one side or the other may occasionally slip up and make a policy decision that is on God’s side.


    And yet on Tuesday I must balance evil against evil and cast several important ballots.  Where is Jacob’s angel, from whom I might wrest a bit of the divine?  Where is the God of Solomon, who might ask me what boon I would request of Him?  How can that same old sinner who looks out of the mirror at me every morning be trusted to choose well without divine intervention?

    “I don’t know how to make any choices any more; I mean, who do I vote for?  I get the feeling that as soon as something appears in the paper it ceases to be true.  I want to meet the man who can crack this world of injustice like a safe.  Someone with the courage to allow room for good things to run wild.”    --T Bone Burnett, “The Wild Truth”

    

    Kyrie, eleison

    Libera nos a malo

    etiam veni cito, Domine Iesu

    

pax vobiscum,

MMe

Thursday, September 08, 2022

grief



apparently i loved them
even when i didn’t really like them

i dreaded their calls
the emotional toll
that now i miss

i wished that they would go away
and leave me alone

and then they did

i should feel relieved

but i am bereft


25 December 2021

Tuesday, September 06, 2022

SWMBO’s Tomato Pie construction instructions

 Step-by-step instructions for a wonderful summer treat.


Pie filling ingredients:

  • 2 to 2.5 pounds very ripe tomatoes, heirloom if you can find them. Sliced ~1/4 inch thin — peeled if you are me.
  • 1 large sweet onion, thinly sliced
  • 3 Tbsp seasoned bread crumbs
  • 1/4 cup Dukes
  • 3/4 cup grated Mozzarella cheese (or one small burrata)
  • 3/4 cup shredded sharp dry cheese (Manchego, sharp Gouda, or similar--not Parmesano or Romano) -- grate another 3 Tbsp to add later to the pie crust
  • 2 Tbsp Italian seasoning 
  • Kosher salt
  • Fresh ground pepper


Assemble pie filling ingredients and take a picture. (Crust ingredients later…)




Sliced tomatoes thinly. Mix in a bowl with 1 teaspoon of kosher salt. Spread them out to drain. This keeps your pie from being soggy.

Turn the tomatoes over every so often. You can also use paper towels to blot up excess moisture. 

(If you are me or otherwise need skinless tomatoes:

Bring a stockpot of water to a boil. Dip tomatoes into it for 45-60 seconds, then plunge into ice water to cool. Quickly remove tomato skins. Let cool on cutting board, then slice as above. Slices won't be as thin, but will cook just as nicely.)




In 1 Tbsp of olive oil, caramelize your thinly sliced Vidalia onions. Sweet onions made even sweeter… Heavenly!



While the onions are cooking and the tomatoes are draining, let’s make a pie crust.

Sift (yes, I still use a sifter!) together:

  • 1.5 cups white flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt



Using a pastry cutter, mix in 1/2 cup Crisco in two batches. 

I mix in half of the shortening (1/4 cup) until the mixture has the consistency of cornmeal…



...then add in the rest of the Crisco until it looks like large peas. Does wonders for the flakiness.


Not pictured, but important: stir in the 3 Tbsp hard grated cheese at this time.


Pie crusts need water. Use vodka (flavored is great!) for half of the 4-6 Tbsp water you’ll need to get the crust to cling together.



Always helps to have precision instruments. 

iPad for recipe, of course!



Form dough into a circle, and roll out into a pastry cloth sprinkled with flour and yellow cornmeal. Dust your rolling pin cover with flour as well. 

It is helpful, when making pie crusts, to think of the crust as being made of snow and your hands as being on fire. Touch the crust with your hands as little as possible.


Roll out into a circle about 3" wider than the diameter of your pie/tart pan.



Using the pin and the pastry cloth, carefully pick up the crust…



…and place it into a tart pan (or pie pan if you don’t have a tart pan. Seal any holes or tears with a roller. 

Touch the crust as little as possible, so it doesn't get tough.



Prick the crust to allow for heat escape.

Line the inside with foil, and use dried beans to weigh it down during the initial cooking phase.



Pre-bake the crust at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, then remove the foil & beans and bake for another 10. 

When the crust comes out, turn the oven temp up to 375.



While the crust is cooking, and the tomatoes are still draining, mix together the rest of the cheeses, the caramelized onions, the spices, the breadcrumbs, and the Dukes.



Take a swig or two from your DDP.



Spread the onion/cheese mixture over the bottom of the pre-baked crust.



Add in your tomatoes. I used kitchen shears to cut larger slices that wouldn't be seen. It makes pie-slicing easier later.



Put the prettiest slices on the top. Drizzle with about 1 Tbsp olive oil and grate some fresh pepper over the top.



Place into the 375 oven for 50 minutes. I recommend using a pastry shield, especially if you aren't using a tart pan. It will keep the top of the crust from drying out.



Remove from oven.



If applicable, remove from tart pan. 

Enjoy! This is one of the wonderful gifts of summer.



Saturday, July 09, 2022

Velma’s Fudge

This one has been carried around on notecards for decades. I'll try to link a scan of selfsame. In the meanwhile:

Butter up a pan. 9 x 9 will do nicely, but you’ll figure out your own pan for thickness &c.

In a large* saucepan, stir:

  • 2 cups sugar
  • 2 oz. baking chocolate
  • ½ cup milk
  • ½ cup light corn syrup
over low heat until sugar dissolves and the solution begins to boil.

* Seriously, use a much larger pan than you think you will need. Sugar and milk both foam way up into huge messes when they start to get really hot. You don’t want this to boil over. You don’t want to have to clean this mess off of your stove.

Cook without stirring until the stuff reaches a soft ball stage (230-240 °F).

Take off the stove, toss in
  • large lump of butter
  • at least 1 tsp vanilla
Beat with an electric mixer until it all starts to congeal.

If you want to add some manner of nuts or raisins or whatever, this is the time to stir them in.

Pour it all into the buttered pan and try to exercise some self-control while waiting for it all to cool off and be ready to cut. You can always console yourself by licking off the beaters and scraping the remaining deliciousness out of the pan.



Saturday, August 14, 2021

We Are Still Married (1998)

 Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 13:08:58 -0400

From: Victoria

Subject: not sure if i should send this, but...

i’m back again, sorta.

back from the east coast anyway, where i went for a week or so to get my thoughts together, decide why i wanted to kill/hurt/maim myself as badly as i did, why i was so paralyzed with fear over turning 30, why i was so desperately, miserably unhappy.  i learned that i have very few boundaries.   i learned that many parts of me that i’m ashamed of having are part of me whether i like it or not, and i’m going to have to learn to deal with them (for further clarification, read “two women” by denise levertov). i learned that i am not in love with my husband anymore.

it’s that last one that’s throwing me for a loop.

it’s that last one that’s eating me apart inside.

<snip>

....i’m just trying to get a handle on this.  i’m wondering if anyone else out there has felt this, is still married, and why.  please don’t write and quote me all the sanctity-of-marriage verses in scripture:  i know them already....

<snip>

has anyone else ever been here?

i’m desperate, or else i wouldn’t be telling a bunch of people that i really don’t know.  answer me privately, if you wish.  i want to want to work this out, but if i were flat-out honest i’d rather be anywhere than here.

i never knew love was this fragile.

victoria

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi, Vic.  It’s Izzy, lifting the title of someone else’s book.  You say:

>i learned

>that i am not in love with my husband anymore.

to which I say “So what?”

Alright, now that your hackles are up, let me expand.  And I’ll try to have something practical after I ramble through some theory...

SWMBO and I recently celebrated our 15th anniversary.  This is something of  milestone for us, since we now figure we have half a chance of making it.  Well, actually, it’s not that WE figure, but... Well, the first Sunday back from our honeymoon, one of our elders came up to us and said, “If you make it 15 years, I give you half a chance.”  Gee, thanks for the encouraging word.

But he wasn’t too far from wrong.

We had a longer honeymoon than most (about four years), but for most of our married life we have not been “in love”.  Some of the time, we haven’t even liked one another all that much.  But we made the decision before we were married, and vowed to one another in the ceremony, that we would make the effort to love one another, and so even when we don’t like each other, we try to love one another.

There have been times that I have carried this marriage on my back alone.  And there have been (probably more frequent) times that SWMBO has carried it on hers.  In retrospect, had we treated marriage like a 50-50 partnership, it would have dissolved years ago.  Instead, we try to treat marriage like a 100-100 partnership.  Now at any given time, the total effort going into this thing called our marriage may only be about 70% total, instead of the 200% total for which we claim we want to strive.  This has been enough, so far, to get us over the bad patches.

OK, I know I haven’t been too encouraging so far, but here’s the thing.  Yes, there have been bad patches.  Yes there have been times when we didn’t like one another all that much.  But we have found it well worth getting through the bad patches because the good patches are so much better when we get back to them.  I personally don’t put a whole lot of stock in being giddily in love; I know how volatile emotions can be.  And yet, even after fifteen years, we still hit times when we are just plain stupid in love (we’re leaving one of those periods right now, and on a downhill ride toward being friendly roommates.  God willing, we will rise again.)  And quite a bit of the time, we function well as a team now.

SO here’s the deal: after years of training one another, we fit well.  We anticipate each other’s stupid jokes.  It’s harder to arrange a surprise for each other (but what’s life without a challenge or two?).  We’re already starting to remember shared stories differently (it was during the summer of ’91 that we...  No, it was ’92; I remember because Aunt Flo...  But Aunt Flo was in Utah in ’92...)  And when we take on responsibilities, we apportion the work well and collapse into a comfortable heap afterwards.  People accuse us of being cute.

As for the notion of being “in love”, I think it’s one of the most overrated and damaging ideas invented.  Desires in general are aimed at extinguishing themselves.  If I have a real hankering for chocolate and indulge that desire, I satisfy it and the desire is (at least temporarily) dead.  The only way to hold onto a desire for any length of time is to never fulfill it.  And being “in love” is a desire.  Think about all the TV shows that keep us going from week to week with a “will they or won’t they” plot.  Now think about the shows in which they “do.”  Either the shows lose their impetus, or we have to start throwing new obstacles in the way of the new lovers.  Why?  Because being “in love” is by its very nature a transitory thing.

By the way, the notion of “true love” was forged in the tradition of Courtly Love, in which the only real love is for an object that can never be attained.  Thus the world’s great love stories: Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliette; they end in death.  Or Cinderella, where marriage takes the function of death and there’s some magic “happily ever after” that can never be spelled out.

Look, nothing can kill pure, spiritual love like putting flesh on it.  Suddenly, this great object of romantic passion reveals itself as a lump of flesh that makes funny noises and weird smells, that always stirs its coffee in that annoying way, that always leaves things in the wrong place.  This is what it means to live and to love in a fallen world.

SWMBO and I were called to love one another the best we can.  This means taking the bad with the good, as we promised in our vows:  “For better or for worse” assumes that there will be worse.  We just have to learn to get through it to the better again.

SO what has helped us get through the bad?  Well, in general, having good network of Christian friends with whom and to whom we are accountable for our actions.  Having in that network people who have been married and walking with God longer than we’ve been alive and being willing to go to them and bitch.  I think SWMBO would have killed me during our second year if she hadn’t been able to go to an older woman and complain about me, only to be met with some gentle laughter and similar stories from years before.  It helped SWMBO to have someone demonstrate that she had been there as well and that it was worth getting over it.  It also helped to have this same woman remind SWMBO of a number of my good points and to tell her how obvious it was to everyone that I was mad for my wife.

It has also helped me in those times when I wasn’t so mad for her to ACT s if I were.  Sometimes, I have been able to rekindle the feelings by acting on what I don’t feel.  So I’ll do something self-consciously sweet like send her flowers for no good reason.  And send them to her office.  And here’s what happens.  Her coworkers ask “Is it your birthday/anniversary/tpam?”  “No?  Well he must have *done something*.  What did he do?”  “Nothing?  Well, what did YOU do?”  Eventually they get the idea that SWMBO has received flowers for no particular reason.  This makes her coworkers jealous and makes her feel good.  And perversely, it makes me feel good to make her feel good in front of her colleagues.  And at the very least/worst/most selfish, her coworkers all think I’m hot stuff.  All this from doing something I didn’t FEEL like doing; much good from an act that could be viewed as hypocritical or cynical.

Alright, I’ve rambled on long enough.  The big message I have for you is this.  You are not alone; many of us have gone through bad patches and know that we’ll go through them again.  It is well worth the effort to figure out how to get to the other side.  The good patches get better every time.  And forget about this being “in love” shit.  Emotions are too unstable to form the basis of any relationship.  It’s great, even wonderful, when they fall into place, but don’t trust ’em, don’t rely on ’em.  Learn to love without being in love.

Pax,

Izzy

OK, one more story.  Sitting in a Greek class where the prof had been married only about 8 years, I had been married about the same amount of time, and my favorite classmate, Susan, had been married long enough that she had actually dropped a class a couple years earlier when she walked in and found *her son* enrolled in the same section — sitting in this class a fellow named Mark said, “I’m getting married soon, and I know a lot of you have been married for a while so I thought I would ask, what’s the secret to a lasting marriage?”

The prof said, “Well, you just take it one day at a time.”

Mark, never one to let people get away with non-answers like that, said, “OK, I’ve heard that before.  What does it mean?”

I leapt into the breach:  “It means you wake up, roll over, realize you don’t like this person next to you so much right now and you say, ‘Gee, I think I want out of this.  But is it going to be easier FOR TODAY to get up, get showered and dressed, eat my Wheaties, go to work for nine or ten hours, come home, have dinner, watch some TV, and go back to bed?... or is it going to be easier FOR TODAY to call in to work and get some time off, find a lawyer, and start divorce proceedings?  I think that FOR TODAY, it will be easier to just move along in this well-worn rut.’”

Mark and the prof stared at me, aghast at what they’d heard.  Susan looked at me and said, “You are wise beyond your years, child.”

Cynical, I realize, but there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere.

Pax Christi,

Izzy

who is constantly amazed to wake up and find that once again his wife has forborne to murder him in his sleep

History to We Are Still Married

 I honestly can’t believe that I have never blogged this. I had it as a FaceBook note for a long while (before FB decided that those couldn’t be monetized and shut them down), and before that it lived on a website curated by a Canadian OOGer. 

It has been 23 years now since Victoria sent her primal scream into the OOG list and I typed out a rushed response over my morning breakfast cereal. It has been over a decade since I posted this note on the eve-more-malevolent Book of Faces. In the interim, Victoria fell off a step-ladder while hanging decorations on their house, banged her head, and turned into an overly-large and overly-strong toddler for her husband (not recognized as such by her) to nurture. He’s doing the best he can, and their relationship is far different from anything either of them had ever imagined.

I still haven’t written anything more coherent, but have been told by many people over the years that this has been helpful. And now that Visage Codex has taken away the only method of long-form, thoughtful discourse they had, I find that I need to correct the absence of this essay from cyberspace. And this only so that I can share it easily.

14 Aug 2021 (during a pandemic)

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Intro to the now-lost note posted on Zuckerberg’s social medium platform:

The following was written in haste one morning almost ten years ago over breakfast before the morning commute in response to a heartfelt posting on an e-mail list.  I include here a portion of the original post followed by my somewhat disjointed reply.  Frankly, had I set out to write an essay on the topic, I would have made it more coherent.  The main reason I’m posting it here in its present form is that it seemed to touch a nerve with a lot of people on that list, many of whom (including a couple of pastors) asked for permission to pass it around.  I consider this a rough draft based on some things that SWMBO and I had been discussing that summer; had I known this post would have a life of it’s own, I would have put more thought into it and been more careful to footnote.  Some day I’ll write a more coherent essay, or at least post a similar set of ruminations from Fitz Allison’s The Cruelty of Heresy. http://www.amazon.com/Cruelty-Heresy-Affirmation-Christian-Orthodoxy/dp/0819215139/  But its heart is genuine, and it will have to do for now.

For those who worry about such things, I’ll just mention that Victoria and her husband are still together and have happily added to their family.

Sometime around 2008

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb”

The Hill We Climb
by Amanda Gorman

(on the occasion of Joseph Robinette Biden jr.’s inauguration, 20 January 2021)

When day comes, we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken,
but simply unfinished.
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,
but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried.
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious.
Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb, if only we dare.
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.
This is the era of just redemption.
We feared it at its inception.
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,
but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves.
So while once we asked, ‘How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?’ now we assert, ‘How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?’

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be:
A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change, our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left.
With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest, we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the golden hills of the west.
We will rise from the wind-swept north-east where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked south.
We will rebuild, reconcile, and recover.
In every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country,
our people, diverse and beautiful, will emerge, battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Tomato Jam

There are lots of versions of this recipe with many variations in the list of ingredients. This one comes from Chef Wes Fulmer of Motor Supply Bistro here in Columbia. The recipe Eddie Wales handed me called for fifteen tomatoes. The recipe at Very Vera calls for eight. I really wish that the recipe called for a weight of tomatoes rather than a number. Right now, I’m choosing to err on the side of more tomatoes and tomato flavor.

  1. Core out and score 8 - 15 tomatoes on the bottom.
  2. In a medium stockpot bring 1 gallon of water to a boil. Place the tomatoes in and blanch until skin starts to separate from the flesh.
  3. Meanwhile dice 1 large yellow onion and one bunch of fresh thyme. Sautée them and set aside (if you have time before the tomatoes are done).
  4. Place tomatoes in an ice bath immediately. Peel and rough chop.
  5. Place the roughly-chopped tomatoes, onions, and thyme in a medium rondo or small stockpot on medium-low heat. Add 
    • 1 c. sugar
    • 1½ c. rice wine vinegar, and 
    • 3 large bay leaves
      and cook on low heat for about 2-3 hours until almost all liquid is gone.
  6. Spread on a half sheet tray and let cool.
  7. Enjoy!

Feel free to add other flavors as your taste buds dictate. Ginger is nice. As are cloves.

Saturday, October 31, 2020

New York-Style Pizza Crust

This is based on J. Kenji López-Alt’s New York Pizza recipe. His recipe makes three pies; we only ever make two crusts. It is well worth reading the original and following his link to the windowpane test to make sure you have good gluten development.

Oil the insides of two 32 oz. lidded containers (I tend to use quart-sized deli rounds) and set them aside.

Into the bowl of a food processor, put

  • 15 oz. / 425 g. bread flour (~ 3 c.),
  • 1 Tbsp sugar,
  • .23 oz. / 6.6 g. kosher salt (~ 2 tsp.), and
  • 1⅓ tsp. instant / rapid rise yeast.

 Pulse to combine.

Add

  • 2 Tbsp EVOO and
  • 10 oz. / 283.3 g. lukewarm water.

Run the processor until the dough forms a ball that rides up along the side of the bowl (~15 seconds) and then continue for that much time longer (~30 seconds total).

Turn out onto a lightly-floured surface, knead a couple of times (feel free to check the dough by using the windowpane test), cut the dough in half, form into balls, and put them into the oiled containers. Refrigerate for one to five days, checking every now and again that the lids haven’t been blown off the containers (don’t ask me how I know that this can happen).

At least two hours before needed, take the doughs out, punch them down, reform the balls, drop them pinched-side down back into the oiled containers, and let them warm and rise on the counter until doubled in volume.

After this, it’s nearly the same instructions from the Thin Crust recipe, but for convenience, I’ll paste them in here:

[Insert two hours worth of music & other chores here.]

  • Place a pizza stone, cast iron bistro pan, or some other such item into an oven and preheat to 450℉.
  • Punch down the dough.
  • Get out some parchment, sprinkle with semolina (I switched from corn meal and like the texture slightly better), and place a dough ball onto it. With fingers & knuckles, work the ball out into a rough disk (feel free to pick it up by the edges and let gravity do some of the stretching), then start rolling out the dough from the center, shifting 90° with each stroke.
  • When the dough is ~13", sprinkle with a bit more corn meal semolina,
  • prick all over with a fork,
  • flip,
  • brush with olive oil, and
  • top with desired toppings.
  • Transfer to heated stone or iron in the oven. (I slide a thin metal pizza pan underneath the parchment, just set the parchment with the pizza down on the hot stone or iron, and slide the fake peel out; the parchment makes a convenient tool for removing the cooked pizza from the oven and for containing the mess when cutting and serving.)
  • Bake for ~12 minutes
  • check for desired browning of the crust, and either leave in for a bit longer or
  • take out, cut, and serve.

Tuesday, June 04, 2019

Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.


I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress,
Fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Monday, May 20, 2019

When Abortion Stopped Making Sense

When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense
By Frederica Mathewes-Green

January 22, 2016 9:00 AM

Roe v. Wade -- Abortion Won the Day, but Sooner or Later That Day Will End

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.”

The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the decision. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester. The Supreme Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her doctor. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of what abortion was. We knew nothing of fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.

We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion.

Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v. Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it; those babies had no names.

We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It won’t embarrass her mom and dad.

Abortion is like a funnel; it promises to solve all the problems at once. So there is significant pressure on a woman to choose abortion, rather than adoption or parenting.

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, If she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.

This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.

If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.

The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I really didn’t have a choice.”

I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article in Esquire magazine, way back in 1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along.

Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant, lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and “dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.)

After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.”

He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life.

The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth of what I saw?”

The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals, wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and daughters?

For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. No matter who the father, every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just as much as any child she will ever bear.

We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose between his career and the life of his child?

Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. Like the claim that a fetus is not really a person because it is so small. Well, I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people? That if you catch them before they’ve reached a certain size, it’s all right to kill them?

What about the child who is “unwanted”? It was a basic premise of early feminism that women should not base their sense of worth on whether or not a man “wants” them. We are valuable simply because we are members of the human race, regardless of any other person’s approval. Do we really want to say that “unwanted” people might as well be dead? What about a woman who is “wanted” when she’s young and sexy but less so as she gets older? At what point is it all right to terminate her?

The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg. That new single cell has a brand-new DNA, never before seen in the world. If you examined through a microscope three cells lined up — the newly fertilized ovum, a cell from the father, and a cell from the mother — you would say that, judging from the DNA, the cells came from three different people.

When people say the unborn is “not a person” or “not a life” they mean that it has not yet grown or gained abilities that arrive later in life. But there’s no agreement about which abilities should be determinative. Pro-choice people don’t even agree with each other. Obviously, law cannot be based on such subjective criteria. If it’s a case where the question is “Can I kill this?” the answer must be based on objective medical and scientific data. And the fact is, an unborn child, from the very first moment, is a new human individual. It has the three essential characteristics that make it “a human life”: It’s alive and growing, it is composed entirely of human cells, and it has unique DNA. It’s a person, just like the rest of us.

Abortion indisputably ends a human life. But this loss is usually set against the woman’s need to have an abortion in order to freely direct her own life. It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself is painful, humiliating, expensive — no woman “wants” to go through it. But once it’s available, it appears to be the logical, reasonable choice. All the complexities can be shoved down that funnel. Yes, abortion solves all the problems; but it solves them inside the woman’s body. And she is expected to keep that pain inside for a lifetime, and be grateful for the gift of abortion.

Many years ago I wrote something in an essay about abortion, and I was surprised that the line got picked up and frequently quoted. I’ve seen it in both pro-life and pro-choice contexts, so it appears to be something both sides agree on.

I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience. That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it.

Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression.

***

And so we come around to one more March for Life, like the one last year, like the one next year. Protesters understandably focus on the unborn child, because the danger it faces is the most galvanizing aspect of this struggle. If there are different degrees of injustice, surely violence is the worst manifestation, and killing worst of all. If there are different categories of innocent victim, surely the small and helpless have a higher claim to protection, and tiny babies the highest of all. The minimum purpose of government is to shield the weak from abuse by the strong, and there is no one weaker or more voiceless than unborn children. And so we keep saying that they should be protected, for all the same reasons that newborn babies are protected. Pro-lifers have been doing this for 43 years now, and will continue holding a candle in the darkness for as many more years as it takes.

I understand all the reasons why the movement’s prime attention is focused on the unborn. But we can also say that abortion is no bargain for women, either. It’s destructive and tragic. We shouldn’t listen unthinkingly to the other side of the time-worn script, the one that tells us that women want abortions, that abortion liberates them. Many a post-abortion woman could tell you a different story.

The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?
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In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back, are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era. Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters.

One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of ours. And they are not obligated to be kind.

Saturday, April 06, 2019

Magnificent Obituary

Tim Schrandt

June 11, 1955 - March 29, 2019
U.S. Veteran

Tim Schrandt, age 63, of Spillville, IA died on Friday, March 29, 2019 at Gundersen Health System in LaCrosse, WI after a short battle with cancer.

A funeral service will be held at 11:00 a.m., Thursday, April 4, 2019 at the St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church in Spillville with Deacon Pat Malanaphy presiding; burial will be in the church cemetery with full military rites.

Visitation will be from 3:00 – 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 at the St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church in Spillville and also after 10:00 a.m. at the Church on Thursday morning.

Tim Schrandt (Lynyrd) made his last inappropriate comment on March 29, 2019. If you are wondering if you may have ever met him, you didn’t — because you WOULD remember. For those of you that did meet him, we apologize, as we’re sure he probably offended you. He was world renowned for not holding back and telling it like it is.

Tim was born to William (Bill) Schrandt and Mary (Schrandt) Manning on June 11,1955 - 100 years too late. Given Tim’s demeanor he would have been the perfect weathered cowboy in the old west or rough and tough pioneer, or maybe he just should have been Amish.

Tim was the 4th of 8 kids, the bottom rung of the top tier (the big kids). Instead of taking his place on that rung, listening to the older kids and doing as he was told by his older siblings, he decided to anoint himself “king” of the 4 little kids. Tim spent his childhood and early adulthood ordering them around and in general, tormenting them. He was a great orator, (not like Shakespeare, but more like Yogi Berra), as he always had something to say,
and always had to get in the last word.

His position as “king” and orator was challenged by the nuns at St. Wenceslaus school in Spillville. He may have met his match. We’re not saying the nuns won, but they put up a good fight, we mean literally - he got into a fist-a-cuff with a nun. In fairness, she probably started it. You didn’t take a swing at Tim and not expect one back. Tim’s fondness for authority (his own - not others) followed him to South Winneshiek High School in Calmar and later into the Army. This provided for many interesting episodes and stories, detentions and demotions, and a few “run ins” with the law, not just locally, but globally.

Tim worked at Camcar/Stanley Black and Decker in Decorah as a tool and die maker for 30 plus years. Tim worked with many friends and “a bunch of morons”. His words, not ours. Well not exactly his, words because that would have included a bunch of swear words.

Tim leaves behind a hell of a lot of stuff that his family doesn’t know what to do with. So, if you are looking for a Virgin Mary in a bathtub shrine (you Catholics know what we’re talking about) you should wait the appropriate amount of time and get in touch with them.

Tomorrow would be fine.

In addition to his stuff he leaves behind two great boys who he was extremely proud of, Cody (Jenny) Schrandt and Josh (Lydia) Schrandt were the product of his marriage to Crystal Hilmer. He will be missed by his two granddaughters that he adored and taught to cuss, Peyton and MacKenna. Also left to keep the stories alive (but damn, there won”t be any new material) are his mother Mary Manning and siblings Mike (Rita Dixon) Schrandt, Marty (Clint) Berg, Becky Schrandt-Miles, Bill (Grease) Schrandt, Pam (Rick) Barnes, Peter (Sandra) Schrandt and many nieces, nephews and cousins that wanted to hang out near him, because you just knew he was going to say or do something good. It’s not that he was such a great storyteller, it’s that he WAS the story!

To his siblings’ amazement he was actually able to snag a good woman, Cheryl Murray, and hold on to her for the past 13 years, and as far as we know restraints were not used. Tim also created great memories and stories for Cheryl’s kids Alex (Christina) Murray and Samantha (Evan) Luedking and grandkids Tatum and Grace.

He will be having a reunion with his infant daughter Ashley, his brother Duke, his dad Bill Schrandt, many aunts and uncles and a handful of cousins that passed before him. Tim was in charge of getting the beer and ice for our family reunions, so they will be happy to see him.

A common line in obituaries is “He never met a stranger”, in Tim’s case he never met a rule he couldn’t break, a boundary he couldn’t push, a line he couldn’t cross and a story he couldn’t stretch. Another common obituary phrase is “He’d give the shirt off his back”, well Tim was prepared to do that, and he could do it quickly, because he always wore his shirts unbuttoned ¾ the way down. Tim was anything but common!

Despite his crusty exterior, cutting remarks and stubbornness, there is actual evidence that he was a loving, giving and caring person. That evidence is the deep sorrow and pain in our hearts that his family feels from his passing.

Tim led a good life and had a peaceful death - but the transition was a bitch. And for the record, he did not lose his battle with cancer. When he died, the cancer died, so technically it was a tie! He was ready to meet his Maker, we’re just not sure “The Maker” is ready to meet Tim.

Good luck God!

We are considering establishing a Go-Fund-Me account for G. Heileman Brewing Co., the brewers of Old Style beer, as we anticipate they are about to experience significant hardship as a result of the loss of Tim”s business. Keep them in your thoughts.