Week 50

Faces of the Davenport

Triple selfie with Der Bingle's jacket, Davenport Hotel

The snow returned on Monday morning. I sensed the brightness filtering through the bedroom blinds when I awoke around 2 a.m. and knew it was there. I took the dog out a few hours later and she bounded down our usual route to make the first tracks. I can truly understand how Mary Oliver can write poetry about this stuff.

I feel surrounded by calls to peace right now. The end of the year brings this out in me, and probably a lot of us, as a way to counteract the convoluted notions and high expectations we have about Christmas. I think about it often on my commute. During my Monday bus ride, thinking about the quiet and stillness of the snow, my mind wandered to a lyric from my days in the high school jazz choir. In jazz choir, you don't always have to sing jazz. In my experience, the un-jazz songs we performed were ultimately the emotional high points of our tenure as young singers, rather than the swingin' saccharine (I mean this in the best possible way) we originally signed up for. We sang an arrangement my senior year titled "Of Love." You could plop me back in choir and I'd still know every word, every second-alto note. We sang it at a festival and then sobbed after our performance, partly because we nailed it, partly because a choir-mate's mom was dying of cancer, partly because many of us were soon parting ways. Almost two decades later I could still feel the emotion, too, perhaps because it hit me at just the right moment of bus-commute reflection.

Sit down and rest--
Life will wait for a few moments.
There's still time to practice love,
(for a little while)
time to let the fresh air of real peace
into your life.
Be still, be still
and learn again how to live.
Raise your eyes and see beyond this narrow life,
Learn to love
and fill your heart
with sunshine.
Be still.

It was a busy week, otherwise, with parties and festive things happening almost daily. Two Christmas lunches at work, one P.E.O. Christmas party, one midweek game night, one neighborhood cookie exchange, one shopping extravaganza and happy hour. Friday was the most low-key of all the days, when we went out for ramen and a stroll around the Davenport. I took very few pictures this week.

Watching

I still can't keep all characters straight in the My Brilliant Friend series, and I read the frickin' books! We're five episodes in, and I think I'm finally getting who's who. That said, the characters are beautifully portrayed. They bring the books to life in a new way for me. The woman who plays Lila is not so far off from how I imagined her, but seeing everyone else as so...Italian, I guess, really highlights the culture, as does hearing the dialect (based on the few Italian words and phrases I know).

We also watched "White Christmas" while playing dominoes. I always want to like that movie more than I do.

Reading

Not much going on here these days. But I did appreciate this article, as a subscriber/reader of The Skimm.

Making

I'm making progress on my Project Peace cowl. I think I'm finally in my peaceful groove now that I know the pattern.

Recipes

I will always remember this as the soup Joel made me during my first cold as a couple. It has all the best greens and other assorted vegetables in it, a good beefy broth, bacon, little pastas and a healthy glug of olive oil and sprinkle of Parmesan. He made it this week. I contributed the rosemary focaccia.

It was also a pizza week - we ate it twice. The first version was prosciutto with tomato sauce, onions, mushroom and mozzarella (pictured). The second was a riff on the current pizza special at Veraci - bacon and leek - in which I use an olive oil base, prosciutto, mozzarella, leeks and mushrooms (lightly sautéed with rosemary), and topped with homemade breadcrumbs for the last five minutes in the oven. It was an instant favorite.