The Kitchen Ballet

This year I wanted to shake Thanksgiving dinner up a bit, so I combined old standbys with a few new recipes. The hardest part for me is to having everything ready at the same time, so I made dessert the night before and planned ahead more than usual. This would have been the first time in history that my schedule was perfectly coordinated, if it had been perfectly coordinated, which it wasn't. But it came close. And I do have to say I enjoyed myself more than usual. The novelty of new dishes added extra spice to things.

I like pumpkin but have too many memories of trying to finish off most of a pie by myself. I didn't want anything too rich, so I tried a recipe for pumpkin doughnuts that converted easily to cake. I have a metal pan with an autumn design stamped in so that when you turn the cake out, it has raised leaves and vines on top. The effect was muted by the lemon-yogurt icing I drizzled over it, but the result was just what I was looking for: not-too-fancy, not-too-heavy, but just special enough.

On Thanksgiving Day, the biggest hassle was the turkey. Even though I had moved it from the freezer to the refrigerator the day before, it hadn't thawed, so I had to cook it longer. I cooked it in a clay pot, which added an antique touch, but I'm not really sure it tasted any better than if I had used an ordinary pan. Once it was in the oven, I started on the cranberry relish. I had never fixed it at home and didn't think I liked it that much, but I found out what a difference cooking it yourself makes. I didn't know how simple it is: just three ingredients and a little bit of stirring, and the flavor just pops.

I had found myself thinking about saucepans the night before -- how many I had and which ones I should use for what. So there they were, all lined up on the burners. So far, so good, and I started to think I might even be able to manage some gravy, which I usually skip due to lack of stovetop real estate. Things only got tricky when I got to the mashed potato stage. The potatoes were done a little early, so I had to move them to a different burner and keep them warm until I was ready to mash them. Shuffling of pans ensued. Dressing is easy, so I put those ingredients to one side and started the winter spinach with raisins and nuts. Once you start this it goes really fast, I found. The only mishap was a partially melted tip on a plastic spoon, but it was a small price to pay for something delicious. The oil and garlic and the sweetness of the raisins cut the bitterness of the spinach, and it was a nice change from green bean casserole.

The action was fast and furious after the spinach was done. I had to take the turkey out and get it on a plate, make the dressing, mash the potatoes, and set the table (which I would have done earlier if I hadn't forgotten, due to the general atmosphere of gourmet excitement). And oh, yes, the gravy -- I used my smallest saucepan for that, and it only boiled over once. I mashed the potatoes with butter and milk, having decided that this was the place to spend calories. Plain potatoes go totally against the spirit of Thanksgiving, I feel.

It occurred to me while pivoting around from the counter to the refrigerator to the table to the stove that I felt like a dancer. It started out like a country dance, sort of slow and measured, and heated up into something more like hot jazz. I was working all four burners and hadn't scorched a single pan, and nothing had fallen on the floor yet either.

Well, finally, the potatoes were mashed, the relish had cooled, the turkey was ready to carve, and I started spooning things out on the plate, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I wish you could have seen it. I think the mistake I made in the past was going too much toward the casserole end of things. Having a couple of lighter items brightened up the menu, since I knew I wouldn't be in carbohydrate overload afterwards. I looked at that plate, with its sliced turkey resting delicately under a silky gravy, cranberry relish a beautiful shade of red, the old familiar dressing and potatoes, and winter spinach a deep green that totally (I must say) complemented the red, and thought two things: 1. It's a shame I'm not showing this off to someone else and 2. I forgot to put ice in the glass for my tea.

When I sat down to give thanks, I became thoughtful. I realized that it was probably not the time for philosophy but for staying in the moment. My main thought was that I was thankful for being able to put that beautiful meal on the table, a gift I gave to myself compounded of a little artistry and the many gifts life gives us. OK, I guess that was a little philosophical, but I started eating before it could drift into the mind/body problem or something else.

Oh yes, dessert! I can't forget about that! The cake was very good, and here's a hint if you ever want to try it yourself: yogurt works just as well as sour cream for the icing. But it's that little hit of lemon that really sets things off.

The Lord of Misrule

People complain about the holiday frenzy starting earlier every year. It's a cliché, but it may actually be true. Last Friday afternoon, I saw people changing lanes repeatedly (more than usual, it seemed) in heavy traffic near the mall. An overeager van driver jumped in front of me with hardly any room to spare, causing me to miss a green light. He/she probably considered it adroit maneuvering, but I considered it rude.

Same thing at the coffeehouse: I don't know what people are drinking to make them so excitable, but it's not the same thing I'm getting. I usually take a book to read, but even if I were talking with someone, I could probably do it without sharing my conversation with the whole room or blundering into other people's tables. What's with all the attention-seeking behavior: loudness, lack of regard for personal space, and odd mannerisms? I was only that overstimulated once in my life, the time I took Midol for cramps and suddenly found I was bouncing off the walls. Maybe some people just shouldn't drink coffee in the afternoon?

Everybody knows that feeling you sometimes get during the holiday season when you've been overtaxed by addressing cards, shopping for gifts, and planning dinner, and you've navigated the over-bright and over-crowded aisles of the department stores one too many times. I remember walking through the grocery store a few days before Christmas one year feeling worn out, and the main action hadn't even started yet. Generally, that frazzled feeling can be expected in mid to late December, but yesterday it seemed to have hit people about a month too soon. I never saw so many pedestrians nearly run over, and that was before I even got inside. The store was extra crowded with people shopping for Thanksgiving, and things only settled down once the people thinned out.

I usually like to take things in small doses, including holiday cheer, but of course that runs counter to the spirit of Saturnalia, the ancient holiday that celebrated excess and the overturning of social order every December. Having read about some of the customs of Saturnalia, I'm inclined to think most of our modern celebrations are an improvement. Shopping and eating do sound better than an actual descent into lawlessness.

If my reading of the current situation is correct, the spirit of Saturnalia may be making more of an appearance than usual this season. If so, we should be prepared for a bit of a bumpy ride. It's probably best to give yourself plenty of time to get places, to focus on doing the things that truly give you happiness, and to handle any tendency to excess with an extra helping of turkey, a well-planned shopping excursion at off-hours, or some enthusiastic caroling. Resist any temptation to run naked in the streets or steal your neighbor's nativity display. Likewise, be prepared for defensive action. If anyone dashes up to you with a spring of mistletoe and a wild look, your shopping cart makes an excellent barrier.

Moonlighting as Gods

We're under a weather advisory right now, but so far, we've only had rain. That's probably a good thing, since there have been very severe storms in the Midwest today. I heard the storm warning alarm go off a while ago, but whatever the hazard was, it must have passed us by. Here, it's just a rainy Sunday.

I've always lived in places where tornadoes are a possibility. In Florida, hurricanes sometimes spawn them, and in Kentucky, we get tornadoes with severe thunderstorms. In high school, I spent one especially wild night listening to the radio by candlelight as a supercell storm raged outside. This storm was so immense that it affected multiple states throughout the Eastern U.S., dropping numerous tornadoes, one of which damaged our school. We had turned in English papers that week that were lost, our words literally carried away by the wind (now I always make a backup copy).

No wonder there were so many sky gods in the ancient religions; no wonder Thor's emblem is a hammer. I remember as a child seeing a commercial that featured an image of a cloud-wreathed god striking an anvil with a huge hammer. That was the image I carried in my mind of Thor or Vulcan, of how he created thunder and lightning every time he struck with his brawny arm. I could almost see him up there any time the clouds were especially black.

I suppose any time the origin of a force is invisible, the imagination is stirred like that. Right now, for instance, there's no thunder or wind, but there's plenty of noise above my head. For the last several years, I've had a succession of exceptionally noisy upstairs neighbors. If I hadn't seen them with my own eyes, I might have wondered if Thor or Vulcan had actually moved in above me! Sounds of heavy objects falling (Crack! Thud!), sounds of hammering and scraping, a commotion as of sizable objects being shoved or pushed -- it's all in a day's work around here.

It gives me sympathy for those poor denizens of the mythical realms who must have lived beneath the workshops of those sky gods (not having had any recourse to NIMBY petitioning, under the circumstances). I can imagine their dismay at all the thundering and yammering and unexplained but ominous bumps in the night originating from up top the mountain. They must have wondered what epic storm the gods were stirring up now every time they heard those low-pitched rumbles and ear-splitting cracks. I have wondered several times if someone was about to come through my ceiling and make an unwelcome deus ex machina appearance in my own living room. (You just really don't want a visit from Zeus; he's usually nothing but trouble.)

So if it is Hephaistos' workshop up there, what could they be building? Furniture? Ships? Trojan horses? All seem like odd hobbies for graduate students. When I was in graduate school, I barely had time to cook dinner, much less moonlight as a cabinetmaker. Maybe I have the wrong mythology, and it's really a latter-day Noah up there now, building an ark for a rainy day. The neighborhood is subject to drainage issues, after all.

The only problem I can see with that is he'll never get it out the window. He can't be a god, or he would have thought of that. I suspect it must be some human foolishness, which makes sense. I can't picture Thor using a dishwasher anyway.

Our storm watch has ended while I've been writing, and so, for now, has the noise upstairs.

Questing for Wanwood

While driving this afternoon, I noticed the sunlight playing on a tree with bright yellow leaves. The leaves were riffling in a slight wind, and it was the kind of sight that could inspire poetry. A phrase concerning showers of gold ran through my head, but I left it there. It was enough just to see the tree in the light.

But you know how writers are: sometimes they just have to tinker. For the last few minutes, I've been trying to think of a word that describes the quality of this afternoon's light. Melancholy is too strong; pensive doesn't quite fit. It was a waning light, but glorious and tranquil. It invoked a wistful feeling, a sort of yearning mixed up with contentment to be out on such a beautiful day.

There are many notable poems about autumn, but Gerard Manley Hopkins' phrase "worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie" from "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" came to me as I was thinking about the trees and swirling leaves of my drive. That led to a realization that even though I've known the poem for 30 years, I don't actually know what wanwood is, so I looked it up. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that Hopkins might have coined the word, intending to evoke a forest in its decline.

The poem as a whole is heavier in mood than this afternoon's sunlit trees, but "worlds of wanwood" is just right to describe the drifts of leaves now blanketing yards and sidewalks all over town. I've always pictured wanwood as yellow -- I don't know whether Hopkins did, but this afternoon's palette was definitely in that key.

My search for wanwood led down another interesting byway. I found that -- along with generations of other students of Victorian poetry -- singer and songwriter Natalie Merchant was greatly moved by "Spring and Fall," adapting it to music for her 2010 album Leave Your Sleep. The poem's elegiac quality has never sounded more graceful than it does set to her plaintive melody. It's somber rather than wistful, more in line with a grayer day than today, but beautiful nonetheless.

Autumn is, after all, a time of shifting weather and moods. It shifts with the wind, from mellow to cold and wet, to brisk, to summery, and back again. It's a patchwork quilt of events.

Peripatetic

It took a while, but I finally tracked down a copy of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America at the library. I started looking for it years ago, but the main library's copy always seemed to be checked out or missing. Being a fan of both travel writing and John Steinbeck, I was looking forward to reading this memoir, and my only disappointment is that it isn't a longer book.

Maybe it was fate that I never got a chance to read Travels with Charley before. I know I read it in a different way, perhaps with a sharper eye, than I would have even a few years ago. I've traveled some of the same roads as Steinbeck in recent years and was especially interested in the parts of his trip that overlapped with mine.

I've long had an image of Mr. Steinbeck as what you might call a "man's man." It was only recently that I came across a photo of him in his prime that reveled how handsome he was; at six feet tall with those piercing eyes he must have cut quite a figure. It's charming to imagine him traveling about with Charley, his poodle, camping out, and talking to people everywhere without being recognized by any of these strangers. His account of the journey reveals him to be open-minded and deeply thoughtful, with a good sense of humor, though you can tell all that by reading his fiction.

One thing struck me especially, and that was his description of the loneliness that descended on him at the outset of his trip. He missed his wife and, after starting out from Sag Harbor, New York, reunited with her during a stopover in Chicago, not even a quarter of the way through his travels. When they parted for the second time, he was just as lonely as before. I had imagined Mr. Steinbeck as somewhat stoic and was surprised and delighted to read about how regularly he called home and how much he missed it. It made him seem more human and less godlike.

Mr. Steinbeck found Wisconsin especially beautiful; he was prevented from traveling through Yellowstone National Park by Charley's open hostility toward bears; a native of Monterey County, California, he smelled the Pacific Ocean while still far inland; and he made the same trip from Bakersfield to Needles and the Arizona border that I once did (though the roads may be different now). He went quail-hunting in Texas without seeing any quail, but he did catch some fish. He traveled from Amarillo to New Orleans, skirting the Atchafalaya Basin, and witnessed a piece of the desegregation drama then taking place in Louisiana.

Early on, he had gotten lost in a small town in New York, and near the end of his trip, he got lost in New York City, not far from home. In all of this, he captured the bittersweet quality of setting out and leaving behind better perhaps than anyone else I've ever read.

Mr. Steinbeck died when I was quite young. I would have liked to have known him; so much of his personality comes through in his writing that in some ways I feel I do. I once spent a pleasant afternoon visiting his hometown and looking in at the Steinbeck Center, where I read a letter he had written containing a humorous response to the proposal of having a school named after him. I've visited Ed Ricketts' rebuilt lab in Monterey, even summoning up the courage to climb the stairs and peek in. (I received the surprise of my life when I glimpsed a group of men sitting around, apparently shooting the breeze. I beat a fast retreat but not before getting the impression that I'd just witnessed a scene much like the ones Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their cronies would have enacted many times in their day. It's nice to think that some things don't change.)

There's also the matter of the Joseph Campbell connection. He was one of their group of friends, and apparently he, like Steinbeck, was influenced by Ricketts' writings on nature and philosophy. When I was visiting the Monterey area all those years ago, reading Cannery Row and thinking about Steinbeck, I wasn't aware that a few years and a few miles down the road, I'd be the recipient of some of that influence when I started my own studies of mythology. How strange that the winding road that led from John Steinbeck to Joseph Campbell and back again, many times, has not only philosophical and literary layers but also geographic ones.

Looking for Asklepios

As a teenager, I thought medicine was romantic. I blame it on the doctor shows that used to be on television, with all those handsome interns and Dr. Joe Gannons running around. First-hand experience of hospitals will cure you of this kind of thing, and it doesn't even require an overnight stay.

I recently received a medical bill for a service that ended up costing nearly five times as much as I had been told it would. I checked on the cost ahead of time by doing a little Internet research and calling the facility. The price the billing office gave me was in line with what I had discovered on the web, so I thought I knew what I was in for. I wasn't happy, but I was prepared . . . so I was surprised when a routine inspection of my insurance claims revealed a cost of $1,609 instead of $343.48.

Naturally, that started a round of phone calls. The further I got into that, the more I wanted to talk to an actual person. So I walked over to the facility and looked for the office of the patient relations specialist. That in itself took some doing, as I was in three different buildings before getting to the right place. When I found the proper office, the people there were courteous and listened well. I felt a release of tension after simply telling my story, which shows the power of a good listener.

I was distressed and amazed to learn that asking for the cost of a medical service ahead of time is no guarantee that you'll get a figure even in the ballpark. Why? I don't know. Billing is governed by very precise procedure and diagnostic codes, so if the facility knows what you're coming in for, it seems to me they ought to know what they're going to charge you.

I did not see Dr. Noah Drake while navigating the corridors of the hospital and its office buildings. I didn't even see Marcus Welby. The people who gave me directions were all polite, but the surroundings were utilitarian, the signs a little confusing, and the atmosphere austere rather than warm. The corridors were in fact rather mazelike. My medical health is fine, but I was having an irritating experience of the system itself. Imagine going through this if you were really sick.

I've noted before how little influence the Asklepian model of healing seems to have in modern health care. Talking to a priest about the dreams you had was a part of the Asklepian system. In my case, the talking involved recounting my frustrating experience, but I felt the frustration lifting just in response to having someone sit down and listen. It may be that this one simple thing, listening, is the missing ingredient in so much that happens. Science is wonderful, but it still needs the human touch.

I was so tired last night that I barely hauled myself to bed before falling asleep. I had a dream that I was driving to a cemetery where a family member was buried. The road ran like a tunnel down a green, leafy hill, surrounded by a broad plain of small waterfalls and gentle rapids. Unlike the deep pool of the unconscious, these waters rippled gently. The road was dry and clear.

The cure in the Asklepian temples involved bathing in healing springs and sleeping in the sanctuary to await the curative dream. My own dream was filled with symbols of life, from the running water to the graveyard, which is (contrary to what you might think) a powerful symbol of regeneration. Maybe my Asklepian moment in the patient relations office triggered a suggestion of a way to deeper healing. We could all use it.

Hunter's Moon

Just in time for Halloween, an online article came out the other day on old-fashioned candies that are becoming hard to find. I read it with interest. I remembered most of the items on the list, and many of them were things that always ended up in my trick or treat bag. Necco wafers! Sixlets! Tootsie Rolls! Ah, the ghosts of Halloween past!

A couple of years ago, I was taking an evening stroll on Halloween while trick or treating was underway. It was fun seeing the neighborhood kids in their costumes being shepherded up and down the street, but it struck me as being more orchestrated than my own Halloweens were (or seemed to be). These children were all accompanied by adults, aside from the fact that it wasn't even dark yet, and it didn't seem they would bring home much of a haul at the funereal rate they were going.

This sounds like one of those "When I was your age, I walked five miles in the snow to school" stories. "When I was their age, I ripped through the neighborhood, like all the other kids, with nary but a sibling and would have been insulted if you'd suggested I get home before dark. You would see other kids, but it was understood that they would go their way, and you'd go yours. Each group operated independently." I guess things are different now . . . or perhaps it just seemed later, darker, and more adult-free than it actually was. (Now that you mention it, wasn't that my Dad in the car, following at a discreet distance?)

Forget Samhain. The campy, jokey aspect of Halloween appealed perfectly to my sense of an enjoyable spookiness: like The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, it was silly-scary. The pleasure of being out after dark, wearing a costume, was thrilling precisely because it was understood that for just this one night, ordinary life was somewhat (but not too much) in suspension. What a sense of freedom, to be larking around, with that autumnal feeling in the air (even in South Florida, an October night is entirely different than a June night), passing nothing but the importunate princess, pirate, or ghost that imperfectly disguised another neighborhood kid (and an adult or two in tow, though they somehow seemed to fade into the background).

And then, to ring doorbell after doorbell and have the people within each candlelit house load your bag with candy! -- the object of the whole evening being to end up with a trove you'd be eating for two weeks. Once the thrill of the hunt was over, you had something to show for it. Never mind that there would always be duds. You could trade these off, or at least wait until you'd eaten all the good candy, by which time any undesirables would start to taste better. I can still remember my personal pecking order: chocolates, candy bars, caramels at the top, licorice and unidentifiable taffy at the bottom.

When I was out walking earlier this evening, enjoying the combination of a glowing sunset and a rising Hunter's Moon, I had a fleeting sense of that autumnal excitement of years ago. I know a lot of adults love to celebrate Halloween, but for me, much of the thrill is gone, a joy I left behind when I graduated to trick or treating for UNICEF and then becoming too old to trick or treat at all. I've been to Halloween luncheons and costume parties with pumpkin-shaped cookies and apple cider, but they don't hold a candle to a childhood Halloween, being rather tame affairs in comparison.

That's all right. Every once in a while, like tonight, a yellow moon, combined with a certain briskness in the air and a fading orange twilight, brings with it a faint echo of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," the smell of a plastic mask, and the taste of candy corn. There's a lot of enjoyment in just remembering.