Quiet Reparations

December 10 2008, 10:56 PM Lightly

The smoke detector in the alcove by the kitchen and I have an understanding. It is, by nature, quite sensitive and particular about the ambient environment. It is also, by nature, prone to becoming quite upset should the little world in which it lives be tampered with bits of carbon, ash, or whatever else is in the stuff that sometimes gets sent up from overhot things in the kitchen. I honor it for that. The understanding is this, among other things: do not try to be clever about the oven. It is known that some foods want for a hot oven, but if I crank the thing up over 425, I do so fully warned that I put at peril the peace of this place. But sometimes I do it anyway, because it is necessary, and because it is utterly worth it.

I'm learning how to make naan.

There are two sides to this. It is useful to be meticulous; baking takes well to care. I have the measuring spoons out, now, cleaned and shining in a broken handled mug, eager to be of assistance. I should really break out the notebook and the scale; weighing is more accurate than the measured cups, and precision matters with bread. Instead, I have a recipe scribbled literal on the back of an envelope, slowly filling in a gloss of ticks and notes.

At the same time, it is useful to pay careful attention to those things that measure poorly, at least with my meager tools. Watching the mass become shaggy under the spoon until the bowl is cleaned of flour. Feeling the flour take up the water and build strength between my hands and the board. The soft pop of the dough after rising, made thin by the careful work of the dowel. It will take time to learn these well, but there are benefits to that.

"This is Touch," she says; I can hear her say the words that way. Small spaces on our fingers bridge, slide, softly press. There are a few things we know about dancing; she is gentle when she tells me this is dangerous.

There is a light rain falling cold outside, and may soon fall colder; all the trees could be glint under tomorrow's sun. Inside, the walls do their work to keep snug; aromas of good wheat still linger. The kitchen is warm yet from the rock in the oven, slowly seeping heat, and there is bread on the table.

November 20 2008, 10:40 PM Working Title

Back in the late eighties, my father had a joke: "What with all of the centralized billing and databases and credit cards and everything else, the only way to keep yourself off of a list these days is to only pay cash and to only use phone booths." He would pause in a quiet, smiling way, and then say: "Of course, the FBI keeps a list of people who do these things."

These days it is rare to pay cash for anything. We all carry terribly important bits of plastic around, and somehow they convince other people to give us things on the promise we'll pay someone else later. So, too, it has become somewhat difficult to find a phone booth. This is possibly the reason I often see that slightly nervous and over-dressed man with the glasses and the single wayward curl sitting in Klavon's sipping a chocolate phosphate.

But the nice thing about this place is that there are always folks who know him that come on by. They say hello; they wonder at the flavor of his day. When he asks after them in turn, it's easy for them to tell all the little stories that have rattled around in their lives that week. There is a stretch, a sigh, a shake of hands. He goes back to paying careful attention to the phone booth; they stand and walk out the door into the brisk light of the afternoon. Sometimes, he gets to talk to people that don't know him at all.

And that's fine, too.

October 04 2008, 11:43 PM Four Mile

I took to my feet again, following the roads as they turned across the rises, a quick brisk walk to where the spine of my neighborhood runs along the river, down near the tail, to lean against a wooden fence and look down across the valley. I got there early. There were fifty or so of us there, by the fence; some brought chairs to sit on the slim flat spots above the wooded drop. A spotter plane circled. We took in the city, waiting for the start, looking down onto the dark waters and watching the tugboat with the coal barges furtively cast a spotlight out in front, waiting for the pool to clear: even in celebrating, the work goes on in this place.

They started more or less on time. We had no count; a moment of clear air over the lights of the city, and then fireworks began to erupt from the rivers, the park, the buildings themselves. The distance of them made the thunder of the thing soft and rumply, a low tide of rumble that rolled up the valley through the crisp air. The bursts and orbits and candles began brightly, sharp and star bright against the black sky, muting themselves as they left behind more and more smoke, becoming textured and softened but no less glorious. We chatted and watched, took pictures. Someone down the line said, Hey, we should sing and we did; a big handful of people on an anonymous ridge in the night, all standing against a wooden fence, singing Happy Birthday to Pittsburgh.

There was a finale, the last burst, and then the night came back in, the vast cloud of smoke still hanging lazy over the city lights, a reminder of other times, a proud history. We clutched our mugs of cocoa and coffee, waiting to see if it was really over. It was; the sky was quiet again. And more, too. Even after all of that, and returning to the simple skyline and the normal lines of office lights in their ladders marking the stories:

We have a beautiful city.

September 17 2008, 11:02 PM The Wind Up

Earlier in the week, there was a wind. I took advantage of this, and carefully opened windows in the house to welcome in the air, pulling off mill runs from the rivers outside. There were some stacks of paper that took this badly, and some of the ornamentation shifted from their places on the mantles, but it was worth it. Air from the outside, filling the rooms, pulling in freshness and chasing the stale from every corner in a merry whirl. These recent mornings have turned cold, so I have shut the windows again, in part because of my own cold, nasty and lingering congestion that has taken up station in my head. I am beating it back with the harvest: tomatoes of many kinds, garlic and potatoes roasting in the oven under oil and pepper, cups and cups of tea. In the mornings I walk in anyway, through valleys of trees still fluffy from the winds, giant hands having reached down to shake them well.

Yesterday I was offered an unexpected ticket to sit a while in the ball park. I've said this before; we have a beautiful ball park. There is a dignity to the stands, built in their dark metals, but not an unkind one: it is not so proud a place to not offer protection when the rains come. There were no rains last night, as the evening ran through dusk and beyond, and the little blue lights came out to mark the structure in the darkness. The city was framed by the cozy space past the outfield, looking for all the world impossible, a thing too pretty to be anything less than expensive set dressing for a Hollywood picture about dreams, love, baseball. The broad sweep of the yellow metal of the bridge led our view up to that cheerful gathering of buildings, lovely in the night. The moon clambered over the tops of the bleachers, very nearly full, gaining clarity as the cool air came on. It was wonderful.

There was also a game down there, of course. They never do anything to formally begin; they just start. I love that.

I missed most of the carnage; I spent the second inning buying a sandwich. It says something about this place that the All You Can Eat section was neigh empty, while the line for the sandwiches was bizarrely huge. Or that one can even get a decent sandwich at a ball park, these days, in among the nachos and the odd hamburgers and other assorted things. It could be said that I should obviously not buy sandwiches and thus avoid angering the gods, but I would honestly fear the gods more for not honoring the sandwich, here in this place.

(Besides, I have no illusions; they are my ball team. I come to watch them play: I have no expectations they will do anything else.)

I was enjoying that sandwich and musing over the notion of karma and ball park food when I got to strike up a conversation with an usher. I lamented the absence of the Turn Back The Clock inning; he said he thought they did entire games like that, now. That requires further investigation; I would become a regular of those. I would also need to drum up support to ask (nicely) for someone to have all the damn signs on the tops of the buildings turned off for those nights. It is worth it, though: there is little like a ball game where the noises are crowd and crack of bat, the only music comes from an organ, and the scoreboard does what's it's supposed to do, and only that: show the score.

(The nine on the field did a bit better tonight, I hear. Well done!)

This morning, the hills lay under a carpet of fog, all distances made soft. The sounds were soft, too, engines becoming distant humming. A train whistle found its way up through the valley, but was too far away; a caution call from some other place, some other time. In short order the sun burned it all away, making the day warm again.

That trick will not work for much longer: there will be apples, soon.

August 30 2008, 10:35 AM Tensor

A lute has fifteen strings.

This is not entirely accurate. Lutes started (for some value of start) with less. As the clocks wound down and time danced onward (wind them up again) the luthiers added more, and then more, and then even more. There is the tall imposition of the theorbo as a solution to this, as well as the fat and happy archlute, an alternate design. In the Baroque, the lute acquired a ridiculous amount of strings, and I can only imagine that those who played them had hands the size of dinner plates when spread, with fingers long to reach the courses, strong to press the strings against the fret, tender to coax the sweet notes. You know what they said about people with hands like that.

They could play the lute.

It is difficult to keep a lute in tune. The thing itself is wood, just wood, a natural product that breathes, seasons, and flexes with changes in temperature, moisture, and mood. Unstrung, it is bent backwards. The strings provide the tension to make it true, but there are fifteen of those bloody things, and each has its own taut to sing its proper note when plucked. This can make tuning tricky, as bringing one string up to note will change the balance over the whole instrument, sending other strings awry.

(I have a piano, too. It needs a tuning. Dad lent me a book. I've not yet tried it.)

Another difficulty with the strings is that they need to be quite taut to be true, to wiggle in the proper way. With some of the courses, I've found that proper tuning brings the strings right up to the point of breaking, sometimes leading to a kind of disheartening percussion which has no place. I've found that early on with an instrument I tend to be careful, wincing slightly as I timidly wind the string up to height. Eventually I give up and just go, finding the note with an authoritative twist. Sometimes, I can bring the whole instrument into a happy balance. Sometimes, I flinch when a string is tired and has decided to give up. I buy more strings.

This particular lute can be perverse, though. The other night while I was on the couch and the flat back of the lute was resting comfortable and quiescent on a stack of books in the far corner of the room, one of the strings, perhaps bidden by ghosts, just

snapped.

My lute has fifteen strings. It is enough for me. It is more than enough.

August 26 2008, 11:36 PM Fruit of Labors

The quince turned out disastrously.

It all started well, if a little painfully. Quince are hard little nuggets, tough yellow things that dislike yielding to the knife. I spent a bunch of good time at the kitchen table pulling them apart, flicking out the seeds from the large seed casings, building up a pile of quarters. Each slice was mostly casing, little fruit, but that was alright: there is fantastic amounts of pectin in the casing: to quince for jelly, I need add none.

Then, into water to simmer for hours. What was supposed to come next was that the fruit would soften, turn pinkish amber, release delicious scents. This last bit happened, and soon enough the simmering pot was making the house heavy with the perfume of pineapples, vanilla, guava. What I had not counted on was that the quince bits would suck up water like sponges, and I managed to burn them when they pulled the pot dry. It was promising, though. I need to find more quince. And for that matter, bigger quince, for more efficient work. There is worth in taking found fruit and making good things of it, but I now have a fuller understanding of values of agricultural selection. Little bastards.

The blueberries fared much better. I had frozen six pints of them some weeks back, and took to using the low-sugar pectin to turn them out into jam. Again, a pot of blueberries simmering with sugar is a mighty thing. For the trouble, I ended up with a dozen half pint jars of well-set jam, dark and deep and lightly sweet. Myself and my house guest descended on them, spooning jam on toast, marbling it into yogurt. Other jars disappeared into the larders of others, given as gifts or sent on in trade. The rest have taken station with the small stack in the cupboard, waiting for winter: blueberry and black raspberry and sour cherry, so far. I am looking forward to the problem in the coming cold days of deciding which kind of jam to open up next.

Yesterday morning, I shuffled out onto the porch to get the paper and nearly tripped of a bushel of peaches that some anonymous donor had left for me. I seem to be gaining a reputation.

I took them inside; I found out who left them later in the day. It does not do to keep ripe fruit waiting: once home again, the evening was taken up with dunking them in a simmering bath, pulling aside the mottled skins, prising the fruit off of the stone. I should not be a choosy beggar: the fruit was found, free, and wonderful besides, but I note for reference that should one want to put up canned peaches that look pretty, one is advised to seek out freestone fruit. These were not.

So I sat at the kitchen table. The door was open, the cool breeze making merry with the flames under the canner, mixing the heat of the room. There was music tumbling in through the doorway. Over and over I pushed my thumb through a peeled and quartered peach, separating flesh from stone, juices pooling on the cutting board, spilling over into the place mat, making a mess.

Someone should be here to seduce me, I said, to no one in particular. Put her there, in the chair across the table, with one leg tucked up under to keep an ankle warm in the cool air around out feet. Put coffee laced with sugar and cream in her hands, steam gently rising from the cup. Have her tell me stories, should she wish to, a smile in her eyes, as I pull these things gently apart and the kitchen becomes dense with the scent of fresh peaches for both of us.

Eventually the bowl of peaches sprinkled occasionally with lemon juice became full. The fruit all tumbled then into a simple syrup for ten minutes of simmering and skimming, and the full power of cooking fruit came again from that pot, not yet failing to surprise nor delight. After this, into jars, then into the canner, then out again some third of an hour later, to sit on the towel, awaiting the pop of the lid that signals all is well.

All told, I ended with seven pints of peaches and (whoops) a good extra quart of peach syrup, which I am adding to things to make them tasty. I was only able to get to half of the peaches! For the person who left them on my porch yesterday, I was able this morning to put three pints of peaches into their hands. We'll see how long it is before we eat them all up.

If you have extra fruit, feel free to leave it on my porch. Please me patient, though; I'm out of Mason jars.

August 05 2008, 11:25 PM Fifteen

Let us bring it back a bit.

There is a pile of quince in the kitchen, sitting comfortable in a brown paper bag, down at the bottom of the fridge. This is found fruit, pulled down from shaggy branches of bushes that live in an equally shaggy yard some miles away. I was given them in a sack, standing in a hallway, a simple hand off of fruit from friend to friend. I don't know of anything to do with them but make jelly.

I've been making some progress in that area, building on the success of the blueberry jam of last summer. This year, I and a friend have been able to put up into the pantry shelf several pints of wild black raspberry jam, deep purple and only just holding to itself. We were also able to come away with many little jars of sour cherry preserves, although those did not firm up as well. I hear tell the ancient world called it spoon fruit; the cherries have always been ornery about becoming set. I have blueberries in the freezer, but not yet, not yet: first I must deal with the quince.

The procedure here seems to be to first cut the fruit to bits, removing stem and seed (but save the pectin from the seed cases; they are loaded with pectin). Then: simmer the hell out of the things. Once done, they turn from green to the lovely amber I remember from the thin shelves against the cool wall of my Grandmother's basement. The recipes say to go after the fruit with a potato masher, then pour the glop into a jelly bag. Let gravity take its time: let the juice run out into a catch below. Squeezing the bag makes for cloudy jelly. Then: reheat the juice with sugar, heat up into a syrup, then jar and process. I might try the whole thing tomorrow; I have new gadgets and implements littering the kitchen, a small evil workshop there on the table, eager and ready to to generate villains that will enter combat with nut butter for supremacy of the entire sandwich. We will see how it goes.

I will say this, too, and I am somewhat looking forward to this part: there is little in the world as intoxicating as a big pot of slowly cooking fruit.