Epiphany

This is going to be such a prosaic post for such a wonderful day. Three Kings Day, La fete des Rois. Never mind that yesterday was the real day--- the twelve days of Christmas, done. Maybe that is why my energy suddenly dropped off late this afternoon. I did not make it to church this morning (I miss my old one and get rather homesick when in the one here, but truth be told, I have fallen out of the habit, and have taken Sunday morning for myself: quietude, cats in the sun, NY Times on my lap), but Advent through Epiphany is my favorite time of the year. No galette, either, since we still have the fruitcake and it came out exceptionally well. I chopped the apricots and figs for a new one to be made tomorrow afternoon. My mother came over yesterday and we ran some errands and had lovely late afternoon with tea and large hunks of fruitckae.
I am keeping the Sportos, pictured. I trekked out to Marshall's to revisit the boot that started me on Sportos in the first place (a style from last year, the Allison, I think. They didn't have it in my size at M's). It was no higher than the Amelia and not as attractive. Settled. I could really do with some snow right now. The shoe thing must be some kind of turn-of-the-year ritual for me. I have set about cleaning the master bedroom closet, and "found" some shoes that just needed sprucing up. Now they are cleaned and polished, sitting in a row. Even my old pair of LaCanadiennes, plain black, just over the ankle snow boots that I bought years ago when I was in New York, heading downtown from the public library when it started to snow unexpectedly. I think I had crossed onto Broadway at that point, and found a shoe store having a January sale. I bought what was available, and had no idea of how good a sale I'd encountered until, with the boots wearing out, I had checked the brand on the label and then looked online for more like them. The sticker shock ! I covet the Tillie's (or Tilly's, I think), but haven't worked up the financial nerve.

Too much NYTimes this weekend, actually. I read a sad story about a woman who lost her husband to a brain tumor and had intimations of my own short time on this earth; between polishing shoes and chopping fruit, I must find a way out of this morass that my career has become. Remember, during the Columbine aftermath, when the kids trapped in the classroom with their dying teacher held up a sign to the window that said "Person Bleeding To Death" ? Metaphorically of course, that sign could be in my window, especially every Sunday night. Then there was the cover article in the magazine, about the baby sitter turned incompetent and possibly murderous nurse (no parallel there, thank goodness). It kept rattling around in my head that the author took note that the babysitter, her former babysitter, always found someone else at fault for what happened to her. The very thought led to too much introspection on my part. What if really bad things have happened ? What if people really have, for their own psychological reasons, perpetrated bad acts upon one, caused damage that one did not incur? The article walks a fine line (the babysitter-nurse, as it turns out, was a victim of incest, which "explained" why she was the way she was, which was someone so incompetent and unsure that she could not admit she was wrong, ever). None of her story sounds like mine, not in the least. It is that a story so distant in every way from mine opened up the whole thing again, the aching question of one's own potential complicity in a fairly catastrophic event, or series of events. The fact that our society is quick to find fault with the person who suffers, too shallowly Freudian to face up to the fact that on an everyday scale, a civil and humane scale, people can be quite uncivil and lacking in humanity. The inhumane we apparently have no problem comprehending, or are so bombarded by it that we cannot associate it with ourselves, as in the dim feeling that many people treat the Iraq War as something apart from themselves and their daily lives. A reality tv event, survivor on a grand scale. The other extreme, finding fault with the sufferer, I have seen only to well years ago when the AIDS crisis hit: why were some sick and others not ? Were you thinking positively (a great irony of word choice there)? I've seen this with cancer patients as well, people with even good intentions implying that attitude, strength of faith, secretly desiring to get well/die were causing things to turn out the way they were going. I understand it: we all want to think if we do things right, we will be spared. Perhaps what I felt from the author of the NYTimes article was her own anxiety not about how she could have hired such a person, but about what she shared with her and could not acknowledge: a vulnerability to other people's secrets, a realization that she was laid open to more complex and perhaps darker motives than she had expected.

I wish I could wrap this up neatly, find my way back to the Three Kings, the presents for the saviour-child. Perhaps it is enough to look around at this end of the season, see fine shoes waiting for my feet to fill them, cat pressed against my side, soft lamplight, chopped fruit in a bowl, the house warm, the rain outside.

Fruitcake, Part II; Shoes Again

All week long I've not been able to get myself to bed for a long sleep: the first few nights I simply stayed up too late, but these last two nights I've fallen into a sleep on the couch, then had to pull myself awake and get properly to bed.I couldn't wait for Friday, and now am home and happily settled in for the weekend. Friday, and I'm very tired. Not in a state of near-coma exhaustion, but close. I should be in bed now, but fortified with a good dinner and the New Year's fruitcake, I'm trying to have a bit of an evening here.
I found a large box at my door when I came home; my online shopping treasures had arrived. A side lesson: I took the free ground shipping from these companies and both packages have arrived within a week. Good to know. The snowboots are lovely, but, alas, shorter than I'd thought (I think the given shaft measurement was off). Before deciding to send back or keep, I'll go out to the local Marshall's and see if there is another style to be had that appeals more. They're Sporto Amelias in black, and have much to recommend them: they were comfy right out of the box, and are awfully good-looking. One step into a snow drift, though, and you'd risk snow tumbling in over the top. Not that this is an immediate worry with the globally warmed winter (I use that term traditionally and loosely) we've been having. The ankle boots from Coldwater Creek, are, I think, going back. I risked a three-inch heel, but that's not the problem. The boot is tight on the sides of my right foot, and I don't really cotton up to the concept of "breaking in" a shoe. I wore them for an hour to see how they'd feel and couldn't feel my right foot after half an hour. Feeling returned, but I'm happier now that they're off. Too bad, because they have a nice look.

Here we go. Fruitcake and Baking
(Instructions for preparing the dried fruit and candied ginger, orange or lemon peel are in the previous post below. Since they have to soak up the Cointreau, please read and prepare fruit before making the batter.)

Ingredients for the batter:
3 cups all-purpose flour and more for dusting
1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt (you need salt to help with rising; you can lessen to 1/4 tsp, but don't skip it)
8 ounces (2 sticks) of unsalted butter, melted (no substitutions)
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
4 large eggs
2 tablespoons dark unsulfured molasses (Martha warns: "not blackstrap")
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract (Yes. You read that right. A tablespoon)
1 cup sweetened flaked coconut
[The original recipe calls for 1 cup chopped toasted walnuts, but since I can't eat them, they're not in my version]

Pan: Use either a 7x3 or 9x2 inch pan. The smaller pan means longer cooking. I use a 9x2 springform pan, which makes getting the fruitcake out very easy. Martha suggests coating the pan with cooking spray and lining with parchment paper, then spraying and flouring the lining. I have never done this, and have just buttered the pan and dusted with flour. My fruitcake browns fast, and this may be why. Martha's method may be best if you don't have a springform pan.

PREHEAT OVEN to 325 F

Whisk together flour, baking powder, spices and salt in a medium bowl and set aside.
Put butter and sugars in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle; mix on medium speed until smooth. [I confess that I do not know if a "paddle" is different from the beater that came with my Kitchen Aid.] Mix in eggs, one at a time, molasses and vanilla. Gradually add flour mixture; mix until smooth. Mix in fruit and coconut, (and if you're adding them, nuts). The batter gets very heavy and sticky at this point. If you're using a handmixer, you may smell the motor burning...

Pour batter into pan. Bake until a cake tester comes out clean, about two and a half hours for a 9x2 inch cake or two and three quarters hours for a 7x3 inch cake. [In my experience, it is wise to check for browning; after the first hour or so, I put a loose piece of aluminum foil over the top.]

Remove cake from oven; if desired, brush with up to 1/2 cup of Cointreau (I used 1/4). Unmold cake, let cool. Store, wrapped in plastic, at room temperature for up to three days or in the refridgerator up to one month.

You can cut the cake when it is warm or slightly warm, and it is a delight, but it will be crumbly. We enjoyed it this way on New Year's Day, when it had come out of the oven three or four hours before we had dessert. After some fridge or settling time, it is easier to cut.

Well, it is almost eleven. One of the cats is sleeping in the rather large Coldwater creek box, and my eyes are starting to close as well. Good night all.

Fruitcake

God bless our food, God bless our drink; and keep our homes and ourselves in your embrace, O God.

Fresh fruitcake used to be an oxymoron to me until I found this recipe and a new New Year's Day tradition was begun. I love the symbolism of the dried fruit, the preserved riches of a warmer season, revived within this spirited (pun intended) cake full of the riches of a winter kitchen's pantry: molasses, cloves, ginger, brown sugar, cinnamon. Our new tradition of New Year's Day Fruitcake, begun 1 January, 2005, is a celebration of life and health, with a wish that these most basic and important blessings thrive in the new year.

It's from a Martha Stuart magazine, December 2004, and not, as far as I have been able to tell, archived on the website. I have adapted some of the dried fruits to my own taste, but otherwise, it is essentially as printed there. I have editorialized as well.

Tonight, the fruit part:

1 cup dried figs, chopped
1 cup golden raisins
1 cup dried apricots, chopped
1/2-1/4 cup dried cranberries*
1/2-1/14 cup dried cherries*
1/2 cup of candied ginger, chopped
1/4 cup of candied orange peel, chopped(I used candied lemon peel this year, to good effect)
1/2 cup of Cointreau (orange-flavored liqueur; costly, worth it, no substitutions)

Stir together the dried fruit, candied ginger, peels in a small-medium size bowl. Douse with the full 1/2 cup of Cointreau, and stir to mix. The alcohol makes the fruit less sticky on the surface and easier to blend. I use a pretty ceramic bowl, and cover it with a snug fitting plate as a lid (rim fits the bowl rim). You can use plastic wrap. Let sit at least three hours or overnight. And we'll leave it to do so for this evening. *The original recipe does not include dried cherries or cranberries, but called for 1 cup of dried pears, chopped.

These Feet

The kitchen is a wreck right now: evidence of a New Year's Day well spent, cooking then dining with my mother and her companion (he is eighty this year), football humming pleasantly in the background while the fruitcake, and then the ham and side dishes cooked on the stove and in the oven. Taking the lid off of the chopped dried fruits one has soaked for hours in Cointreau: an exhuberant smell, nostril clearing, heady. Nibbling at the alcoholic fruit along with one's morning cappucino while proceeding with the recipe: shameless. A peerless sense of warmth and well-being.

I can see I shall be going to bed late, waking early for the return to work, and the kitchen stands a very good chance of remaining in shambles as I attempt to avoid tomorrow by avoiding going to bed.


Feet: I have done this two years in a row now on my Christmas vacation: I have become taken with shoe shopping, or shoe window shopping. I am not Imelda. I tend to find one pair of graceful and comfortable shoes (Liz Claiborne Flex Lynx has been the one), buy several pairs, wear only this shoe and neglect all others in the closet unless I'm in flats for the weekend, slip-ons for biking, etc. I have slippers that I do not wear and go barefoot in my own house. I do not have trouble with my feet, pedicure my feet, or any such special allowance. What I do not do is go to Zappos and click through the entire inventory; instead I start out looking for something reasonable, say a new pair of Lynxes, but end up following out links, and not very shoe-fetish titillating ones either: Land's End, Clarks, Ecco. It dawns on me that, say, it might snow, and I then would need some snow boots (LaCanadienne Tillie's, but I have not yet purchased them), or I find a deal, say the polartec boots at Land's End, and then go looking for other deals. So far boots are ahead, whereas shoes of various styles took the lead last year. I have, or will have, when the orders come through, ankle boots, sort of snow boots, and dress boots. Perhaps I simply have all the clothes I need and am focusing on something where variety could do some good (?).
No remaking of the self here in a conscious way, but I do recall that I used to have dreams in which my feet figured prominently, though shoe buying or wearing did not.
Maybe it is simply easy, all this passive and mostly virtual window-shopping (the purchases, save one, were made in person). Besides the Tillies already mentioned, I also covet what looks like a perfect pair of dress pumps made by Ecco. I apologize for all this brand-dropping. When I get a shoe I like, I will wear it until I kill it. I will buy one after another until the company stops making them. My last Lynxes have a frayed hole near the sole (irreparable), so I shall be forced to choose from among my collection of "occasionals" tomorrow.

Tomorrow is sure to be bothersome, isn't it ? Messy kitchen (too late to clean it now), not enough sleep (too late to even rush to the bed now), not my usual dress shoes. Or will I, in my certain fatigue to come, find evidence of life welling on the surface? Will it carry me through the day ? How shall I stand ?

Oh.I have had the sound off on the television. On Jay Leno, a balding largish man in yellow swimtrunks is holding his nose underwater in a bathtub. Clearly time for bed.

When New Time Folds Up

This post's title courtesy of a book of poems by that name by Kathleen Fraser. I had the privilege of meeting the poet once, when I was in my twenties and living in Oregon. She had come to where I was working and had given a reading, and I remember getting slightly lost, but finally finding, the house-on-a-hill-in-the-rain where she was staying, with a sister or cousin, I think. All by way of saying that, at the time, I found the title of the collection abstract. My mind kept seeing Brancusi's Bird in Flight, but I could not imagine, outside of that image conjuring itself, what it meant. I was so young.

Now, a few minutes before the New Year officially comes into being, here I am: I have pondered that phrase since at least March Nineteenth, when I started a post of ths same title and hung it up out of fatigue. When new time folds up: I have deliberately not looked at the poems, which I still have, autographed and slightly brittled. How absurdly unabstract, I now think in my forties. New time, once so infinite, once so renewable, moves faster now; the years fold in upon themselves, curiously more moebic (as in moebius strip) than the linearity of the journey stretched before one. Coincidentally, at The Cassandra Pages , Cassandra writes that blogging seems a youthful mode of activity, the feeling of all possibilities open; time, as she puts it, as her younger self experienced it: that she used to sew, knit, cook, etc., and, as she writes, "when I turned forty I decided time was up, that I'd better concentrate on something." Exactly, O Prophetess. (Hmmm... my neighbors are cheering early. The ball is dropping.)

Perhaps we do simply grow more tired, need longer to feel still, to create. Happy New Year, All. New Year's Day is really the day I savor: time has no folds, dinner cooks all day, a warm house with guests begins the year. A day out of time to rest easy in as I, as we, all plunge ahead. I, too, have a book coming out (much more technical than Cassandra's, to be sure) that will mark, I hope, some kind of turning point, whereafter I shall not have to write that my legs are tired, my chest tight, my spirit discouraged, and ambition unfulfilled, as I feared I would keep chanting if I kept writing this blog last year.

How do we do the dishes, do our jobs, read good books, have time to write ? I leave you tonight in the new year, my dishes undone, the fruit for tomorrow's fruitcake not yet soaking in its bath of Cointreau; the cats are asleep, the revelers are still cheering; time yet to fill the dishwasher, chop the fruit, and begin again.

"As we lie down to sleep, the world turns half away..."

Several things to report, so little time: Blue, once a mood, now a card. I've received mine, with its embedded microchip for swipeless swiping, and note that besides looking cool, it came with all kinds of info on music downloads, etc., presumably aimed at a generation of debt-makers slightly younger than myself. Or at least I concluded this after not being able to find aforementioned translucent card for about five times in thirty minutes: if you need glasses to find it, perhaps the traditional Amex is more for you. Still, I managed to park a sizeable balance transfer on my new Blue; good-bye, good-bye to the too high interest of one of its competitors.

At the behest of a friend, I slogged through this personality survey

Genuine Creator. Somehow, this cube represents the results of My Personal Dna Report , which did not turn out to completely match my Myers-Briggs (INTX), but then, things are in flux. Though it agrees with a number qualities more scientific tests have suggested are part of my "self," at one point it insists (rather disturbingly) that "In your experience, people tend to get what they deserve." Oh, au contraire,, if only they did. No, that has not been my experience with either good works or malicious plots, and I wonder which of my responses would have led whatever algorithms drive the thing to think that.

This post's title quote courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Sleeping Standing Up."

Polycarp's Day

It is getting lighter earlier. I leave the house at six or ten past, and have been driving just about the full hour in total darkness. The earlier intimations of sunrise have actually been jarring; today was easier, greyness and light fog, a liminal hour between me and the day to come. Meanwhile, there have been series of commercials for the state lottery, showing people doing outrageous things at work: toll booth guy slams the gate arm down on a car hood repeatedly, supermarket cashier scans items while saying "rip off, rip off again, ninety-nine cents across the street..." and then up comes the text,
"When you win the lottery, how will you quit your job ?" Oh, the thought--- it was great, though, to see the people in Nebraska (it had to be the midwest !) win that huge jackpot, folks who could clearly really use it. I may have to buy a ticket one of these days.

In a training session the other day, they brought in more experienced people to share war stories with the newcomers, of which I am technically one. Predictably, they like what they do. When one guy said, "I just don't want to be one of those people who gets up in the morning and doesn't want to go to work," I wondered if I was blushing, twitching, smiling too hard, something that would blow my cover. I have a poker face and put much energy and time into my work, and this all leaves me spent. I remember loving what I did, I thought. I try to push it away, but my subconscious has burbled up in dreams lately after a year of not remembering any dreams. My legs ache, I sleep too little for all the work and my double life of trying to get back to my life on top of it. I dream combinations of now and then, and attempt to read, think and write in between, all the while trying to continue to bake cookies, go out and shop, play, love and live. I wonder if I am slowing down in spite of myself, should be pushing harder.

None of this has anything to do with poor Polycarp of Smyrna; it's just his day, and well, omnis canis suum diem habeat.