Away we go

So tomorrow we are taking Mom to Belgium for what will surely be her last trip abroad, her last visit to the land of her birth, and most likely her last trip in an airplane. We are doing this just in time. (That is what I am hoping. We could also be doing it too late, in which case I can anticipate a meltdown at the junction of Rue de Chêne and Rue de L’Étuve, when Mom does not recognize Manneken Pis.) Her short-term memory is shrinking like wool in the dryer; sometimes her retention can be measured in seconds.
In preparation for this trip she has read a book about Belgian castles (lots of pictures, written in 4 languages, at least two she knows well), and has told me that she is surprised to learn that Belgium is full of old castles (22 times.) She praises my cousin Pascale for having given me this book (19 times.) She tells CSB that he will enjoy the flat countryside (11 times). She informs us (countless times) that although she was born in Belgium, she never lived there, as they moved immediately to Egypt after her birth. She has related (4 times) an apocryphal story of her maternal grandmother urinating in soup she was forced to serve to billeted German officers. (Mom has the wrong war.) Also in preparation Mom has had a massage, will have a facial later today, and tomorrow will get a wash and blow dry. I will take more Sudafed. So we are ready to go.

I am looking forward to finally seeing Geel. For years I have read about this unusual town outside of Antwerp, where for hundreds of years the inhabitants have taken in the mentally ill, and cared for them in their homes. The tradition goes back to the (possibly apocryphal) martyrdom of Saint Dymphna in the 7th century. She was the Christian daughter of a pagan Irish king. Her beautiful mother died when Dymphna was young, and her father the king vowed he would never marry again unless he found someone as beautiful as his beloved dead wife. When Dymphna grew to be her mother’s spitting image, her father conceived an “unlawful passion” for his daughter, and she had to flee from her homeland. She went with her confessor, Gerebernus and they ended up in a forest outside Antwerp. That should have been far enough and remote enough, but it wasn’t, and her father discovered refugees in their sanctuary. Again she refused his incestuous overtures, and the king ordered his soldiers to kill both Dymphna and Gerebernus. But the soldiers refused to decapitate the lovely young girl, in the end her father did the deed himself. (Sounds like mental illness to me.) Their martyred bodies were buried by angels, and over the years the place and the relics were imbued with miraculous healing powers. Pilgrims came from all over, and brought along lunatics, epileptics and sleepwalkers to be cured. The tradition continues, and Dymphna is the patron saint of lunatics, sleepwalkers, epileptics, incest victims, those with neurological disorders, princesses, runaways and therapists. We would be remiss not to make the pilgrimage.

The beheading of St Dymphna by Godfried Maes (1649-1700), a member of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke; he was particularly good at ceiling designs.

Meanwhile, I am reading about new tests one can take to learn if one has the ApoE4 gene that indicates a high likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s. Should I get this test? Having an exit strategy is not a bad idea.

Bread

This past Christmas two very dear friends – who perhaps have a rosier notion of my technical abilities than is warranted – gave me a breadmaker. Not a baker, as in a person who makes bread, but a squat stainless steel machine that makes bread. It would not exactly be true to say that I have always wanted a breadmaker, but I do love bread, and in particular, I think a French baguette is one of the most perfect foods on the planet. This breadmaker does not make baguettes, but we will not discuss that.
My first loaf – Artisan white – was perfectly fine. So fine that instead of recognizing it for beginners luck, I became cocky and decided to try for a rye bread, CSB’s favorite. The recipe called for Vital Wheat Gluten. I had never heard of Vital Wheat Gluten and had no idea what it was. But I had heard of Wheat Germ, and while I don’t know what wheat germ is either, I had some in my refrigerator. I have since learned that Vital Wheat Gluten and Wheat Germ are not the same thing. Which would explain why they are known by different names. The substitution of Wheat Germ for Vital Wheat Gluten in the rye bread recipe may not be the only reason for the pathetic failure of that bread. I say that because my attempted oatmeal bread also turned into a lumpy, messy, hardened and unmixed lump. And Vital Wheat Gluten was not called for in the oatmeal bread recipe. I did however substitute honey for maple syrup. You may think that my creative substitutions are the reason for my failures. But I used the exact ingredients listed for the rosemary bread, and still, it deflated like one of those hideous inflatable Christmas dwarfs in front yards.

Hagio-alert: saints will now be mentioned. It has occurred to me to consult with various of the patron saints of bakers. One of the more interesting of these patrons – though his patronage does seem unintelligible & random – is St Meingold. He was born in Huy, which is in Belgium now but was not then because Belgium did not exist then; it wasn’t even imagined back in 850 CE. Meingold was adopted by the childless Emperor Arnulf of (somewhere in) England, and so he crossed over to meet his new family. His first mistake was to marry Geyla, whose brother Albrecht was hostile, violent, and plagued with persistent shingles. Albrecht besieged the newlyweds and tried to set fire to their castle, but managed to drown in the moat instead. The emperor fished him out. Following that debacle, Meingold and Geyla gave up their estates and silken robes, dressed badly, and wandered for seven years from shrine to shrine, admiring finger bones and skulls and even some very special vials of saintly blood. Meingold was killed by some old enemies while he was praying, and there is nothing in the story about him ever having anything to do with bakers or baking or even ovens, though it seems safe to assume that he ate bread. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary is a far more obvious candidate for Patron Saint of Bakers, as the bread she was carrying to the poor turned into roses when she was rudely questioned.
The bread I tried to make just turned into an unappetizing lump, though the chickens were delighted with it.
As I read it, the subtext of his tale is that Honorius of Amiens was not a particularly saintly person. When she heard that he had been made a bishop, Honorius’ old nursemaid was baking bread and said, “That brat is no more likely to be a bishop than this peel (shovel/spatula) is about to turn back into a tree.” I don’t need to tell you what happened next. Her baker’s peel sprouted roots and instantly grew into a blackberry tree.Nine hundred years later gullible pilgrims were still visiting it, and Honorius got to be a patron of bakers. There is a chain of cake-shops in Hong Kong named for him.
If the above is possible, then it should be possible for me to produce an edible loaf of bread with a state-of-the-art breadmaker.

How do you say Happy Birthday in Flemish?

Today is my mother’s 80th birthday. And where is she? Is she celebrating this significant milestone with any or all of her five devoted offspring? No. Or with any of her countless grand-offspring? No she is not. She is in Belgium with her second cousin thrice removed who is, admittedly, a far better cook than any of us. Last night they dined on Maigret de Canard and an apricot tart we will be hearing about well into 2011.

Eighty years ago today my grandmother gave birth to her first child in her parents’ house in Schooten, near Antwerp, in a bedchamber newly painted white for the occasion. By the time the birth was accomplished, the walls were splattered with blood, but that was just because of the uncoiling flailing umbilical cord, and everything was actually fine.

Their time in Schooten was brief. My grandmother had spent her pregnancy in Switzerland, where she and my grandfather lived at the time, and if the photographic evidence is to be believed, she spent much of that time sledding in the Alps. She returned to Belgium in order to give birth and having accomplished that, the three of them moved to Egypt, where my mother would spend her delightful childhood and where my grandmother would become the belle of the Costume Balls.
They never moved back to Belgium.
They never again lived in Schooten or even pretended to speak Flemish or attended mass at Schooten’s massive Gothic church of St Cordula. In case you don’t know, Cordula was one of Saint Ursula’s 11,000 virgins. However, when the Huns were ruthlessly beheading the young ladies, Cordula became fearful and hid herself. The next day she repented her cowardice – though some might define it otherwise – and presented herself to the nearest Hun for immediate slaughter. He complied. In the 13th century, her body was discovered in Cologne, smelling sweetly and with writing on the forehead to facilitate identification: Cordula, Queen and Virgin. But this remarkable head is not to be found at Schooten.
Instead of St Codula’s, my parents went to church last Sunday at an Art Deco basilica in Brussels, where attendance has dropped to such low levels that it is now used as a training space for speleologists and climbers.
Schooten’s other claim for notice in the global marketplace is as the site of the first-opened Quick, the Euro fast food chain uncannily similar to McDonald’s.
Eighty years later, will my mother return to Schooten today? Not very likely, and perhaps Quick is partly to blame. Or perhaps it is because she would not understand a word spoken or any written sign, because now Schooten is solidly in the Flemish camp, and my mother is an unrepentent Francophone.
Instead she may visit another bee museum. As earlier noted, Belgium has more bee museums per capita, per square mile and per honeybee than any other country on earth. My parents visited one last weekend and because it was in Belgium, they drank honey beer, and my mother became fast friends with the 2 gentlemen who run the museum and upon whose mutual sexuality my mother enjoyed speculating.
As for her birthday meal, we await the menu.

Thirteen hundred and twenty-two years ago today, Saint Wandrille (or Wandregisilus) did not die a gruesome martyr’s death. He was not charbroiled on the pyre and then removed for beheading while having his entrails drawn out on a windlass. He was not thrown into the roiling water with a millstone tied around his neck. He was not mauled by a bear, chewed by a lion, or devoured by a dragon. He was not skinned alive while being forced to watch Mel Gibson’s all-Aramaic “The Passion”. No, in mid July he took to bed with a slight cold, had an ecstasy and died surrounded by his faithful monks.
Before his unmartyred death, Saint Wandrille founded the Abbey at Fontanelle in Normandy, which Maurice Maeterlinck and his lover Georgette Leblanc would rent in 1906, while Maeterlinck was experiencing depression and the two of them were having relationship issues, although they called it neurasthenia. While staying at the abbey Georgette often wore an abbess’s habit and Maurice roller-skated through the abbey’s vast halls and courtyards; he also wrote his great socialist essay, The Intelligence of Flowers.
I am interested in Maeterlinck because he is Belgian and because he wrote one of the most beautiful books ever written about bees, The Life of the Bee. I don’t know what the connection is between those two facts, but I do know that there are four bee museums in Belgium, where most countries have none and others have one. And perhaps while my parents are in Brussels this week*, they will visit one of those four bee museums, although because this is Belgium, it will probably be closed all week and my father will have no memory of the visit two weeks later. But that is fine because he will surely remember the first time he and my mother visited Belgium after they were married in 1951, and they dined with her beloved Oncle Augustín who kept a life size horizontal portrait of his entombed dead son, the great Belgian resistance hero, Paul Brancart, hanging above the sideboard in the dining room. Paul died young to protect the integrity of Belgium, so that it could go on to argue about the supremacy of French or Flemish well into the next century.
How were Maeterlinck and LeBlanc able to rent an entire monastery for their rest cure, you may well ask, and how can I do the same? Sorry. Not this one. In the anti-church hysteria concomitant with the French Revolution (consider the poor nuns in Dialogues de Carmelites), the monastery of St Wandrille was suppressed in 1791 and then sold at auction to become a factory. Later still the Stacpoole family owned it until 1896 when a very religious Stacpoole returned the abbey to the Benedictines; in 1896 they installed their first abbot since the French Revolution.
This does not explain how ten years later, in 1906, the depressed Maeterlinck and his lover were able to rent the place. Roller skating has since been banned in the cloister.

Nor does it explain this passage from Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1882 edition of his Lives of the Saints:
“Of [Wandrille’s] relics only two arms remain, one at Fontanelle the other at Bron. Of the noble abbey, the cloisters exist and part of the abbey I turned into a factory. Of the four churches, one the great abbey church, a magnificent specimen of architecture of the 13th century, nothing remains. In 1828 much of this great church existed. Since then the proprietor M. Cyprien Lenoir – let his name go down gibbeted to posterity – has blown it up with gunpowder.”

Baring-Gould does not mention the skull of St Wandrille, perhaps because it was not found, in Liège, Belgium, until sometime in the 19th century. And then returned to the Abbey in 1967. Clearly, neither the arms nor the skull were at the abbey when Maeterlinck was roller-skating through its unhallowed halls.
Just now, the Abbey is closed for renovations until Christmas. Which would not be at all surprising if it happened to be in Belgium. But it is not.

*Staying with a second cousin who has planned every meal well in advance. Tonight they will dine on tomate-crevettes, followed by a pheasant Brabançonne with frites, an endive salad, ending with stinky cheeses from Didant.

Dymphna's Day

Saint Dymphna lost her head somewhere in the middle of the seventh century after Christ. She was the daughter of an Irish king who, after the death of his beloved wife, conceived an incestuous passion for his daughter. In order to escape from his advances, Dymphna and her confessor, Saint Gerebernus, fled across the water to Antwerp and settled nearby in Gheel. Inevitably, the Irish king found them there and he slaughtered Gerebernus before beheading his own daughter. Centuries later, in the 1300s, the relics of the two saints became objects of reverence; their finger bones were encased in gold and rock crystal coffers, their skulls displayed in gem-studded reliquaries. From all over darkened Europe epileptics and lunatics made the pilgrimage to Gheel. These poor souls were taken into the homes of the local inhabitants, who cared for them and treated them as members of the community. And many were cured. This was a time when the mentally ill, the demented, the delusional obsessives, the paralytics and the merely strange were often rejected and cast out; although sometimes they were sanctified.
To this day, the tradition continues as mentally ill and neurologically afflicted patients come from all over the world to be housed in the town and live amidst its compassionate inhabitants.
Visitors also come to visit the shrine of Saint Dymphna, to touch the relics, to walk the well-trodden streets of Gheel. Some may come to see the carved sarcophagus of Jan III de Merode.
Had my parents named me according to old tradition, for the saint whose feast day it was, they might have named me Dymphna. But they did not. Isidore, Bertha, Torquatus, Hallvard and Magdalen are other choices they rejected.

One thing I love about my Mother is her comfort level with Weird Juxtapositions

Early this morning my mother sends me an email about our Belgian cousin's second disastrous marriage and her upcoming divorce, and how her second creepy husband scheduled their day in court on the exact day my cousin needs to take her mentally disabled brother into the hospital for major surgery and how her younger daughter will have to postpone college and keep modeling and losing weight because her father, creepy philandering husband #1, refuses to pay, but the real point of the email is that my cousin would like some more of that wonderful Press’n’Seal® I gave her last summer and would I please buy some and send it to my mother and then she will send it to Belgium.
(Of course I could send it directly to Belgium, or my mother could buy it at her local supermarket and send it, but that is not how we do things. That is not the Walloon way.)
In the best of times, in the worst of times, even in Wallonia, we still have to wrap up the leftovers.