Serial (The Quickies), Part 7

Can anyone out there remember parts one through six? Read forward, read backwards.

7. In the year before she died, Rachel Zinc heard from the sister she didn’t know she had. It was the old story. It was always someone’s newest story. Their parents, having sent their daughters to safety in Canada, died in Auschwitz in the last week of the war. Afterwards, two American couples adopted the girls, Rachel and her older sister Miriam. Things were confused at the time, and so siblings were sometimes separated like that. Both girls were beloved by their parents. Rachel was happily married, with two sons and a daughter, when the sister she thought was long dead contacted her. Miriam suggested a DNA test to allay any doubts Rachel might have. Doubts were impossible once they met, by the big clock in Grand Central Station. They looked like sisters. They felt like sisters. Both women had aged in the same way, getting plump in the midsection. They both dyed their grey hair the same shade of brown. They both favored tailored pants and sensible shoes. They had both married men named Howard, Rachel’s a dentist and Miriam’s an urologist. They both loved the same silly romantic comedies. They were not twins, but a stranger could be forgiven for thinking so. A week later Rachel received the biopsy results. The last year of Rachel’s life was eerily happy. She felt at peace with her sister as she had never felt in her other life, and yet she was someone who had always thanked her lucky stars. The happiness prevailed, except in the middle of the night, when she woke up sweating from the same nightmare in which she was clawing her way up a crumbling stone wall, on the other wide of which was her childhood. The dream was so vivid that she couldn’t help but check her fingers upon waking, expecting to find fragments of the friable rock lodged beneath the nails.
Susanna Dewitt had gone so long between dentist visits that when she finally saw Dr. Howard Zinc about the sensitivity to cold in her upper right molar, he had lots of news to catch her up on. Susanna Dewitt had been his patient for thirty-eight years. She knew the names of Howard’s children, and he knew the history of all her crowns. First he complimented her on her agility with the prosthetic leg – she was a natural, he said. Then he started the narration with his late wife’s happy reunion with her newfound sister, segued straight to her sad death and his grieving, and then moved onto his subsequent reentry into the dating scene. Of course it wasn’t all as fast as it seemed. Howard Zinc wasn’t a heartless man by any means. But he couldn’t deny that he was pleasantly surprised to discover what a sought after commodity he was on said dating scene. And already he was no longer dating, in the ‘looking’ sense of the word, because he had met his soul mate, a widow with a brilliant sense of humor and a handicap of three.

Thirsty in Chile

The sweet frenzy of the extraction is my only excuse for failing to mention, yesterday, the feast of Saint Teresa de los Andes, if only because she was the first Chilean saint, the first Chilean to be canonized, and it just so happens that my new novel (can you stand the wait?) hinges upon a race to have a certain ancestral maiden aunt officially declared the first Nicaraguan saint.

But when I think of Saint Teresa de los Andes (a Discalced Carmelite mystic who died at the appallingly young age of 20) I tend remember Difunta Correa, because they are both Chilean and I first learned of them both in Chile, and yes it’s a big (LONG) country and so this might well fall under the D0-you-know-my-Aunt-Sally?-She-also-lives-in-New York-Fallacy.

Difunta Correa is not a real saint and unlikely to ever be one, and maybe she never even existed.

Her shrines throughout Chile & Argentina could be mistaken for impromptu recycling centers – until you notice that all the plastic bottles are still full of water. Because the legendary Difunta died of thirst while crossing the arid plains, her devotees leave the bottles to assuage her eternal thirst. The miracle attributed to her is that her nursing infant lived on after his mother’s death, taking nourishment from her breast, until gauchos discovered them.

First extraction of the season

As we set out to extract honey this past weekend, it became abundantly clear that we have a certain workplace dialectic going on here. That is, CSB is strictly clean and hygienic and I am, shall we say, laissez-faire. I figure that if honey is used as an antibiotic to heal post–surgical wounds, it can certainly handle the insertion of my fingertip for a taste. But not CSB. He takes a clean jar and sterilizes it. He gets upset if I smudge a jar. And he gets especially upset if any stray bee bits get in the honey. And while I realize that not everyone recognizes the health benefits of actually ingesting pieces of wax and propolis and bee anatomy, I certainly do, and recommend it.
Whose workroom rules prevail? Silly question. CSB's of course. So far he hasn’t yet made me wear gloves when I bottle the honey but I fear we are moving in that direction.

I am filled with an almost atavistic serenity, an all's-right-with-world sense of abundance when I watch the golden honey pour out - richly, thickly golden, amber, forestal, champagnesque. As quart after quart sluices over the lip of the extractor, I can only wonder that each ounce of honey required a bee to travel about 1600 round trips to gather nectar. A pound of honey is the result of about 2 million flowers. Since a single bee visits somewhere between 50 and 1000 flowers a day, that means that it takes a single bee at the very least 2 days to make an ounce of honey.

Of course this is not about a single bee, but about the hive.

So the honey pours out, I fill one hexagonal jar after another, and then I bring down the stopcock and put on the lids (also washed and meticulously dried by CSB, lest any stray moisture get into the honey and promote crystallization.). Have I mentioned how much I like any activity that allows me to use, with impunity, words like stopcock?

The moose (plural)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when I enter the state of Maine, the resident moose all decide, unanimously, in unspoken but clear communication, upon a course of action, to wit, to vacate the state. Perhaps they decide to vacation over the border, perhaps they take the opportunity to visit relatives in New Hampshire. It is not known where they go. It is known that they go elsewhere. When I am in the state of Maine there is not a moose to be seen.

Or such was the case until yesterday (longer ago than that) morning, on Route 201 between Moscow and Bingham, when two moose cows (cow moose?) wandered out from a wooded swamp and stood idly at the edge of the road. Where I saw them. Where we saw them quite well. Where I managed to get a picture of them.

Of course I was and am excited and grateful to have finally, at long last, seen a moose.

But then I have to wonder and worry. Did these two cows not get the message? Are they out of the moose-loop? Were they bucking a trend? Did they lose their friends and family who are now safely in Canada? Do they suffer from a congenitally lousy sense of direction? So many questions.

Things to do in Pleasant Pond, or something for everyone

• Wear my Bug Repellent Wrist Band ®
• Listen to the loons call to each other at dawn. (Interesting note: Loons are bigger than you think they are - 10 to 12 pounds bigger. I have this on good authority from my sister who swam under one and got rather nervous. How was she able to get so close, you may ask? She does excellent loon imitations. She has received awards for her loon imitations.)
• Watch Daisy leap from the dock. (NB: Daisy is an excellent swimmer. In their puppyhood, we tried to convince Bruno to dog paddle along with his sister. He was never persuaded, and we are now resigned to his aquatic aversion. Not only can she swim, Daisy can dive.)
  
• Kayak to Bowden’s Rock, take off our clothes, lie on the hot boulders, swim, dry off on the hot boulders, and kayak back to camp
• Read old copies of Down East
• Complete jigsaw puzzles, very difficult old wooden puzzles of fuzzy & marginally bucolic country scenes featuring barns, trees in midsummer. On the boxes, written faintly in pencil in perfect penmanship: One piece missing [out of 1500] or Completed with Aunt Florence at the pond, July 1958 [ Aunt Florence died in August of that year]
• Read several old (but not as old as the Down Easts) copies of NYRB and learn many interesting things:
• • Akbar, the Mughal emperor, was a devout vegetarian;
• • Beneath the deepest part of the ocean is an even deeper part called the hadal region, so named for Hades;
• • There is something bigger than the giant squid, called the colossal squid.
• • The relationship between Tennessee Williams and his sister Rose resembled the relationship between Henry James and his sister Alice, in certain ways.

Serial (The Quickies), Part 6

6. Less well known than the conservatory at the Botanical Gardens, and yet of enormous benefit to many, including Mrs. Susanna Dewitt, mother of Tom the chiropractor, were the Glass Gardens at the Rusk Institute providing horticultural therapy to the patients rehabilitating there. Upon losing her leg after a valiant fight against the encroaching venom of the Indochinese Sea Snake, Susanna spent six months at Rusk regaining her strength and learning to walk with a prosthetic limb. It was her right leg. She also spent the time learning to graft tree peonies. The peonies she worked on, there in the hospital’s garden hidden from the surrounding city, were all named for Greek gods and goddesses, all named by their hybridizer Nassos Daphnis: Demeter, Persephone, Hephaestus, and Leda. This pleased Susanna because she had met the late Mr. Teddy DeWitt on a Greek island and they had revisited it every year while he lived, and if he still lived she would never have gone to Vietnam and been bitten by the sea snake and so would probably still have her right leg now. Time stood still or crawled when she worked with the tree peonies, and even stiller afterwards when she walked out of the Rusk on her shapely prosthesis. It would be years before she would know if her peony grafts had taken.

And now, dear readers - if you are out there and if you are dear - I will be off the grid for about a week so this would be a good opportunity (comments section) for you to express yourselves and let me know if you are enjoying any of this blog. Or if not, though I am very thin-skinned.

Ramon Llull, who else

(This was meant to be posted yesterday, being as that was the feast of Blessed Ramon, but a series of crisis phone calls involving loss of vision, a parental trip to the hospital, anxiety and the unknown transpired instead. We hope today brings a happy resolution.)


I could be embarrassed (chagrined, ashamed, bemoaning) that I have lived to these many years unaware of the very interesting existence of Ramon Llull, or I could just be pleased to finally, belatedly have made his acquaintance.

Ramon Llull is not a saint nor is he ever likely to be one, given that Pope Gregory XI (in 1376) banned Llull’s writings and condemned his rationalistic mysticism, and Pope Paul IV followed up with a re-condemnation. Given that he has some claim to the title of alchemist. Given that he is credited with pioneering computation and influencing Leibniz. He does however have the lesser designation of a Blessed.

Born in 1232 in Majorca, Ramon was well educated as a chivalric troubadour, and fluent in several languages, including his native Catalan, Occitan, Latin and Arabic. He married and had children. And then came the defining moment, the conversion experience. There are (at least) two versions of his conversion (the conversion versions – I can’t help myself) and you can decide which one works for you:

In version numero uno Llull was a frivolous and licentious young man given to composing lyrics for the purposes of seduction. One night, as he sat down to write such a lyric he looked up and saw a vision of Christ crucified, “as if suspended in midair”. The vision was repeated five times, after which Ramon devoted his life to converting the Muslims to Christianity. (We know how successful that was.)

Version numero dos comes to us from Schopenhauer, not the cheeriest fellow. According to the philosopher, Llull had been courting a beautiful woman for a while and was at last to be admitted to her bedroom. But when he entered, she bared her bosom and revealed the ravages of her cancer. Repulsed (and converted), Llull immediately left the bedroom and the court and went into the wilderness, where he did penance for nine years.

Whichever version you chose, Ramon Llull henceforth wrote copiously (265 works, depending who’s counting) and labored - through rational discussion involving symbolic notations, diagrams and lists of all knowledge - to reveal to the Muslims the correctness of the Christian faith.

His novel Blanquerna, the first major work in Catalan, is also considered by some to be the first European novel.

But it is his Art Abreujada d’Atrobar Veritat (the Abbreviated Art of Finding Truth) that sounds most appealing to me, not least for its touted abbreviation.

Llull was a list maker. He made lists of religious and philosophical attributes, and lists of all the questions one could have about the Christian faith. And he indexed them with the appropriate answers, as a tool to be used in debating Muslims.

The Llullian Circle consisted of paper discs with letters or symbols referring to a list of attributes. By rotating the discs, singly or together, you could generate all possible combinations to show all possible truth.

One list (if only I can remember it all) that strikes my fancy is The Nine Functions of Memory. Llull names them:
1. Attractive memory
2. Receptive “
3. Conservative “
4. Multiplicative “
5. Discursive “
6. Significative “
7. Restorative “
8. Determinative “
9.Complexionative “

Llull traveled around Europe, visiting with potentates of all ilks, setting up institutes of higher learning and he always argued for the teaching of foreign languages (for the purposes of evangelizing, bien sûr).

On returning from his first trip to Tunis, he preached for the unification of the three great monotheistic religions. (A forward thinker? Or a lunatic? Can we ever tell the difference?)

On his third trip to Tunis, he was brutally stoned and died, either on the return trip to Majorca or soon thereafter, in 1315.

He is known as “Doctor Illuminatus”.