Prayers for Upstate New York

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I spend time every summer in the Catskills. The Catskills were devastated by flooding following Hurricane Irene, which dumped over a foot of water on them in one day. It had already been a wet summer, and the saturated ground and high creeks and rivers just could not absorb the additional water. Flash floods raged through picturesque towns, knocking houses off their foundations, flattening crop fields, killing livestock. Fortunately very few human lives were lost, but there were a few. My little town, where my parents' house is, was spared, but nearby communities suffered chest-hight floodwater, bridges and roads washed away along with people's livelihoods.

The little towns I drive through every summer, the farm stands I frequent, museums and stores and restaurants are gone. I am waiting to hear what became of the piano museum in Hunter, which I so happily visited six weeks ago, and whether any of their half-dozen playable 19th century instruments survived. Based on the pictures of the town, I suspect they did not. I am also waiting to hear about the damage on the pretty little Catholic church in Phoenicia. I bet the rebuilt historic railroad there was washed away, too, the fruit of many years' labor by volunteers.

As so often occurs with natural disasters, the regions hardest hit were the ones that could least afford it. Very few there have flood insurance, and Greene County was already an economically depressed area. Some of those destroyed businesses will never reopen. Some of the destroyed houses will never be rebuilt or repaired.

Here are a few images of the devastation: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/08/30/us/20110830_HURRICANE-2.html

Diets



I need to lose quite a bit of weight, not just for aesthetic reasons but because high blood pressure and type-2 diabetes run rampant in my family and I want to put off that scourge as long as I can. I do quite a bit of walking with the dog, and some exercises with dumbbells three or four times a week, so it's not the exercise that's a problem. It's the food.

Since I married, I've gained more than thirty pounds. I gain weight easily anyway, but cooking to please my husband's picky palate means I eat a lot more fried/breaded food, cheese, bread, cookies, milkshakes, and all those things you're only supposed to have a little of, and a lot fewer vegetables and fruits than I would if left to my own devices. I don't really have time to cook two separate meals for him and myself, and buying extra vegetables just for myself is problematic because of the cost and the waste--a lot of vegetables available here come packaged rather than loose, and it's hard for one person to eat them all and still have a variety. I can buy a package of green beans, but it means I have to eat green beans almost every night for that week.

I can't really expect my husband to change his eating habits. He sort of self-medicates for stress with junk food, a bad habit for sure, but one that is difficult to change when your job is really stressful and you don't have a lot of time or money for more positive stress-relieving outlets like exercise or going to the movies or the shooting range. If I don't cook the fried things and sweet things that he likes at home, he relieves his stress by buying them from fast-food joints and coffee shops--even more unhealthy, and definitely budget-busting. So, I'm stuck baking the cookies and frying the chicken. How can I bake cookies and not eat any?

Oh, by the way, I can't sneak in veggies or whole wheat or sweeten things with stevia instead of sugar, either. He can always tell, and will then refuse to eat them. And he won't eat cookies with dried fruit in them. There has to be chocolate.

So, I can't really change his menu at all, and I don't have time or money to cook two separate things (or brains--I'm a respectable cook, but it takes all my concentration to keep things from burning). Am I doomed to choose between fattening food and really boring food? How do other married women deal with this?

Help!

I Love L'Angelus

The prayer:



And also the band:




I'm in a French (and Cajun) mode these days.

If You Have a Moment...

...stop and say a prayer for the dear lady who blogs at Renidemus and her husband. They have been hoping for a child ever since they married five years ago, and are now waiting on an adoption. The legal process for the adoption is moving very slowly, court dates keep being moved back, and there is no end in sight for them. I hope that their long-awaited child will be home with them as soon as possible, and that God will comfort them in the meantime.

I understand a little bit of her pain, since I have been married almost four years myself and am not yet a mother.

Well That Was Unnecessary

My husband's boss, who is ill and away receiving treatment, just sent an email update. He's doing ok, but for some reason he felt the need to sermonize as well:

We went to the Extraordinary Rite [sic] Mass at the Cathedral yesterday. As much as I love the Latin and the chant, it became painfully obvious to both of us why we had to move on to where we are today, and beyond. These poor folks obviously find the reverence and ritual nostalgic, but THEY JUST DON'T GET IT! So out of touch with the mystical body of Christ. It was a good experience for us, to help remember why we do what we do.

WHY?! Why did he have to say that? Why did they even GO? I have to say, this doesn't exactly put me in the right frame of mind to pray for his good health. Not that I wish him ill health, but I find it hard to pray when I'm angry.

So, thanks Mr. Boss, for insulting me and many of my friends, and our bishop, and lots of other people. Even if you think that, it's not very polite to just come out and say it, especially in an email sent to the whole parish staff and everyone in all the choirs.

Maybe this picture of my cousin's cute little dog will cheer me up.






Yeah, that's better.

Jammy Memories

My friend Maggie makes jam. I haven't bought any yet, but it sounds awesome. Today she posted on Facebook that she was making Santa Rosa Plum Jam.

A flood of memories washed over me. When I was six years old, my family moved to Napa. The backyard was huge, 2/3 of an acre, and all uphill. Landscaping it was a real challenge for my parents, but they were up for it. They devoted a lot of time and care to that yard, making sure to plant things that would grip the hill and halt mudslides, things that weren't needy when it came to watering, things that were useful as well as beautiful. It seemed like we had miles and miles of rosemary and lavender. The pussy-willow grew bigger than any pussy-willow anybody had ever seen--I think it was ten feet tall. There were already a few cherry-plum trees growing wild, maybe leftover from some forgotten orchard, which they worked around. In the flat bit in the middle of the hill they also planted new fruit trees; an apple which didn't thrive and never really bore edible fruit, an apricot in which I once found my cat munching on the fruit, and a plum. A Santa Rosa plum. Dad was insistent that it be no other variety. His parents had a Santa Rosa plum in their yard, and he had fond memories of jam-making with his mother or just eating them right off the tree. So, a Santa Rosa plum was duly procured and planted. It thrived.

We started making jam a few years later, because otherwise the fruit just ended up squished into the bark below the tree. We only made two kinds of jam, or variations. Apricot and plum. Sometimes we mixed them. One year the apricot jam came out kind of runny, but it turned out to be the perfect topping for grilled pork tenderloin, and an awesome salad dressing additive, so it didn't matter. We were actually sorry that we could never replicate that consistency. With the plum jam, we sometimes mixed in cherry-plums from the semi-wild trees. Sometimes we mixed in strawberries, either from our own little strawberry patch or ones my grandfather brought with him, leftover from his jam-making.

I only remember my maternal grandfather making strawberry jam. As far as I know he never made any other kind, and he did it by himself--my grandmother did not participate.

In our house, though, jam-making was a whole-family experience. Mom and Dad and I all crowded into the kitchen and heated the jars and lids, separating the skins and pits from the cooked fruit, measuring the sugar, stirring the pot. Every window and both back doors would be open, the scent of blooming jasmine mixing with hot fruit. The bewildered dog and cats got underfoot, and I risked burned fingers to scrape a little of the thickening mixture out of the emptied pot and taste the red sweetness of the Santa Rosa plum jam. I always had to wear old clothes for this process, because I invariably came out sticky and stained at the end. Some things never change; I still have to wear an apron when I cook.

Maggie lived about a block away from us, and probably didn't know or care until I mentioned it on her fb today that we used to make jam from our own plum tree so close by. I think the only cooking she ever saw at our house was on a singular occasion when my dad baked cookies with her little sister (a memory for another day). But the mention of her Santa Rosa plum jam brings happy, homey memories of the "old days" in Napa.

New York Descends Further Into the Pit

They've legalized same-sex "marriage." Knowing that the vote was coming, some of my friends have been much more busy on Facebook than usual, and through this I discovered that three of my college friends are lesbians. I hadn't known that, although in one case I suspected it. They didn't have girlfriends when we were in college, but they do now (two are in a relationship together). I'm not so upset by information like this about my graduate-school acquaintances. Most of them are not religious and never have been. But it really throws me for a loop when somebody that I used to go to daily Mass with stops going to church and announces on Facebook that they're engaged to be married to a same-sex partner. Please, if you could keep my friends AS, AK, AM, and AS's partner D in your prayers, I'd appreciate it. I hope that they will be open to God's Will, and return to the Church.

Ut, Re, Mi
Warning: technical music stuff ahead!

Happy feast of the Birth of St. John the Baptist! Father Z reminds us that the Vespers hymn for today is Ut queant laxis from which the 11th-century Benedictine monk Guido d'Arezzo derived the now-familiar system of "solfege"--ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, or as Americans and some other English-speakers know it, "Do, re, mi." Each phrase of each verse of the hymn begins one pitch higher than the previous note. The syllables are the first syllable of each phrase of the first verse of the hymn. As Father Z mentions the seventh pitch of the scale, "si" (for some reason transformed to "ti" in English-speaking countries) is probably derived from Sancte Ioannes.



Guido used this system, along with the so-called "Guidonian hand" to teach music to choir boys. He bragged that with his system he could teach boys in a few weeks what it used to take them years to learn. The boys at a monastery or cathedral school were expected to sing with the monks for liturgical services. Although very large choir books from which many people could read at the same time did exist, monks and boys were largely expected to memorize the chants. Guido, with his new system, could teach the boys about interval relationships very quickly, and using his hand as a guide, he could "conduct" them by pointing to the part of his hand that represented the next note they were to sing. Anyone who has seen a children's (or adults'!) choir director mouthing the words at the singers has some idea of how this might work.*



The ut, re, mi system is still used in Europe and in European-style music schools in Asia, South America, and elsewhere. The often don't use the alphabetical system, ABCDEFG, that's common here in America and other English-speaking countries for referring to notes and key signatures. For instance, I bought a CD in France that says "W.A. Mozart: Messe en ut mineur." Not Mass in C minor, but in "ut" minor. Needless to say, their solfege system is "fixed"--that is, Ut=C every time. In America, we often use a "movable" solfege system, in which do is the primary note of whatever key or scale we're working with at the time. In other words, if we are in the key of C, Do=C. But in D, Do=D, in E, Do=E, etc. Where you put your do in a minor scale also depends on what method your teacher uses. In E minor, it could be that Do=E, or maybe Do=G.

Each method has its advantages. Moveable Do is, I think, very useful for beginning musicians. You learn scale degrees and how they relate to each other quickly, so that the same song transposed into a different key doesn't suddenly become a foreign thing. I think this also helps with basic chord relationships. The trouble comes when you start doing music with more complex modulations than simply major key and its relative minor. Fixed Do/Ut is much more useful for complicated music. But Americans plow ahead with Moveable Do, figuring that once you get to that complex music you probably don't need solfege much anymore.

I first encountered the Fixed Ut usage when I was in high school. A disproportionately large part of the 20th century harp repertoire is French, and a lot of it is only available from French publishers. The pedals on the pedal harp, to refresh your memory, are not like the pedals on a piano. They are for tightening and loosening the strings, which changes the pitch of the strings, whether natural, sharp, or flat. So there are seven pedals--one for each note of the scale--and one pedal operates the mechanism for all of the A strings, one for all the C strings, and so on. So, put the pedal in its lowest position, and all the C strings become C-sharp, put a different pedal in its highest position and all the B strings become B-flat, and a third pedal in the middle position and all the F strings will be F-natural.



For some music you can set all your pedals at the beginning and not worry about it, but in other pieces you have to change in the middle because there are accidentals. Sometimes, kind editors will put indications in for where to change the pedals (otherwise you have to write them in yourself). In American music, you'll see, for example, a big "C#" written under the staff, telling you to put the C pedal in the lowest position. But in French music, the same indication will be written "Ut#." I was mystified at first, but now that I am aware of the thousand-year history of solfege, I am tickled every time I see "Ut" written in my music.

So hopefully now you know more about harps and solfege than you already did, or probably ever wanted to know. Happy name day to any Johns or Joannas out there!




*I have actually sung using Guido's method, in a music history class. One of my professors is very hands-on, so to speak, and thinks that the medieval and early-Renaissance methods of teaching are still very useful for teaching the music of those periods, if you want the most period-accurate performance.

Prayer Request

Please keep this baby boy and his mom and dad in your prayers. He was born prematurely on June 18th. He weighs just 2.1 lbs. The good news is that he is breathing on his own.



Poor little fellow doesn't have a name yet--his mom and dad thought they had almost three more months to think of one.

Update: The baby's name is Bennett!

Belmont Abbey, Again

Well, I may have criticized them for their church interior re-design, but here is something I can completely get behind:

College Maternity Center is a First

I'm also glad to see that the Knights of Columbus of North Carolina have contributed to the project. So proud my husband is one of them!

Catholic colleges, particularly the larger ones, I hope you're taking notes. Non-Catholic colleges, too. Projects like these save the lives of babies and help break cycles of poverty by making it possible for women finish their college degrees. Hopefully there is a childcare center on campus as well.