A Soft Landing in France

Somewhere in the Languedoc, Southern France – Talk about a soft landing! After fourteen months of cancer surgery (gone), reconstruction surgeries (done), teeth implants (done), and one final operation to allow me to swallow again, (plus a cut finger, but that’s another silly story), I have landed in the most impossibly soft bed of French lavender.

Here in the Minervois en Languedoc ensconced in a village over a thousand years old, we wake up to the sounds of the birds and the breeze and the couple who walk their dogs; sometimes the dogs wear bells. This village was built as an outlying stumbling block on the way to Carcassonne. In the shape of a snail’s shell, it winds around a central green where the ancient church serves as the final refuge after every foot of the circulade has been defended. Under the Romanesque church, there is an altar from an even earlier chapel which is easily as old as the first whispers of Christianity in Europe.

Now the village holds two hundred fifty people, mostly artisans, vignerons, ex-pats from various parts of Europe. We are only the second Americans to come here, and certainly the first Texans. I intend to put a Cathar flag and a Texas flag out front soon as it warms up.

I had no idea when we first decided to buy a little home here that the area was teeming with history, both bloody and benign. This is the home of the Troubadours and the Langue d’Oc in which they couched their poems set to music; courtly love, knightly bravery, the beauty of existence. Later it became the center of the first protestant movement and the Pope in Rome used that as an excuse to join with the weak King in Paris 

view out our front window

to come here with a band of brigands and plunderers to dethrone the Count of Toulouse, who was as powerful as the King. Money, land, and power were of course the engines of this invasion but Christianity was the cover story. Every single protestant Cathar was slaughtered, starved, or maimed and marched away to death on a bonfire. The Catholic Church resumed its collection of tithes and lands, the Counts were de-fanged, and the land became ostensibly Frankish, but in truth it never happened in the hearts of the people here. The accent still reflects the old langue d’Oc, the sense of independence and grace still flourishes, and the food is very different.

It is almost December now, and cold by Texan standards; about 45 to 60 and going down. Last night it reached 34 or so. I finally learned how to wear enough layers and a wool scarf and heavy overcoat. Some locals are still going around in shorts or normal outfits, which beats hell out of me; must be thicker blood.

This is wine and olive country and has been since the Greeks and Romans brought their cultivars here and planted them to foster trade. Grapes spring up here un-planted like Johnson grass in Texas, and olive trees stand silvery in every little corner and wedge and otherwise unusable piece of land. Apricots, cherries, peaches are on sale everywhere during harvest.

The wine is in the tanks now, the harvest finished on about October 20^th. I will be tasting them this week and try to form a sensible opinion, though I don’t really know what the hell I am talking about yet. That is my next mountain to climb – viticulture in this beautiful part of this ancient land!

Next: the perils and insanity of renovating a thousand year old stable!

Red Rice

Joe near Rice U campus

well, i'm blogging painfully with one hand this time- another story- but  Miss Apronless  demanded that i put my arroz recipe where my mouth was, or something, so here is my basic go at the idea from a couple of years ago. I might make minor adjustments to it now, but this still holds true until i can get my other typing hand back in the game. Here ya go, madame, and thanks for luring me back to work:

"Spanish" Rice or "Red Rice"

This makes enough rice for four people as a main dish or six people as a side dish. Try to use Texmati, Cajun “Popcorn” rice, or Basmati as they are the best long-grain rices on the market these days. They have extra flavor and aroma that standard white rice lacks. I am using a sort of pan-Mediterranean method here, as I think it gives the best flavor and look. This works equally well for Cajun or Mexican food, as they are both derived from this method of cooking rice. I try to use broth made from the ingredients of the other dishes in the meal- for seafood, use a seafood broth, for chicken, chicken, etc.

1 cup long-grain white rice

Extra-virgin olive oil

Butter

1/2 yellow onion chopped

1 short stick celery, chopped

1/2 carrot, diced

Half a tomato, chopped fine or liquified, or some tomato paste in a rush

Handfull English peas, frozen (raw) or fresh (cooked)

Dry white wine (leftover wine is good)

2 cups broth

1/2 t. Salt & Pepper

Sauteé the onion, celery, and carrot in 1 T. butter and 1 T. olive oil until soft. Add the rice and heat until it becomes opaque. Add wine to cover, simmer until evaporated. Add tomatoes and heat until they lose their liquid and become soft. Add peas, broth, salt and pepper and bring to a simmer, cover, turn to lowest possible flame, heat for 20 minutes. Rest covered for 5 minutes and serve.

Mother's Day Altar

It being almost mother’s day here in the U.S. I thought I would try to honor my own mother (my eulogy blog post for her is here), who passed away this year. I was reminded that Father Brian D’Arcy, our progressive Irish friend, once said to Kimmie, “never forget to pray for the dead”. That seems to me to be a very Catholic idea; growing up in the Disciples of Christ, a kind of liberal Protestant bunch, I don’t think I ever heard anybody make that statement, and the only praying for the dead I ever heard was at a funeral where it seemed natural to do so on that day. However, we never lit candles or went out of our way to address the spirits of our ancestors, or worry about things like Purgatory or Hell or where our relatives had ended up. Nothing in our services ever addressed it as some sort of problem, or undertaking.

When I became aware of the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) ceremonies in Mexico and in some Mexican-American communities in Texas, it was a revelation to me and seemed sort of spooky but fun. Anglo Texans have adopted some Day of the Dead trappings as an addition to our celebrations of All Hallows Eve and Halloween. (Texans, apparently unlike our brethren in Arizona, treasure our shared Mexican heritage. Or most of us do, anyway…)

I think most Protestants miss the magic of some of the Catholic ritual, most without realizing it and be damned if they’d admit it. Humans apparently need ritual and magic and a sense of being able to address The Gods somehow with some tool. We pay people to be our “ministers” or shamans, even the most steely-eyed Protestants of us. The story of Jesus as actually told in Protestant churches is impossibly filled with hoodoo and magic and spilt blood, allegory and horror, but all of that is merely alluded to. Only the Catholics come right out and say that it is really magic and stuff really does happen in the ritual of the bread and wine and that you really can help pray your relatives out of purgatory and into heaven, as I understand it anyway.

So, it came to me that I would set up a little “altar” to my newly dead mother and my dead father and light a candle like we see in all the big cathedrals we visit as tourists in Europe. I have no idea what I am doing, and barely why. I just feel a yearning to do something more concrete than mourn, or cry, or think about them. More concrete and yet totally allegorical and magical, in fact.

Mankind has been lighting stuff and waving it around and using the smoke to carry prayers for thousands of years, of course. Plants like sage in the Native American religions, remnants of slaughtered animals on the altars of the Jews, candles in cathedrals, those incense burners the priests wave in the mass. We hope the smoke, the aroma, will carry all the way to God and he will hear our pleas. We ritualistically roll a joint and pass it around the circle of friends as the fragrance of skunk weed lifts to the sky. To me the candle’s flame is like an ongoing prayer for my parents’ souls that carries my love and admiration and longing to them, I hope.

It is odd to me that I find myself doing this, or even thinking it. I am not religious. I have no concept of “God”, do not particularly care if he exists or not, and do not find that worrying about my own afterlife is a profitable enterprise. I hope, but I do not worry. No religion has a hold on me, or power over me one way or another. I think one basically as silly as the next. So what on earth has possessed me to set up an altar now?

I think trying to come to terms with my mother’s death, in the midst of my own battle for life against cancer, has caused this. Mourning is difficult for me. Big boys don’t cry, and Texas men are made of stronger stuff. My ancestors tell me to buck up and get on with it. Well, sometimes you just have to cave to the need for ritual, for healing balm, for something outside your own little tiny speck of self. I guess this would be it. God bless you and keep you, Mother and Dad. He’ll be needing a good laugh, after all...