Monday Night Dinner

The Paschal season gives us Palm Sunday, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday . . . what, I ask you, did Monday and Saturday do to get left off the list*

Dinner this week fell on Shrove Tuesday aka Fat Tuesday aka Mardi Gras.  In the more dogmatic days when Lenten repentance and reflection was reinforced with fast days and a list of foods you weren’t allowed to eat, Mardi Gras functioned as the last hurrah before 40 days of abstinence and penitence.  These days Mardi Gras gets celebrated by a lot of people who aren’t planning on giving up anything for Lent, must less embracing the abstemiousness that’s supposed to characterize the next six weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Back when I was in high school – you know shortly after the last ice age and before cell phones became ubiquitous (although they did exist and were in fact small enough to put in your pocket – my father had one he never turned on except to call us from the Immigration line at the airport to say, “The Eagle has landed”) – I used to go hang out in downtown Geneva with friends on Saturday afternoons.

Before I’d leave the house I would always end up having some variation on the following conversation – and remember this was pre-cell phones, because if I’d had a cell phone the entire conversation would have been rendered moot. Read the rest of this entry »

Never let it be said that the maxims learned from picture books don’t stick with you.  There’s a Russian Jewish folktale that I am reminded of every winter around about the end of January/mid-February when the weather is unendingly vile and my parents are sending me unsympathetic emails about how they’ve taken a picnic and sat outside in the sunshine reading a book in the forecourt of a 15th C country chapel.

It could always be worse. Read the rest of this entry »