The egg and I (soft-boiled)

Three or four times a week, I jump out of bed, get dressed, and drive to a near-by diner where I have what the help -- who know me all too well -- call "your usual."  Two eggs over easy, with ham, potatoes, toast and coffee.  

It's enjoyable, although I have health-related doubts about the ham.  But it's not what I really crave.

And what do I really crave?  Two soft-boiled eggs, boiled precisely four minutes, served in egg cups, and accompanied by a tiny, well-designed egg spoon.

I've just finished reading, for the nth time, an essay by Ursula K. Le Gwin entitled "Without Egg," in her collection of essays No Time to Spare -- an essay that is a virtual hymn to a properly prepared and served soft-boiled egg.  She emphasizes, as would I were I to have written the essay, the importance of attention to detail.  And the use of the proper implements, especially the dedicated cup and spoon.  

You can't really ruin a soft-boiled egg, especially if you also like hard-boiled eggs.  But Americans, in general, miss the entire point.  Sure, you can scrape the innards out into a dish, salt and pepper them, and eat them with a normal spoon or fork.  It will taste the same as a properly consumed egg.  But as she points out, you thus miss the entire point:

... it tastes the same but isn't the same.  It's too easy.  It's dull.  It might as well have been poached.  The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.

She discusses the egg cup, its appropriate use, and which end of the egg should be up (this last point an apparent matter of some controversy among soft-boiled egg aficianados).   Should one saw off the exposed end of the shell?  Or whack it off?  Le Gwin is an agnostic on this refinement.  As am I.  Both have their pros and cons.

But then the proper spoon.  Americans -- including myself, because often having no choice -- are apt to grab the nearest spoon handy and have at it.  They make a mess, and decide that next time they'll dump their eggs into their empty cereal bowl and eat it from there.  Le Gwin points out that the egg spoon is made tiny, because it must fit into the small opening you have made in the end of the shell -- the egg spoon is more a surgical instrument than a shovel.  Or, as she more delicately puts it, the egg spoon

does one thing only, but does it perfectly and nothing else can do it.  Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.

She doesn't point this out, but I find that I can down two fried eggs in a few bites and still be hungry.  By the time I've worked my way through two soft-boiled eggs, however, I not only have been forced to eat slowly enough that I enjoy every nuance of flavor, but I find that my appetite is quite satisfied.  Although there's always room for a croissant or two.

But maybe Le Gwin understands this also.  She calls her essay a blow against double-tasking.  The concentration required to properly prepare and eat the egg from a shell precludes unnecessary talking, reading, or daydreaming until the immediate task has been completed.  Which is the best way to enjoy any food worth enjoying.  She relies on the exhortation in Ecclesiastes that whatever you set out to do (presumably, even eating eggs) you should do with

all thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither thou goest.

Ursula Le Gwin adds "Nor is there any breakfast there.  The grave is without egg."  I say she thus has taken a morbid, if amusing turn.  I'll just say that if it's worth eating, it's worth eating properly.  And my soft-boiled eggs consumed in Europe, with proper spoon and cup, are far tastier than those gobbled down at home.  

Having written all that, I find I'm hungry enough to fly to Paris for breakfast.  But instead, I'm off in the morning to Santa Rosa for Christmas.  

Merry Christmas to all.  And eat egg.

Music at Christmas

Once in royal David's city
Stood a lowly cattle shed,
Where a mother laid her Baby

In a manger for His bed.

The audience sat hushed as the ethereal, solo voice of a boy soprano reverberated throughout the austere interior of Seattle's St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, joined in the second verse by the full choir as it filed down the aisles in two parallel lines from the rear to the front of the church.  The Northwest Boychoir, in its 44th season, presented yet another annual Christmas "Festival of Lessons & Carols." 

Advent is traditionally a season of penance, and I decided to walk in the dark from my house to the cathedral.  The distance was only 1.5 miles, but the temperature was near freezing and the sidewalks were icy -- I came close to slipping to the ground as I started up one steep and treacherous stretch.  But the air was clear, and many of the houses I passed were brightly illuminated with holiday lights.

My timing was good, and I arrived forty minutes after setting out -- cold but bright-eyed, wide awake, and clear-headed.  Ready for the hour and a half service that each year transforms me into Christmas mode.

I like the fact that the format is always the same, based on the Christmas service of the choir of King's College, Cambridge, England.  It always commences with the solo first verse of "Once in Royal David's City."  After a couple of introductory carols, nine members of the choir -- beginning with younger and ending with older -- always offer the same nine readings from the books of Genesis, Isaiah, Micah, Luke, Matthew, and John.  Each reading is always followed by a carol sung by the choir, followed then by a familiar popular carol in which the audience joins in.

The choir consisted of 29 young members of Northwest Boychoir proper, 33 teenage boys from the associated group Vocalpoint Seattle, and 18 teenage female singers, also from Vocalpoint.  All singers were masked as a precaution against Covid and the flu.  This year, the proportion of teenage boy singers seemed higher than in the past; at least to my ears the tenor and bass voices, when all singers were singing together, seemed more predominant.  (At King's, there are equal numbers of each age group.)

My opinion is purely subjective, obviously, but -- even though the singers were still masked -- the singing impressed me as being sharper and more clear than it was last year.  And the excellent piano accompaniment sounded appropriately supportive, rather than dominating.

I was again moved and impressed by the entire performance.  After a final carol -- "O Holy Night" -- the audience burst into an extended applause, an applause appropriately delayed until the end out of respect for the religious context -- and another round of applause after the choir had filed out singing "Joy to the World."

Poised youngsters, still dressed in their choir gowns, greeted us as we left the cathedral, thanking us for our attendance.  My mind was full of musical phrases as I embraced the freezing air outside, and began my walk home.

Christmas cards

Two weeks from Christmas Eve.  Christmas music on the stereo, cat on the sofa, and me.  Bent over the dining room table, filling out Christmas cards.

Yes, I know. Part of my annual tradition has become posting on this blog a short essay anguishing over whether I should still be sending cards, forcing myself to hang on to a dying tradition.  Or should I just shout out on Twitter, "Yo, dudes, merry whatever and eat lots of turkey."

But no.  This year I had no doubts.  I would send cards.

Then came the problem -- where will I get those cards?  I usually drop by the University of Washington Bookstore, and peruse tables covered with stacks of cards -- a tradition I began decades ago as a college freshman, perusing similar Christmas card displays at the Stanford Bookstore.  But what did I discover this year?  One-half of a table with a scant selection of uninspiring -- even somewhat ugly -- cards.  I recoiled, and returned home to my computer.  Surely Amazon would have oodles of cards on offer.

Well, it was better than the U Bookstore, but most of Amazon's cards didn't seem very attractive. I finally hit on one design that seemed somewhat acceptable, and ordered them.  They arrived today.  They look fine, but I've certainly had better ones in past years.  I'm certain that wonderful cards are out there, somewhere, still.  I just didn't look in the right places, or maybe I waited until too long after Thanksgiving?

But it's the thought that counts.  I have passed beyond the point of feeling awkward sending cards to people who don't reciprocate, although I do take their past instances of non-reciprocation into account in drawing up my address list.  I mean, if I don't get a card from them, I don't take it as a personal affront.  Quite possibly, they don't now and never have sent Christmas cards.  Or maybe it's been a bad year, and they just don't feel in the spirit. 

On the other hand, I've never encountered anyone who was offended by receiving a card, and it will hopefully make their Scrooge-like December a bit more cheerful.  And they hopefully will not brood, as I myself might do, at the fact that they didn't send me one -- or force themselves to send one to me next year!

As full-fledged adults, we're apt to worry too much about things, aren't we?  Things that don't call for concern.  I'll try to recall my youthful enthusiasm to simply wish everyone a wonderful Christmas, without worrying about what it all means, or how my wishes might be received.  Let's keep it simple.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!  

Family Christmas in Sonoma

Just over two weeks until Christmas.  

For us as kids, Christmas was ritually a very stable holiday.  My mother made sure that certain rituals were repeated each year, rituals that she had more or less devised herself, but which to us kids seemed to represent  the true way that all non-pathological Americans celebrated Christmas. 

We were a small family in terms of non-resident relatives -- parents, aunts and uncles, cousins -- and so the rituals of Christmas almost always were observed in our small house: my parents, my brother and sister, my mother's twin sister and her husband, and my grandmother on my father's side.

The period of time during which these stable rituals occurred was little more than a decade, but a decade to a child (or even a teenager) is a lifetime.

Life is more chaotic as an adult.  Relatives insist on living all across the country, sometimes around the world.  And even relatives who are geographically near often prefer to act out their own family rituals, rather than merge into a gathering of the clan.

But this year, we will have such a gathering -- either at Christmas itself or, for some of us, during the week following.

Readers will recall that we had a similar family reunion in April, when my nephew Denny returned from Thailand to his California hometown, Sonoma, for the first time since the start of the Covid pandemic.  I concluded my essay describing our get-together with a plea for more frequent family reunions -- and my plea seems to have been answered.

We gather again in Sonoma.  Denny will return once more from Chiang Mai, Thailand, together with his wife Jessie, his now-teenaged daughter, and his dad.  My sister and her youngest son will arrive from Challis, Idaho.  My brother and his wife, together with their daughter, her spouse, and their eleven-year-old daughter will arrive from Southern California.  

We will also be joined by Suzanne, the daughter of my closest friend from college days, together with her husband -- visiting from San Diego.  She has stronger ties to my family than merely those resulting from my college friendship with her father, but those ties require more explanation than required at this time!  But they are family, too.   

And it will be a multi-family reunion, to some extent, as Jessie's family lives in the Sonoma area, and some of our gatherings will be together with them.

My  own somewhat solitary life in Washington state, in the Northwest Corner of the nation, at times feels like that of a tender of a lighthouse on a rocky outcropping from the shore.  Even though Washington is the ancestral home of my family, where my siblings and I spent our pre-college years, all but I have since fled our wintry rains like rats leaving a sinking ship.  So I look forward eagerly to these large gatherings, masses of people all related to me in one way or another, and wish they occurred more often.  It makes Christmas feel more like Christmas, even when celebrated in a distant land (i.e., California!).

I leave home on December 21, and will return on the 28th  My brother and his wife won't show up until the day after Christmas, which I regret.  But I spent a wonderful five days with them over Thanksgiving at their home in Palm Desert.

Now, my only problem will be explaining my absence to my two cats, trying to convince them that while the master's away, the cats can play.

----------------------------------------------------

Photo:  Earlier family reunion.  Big Bear (California) (2011)

Feuilletons

During the dark days and weeks since late October -- the period after my old computer crashed, but before I finally pulled myself together and secured a new one -- a computer that arrived only this week -- I had ample time to think about the nature of my blog.  

After nearly sixteen years, and over 1,500 posted essays, the time to think about it did seem ripe.

What exactly do I write?  Essays, but what kind?

Lots of book reviews and movie reviews. Lots of thoughts about politics.  Observations about nature, especially about Seattle's peculiarities of weather.  Holidays.  Travels, completed or anticipated.  Reprints of old travel  journals and newspaper articles.  Musical experiences.  As I look over the list of some 1,500 posts, there's a bit of everything.

I've even written a few feuilletons.  What's that, you ask?  And well you might.

I'm reading a biography of an author and journalist from the first part of the century, a Jew from what is now western Ukraine but that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  His name was Joseph Roth, and his novels were largely autobiographical -- which isn't unusual -- but so was his journalism -- which was more so.

He was a foreign correspondent for a Frankfurt, Germany, newspaper.  But he preferred to take a subjective approach toward his news dispatches, rather than the purely objective approach they taught me and my classmates in high school journalism.  This objective approach was, he felt, despicably and soullessly German and American.  

I will discuss Roth's biography -- Endless Flight by Keiron Pim -- in a later post.  But I mention it now because -- in addition to his news articles written as a foreign correspondent -- he also wrote numerous feuilletons for his Frankfurt newspaper.  While journalists -- meaning American journalists -- don't like to let their feelings intrude obviously into their formal news stories, they often do write feuilletons -- feature stories -- without, probably, even knowing the word feuilleton.  

These tend to be fairly short feature articles based on the writer's observations, and discussing -- explicitly or by inference -- his own feelings about what he has seen.  The observation serves as a jumping off platform for the subjective feeling or thought that he wishes to convey.

I suppose that the readers of the New York Times who send in short discussions of their observations or experiences as they go about the city, designed to arouse laughter or sadness in the reader of those observations -- observations that are published each Sunday under the heading of "Metropolitan Diary" -- are writing (or attempting to write) very brief feuilletons.

Without categorizing what I was doing, I've written a number of such feuilletons, with greater or lesser success.  For example, in August 2017, I described watching a sobbing homeless person being escorted off a light rail platform by a security officer, and forced to enter a train stopped at the station.  I was unable to determine exactly was going on, but I felt free to imagine for my readers the mental state of the upset passenger and the events that had brought him to this unfortunate event.  And I wondered -- far too late -- what I might have done to ease his pain, and why I had failed to do it.

The objective observation was the interaction between the crying man and the security guard.  The subjective component, which converted the observation into a feuilleton, was my attempt to empathize with the man's feelings and reconstruct his history.

I know nothing about the bearded guy's back story, although I tend to make up stories for people in my head. But I'd say he was a gentleman who had no further physical or emotional resources available, regardless of what "act" of his life he was contemplating. I suspect we are surrounded by people like him. Maybe they still have enough pride not to cry. In public. But they want to.

Joseph Roth had written in 1919, with far greater artistic sensitivity:

I saw children blowing soap bubbles.  Not in 1913 -- yesterday.  They were real soap bubbles.  A little bottle full of soapy water, a straw, four children and a quiet alleyway in the bright sunshine of a summer morning.  The soap bubbles were big, beautiful, rainbow-coloured globes and they swam lightly and gently through the blue air.  There was no doubt these were real soap bubbles.  Not the soap bubbles of patriotic phraseology risen up from the muddy puddles of war editorials, the nationalist party, or the press corps, but beautiful, rainbow coloured soap bubbles.

The children and the bubbles were a simple observation, but Roth adds his own comparison of the children's innocence with the slimy, dirty "soap bubbles" of right-wing propaganda, as well as a reminder to his readers of the simple urban joys they had enjoyed in pre-war days.

Feuilletons are deceptively simple in  appearance, but not easy to do well.  I may make a conscious effort to write more of them, now that I better understand the form.

And know what they're called.  Even if I can't pronounce the word.