peterography

My butternut squash vines have died off - victims, I guess, of radical swings in hydration and temperature, so I harvested the squash. Most of them looked ready to harvest anyway - a few still had green veins. Last year I had 15. This year I have 37.

It might seem like a lot but they last a long time. One of last year’s sat in my kitchen at room temperature until March when I finally cooked with it, and it was delicious. Prior to cooking with it I had been using it as a stand-in model to adjust my studio lights before the professional models arrived for shoots. Butternut’s smooth “caucasian” skin, made it a perfect substitute  for my nude models.

Butternut squash is remarkably versatile. I make soups, various baked and mashed squash, casseroles and desserts with it. And I love the seeds for snacks.

Back in my callow youth, before I met my wife, I dated another Jewish woman. When she described Yom Kippur, I said something like, “you mean it’s a really serious, solemn day when you’re supposed to reflect on all your sins and moral shortcomings, and confess and atone for them?  That sounds depressing! Why would anyone want to do that?”

Since that time I’ve attended Kol Nidre (the evening service of Yom Kippur) for over a quarter century, mostly at Congregation Shalom in Chelmsford where I went tonight. “You don’t have to be Jewish to like Levy’s Jewish Rye”, and you don’t have to be Jewish to experience the cleansing benefits of reflection and confession and refreshed resolve.

Sometimes it’s a challenge - tonight I was melting in my suit. My wife suggested I dress casually because of the temperature, but the idea of attending a religious service in anything less than a suit and tie seems disrespectful. The synagogue was packed - I’ve never seen it so full. And I almost immediately acquired a new thought to atone for when a tall, gorgeous young woman wearing what I can only describe as a cocktail dress, revealing lots of beautiful thigh, sat in front of me.

The choir was very good and the cantor sang in an angelic soprano, but her voice was often forced to compete with this year’s solo instrument - a euphonium. To be fair, it was played well, but there was just a little too much of it for my taste. In the past we’ve had a cello, and more sparingly. I like that better.

Behind me sat a family with two little boys who fell asleep and snored in stereo during the rabbi’s sermon.

Rabbi Shoshana Perry’s sermons have gotten better and better. I used to prefer the previous rabbi - Terry Bard. His sermons were abstract and intellectual - he would take some point of Jewish tradition or liturgy and expand on it, discussing its history and meaning, like a college professor. I relate well to that, and when Rabbi Perry took over - 8 months pregnant - I found her sermons too maternal, or (dare I say it?) too female. She would reflect on her feelings while bathing her baby but I’m not a parent and I could only take her word for it all.

She still sermonizes about her personal experiences - tonight she confessed the dark and empty recesses in her thoughts while she’s alone in her car. But she’s much better at expressing their universality, in this case bringing it all around to the core Jewish identity of questioning and wrestling with the ineffable. Unlike bathing babies, this is something I can understand: the questions, the doubts, the struggle. Tonight she made me feel like a kindred warrior.

But I really wanted to talk about confession. Kol Nidre is about confession. And I’ve often said that this is where the Jews and the Catholics have an insight into human nature that most Protestant denominations lack. My family is Lutheran but, as kids, we went to a Congregational church because no Lutheran churches were handy.

It’s not that the Protestants don’t see the benefits of confession and the healing powers of forgiveness. But what the Jews and Catholics “get” is that people sometimes need a little encouragement to face their shortcomings and to confess. So it helps to institutionalize it in a prominent way, which the Catholics do through the Sacrament of Confession and the Jews do through Yom Kippur.

That’s why it was interesting to read in today’s Wall Street Journal that the Lutherans are reinstating it. In Confession Makes a Comeback, Alexandra Alter reports that in many Protestant churches and all over the secular web confession is the new black. I hope this is a fad that sticks.

The weekend found us in Joisy where we went for two birthday parties - my mother-in-law’s number 80 and my nephew’s number 4.    I returned late Sunday and I’m not even unpacked but things have suddenly hotted up at work with my boss making the totally unreasonable demand that a project I had promised to finish last year actually be delivered sometime this year. Doesn’t he have any sense of literary irony and dramatic tension? Meanwhile a relative of mine is having a personal and financial crisis and we’re trying to figure out how to help in our usual fluttery and dilettante fashion. I wish I was one of those square-jawed testosterone-dripping action heroes who knows how to charge into a situation and confidently bark orders. And on top of that, our little 13-year old Birman has suddenly started to issue op-ed poops about something in doorways and other heavily trafficked areas. He did it again tonight so I scolded him and locked him in his room but we have no idea what he’s trying to tell us.   Albert, our Maine Coon, speaks fluent cat, but he’s no good at translating. 

Still, pears and squash wait for no man.   This is the time of year when everything is coming in from the garden. Tonight I baked the last of our pears into the last of our ginger pear crisp. We’ve made other dishes with pears - chicken and pears, pear chutney , and pears with chocolate sauce, but Jane Brody’s ginger pear crisp is so incredibly good, and it freezes well and is a reliable hit at parties, so we can’t resist devoting most of our crop to it.

I also found myself with two big zucchini bats - the last of that crop this year. Their seeds and skins were too tough, so I cored and peeled them and quartered the fruit. I sauteeded up some big Vidalia onions with extra olive oil and then dumped the zucchini chunks into that sweet mess with some salt and pepper. They finally became soft around midnight so I put the whole thing in the refrigerator. A few hours ago my wife picked about 20 beautiful plump, red, sweet tomatoes, and tomorrow I’ll chunk them up, and make a casserole with them and the sauteed zucchini and some cheese and breadcrumbs. Now it’s time to release the Birman prisoner and join my wife in bed.

We went to dinner for Rosh Hashanah at our friend Naomi’s last night.    We supplied some of the the dessert - an apple crisp made by my wife and our very reliable ginger pear crisp that I make every year - all the apples and pears were from our trees.    Many of the people were from our usual music crowd and it was a great pleasure as always, but I was disappointed that we missed one tradition - usually when we get together on Jewish holidays the musicians play Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, but it needs a clarinet and Peter, our outstanding clarinetist, had to leave early.  

 I was also disappointed that I sat at the wrong end of the table to take part in a lively discussion on the other end about  the Patriots’ scandal. 

I know this isn’t a sports blog, but I’m so incredibly pissed about this.    I’ve been a Patriots fan since the third grade back at the Warren School in Wellesley, when I was a classmate of Patrick Sullivan, whose father owned the team.  We used to hang out at his house on Bay State Road  and play tag football in a small field on Orchard St across from our friend Cynthia’s, house.    It was the Boston Patriots, in the AFL, in those days, and they used to play on some obscure college field, I think.  I attended one game and I remember nothing about it except rain from gray skies and mud and half-empty stands.

Being a Pats fan, lo these many years, has meant enduring a lot, but the new era of Bob Kraft and Bill Belichick and Scott Pioli and Tom Brady made it all worthwhile.   The Patriots were the cream of the crop, the team to emulate, the team to beat, and if there were murmurs of dissent and intimations of Pat’s classlessness from around the NFL, well, that  was probably just sore losers and sour grapes.

But the murmers have become harder to ignore with an unseemly victory display after the San Diego game last year, Belichick knocking over a cameraman, Rodney Harrison’s HGH admission (but I give him credit for manning up to admitting it), and now “videogate”.

I don’t care whether “everybody does it” or whether the Jets ratted out New England as part of some feud between Belichick and Mangini.   None of that changes the fact that it was still an incredibly stupid thing for the “smartest coach in the league” to do.    Already, all over ESPN and Sports Illustrated and reporter phone conferences with NFL players, and a thousand sports forums and blogs on the web, people are asking one question.  How much of the Patriots’ success in recent years and their three Super Bowl Wins was due to cheating?   Personally I don’t think it was a factor.  But that’s irrelevant.  In many people’s minds, now, the stats, the accomplishments, the Super Bowl rings and everything else achieved by six years of hard working, well-prepared, self-sacrificing Patriots players will appear next to little asterisks.   

And that’s the other damnable thing about this.   The Patriots don’t need to resort to subterfuge.  They have so much talent, and they are so well prepared and coached that for them to cheat is like Bill Gates holding up a liquor store.  There is nothing to be gained and everything to lose.

This morning was cool and damp and gray.   The ground was sprinkled with the fiery leaves of fall.   There was a child’s kickball in my driveway – white and blue and pink.

Yesterday I was returning from a run during halftime of the Patriots’ game and I was eager to get home and treat a blister and to resume watching New England trounce the Jets.   A young black lab I had never seen before jumped out of some bushes across the street and charged right at me.   I like dogs but I used to be a paperboy and a census taker and I’ve been chewed up a few times, too.  I had a split second to decide whether I was about to get hurt or make a new friend and luckily I saw the ball by the side of the road.  I grabbed it and rolled it toward the dog.  He soccered it around a few times and picked it up in his mouth – the ball was slightly soft – and brought it back to me.  The game was on.   We played soccer and catch and  fetch all the way to my house where I abandoned him in my driveway looking sad and disappointed when I went inside.   He must have left the ball there when he departed.

Saturday was humid and in the 90’s – maybe the last really hot day of the summer.  I enjoyed it by working in my garden.  

One of my blueberry bushes has died.  It could be from our recent drought but it also might be BSV – Blueberry Scorch Virus.   Unfortunately here in Massachusetts we have no Agricultural Extension Service to call on.   By “we” I’m referring to home gardeners.   The state, in its finite wisdom, decided to cut back the extension service to only commercial growers.  So even though I’m paying taxes for it I don’t get to use it.    If they had eliminated it entirely then commercial alternatives would have arisen to provide plant testing and parasite and plant pathogen lab services that growers need.    But since the state is skimming the cream of that business they short-circuit those market forces so backyard gardeners are stuck with nothing.

Saturday night we had our friends Connie and Mark over for dinner, which included our pears, tomatoes, basil, rosemary, mint, raspberries, and apples.  They just returned from a bike trip in Switzerland where they were scouting out new routes for a bike touring organization.   When they’re not bike-touring they’re building their new house – with their own hands -  an amazing solar-powered, energy efficiency showcase that they designed.   I even got the recipe for the dessert I made on Saturday from Connie.   They also have day jobs.   Whenever I feel tired and listless I think about them and the inspiration renews me!

In the early hours of Sunday morning a thunder storm kept me awake for a long time.  The lightning flashes were so frequent and the thunder so continuous that I couldn’t count the seconds between flash and boom to estimate the distance.  

We haven’t had any real rain in so long that whatever reserve of moisture the soil once had is gone. Every day I pour water directly from the hose, sans nozzle, onto the soil around my squash and tomatoes for a long time and the ground just drinks it in until it disappears. For awhile my plants perk up, but the next day they’re folded and limp again. I’m probably violating the local watering ordinance but what can I do? All the towns around here have tightened up -here we can water lawns 3 hours a day, every other day. Other towns have banned watering entirely.

The rest of my life has been dry, too - no new poems or paintings, no shoots scheduled - I miss my models - and at work I got a new computer before my Bermuda vacation and it still isn’t entirely configured! I went to work on Sunday of the long, Labor Day weekend to try to get some work done and got messages about missing libraries in our software development environment when I tried to build. I work for a Famous Huge International Corporation that You’ve Heard Of, and I cannot understand why even the simplest things are so long and complicated. At home I use essentially the same software development tools as at work and when I buy a new PC I’m up and running in a few hours.

My one big accomplishment in the last few days was finally launching my new music blog: Music4Peter. Music4Peter will cover all my musical interests - from concert reviews to technology to the music business, and unlike the little personal blog you’re reading now, I’m hoping to generate some real traffic on it.

One of my first entries was a review of the Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert my wife and I attended in Lowell on Friday night. Outstanding. Read about it in my blog.

Today we went to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich and stayed there until the sun set, turning the sand and water into ever deeper shades of gold and orange. Afterwards we ate lobster at Woodman’s, a local establishment that for years has maintained legendary status among fried clam and lobster lovers. People drive in from surrounding states and stand in line for an hour for the privilege of eating there, but I don’t get it: my lobster tonight was good, but no better than what I could make at home by tossing one in a pot. The cole slaw was above average; the clam chowder was below average - milky, not creamy. Everything is served in cardboard and styrofoam containers under conditions I would generously characterize as Spartan.

But the worst thing about Woodman’s is its sheer chaos - you place your order and collect your soup and sides at one counter; the lobster is purchased in a separate transaction in a different spot and if you want a beer you buy that in a third place. And it has to be the right third place because if you want to eat upstairs you can’t buy the beer downstairs.  The stairs are on the outside of the building and you can’t take a beer outside in that town, so they have an upstairs bar and a downstairs one and big signs warning you about this. My wife and I bought our drinks downstairs took them upstairs and somehow managed to avoid arrest.  Assembling a meal at Woodman’s is like a Dungeons and Dragons game where you wander about a maze of twisty little passages collecting bits of treasure and avoiding danger. But the treasure at Woodman’s wasn’t valuable enough to make the quest worthwhile.