Ash Wednesday

For a number of years I got stuck on Psalm 51, particularly the line "I am a sinner from my mother's womb" (in the translation in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer). But this year what struck me were some lines from Psalm 103:

11
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so is his mercy great upon those who fear him.
12
As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our sins from us.

I went to the 7 am service and our interim priest was enthusiastic with the ashes. If my students ask me about the ashes I am happy to talk about it, but it feels awkward to bring it up if they don't ask. I think I should have--after my first class a woman who is sitting in on the class as a typist for a deaf student came up to me and asked me what happened to me. She thought it was a bruise, that I had been in a nasty accident.

what moved me Sunday

From St. Francis, by Nikos Kazantzakis, St. Francis speaking:

Deep down in the bowels of every man, even the saintliest ascetic, there sleeps a horrible, unclean larva. Lean over and say to this larva: "I love you!" and it shall sprout wings and become a butterfly.

fish

I went to Dekalb Farmers Market Saturday--it says something about living in rural South Carolina that I happily drive two hours each way several times a year just to buy food. One of the things I usually buy there is fish, as Sams Club has good salmon but not much else is good here. The bluefish were too small and so I hesitated and then bought a 10 lb striped bass. I grew up eating striped bass from the Atlantic Ocean, but they have become a significant fish in southern freshwater lakes, and this was listed as a lake fish. The interesting thing about buying whole fish at Dekalb is they don't clean it until you buy it. The person cleaning my fish asked me if I wanted the head (my daughter vetoed that) and whether I wanted the roe. I was surprised but said yes, so I got a set of roe looking very much like shad roe. I cooked it like shad roe with butter, vermouth, lemon rind, and capers and it tasted similar but was considerably softer, almost creamy.

We ate the fish baked last night and tonight I will make chowder. I've always made a chowder with bacon, onions, potatoes, fish stock and cream. Since I don't use potatoes any more I decided to check recipes, and interestingly the fish chowder recipe Legal Seafoods has on their web site doesn't include potatoes. I will reduce the amount of fish stock and then I can certainly skip the flour. I'm torn whether I consider bacon is an essential ingredient or whether I want to try their recipe as written.

update: It was good, but I missed the bacon.

dialect

A very interesting quiz that will tell you what dialect you favor. I scored as barely yankee, which I suspect does reflect how long I have lived in the south now (getting close to half my life). Thanks to Chutry Experiment.

fashion

A friend pointed out that the newspaper article about the car accident says of my father: "At one time, when he was a sophomore at harvard, his talent at fashion design won him the editorship of the fashion section of the Radcliffe News." My friend was pointing out that this was ironic, as I am as uninterested in fashion as you can get. My father ended up an art historian working for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in what used to be called the Department of Decorative Arts.

legal records

Five years ago I did some research on my father's death in an automobile accident in 1958 and obtained a death certificate and found out that the driver of the other car plead guilty to manslaughter. Suddenly now I am back obsessed with the topic again, and it is very frustrating trying to find more information. What I need is someone in Massachusetts who would be interested in doing a little research for me, but all I can find is endless companies that do background searches of court records for the last 7 years. I can't figure out how to find an individual who does such work and would be able for a reasonable cost to look at the last 40 years.

humor

The thing that cheered me up today was When Encountering a Stop Sign, which I happened upon thanks to Baraita.