Tag Archives: Welsh

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Op eds, New Year’s Resolutions, and the Past

You might think a blogger would love op eds. “After all,” someone might say, “a blog is really just an op ed of a different sort.” Point taken. Yet, hopefully, this blog, is more, even though it purports to be from a residual Welshman, i.e. someone of Welsh heritage so distant that if he doesn’t do something about that, such as each week writing a piece called the Residual Welshman’s Blog, it would be lost.

“Is your ‘Welsh’ heritage really so worthy of preservation?” that same someone might query. “Why don’t you just do what everyone else does—move on, get on with your ‘American’ identity already. Get over this vain preservation of your romantic notions of ‘heritage.’” I’m sorry, this time point not taken.

Why? Because dealing with history, grappling with our own history, is actually not as much cathartic as it is enlightening. We must ask questions about how we got where we are, recognizing that “we” is not simply ourselves but it is the collection of those who made us who we are—our parents, our grandparents and, if we are lucky enough to remember them, our great-grandparents. Yes, as the Bible says, “we are not our own,” though I think St. Paul means what he says there (“and you are not your own” [καὶ οὐκ ἐστὲ ἑαυτῶν], 1 Cor 6:19) in a different way in that passage. There he is talking about redemption. Yet maybe I am, too, or at least what must lead up to redemption, for that same saint explains that you can’t self-redeem any more than you can self-birth or self-resurrect. We are part of a larger, human family, and that human family, like our own family, has problems.

What I am getting at, then, with this blog is the first thing we should do, if we want really to go forward into, say, the new year resolved to be better people—assuming betterment is on your mind at all—is to confront the truth of who we are, how we have become who we are, not forgetting the past but embracing it, confronting it, dealing with it, and maybe even admiring some parts of it. For there just may be some folks in our personal histories we admire. For me there certainly are.

I think a recent op ed. that I reluctantly read but basically agreed with states this pretty well.[1] It’s about confronting the truth, taking ourselves out of our psychological safe spaces and looking hard and long at ourselves and saying, “Well, this needs to change.” And some of that may come with reminding ourselves why it needs to change. Maybe it’s just a matter of being a bit overweight, so for our health, our longevity, and our role in our family or our need to be a good example to others that we need to lose weight. Or maybe it’s something even more serious, like our comportment or something we do that we know our grandparents would never have approved of. Maybe that kind of recollection of the past can urge us to make some changes. Maybe we can learn to forgive more quickly, too—I speak for myself. I know for me, in that sense, my grandparents, who taught me the “law,” as it were, also provide an example of grace.

Thus, as we get ready to launch into the new year, I hope you and I and all of us can exercise the good judgment that hopefully our forebears once did, and be tough enough on ourselves to make the changes that need to be made, while showing the grace to others that, I hope may be true for you, our grandparents once showed to us. Paradoxically it all starts, as every new beginning always does, with the past.

[1] http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/12/26/heres-new-years-resolution-that-can-change-your-life.html

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: The Miners of Shaft 17

French, Welsh, Cornish, English … Here’s a little of each from The Curious Autobiography:

The evidence that James was as good a lunchtime cook as he claimed was noticeable in the miners themselves, for within two years’ time, not a single miner at Shaft 17 packed his lunch, all preferring to buy it from James Jakes’s vending cart. . . .

Further evidence that James was a good cook could be found not only in the fact that the miners stopped bringing their lunches—which engendered not a little friction between those husbands and their wives, particularly among the younger couples—but also in the miners themselves, whose appearance was surprisingly different than the other miners fed at the mouths of the other mine shafts, who brought with them their typical lunch of a pasty (pronounced with a short –ă-, as in “has” not “paste”), the origin of which lunch item is of course not really Welsh but Cornish. The Cornish called these pasties “hoggan.” When the Welsh miners (or, more specifically, when their wives) got hold of that particular food, however, to make it their own, they seemed to have employed the now widely disseminated word “pasta,” which by that time, even in Italy, had begun to serve as an all-purpose word for various different kinds of food. Suddenly, the Cornish “hoggan” was the Welsh “pasty,” with no credit whatsoever given to the Cornish at the time; the pages of history were corrected only later in cookbooks published by honorable Welsh chefs, who felt guilty about the theft of one of the most common lunches prepared by the hands of honest, hardworking Welsh wives. But it was most certainly not pasties that James Jakes made as his specialty, for while a pasty will put meat on the miner’s bones, it won’t thicken him up the way James’s cooking clearly did. James’s specialty was ragoût de veau, a delicious veal stew, the recipe for which had been handed down to him by his father, Charles, who did some of the cooking—especially on special occasions—in the Jacques household, over the not-occasional objections (but to the epicurean delight) of Charles’s wife, Ruth (née Priestman), James’s mother. She was a woman of great faith but of ordinary culinary skill; her specialty was “Missouri” (also known as “Missouri Casserole”), a dish that became my personal specialty dinner, as I had about as much a knack for cooking as my great-grandmother Ruth—edible, quite; delectable, not quite, but rugged, rustic, and good. Missouri consists of ground beef (at bottom), precisely cut slices of peeled potatoes, equally precisely cut onions, and diced tomatoes. James Jakes, however, inherited his father’s unique culinary knack. Accordingly, James expanded his repertoire to include noix de veau Brillat-Savarin, which involved much more than warming some flavorful veal joints. Rather, add to that ample foie gras (which, beyond its use in Strasbourg pie, can be an excellent flavor enhancer for a number of dishes), bacon strips, morel mushrooms, and other various vegetables (chief among them carrots), all in savory béchamel sauce, with a few shallots added at the last minute, to taste—one should always be careful with onion products; perhaps, he added them a bit earlier than the last minute. Of course, the vital ingredient that he added—the key ingredient of any true French chef—was butter. All this on three substantial saucepans cooking on three portable Soyer (which he pronounced in the French fashion, “soy-yeah”) stoves, all at once, with sizable chunks of real French bread—surprisingly, the Welsh miners loved the French bread, for the supply of which my grandfather found a young baker who had a small bakery in Kingston at 334 Pierce Street—put on the side of each plateful served. And these were only two of his numerous French feasts. Among others, one could also find poularde Talleyrand Escoffier (a French dish paradoxically coming from London, a new dish at the time of my grandfather’s culinary apex). On top of all this, even during the dark years of prohibition he discreetly provided for his best customers a small glass of red wine, gratis—small because they had to go back to work, of course. The miners’ wives had no way to compete with these hot dishes, the French bread, or the occasional glass of vin rouge. Although Grandfather James Jakes’s business admittedly never made a great deal of profit—for the overhead for such a miner’s lunch was, one can imagine, high—he did feed the miners well, so well, as I was saying above, that the miners of Shaft 17 had a different appearance from the other miners. That difference could be measured in terms of their size, for they were slowly but surely becoming more and more corpulent. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that the miners of Shaft 17 gained, on average, a solid three inches around their waist per year, stuffed as they were with my grandfather’s scrumptious French cuisine. This led to upheaval because Shaft 17 was the only functioning mine shaft in the history of the Wyoming Valley that had to be recut to accommodate its workers. Furthermore, a greater number of the miners of that shaft had to see their church rectors for marriage counseling than any other shaft. Such was the depth to which my grandfather’s cooking led the miners to descend. Fortunately, I learned from that side of the family not the way of cooking à la française but only the Missouri recipe of James’s good wife, Ann, who was also not Welsh.

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: The Multi-culti Irish

st-patricks-dayThere is nothing sweeter to a Welshman than confusion about the Irish, especially when the confusion comes from the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States (though only a little, in the case of Mr. Pence) and, best of all, from the speaker of the house, because he is actually of Irish descent—nothing sweeter: nid oes unrhyw beth felysach to Cymro. And in this sweetness, the Irish turn out to be rather multi-culti; a bit Irish, a bit Nigerian, and a wee bit Scot.

Why? Well, it stems, I suppose, from the irrational rivalry between the Welsh and the Irish, a contest that we Welsh have pretty much never won. Of course, despite their endless rivalrly, the Welsh and Irish have often been united. Who could forget the Battle of Banbridge, the 100th anniversary of which approaches in July four ywelsh flag blowingears hence? Then Welsh and Irish stood firm against the Scots and English, achieving Irish independence. But not Welsh independence. And that is why, I suppose, the Welsh love it when President Trump gets an “Irish” proverb so hilariously wrong.

What did President Trump do this time, you might be wondering, if you haven’t been following the “Irish in the News” section of your local paper. Well, according to David Quinn of People magazine, in the midst of the visit of Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny to Washington D.C., Mr. Trump quoted (properly in a speech, not a nattering via twittering) an apparently allegedly Irish proverb:

“As we stand together with our Irish friends, I’m reminded of a proverb—and this is a good one, this is one I like. I’ve heard it for many, many years and I love it.”[1]

shamrocksThis was particularly poignant as Mr. Quinn tells it, because there were no less than twenty reporters from Ireland stationed nearby. There was the annual Shamrock Ceremony, during which the American president ritualistically receives a gift bowl of shamrocks. Then, having accepted the gift, the president is called upon, of course, to say a few words. This is when Mr. Trump’s speech went off the rails, so to say, for he cited not an Irish proverb but the second stanza of a poem, “Remember to Forget,” by a Nigerian poet (Albashir Adam Alhassan), of which I quote the first two stanzas here:

Always remember to forget,

The things that make you sad,

But never forget to remember,

The things that make you glad.

Always remember to forget

The friends that proved untrue,

But never forget to remember

Those that have stuck by you.

Ironically, Mr. Alhassan, according to NBC News (in an article by Mary O’Hara and Alexander Smith[2]) is a Muslim. So, how did Mr. Trump go from Ireland to Nigeria, from the celebration of the legacy of a Christian evangelist such as St. Patrick to the gentle but certainly not Irish words of Mr. Alhassan? Can’t answer that one.

While Mike Pence’s “Top of the Morning,” spoken to a select audience representing Ireland at a breakfast that he was hosting at his residence to honor the Irish, drew the overly sensitive twittering response of an Irish journalist by the name of Órla Ryan, who stated in all caps that the expression is not used, still the more hilarious bit came from another Ryan, our very own speaker of the house, who attributed golf to the Irish (when every real golfer knows that it is a Scottish game in origin).

What lessons can we learn about ourselves—whether we are Irish or Welsh or Nigerian or something altogether different—from this series of ridiculous missteps on St. Patrick’s Day? First, perhaps, we can learn to lighten up. We live in an age when everyone takes everything and everyone else (and themselves!) so seriously. Good gracious, can we learn to be gracious again? Second, maybe we should learn some real Irish proverbs, for some are quite wonderful; even a Welshman will admit that. Try this one, a beautiful and no doubt somewhat familiar Irish blessing:

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
And rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.[3]

That’s a nice one, and would have been even nicer than the quote from Mr. Alhassan’s poem. But if Mr. Trump was feeling grouchier, he could instead, had he done his homework, have cited a much stronger verse, also quite Irish, one that doesn’t remember to forget but actually remembers not to forget:

May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Lord himself can’t find you with a telescope.[4]

That’s a lot firmer, as it were, than what Mr. Trump actually said. And given the world in which we live perhaps more appropriate.

But enough of citing missteps that were intended to honor the Irish and making fun of the Irish for it. Let’s close with one more Irish proverb, a good one—multi-culti as it spans all cultures (at least where potatoes grow)—and kind, to boot: “It’s easy to halve the potato where there’s love.” I like that one.

And now, to quote the vice president, “Top of the morning to you!”

irishpoem

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-head-scratching-proverb-more-175229251.html

[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/did-trump-s-irish-proverb-come-nigerian-muslim-poet-n734896

[3] http://www.marksquotes.com/Irish/proverbs.html

[4] http://www.marksquotes.com/Irish/proverbs.html

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9781480814738_COVER.indd

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Mars and French Food

north windAnyone who has ever been outside in a severe and bitingly cold wind knows what wind can do to your face, if you have not wrapped yourself with a scarf. It can dry out your face, crack your lips, and shiver every timber of your being. It can, in short, almost take your face away, if you don’t protect it.

Even on Mars, apparently, there have been such winds, no doubt colder and more severe than even the bitterest of such winds on this planet. Solar winds (gusts supercharged by particles from the sun) have recently been determined—thanks to the interestingly acronymed “MAVEN” observatory spacecraft—to have taken away Mars’ atmosphere.[1] These same wind-driven particles would sweep ruinously over our own planet, too—and do touch down here, but only at the poles, creating our spectacular northern lights

Northern Lights
Northern Lights

—if it were not for our robust atmosphere, an atmosphere held in place simply because of our planet’s fiercely abiding magnetic field. In other words, when Mars lost its sense of north and south, its compass as it were, Mars surrendered its atmosphere to the winds. This did not happen all at once, scientists believe; it happened slowly over time until finally the winds dominated the atmosphere that had once protected and have entirely reshaped the landscape.

IDL TIFF file

Even the dust that covers its surface is foreign to Mars. What appears to us to be, and has long been called the red planet, was once not red at all. It was once a fecund place, or at least had the possibility to be so. It might have looked a bit like earth. It might have been able to sustain life, even if not that of Matt Damon, MattDamon Martianat least some kind of life. Yet when Mars lost its atmosphere, it lost its capacity to do so. Oceans, rivers, everything that could have produced agriculture, and culture, were gone.

My great-grandfather died before I was born, as most do. (His story is recorded in the Curious Autobiography [pp. 169–73], where he is correctly portrayed as a chef for Welsh miners.) He brought his cultural identity—French, in his case—as a contribution to his existing family culture, of which at that time was predominantly Welsh. I was thinking about him (and Mars) recently because, even as I write this, I am in France attending a colloquium. (The colloquium is on philology, not the most poultry area of study these days. If you wish to know more about this “p” word, I commend the fine book along with the series based on it: Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith. Portuguese verbs)

Aside from the obvious, such as being in France, sipping coffee in a delightful cafe or the occasional glass of Bordeaux, and superb French dining (from one dish of which I affix a recipe below, one that I understand from family lore my great-grandfather prepared, though what you will see below is not his recipe precisely, but my own recollection of what I ate just a few days ago), one interesting facet of such a conference is the opportunity for rich dinner-time or happy-hour conversations. Such conversations usually are held in numerous “scholarly” languages: German, English, Italian and, of course, French. (It was lamented by at least one Italian philologist that the Spaniards are so sorely underrepresented.) Nonetheless, in case you’re wondering, Mars was not discussed, so I will not yet tell you why I opened with that semi-scientific ramble. Instead, as is often the case with my European friends and acquaintances, topics that come up rather naturally are food (a tasteful subject, of course), life’s difficulties (particularly fiscal problems and taxes), politics, and sex (though chiefly only insofar as sex relates to political issues such as population growth or how impractical having children is, which of course it is for philologists). The first two of these—that is the incongruous coupling of food with worries about the economy—normally dominate the discussion, though I prefer the last of these topics, because I, in fact, like children. Yet at this philological “colloque” (to use the French appropriately), a rich discussion arose about cultural identity. So again, as I said above, I thought of my French great-grandfather, James Jacques, who bore in his person the family name that would later be spelled Jakes and would itself incongruously represent a culturally Welsh family.

To my new European friends, the problem was clear: the bitter chill of a wind of a new cultural identity has begun sweeping across the continent. This chilling wind was not, in the eyes of the person who was speaking to me with a low voice—low not out of shame or embarassment but out of, it seemed to me, grief or desperation—welcome. When I say “in the eyes of” this well-educated, middle-aged Italian professoressa (as such female educators are there known), I speak not of her opinion, but of the clear sense of sadness that I could see in those eyes.

“Italy’s borders are porous,” she said, “there is sea everywhere . . . Tanti musselmani vengono. So many Muslims keep coming in. Have you been to Genova?” She asked me. I nodded. “The culture there—the Italian culture is overrun. It is the same in France. Have you been to Marseilles lately?” she added. “We in Italy are losing our cultural identity. We are losing our food, our country, our heritage.”

Impolitically I added, “Some of that you sadly gave up when churches became mere museum pieces and when you gave your lire up for the Euro.”Lire billEuro

“It’s terrible,” another added despondently, “the loss of the lire, I mean.”

As the conversation ran its course, it became clearer and clearer to me that the professoressa (or any of the Italians present) was not “islamophobic.” She was not a hater of anything new or different. They all had high regard for religion and the shared moral code—what C.S. Lewis calls the “Tao,”[2]—that religions can offer. She was merely stating, as gently as she could, the difference from the old days and the way cultural acceptance is nowadays mandated in a politically correct world. She was affirming but lamenting the obvious: now, instead of the immigrant trying, but ultimately failing, to hold on perfectly to his heritage, he expects society (and society tells him to expect) to accommodate his every wish. He expects full inclusiveness, so that if an author were to be foolish enough to write “he” instead of “he or she” or “he/she” or, now I have also read, “zhe” (for which many a German is secretly rejoicing), or viley to use “they” as if it were the singular pronoun, they would no doubt be pilloried, mocked, or at least corrected.

Yet as I am not politically correct (though I do try to be polite), I not only did not rebuke her, but agreed that the immigrant needs to adapt to the culture, not the other way round. “But we are losing our culture, and I am not sure what can be done about it,” she said raising her voice the way one might at the end of a sentence with a question.

At this point I want to be clear: this fine person was not saying that Italy and Europe should not have a heart for the poor and disenfranchised. Rather, she was saying that in her view solar-charged winds are blowing, winds capable of wiping out a culture. And she is right. “When I was in Paris,” one of the other interlocutors said, “I heard the subway announcements in French and Arabic.”

And then I thought again about Mars, and my great-grandfather. Mars was overrun by winds that destroyed its atmosphere. That happened because it lost its magnetic field. It lost its sense of north and south.

“Europe has lost its moral compass,” another added. “I remember when my grandparents would eat their dinner—even in a restaurant like this one, they would cross themselves and say a blessing—every time! Now, well, nothing, just ‘Buon appetito!’”

And then I thought, yet again, of Mars. It lost its atmosphere because it lost, as it were, its compass. That compass, for Europe had long been not some new, insufficient and intolerant form of impolitical political correctness. It has been, rather, for lack of a better word, the Church. “Now no one crosses himself,” she added, a few seconds later, despondently.

So I close this blog not with an answer, not the answer Elaine Jakes at the close of her autobiography espouses I once gave to a dour presbyter in Wales (Curious Autobiography, p. 253) but with a question. Has America lost its moral compass? Are we more concerned about accommodating others, so worried about ensuring the privileges of a few that we actually harm and debunk the rights of all? My French great-grandfather cooked in the French manner, but what he offered was a contribution to a preexisting society; he did not make demands of it. Even the predominant ethnic group learned the language of Pennsylvania, English. I have learned to speak Texan (as best I can). I would not expect Texans to adopt my predominently Phillyesque accent. Or cook me cheessteak at a barbecue. But I ask again, are we so worried about the privileges of a few that we could actually harm the rights of everyone? If we bow to the demands of a politically correct world, could we soon wind up in the position that Europe now finds itself?

You ponder that one. I will return to my delightful French food. I recommend the potato dish, below. I just had it in Claremont-Ferrond, a city so nice they named it twice.

Tartiflette[1] CNN news (11/5/2015).

[2] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, passim.

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: The Meaning of Life

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Chris the sheepThe topic of this week’s blog may appear, at first blush, a bit unlikely, for perhaps you’re wondering who would be so pretentious as to blog about the meaning of life? I must be kidding, right?

But I’m not. Rather, it donned on me (the meaning of life, I mean), when I saw a picture of a sheep named Christopher in the news. According to the Associated Press article, the poor fellow was lost for several years in the Australian scrubland—a land I had never hitherto known existed—and, when his wool was removed, it yielded roughly 89 pounds of the stuff. The article said it was about half the body weight of the animal. That’s a hefty animal and a lot of yarn. Such an amount of wool apparently can provide one sweater each for thirty people. yarn-dyed

And that’s when it donned on me: I’d stumbled upon the meaning of life. And it’s not merely because I like sheep and can, thanks to Elaine Jakes’ having bought a farm (ch. 9 of The Curious Autobiography) when I was but a teenager, do a near perfect sheep voice imitation. Wherever I go, sheep are seriously impressed when I make a bleating sound (which, I’ve been told, echoes all too well the female mating-call). Nor is it because I happen to have been to Reykjavik, where I’ve seen and smelled some of the finest woolen sweaters in the world, sweaters that themselves still rather smell like sheep. (As I was but a student at the time, I hadn’t the money to purchase one; besides, it is normally far too hot in Texas to wear one). Nor is it because it is a Welsh family tradition to celebrate Easter with a meal of lamb. Nor is it because I am interested in metaphoric vocabulary derived from animal behavior: bull-headed (rather Minotaurish, isn’t it?); creepy (centipedish); catty (how fitting is that one?); jackass (need I say more?); mule-headed (definitely referring to the mentality); piggish (if you’ve seen a pig eat, you’d understand); rabbity (perhaps my favorite); birdlike (a bit too obvious, though “featherweight” is rather nice); squirrelly (entirely self-evident); lion-hearted (too little used any more); and, of course, sheepish. Yet I need not mention that one. And obviously none of these, nice as they are, sheds any light on the meaning of life. Rather, only this heavy-laden sheep does.

wool sweatersNow before I should dare divulge life’s meaning we need to consider something about sheep that is sometimes deemed offensive and certainly, among the most vociferous of sheep-rights activists, politically incorrect in the telling (non rectum reipublicae dictu). No, I do not mean to say here that sheep are stupid. That is a cliché; besides, to tell the truth, sheep have actually come out better than expected on their aptitude tests. There is no sense in perpetuating a false stereotype.

Besides, I would prefer to rehearse some interesting facts about sheep of which one might simply be unaware. First, even after many years, they have a remarkable memory, like elephants; they can also show emotion more readily than many other animals. And, apparently they can remember (or they know instinctively) which medicinal plants to eat when they are ill. Finally, they can even recognize (or at least mother ewes can) the bleat of their own offspring. In other words, sheep may not seem very much like us, but in many ways they are.

Which brings us back to the meaning of life. Before we can state in a mere blog in 1500 words or less what the meaning of life is, we must establish that sheep, like humans, no matter how stupid they may seem—and if one reads the news, it is not difficult to discover that we humans, even to our fellow human beings, can seem very stupid—are in fact not unintelligent. They are, in that sense, humanlike. I shan’t be sheepish about stating it plainly: a sheep can provide a very apt metaphor for a human being.

Unless we bear that in mind, we can’t discover the meaning of life, nor can we understand William Blake when he writes:

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.

By the stream & o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee,

Little Lamb I’ll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

William Blake, "The Lamb," from Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake, “The Lamb,” from Songs of Innocence and Experience

Blake, in his second most memorable poem—“The Tyger” being the most memorable, though “Jerusalem” is my favorite—long before the sheep intelligence study of scientists here tells us the same thing that the scientists have confirmed, namely that sheep are very much like human beings. When he writes “By the stream, and o’er the mead,” it is hard not to detect an allusion to the green pastures and still waters of the twenty-third Psalm, a poem that perhaps needs no introduction for most readers .

Both poems, Blake’s and King David’s, point in the same direction. They point toward the meaning of life. They suggest it, without quite stating it. But the oversized wandering Australian sheep perhaps says it better than even the psalm or Blake, or any scientific study about sheep, even the I.Q. test on which the sheep—and I assume there was more than one of them, for otherwise the results could be skewed, if Albert Einstein sheep Albert Einstein sheephappened to be the sole test-taker—out-performed, presumably, cows, goats and gazelles. And so it is that the sheep in question, the living Chia-pet king of wooliness, Chris, by his mere presence said, when he wandered back in sight of humankind, “I need help. Can you please shear me?”

And that is the answer to the riddle, “What is the meaning of life?” As without help Chris would surely have died, crushed under his own coat, the answer must be that we need each other; that we must help each other. We were born to do that. We reproduce, look after babies and care for our families simply to fulfill that unspoken charge. Many of us will be blessed to care for (sic) aging parents for whom we are privileged to do that. If we are living correctly, our lives won’t so much be about ourselves as about others. We will take the time to sheer each other’s wool, to gather it, to make sweaters for the poor; we will take the time to love each other from the heart. The world tells us “You, and you alone, matter, and you can do whatever you want in this moment.” But then it turns right around and says, “Get with the system, do the trendy.” The unstated premise is simply that so long as you stay current and don’t look back to the past or forward to the future, you’ll be okay.

But Chris the wandering sheep tells us something else. He says, “Remember me.” He says, “Help me.” He says, “Let me have a future, don’t let me die.” He also says, and Blake says it for him (and for the tiger), “The one who made you, made me; we are in this thing called life together.”

Yet I don’t mean to imply mere mammalian reciprocity. Again, the world might just settle for a bit of that. But Chris’ story is different: he is not offering reciprocity but is providing a metaphor for the relationship of the human and divine. Chris needs our help, and the mere fact that he exists demonstrates to us what we were made for and that we, too, have needs that only someone higher than us, in our case much higher, can fulfill. Our existence, our pathos, sorrow, grief, wretchedness, and—dare I say it?—sin shows our deficiency in the same way the Chris’ wool shows his ever-waxing need. How ironic, then, that Blake’s little ditty suggest, too, that the lamb should be, like King David in his youth (or a still greater king), a child.

You may yet be wondering about the meaning of life. In case I haven’t been clear, I shall be now. It is, from one point of view, denying yourself to serve others. From the other point of view, it is, simply put, acknowledging how wooly life can get. Blake says the rest; if you don’t like Blake, take heart, you’ll get another crack at it: Christmas season is just around the corner, the stuff of another blog—rather a series of blogs about life once upon a time in a little town beneath a great arbor. In the meantime, whether with a ringer’s precision[1] or snagger’s compassion,[2] he who has Wolseley’s[3] to shear, let him shear.

[1] Quickest shearer; cf. https://www.facebook.com/ipaustralia.gov.au/posts/528059677247932.

[2] Slowest shearer.

[3] Electric shears.

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Treasure Box

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This week I was doing in late August what many of us do in the springtime; I was going through a closet, cleaning out a box or two that need to be cleaned out I admit that I did not get very far. The reason for that is I did the other thing that most of us, or at least many of us do: I slowed down to think about what I was doing. I paid attention to each object I extracted from the box. Some were pens that no longer write—one in particular stood out. There was a stickpin flag, a toy soldier, a napkin with a bible verse and a date written on it in my grandmother’s handwriting. These objects retarded my progress in cleaning out the box, indeed they prevented me from doing it at all, for I treasured all that I found.

“But of course you did not finish your task,” you might think, if you’re familiar with the Curious Autobiography, “You’re Welsh, wallgof (‘kooky’) man, and I know from that book (and perhaps from knowing Welsh folk) that the Welsh are known, among other things, for sentimentalism.” I don’t mean to coopt your speech or thought, but rather I merely state this much as a point of full disclosure before perusing with you the objects of the box and distilling together their importance, their value.

pencil caseAs I peered into this box—itself quite old, well tattered on the edges, and (from its appearance at least) no treasure box—it donned on me fairly early on that Welsh nostalgia might just kick in. It did, of course. It began with the aforementioned pen. That instrument was preserved in an old zipper case that had printed upon it the words, “Pocmont Lodge, Bushkill Pa,” no doubt a souvenir that my mother, Elaine had picked up on a childhood family vacation in the Poconos. Though the pen no longer wrote—nowadays a refill for this particular kind of pen would be nigh impossible to find—the pen and its case nevertheless presented themselves to me as objects of beauty. Like Elaine once did, her pen had written what it had to say, having poured out all of its ink in the pursuit of storytelling. In the case of Elaine’s pen, such storytelling was a frequent occurrence. The pen’s value lies, therefore, in its enabling her story, its facilitation of a story’s significance, which, in a nutshell, in the Curious Autobiography is a journey home not to a physical place but a spiritual one—a home that is more real than the house she grew up in on Rutter Avenue and lasts forever.

Poconos MountainsThe flag pin belonged to Harry, her father. It had in days gone by been displayed on his lapel, once ogled by little children who felt deep in their souls the patriotism of that period of time immediately after the Second World War. As I beheld it, I could hear the big bass drum of a marching band passing by that played the national anthem in a grand celebratory parade. So I imagined. Those years long ago were not merely a season of patriotism; they were a time when Americans knew that an evil force had been eradicated and hoped vainly that an evil and racist ideology had died with it. Sadly, evil ideology is alive and well, and about racism, unfortunately I hardly need comment. Like the pen, the flag pin continued and still continues to tell its story, symbolizing in a single object a narrative much more important than itself, the constant struggle for America to be a better nation than it is.

lead toy soldierThe toy soldier told the same story but from a strikingly different point of view. Wrought of lead, so not up to modern child-safety standards, it had been my own toy soldier, though it was manufactured, I surmise, many years before the day it was given to me as a gift when I was a lad. My guess is that it dates to the 1940s. This tiny figurine was the model of a World War II American fighter who stands fast, gun in hand. “He seems to be facing battle,” I thought as I turned his tiny, paint-chipped clad figure about between in my right hand. “Would he approve of our wars today?” I mused, recalling having reenacted in playtime as a child many a fictional World War II battle with this fellow. How much have things changed. What does this little man who defies time, stuck as he is for years at a stretch in a closet, think of the modern world each time he is yanked out of his foxhole-like box to see the light of day again? Would he stand and fight for the current iteration of America? I hope so, as I had always fancied him a hero.

clothFinally there was a napkin, or rather a slip of cloth, possibly cut with rounded pinking shears, a term that itself has a rather archaic ring, upon which my grandmother had written—for to this day do I know her handwriting—a bible verse: “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.” Now my thinking slowed down to a crawl. I ruminated, “Does this verse mean anything to anyone anymore? Who gets it anymore?” I wondered, “Who cares these days about living a ‘godly’ life, dwelling in the house of the Lord? Isn’t everyone in it for themselves, for what they can get? Yet perhaps,” my thoughts wandered on, “just perhaps, the final thought about beholding the beauty of the Lord might still wake us up from our collective slumber. Might we care to seek after the beauty of God?”

These were some of the valuables in this box. The pen was from a time when each person’s life was a story that touched upon other people’s stories, when you might still find your way home. The flag pin suggested to me a country united, where one could rely upon one’s sweet neighbor for a cup of sugar, and where one did not “friend” an electronic face but might befriend a stranger in need. The toy soldier represents what I hope it still does, a hero, perhaps not so easy to find anymore, though in recent days, three such heroes or so showed up on a French train and thwarted a radicalized terrorist; such heroism is rare. And finally the slip of material. It is cut from a very different cloth than one usually finds, and it bears a very different message than the political correctness of today’s world. Like the first object, it points homeward, to a place where virtue is alive and well, abiding in heroes’ hearts.

In that box I found four objects far more valuable than merely “valuable,” for they are bearers, each in their own way, of a world, if bygone, still worthy of emulation. They were once perhaps normal patches of this country’s tapestry. “Was each person’s story happy in those days, was it then a perfect world? Were there not sad, profoundly tragic moments then?” someone might ask. Most assuredly there were. Yet every individual, or at least many more than do today, saw their life, their story as a part of a grander narrative, a narrative that made up a community, a country, a world, in a universe in which God gives meaning to each person’s life.

These objects have significance because they represent values. Their value is not the kind one might find on Antiques Roadshow. Their values are transcendent: a story, an anthem, a hero, and God on a napkin. I did not put aside the objects in the box to mourn the loss of those values and virtues in this dark world. Rather, I put them up to write this, for those values are not gone; they abide in the hearts of those who take time to look within the treasure box.