[lit-ideas] Re: Windy Whim
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:38:35 -0700
On Oct 19, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Ursula Stange wrote:
who spent yesterday afternoon drinking red wine on the front porch
and watching the neighbour's maple leaves rattle and skip down the
beautifully sunshiny street. A treat for the heart...
John in New England and Ursula in North Bay are undergoing color
therapy. I've been doing sound and taste:
Harold V. Prickett, Elmyra Lene Wege Willimont, Eskel Leroy Etling,
Lilian Mary (Kouyoumjian) Young, Patricia Parker Larsen, Judith Sue
Routson-Nelson, Milton F. 'Chick' Hettenhouser, Hazal Maria Ingeborg
Phillips, Clayton Melvin Couture, Richard G. Lubawy all trip off the
tongue or are somehow fun to say out loud. All were in yesterday's
obits.
Saturday night was all I could have wished, all I did wish, come to
be. The recipe E. passed to me for spicy mussels, on close
inspection went in a direction I didn't want to pursue--removing the
mussels from their shells and letting them sit in sauce. I like
mussels to be hot, fresh and still in their shells. So I made a
recipe up, from first principles and, lo, it was Good. People who
apologized, said they didn't eat mussels, ate platefuls. Five pounds
of mussels disappeared in no time. As did the biggest bottle of
wine. A couple of years back I bought in Trader Joe's a very big
bottle. That's how it was filed in my mind--more wine than you can
drink on a normal or small occasion. On Saturday everyone wanted to
know what the bottle itself was called. It turns out that the name
for a big bottle of champagne and a big bottle of Bordeaux are the
same, but it's not the same size bottle in each instance; a Jeroboam
of champagne is four liters, a Jeroboam of Bordeaux is six. Since
this was four liters of Italian wine, we settled on Jeroboam because
we didn't fancy Imperial, Methuselah, Mordechai, Salmanazar,
Balthazar or Nebuchadnezzar. Did you know there's such a thing as a
forty liter bottle of wine? It's called a Melchizedek. One of you,
the Rev. Geary possibly, has probably given a sermon with him in it,
but I had to look him up. Very popular with Armenians apparently. I
suppose, living a tad closer to Salem or the Oregon wine country than
I do, there might be some reference to him in Robert Paul's
neighborhood. If so, I've not noticed it.
Do you think they name wine bottles on some kind of sobriety test
principle? "You can pronounce 'Melchizedek,' go ahead and wreck your
brain."
Perhaps at this stage I should mention that there were eleven at the
table and the meal went on a long, long time? Whoops. Four liters
sounds like a lot, so I went to check the bottle. Three liters. We
only managed a double magnum. Of that. With lamb and four kinds of
roast potato and brussels and peas and salad and a chocolate cake
made by a friend and Costco's pumpkin pie. Possibly tending towards
the gluttonous, but certainly convivial. Sunday's tennis eventually
burned off all heavy effects.
After people left, and again on Sunday--two halves to the show-- L.
and I watched a movie based on a play, "Proof." Generally I am in
favor of movies based on plays; you get more interesting dialog.
This one I'd describe as "slender." The plot: mathematician loses
contact with reality--there's a new notion!--and while his daughter
cares for him, she discovers she has hitherto unnurtured mathematical
ability. There's an uncomprehending sister and an untrusting
boyfriend and that's about the un-shape of it. Like many a place,
pleasant, but not much there, there.
Now onward, possibly to examine my dream about forgetting how to get
a bus to Beckenham Junction, which was half of my journey to school
and which, unfortunately, was what got me up betimes this slightly
dreary morn.
Good wishes, all,
David Ritchie,
dipping into his new (1822) Walker's dictionary and finding
"sarcenet," "fine, thin woven silk."
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