Catholicism+Wine

An Odyssey

So there I was, back in January, talking with my new bosses at my new job. A condition of being hired to work at my new school was completing the Montessori adolescent training in Cleveland. Was I open to taking this training in June and July? Absolutely, I said.

The next week, I found out I was pregnant. So after months of worrying, and hemming, and hawing, and trying, in the nicest way possible, to get out of going to Cleveland for a month, I am still going to go.

It's either go this summer- when Little P is at his most, well, compliant- or go next summer, when Little P is a 9 month old. And I'm nursing. And I'm in class 9-4. And Mr. P has to come with me and stay the whole time to watch Little P. 

This summer is clearly the better option for travel with baby. And don't get me wrong, I'm not against the training aspect of the program; I know better than anyone that continuing education is exactly what I need. But it's my first pregnancy, and while it's been (thank God) a normal one so far, I can't help but be troubled by all kinds of "what-if" thoughts, images taken from the most drama-laden TLC pregnancy shows. 

(A good antidote to those shows, by the way, is the documentary "The Business of Being Born."

It is a positive look at pregnancy as a normal, healthy process.)

I have a doctor in Cleveland who has agreed to see me for my 7th month appointment. I have my recent medical records and my last RH shot (I'm RH negative).  There's nothing else to do but get on the plane!

I probably won't have much time to post while away, but will have access to the blog. So feel free to contact me or leave comments.

I am, right now, especially interested in comments of the "Hey don't worry, I've had 10 kids and went to Timbucktoo with my 4th pregnancy" variety. Something to give me perspective. So feel free, if you like!

Until the end of July- farewell, and cheers! Please keep Little P and I in your prayers.

Yet Another Reason to Support Your Local Latin Mass...

..... and this reason isn't from a kooky right-winger, or a frowny trad, or anything of the sort.  It's from Camille Paglia:

Elements of New Age sensibility seem to have entered American Catholicism, which in the 1950s was already moving away from its déclassé ethnic roots and Protestantizing itself through a startling drabness of church architecture and décor. The folk songs, Protestant hymns, affable sermons, and literal hand-holding in today's suburban Catholic churches illustrate mellow New Age principles of inclusion and harmony and reinforce the casualness of the vernacular Mass and the slackness of unpoetic contemporary translations of Scripture. Priests, meanwhile, are now being trained to be social workers; theology and learning per se are no longer as heavily emphasized. The priest, with his public performance of the mysterious Latin Mass, was once an embodiment of learning for ordinary people. Latin, which I still believe to be the basis of most strong writing in English, was intrinsic to a priest's official identity and gave churchgoers a moving sense of historical continuity with classical antiquity, when the Christian story began. The priest, in other words, was an educator, just as university education began in the Middle Ages as training for priests.  

         In the wake of the 1960s cultural revolution, organized religion in America has clearly tempered its authoritarianism and tried to make itself more user-friendly. But in this welcome process, which posits the parish as a happy family, what has been lost is the sense of theology as intellectual history, complex and daunting. Jesuit colleges, following the mandate of early Jesuit missionaries to learn native languages and customs, tended to be hospitable to the post-sixties movement for multiculturalism. But I am not aware of Jesuit voices taking a leading role on either side of the public debate over poststructuralism, which seeped into American universities inthe 1970s and early 1980s and has in my view damaged the humanities in ways that it will take a half century to repair. Surely Jesuit professors, with their scholarly training and tradition of disputation, could have been in the vanguard of engaging poststructuralism in its own terms as a putative philosophy and freeing nascent multiculturalism from its grip. Certainly the response to the theory trend by the professoriat at secular institutions was too slow and feeble, so by the time the general alarm sounded, it was too late.   

She can see our cultural obligation- to the centuries of faithful, priests, martyrs, bishops, scholars, saints- to keep Latin and rigorous theology and philosophy alive.  Now why can't we...

PS- She gave this speech at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit college. I wonder how this portion of it was received.

What Are You Doing To Cut Back?

(recycled Zinfandel bottle wine glasses)

You should hear the commercials that wake us up in the morning. I mean radio commercials (no tv in the bedroom is a hard and fast rule in our house).  They go something like this:
(cue emotional music)
old guy: "I don't want to leave my grandchildren with a California that's dry and barren."
responsible sounding middle-aged lady: "A California that's hot and used up, with no farmland."
youngish-sounding man: "You know, it's our planet, it's our state, we need to act now."

And then some kind of public service message about global warming, and then more emotional music (I think it's Debussy's Clair De Lune).

I'm not on board with AlGore's dogma of man-made global warming; the planet has warmed and cooled without the help of man for millions of years.  Regardless of possible warming and its possible source, I don't think that we even NEED a critical, doomsday reason why we should stop dumping things in the water and air, treating the animals that we eat as if they weren't gifts and responsibilities from God, and consuming in ways that would make Nero's head spin. I don't know what it says about us that we have to have AlGore in his undertaker-cut suit standing on a stage, clicking through a gloomy PowerPoint, in order to reform our ways. 

Rather, keeping in mind those who (especially now, with food shortages) have far less than we, and striving to avoid gluttony and idolatry, we should try to imitate the simplicity and humility of the Holy Family.   This isn't a left vs. right thing, or a commie vs. capitalist thing, or an atheist vs. believer thing. True, many of the "green" ideas out there have been entangled with misanthropy and made-up goddess Earth  theology.  But  at their essence, there is no reason why a Catholic cannot embrace practices that are thrifty, don't pollute or pollute less, and try to best express the commandment to "love thy neighbor."

And did I mention the thrifty angle.... well, part of me thinks that a segment of the population is gleefully embracing every penny increase in gasoline. As with the global warming panic, the gasoline price increases  are forcing people to make decisions that other people have deemed said people should have made a long time ago. Certain radical elements of society seem to think that people are essentially stupid, and that they only way you can influence their decision-making is by compulsion. So if BART ridership is way up in the Bay Area because of $4.45 gasoline (that's what it is in our town), then they  say  "Good.  Whatever it takes to get these people on public transit." Unfortunately, this ugly attitude has also leaked into environmentally sound practices (more misanthropy).

So let's strip away all of the earth-goddess, human-hating detritus and get down to one question: the essentials are becoming increasingly expensive. What are you doing to save money these days? Of course, the follow-up statement to the first statement is that it shouldn't take  an empty wallet to make simple, humble  and charitable choices about where you spend money.  We should aim for this moral trifecta even in times of plenty.

Mr. P and I are just now experiencing the demands of parenthood, and Little P still isn't born yet. For four years, we had just each other and sometimes some extra bucks to blow at the end of the month. Unfortunately I acquired some more expensive habits (primarily clothing- and not just any clothing- high maintenance, Anthropologie and Peruvian Connection clothing). We got used to buying books we wanted when we saw them, going out to dinner a little more, the usual. Now I find that the extra bucks aren't there (food, gas, etc). and what bucks there are are going towards insurance payments, baby items and crazy-big mortgage and general living in the Bay Area expenses.

Do I ever think of ditching the Bay Area and moving say to Colorado, my birth state? Heck yes. And I'm a Colorado native, so I wouldn't be like all those other Californians who've invaded that state ;)  But in the meantime, here are our cutbacks.

Take what you might find helpful for yourself. I know that for me to write a post about saving money is like preaching to much of the choir, when it comes to many fellow Catholic bloggers. So PLEASE leave your own tips in the comments- I know I could use them!!

1) cars and gas- actually, not too bad. Yes gas is very expensive, but we have two small cars, a Focus and a Yaris (toyota) and I've really been limiting my driving. I only go to a big-box store town now when I have three or four stops to make there. Otherwise, I'm staying local.

2) We recycle a lot- and yes, this does save us money, because we pay for the smaller garbage bin option (which comes with a recycle bin twice as large). This I know is not necessarily a family option, so is probably less helpful.

3) I'm going to do it- or try it: cloth diapering. And I've already knitted two diaper covers, which is far less expensive than buying all of them. THanks to Amy Caroline for turning me on to this option.

4) Coupons- yes, but not if it takes tons of time out of the day. I find I end up saving more money by doing:

5) Menu planning. And these menus increasingly consist of healthy Mexican, Italian and other less-expensive ethnic foods. Lentils and the like. Beef is more of a splurge thing, unless it's ground.

6) Avoiding pre-packaged food or frozen dinners(Which still make me feel sick, even this far into pregnancy), and definitely avoiding eating out. REstaurants here are amazing- and dinner for two usually costs around $50.00 per person. We'll splurge for something like an anniversary.

7) No dry-clean only clothes. Fortunately, I took up this habit WHILE I had my Anthropologie/PEruvian Connection obsession. So most everything I bought was cotton or something else machine/hand washable.

8) If there's a promo, I'm there. I don't have time for extensive coupon or ad watching, but if I see something on sale, I'll stock up.

9) Thermostat: this is a hard one. I'm almost 7 months pregnant, it's summer, and I feel like a human radiator. What temp. do you keep yours at in the summer? In the winter? Our summer temp.: 74 (mine- Mr. P likes it cooler) Winter temp: 65-68.  Sometimes this works sometimes not.

10) Take back our parents' and grandparents' Depression-Era habits. Maybe not all of them (rubber-band collection, anyone?), but most of them are VERY good. Canning, reusing things like foil and cleaner large Zip-loc bags, eating in season. Fixing things, if possible and economical, instead of throwing them out and buying new (this is increasingly impossible, since things are cheaply made now).

11) Finally; the one indulgence. Limit all other impulse or splurge buying (no Hi Def, no flat screen tv, nothing like that).  But I try to keep one indulgence, and ONLY one. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. I've cut out the special-order coffees at Peet's and Starbuck's (but have only replaced them with ice cream orders at other stores, unfortunately). Regardless, the one indulgence that we could give up, but find that having it gives us a little sanity, is Netflix. Like I said, this could go, too, and we could rely on our library and inter-library loan for dvds, but while we can afford it, we'll keep it. Netflix have an amazing selection of movies (David Niven as Bertie Wooster- who knew?)

Like I said: there's just 11 tips, I could think of possibly more.  But I'm primarily interested in finding out what others are doing. So fire away!

Old news, but good news...

As far as summer movie seasons go, this one is off to a great start! We've seen "Prince Caspian" and "Indiana Jones," and neither disappointed.

I especially encourage readers to see "Prince Caspian." Yeah, yeah, it's not exactly the same as the book; but as far as mainstream entertainment goes, I don't think we could ask for more. Whatever happened to the family movie? Ever since the "Shrek" drek, they've been littered with coy- or not so coy- adult references, stupid passing pop cultural references, burps, farts, puke, you name it. I've posted on this before though, and it's one of my bugaboos.

If a studio were to create something like "Wind in the Willows" today, I'd hate to see what they'd do to the characters. Toad would drive a loud jeep, with naked-girl mudflaps ("wink, wink, nudge, nudge, get it?? naked girls!! har har").  Ratty would be gay- because, well, NO ONE is that well-groomed and polite without being gay. Ugh, I have to stop now, before the deconstruction is complete...

But with "Caspian," we went the whole length of the movie with nary a "booo-yah!" or uproarious digestive noise. See it, when you can- we vote with our dollars, and the better this film does, the more like it they will hopefully make.

I am still with you

Mr. P and I have had an eventful four years and change: we married in 2003, moved to New York City, and I pursued and received my MA.  Meanwhile, both my grandmothers and my grandfather passed away. When we moved back to the Napa Valley in 2005, we were only here a year before my father-in-law passed away and I experienced a miscarriage. Now here we are in 2008, God willing, and everyone seems fine for now. Little P is due in September.

Of all of our family losses, I really find myself missing my maternal grandmother the most. We really connected, and I always admired her. She was a classy, cheerful and loving lady who wrote beautiful letters, by hand, when it would be easier to call. She loved art, especially that of Georgia O'Keefe, and painted many subjects herself. She also crocheted, knitted and embroidered all through her life.

After her passing, when my mom was going through some of her items, a few unfinished projects were found. One of these, a crocheted baby blanket with its pattern, was handed on to me. I didn't really touch it or get it out of the bag it was in for about a year- baby things still made me feel a little "blegh" after the miscarriage, and I also had focused more on knitting.

So about a month ago I took out the blanket to look at it. One of the first things I noticed was the smell of her perfume on the yarn- even after years- and I wasn't sad. I was thankful for this reminder of her. I gave the blanket to my sister and she had the same reaction.  What an unexpected gift!

She completed most of the afghan- so I've decided to finish it.  When I work on it, I'm connected to my mom, who first taught me how to crochet, who learned from her mom; and I'm literally picking up the yarn and going on from where my grandmother left off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please remember Virginia, my grandmother, in your prayers.

The Economist's Tribute to Trujillo

Mr. P and I were eating breakfast, perusing the massive stack of magazines that usually covers our dining room table (it's only cleared off when guests come over). Much to our suprise- just because I don't think that the Economist usually concerns itself with such things- we discovered the following obituary in the May 1st edition. I really recommend that you read it; not only was it illuminating, but it was an honorable tribute to a true "Miles Christi."

Here's the intro; go here to read the rest.

Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, Vatican enforcer, died on April 19th, aged 72

AFP

IN 1995, as head of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo published a “Lexicon of Ambiguous and Debatable Terms”. They included “safe sex” (no such thing, unless confined to the nuptial bed); “gender” (a construct of strident feminists) and “family planning” (code for abortion). He could also throw back a few phrases of his own: “contraceptive colonialism”, “pan-sexualism”, “new paganism” and, with a special lowering of those beetling black brows, “the culture of death”.

People sometimes forgot, when they met the cardinal, that he had studied Marxism as well as theology at the Angelicum in Rome. He could neatly trade jargon for jargon in the propaganda wars. Or he could write books entitled “Liberation and Revolution” to undercut, from the right, the theologians and priests in his native Latin America who thought they had a monopoly on those words. His red cardinal's skullcap was as much a battle statement as the beret of Che Guevara. “Prepare your bombers”, he wrote to a colleague just before the opening of the Latin American Bishops' Conference in 1979. “Get into training like a boxer going into a world fight.” Every day, on every front, this was López Trujillo contra mundum.

The Southern Rhone

... usually known for great wines, but now, for its archaeological finds as well:

PARIS - Divers trained in archaeology discovered a marble bust of an aging Caesar in the Rhone River that France's Culture Ministry said Tuesday could be the oldest known.

The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 B.C. Divers uncovered the Caesar bust and a collection of other finds in the Rhone near the town of Arles — founded by Caesar.

Go here to read the rest .

A little Waugh to get you through your week

With the news that the film version of "Brideshead Revisited" is going to be released this summer, I thought that I'd post this little clip from the mini-series. It's interesting, because warming the glass is something that you never do now- in fact, some people expressly avoid it, as they claim that it alters the wine (one reason why you'll hear people say that you should "never" hold your glass by anything but the stem).

I don't know how good or bad the movie will be- but ah, to taste wine in these surroundings!

Gotta Have It!!

Being a Zin lover.... and a Papist....I was thrilled when my sister told me about this Napa Valley Wine:

The 2006 Trinitas Cellars ratZINger.

from the winery website :

"About this Wine
Trinitas Cellars is proud to present its ratZINger Zinfandel honoring Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who, in 2005, was elected Pope Benedict XVI. In his first papal encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI underscored that love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable - they both live from the love of God who loved us first. This wine is crafted in memory of Monsignor Thomas J. Herron, close friend and collaborator of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who lovingly labored for the Gospel until his death on May 2, 2004. May you and your loved ones experience God’s love."

Spread the word! Or better yet, buy a bottle. $26.00, available at the winery website (see winery site for state shipping laws)

Saturday Cobwebs

It's a sleepy Saturday morning in the valley. Mr. P and I are cruising around on the internet, and Mr. D is dreaming of catching blue jays (probably).  Just a few notes...

 

<sigh> Not only would I not mind being in London, but I would love to assist at this Pontifical High Mass that Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos will be celebrating in June! Read more about it at www.latin-mass-society.org.

On an unrelated note, I'm discovering that the baby goods industry is just as full of marketing and messaging as the wedding industry.  If anything, it is worse: being a new parent, one is worried about "messing up" or not doing things correctly, and there are all kinds of goods out there to "reassure" you that by buying their goods, you're being a better parent. Examples abound.  Magazines are a good place to start if you want to see what kinds of gadgets are out there for anxious parents. I just read an ad about a "Prenatal Education System" that you strap to your belly.  The gadget then broadcasts "lessons" of various sounds to your unborn child. Spending the money on this product and giving your baby these lessons is supposed to yield all kinds of benefits- smarter! more ready to nurse! etc!  I wonder who gets suckered into these things? I recently talked about language development with a professor from BYU. He listed for me all of the abilities that infants have, innately, when it comes to language absorption and retention. An 18-month old, for instance, already knows syntax- well before he even comes close to reading. Babies have abilities that the rest of us will never have again in our lives. And Socrates, and Thomas Aquinas, and Einstein never had prenatal learning systems that their mothers diligently strapped to their bellies.

So some baby stuff is bunk, or at least easy to reject out-of-hand. But then there's the things that are traditional, and can cost a lot of money now: mobiles! wicker bassinets! strollers that look like old-fashioned prams! These are MY Achilles' heel. I almost buy these things, in my happy baby fog.

I realize, though, that darn it, I am a crafty person who was raised by a crafty mom. When we needed costumes, she made them. When our American Girl dolls lacked clothes or fancy steamer trunks, she made them. And she loves doing those kinds of things-and she passed the love of handmade goods onto us. I can knit and crochet, sew a little and embroider. My sister knits even better than I, can make soap, and does wonders with pastels and paper.

I was at the Pottery Barn website. If you want to see expensive items, especially for little people, go there. They have these adorable mobiles- one was even on sale. I was tending towards the sale one, when something shook me out of my consumer stupor: I could make some of these! They had soft, home-sewn stars and moons on them. I think I even made something like these stars for Girl Scouts in 3rd grade. So there's another project to add to the pile. A challenge, really: I want to make this mobile in such a way that no one knows it's been homemade.

I've also been hung up on baby furniture. I NEED a baby dresser, I thought. We're short on closet space. Then I returned to reality, again, and realized that I already have smaller, modular dressers that are even the right color. With new knobs, they will look very nursery-ish. Done, and hundreds of dollars NOT spent.

A dear friend of mine works at a magazine. She sent me copies of tons of wonderful, old baby patterns, mainly knitting patterns. Among them is the pattern, with a whole photo layout, for a sweater that Princess Grace knit for Princess Caroline. Imagine! Even princesses once knitted for their babies, even though, unlike for other moms, the need for knitted items was absent in Princess Grace's case. But other households traditionally relied on home-knit undies and baby items. And here we are now, not even considering that we could make some of the things that we buy. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't HAVE to knit a whole layette set. But as we try to consume and waste less, making certain things from scratch can be really economical. And it cuts the clutter from our lives.

I told you that this was a random post.  I just hope that it didn't add to the clutter of your own day!