Devshirme

Today our family attended the premier Worcester cultural event of the season – the St. Spyridon Preschool Art Show/Open House.  The children as well as Ms. Jenn and Ms. Jackie worked very hard for five weeks in preparation for the opening.  The students learned about artists like Albers, Monet and Pollock while being exposed to a variety of mediums.  They tried their hands at many new creative art experiences, and the results speak for themselves.  The open house/art show continues Sunday after church – make sure to check things out.  Here are some photos:

The room was reconfigured for the event for maximum ease of passage and display surface:

Here is a mobile that Vaia made, as well as her self-portrait:

We had something a little different tonight at the Cathedral for a Lenten Friday.  Today was the feast of the Annunciation, and so tonight we celebrated the vespers for the synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel, which is celebrated on March 26.  So we did a vespers service and, towards the end before the trisagion prayers and after the hymn of Symeon (Lord now let your servant depart in peace), we had the third stanza of salutations.  There was no reading of the compline (Aspoile/Spotless) or chanting of the canon.  The chanters and priests managed to put the service together between the skeleton form in the liturgicon as well as the special material sent to us by the Metropolitan.   It was nice to do something different.  Before church I started talking to the older women who come to every service – God bless them – and explaining the different service we were having.  They all knew it already because they had watched a church broadcast from Greece several hours earlier.  It dawned on me that these stalwart attendees not only come to every – every! – service but they also watch all of the ones from Greece on the Greek channel.  What dedication!

They reminded me of the elders in my own family.  My great-grandmother was from Naples, Italy and came here way back in the day.  We have her wedding photo, where she was probably all of 15 years old, hanging at my ‘rents’ house.  She would go to daily mass and then amble over to the rectory to get the key to let herself into the church every afternoon to pray.  She did this every day for decades!  She was a very sweet woman, although she never hesitated to raise a fist in warning – the equivalent to the wooden spoon – koutala – of Greek grandmothers.  Ma, as we all called her, was the first person I mentioned in my “statement of intent” when I was ordained.  This is the moment in the ordination where you thank everyone from along the way and talk about what you hope to do and find in ministry.  I gave Ma the honored first position because, well, she certainly deserved it.  I was blessed to have her in my life until my second year of college, and I thank God for even that limited amount of time.

Sunday evening Prez and I went over to Mishana’s ‘rents to celebrate Persian New Year and had a wonderful time.  Sunday was the first day of spring, although you certainly wouldn’t know it here in New England, and many cultures have this time as a holiday.  It was traditionally the start of the Assyrian new year, which is now celebrated April 1, and it is of course Purim.  This was our first time celebrating the holiday in the traditional manner.  Mish and her family coached us through the various parts.  A highlight was the attempt to balance an egg on its end at the very moment of the equinox – 7:20pm.  Here is a picture of Mishana and her cousin trying it.  We filmed it but alas – this year it was not meant to be:

Here is a gathering of many of the traditional items – you can read the Wiki article to get details on each.  The items have all been part of it for many years – only the Qur’an is a later addition:

The bushy thing in the foreground is sprouted lentils.  In Iran the thing to do would be to float them down the river to, as I understand it, send bad things away.  If there is no river nearby you just put them outside for the rain to take.

Of course there was food.  Again, the Wikipedia article breaks it all down.  Everything was delicious and we were able to keep the lenten fast – there was fish and rice and vegetables.  After I gave the blessing Eleni and I ate – believe me – and we were full but not stuffed unlike, say, at a typical Greek event.  The food was all light and fresh, and there was no cheese or bread, which of course are huge in Greek meals, so maybe that was it:

Again, it was a fabulous evening, and the best part of it was the company – what a joy to be with everyone for this celebration.

I mentioned in the subject celebrating the New Year twice.  Earlier in the day, Jasmin, who is Persian, was baptized in our church.  Adult baptisms are always special, but this one had an interesting twist – Jasmin chose to enter the faith on this day because it is Persian New Year and therefore a fortuitous time for the new life that comes not just with spring but also baptism.  So this joyous event was in a way our first celebration of the holiday on Sunday.

Blogging has been almost non-existent around here lately, so I decided to challenge myself (and anyone on Facebook who is interested) by attempting to blog for the 40 days of Lent just as I did for the Preachers Institute’s Advent blogging exercise.  I even got Fr. Peck’s cyber-blessings to do this, so here goes…

Today is Clean Monday.  Interestingly, in Greek the term is Kathara Deutera rather than kathari – an adverb is used rather than an adjective.  ”Cleanly” Monday is more awkward but probably more accurate.  For most of us, this begins the true Lenten fast.  This year I am doing the complete vegan thing, with exceptions for fish at mercy meals and the like.  We emphasize the spiritual aspect of fasting – the introspection, almsgiving and focus on prayer that goes with it rather than the food part, but there is also a physical aspect to this.  Fasting has its origins, I imagine, as a “preview of hell” – not eating food is bad for you and makes you miserable.  Our fasting, which is not a total abstention from food as it was back in the day, is an exercise in focus and sacrifice.  It also has many health benefits.  I am increasingly convinced that a vegan, or at the very least a vegetarian, lifestyle is the way to go.  One of these Lenten seasons I am going to go vegan and never go back.  I am not going to go into it too much here – there is a ton of material available on the web analyzing the benefits and potential risks of a vegan lifestyle.  I am writing this merely to emphasize that while the spiritual stuff is more important for us (and as the Bible tells us what comes out of the mouth is more important than what goes into it) we should not discount the cleansing goodness of the Lenten eating lifestyle.  More tomorrow.  Tonight we have compline/apodeipnon service, as we will every Monday at the Cathedral during Lent.  We have not done this service since long before I came to Worcester, so it will be a nice restoration as well as another tool to help us refocus ourselves during the forty days.

I turned 38 today.  All things considered, I feel pretty much the way I did when I was 37.  Naturally, though, with turning a year older I have been thinking about mortality (and yes, I know 38 is young) and how it has been 20 years since I was 18 – unbelievable!  While checking out my sites today I saw this write-up on the passing of Duke Snider.  The article naturally mentions Mays and Mantle, and I was startled to read that Mantle was only 63 when he passed away.  I remember reading the referenced SI article when I was in college.  He mentioned in it how exciting it was to order a diet Pepsi instead of a drink when he was out.  The next week a recovering alcoholic wrote a letter (must have been two weeks later – I think that was the lag time back then in the snail mail days) saying that Mantle would not enjoy ordering diet tonic after a while when the honeymoon of not drinking ended.  He never got to that point, I guess – he had a much-publicized and controversial liver transplant and then he died not much more than a year after the article.

What a sad story.  He seemingly had it all – talent, fame, adulation, money, goodwill, championship rings – but in reality he never realized his potential both as a player (despite the stats and the rings, which were astonishing) and as a person, with his life derailed by chronic infidelity and boozing (all of which would have been exposed immediately in this era of Deadspin and TMZ – Mick’s tale would have played out very differently today.  It is quite a contrast to the story of the Duke, whose one blemish, according to the article, seems to be that he had some tax issues (I think the quoted judge, in his assessment of Snider’s character, is a little over the top).

So there you have my 38th birthday musings.  I suppose it is appropriate, since baseball cards, trivia, playing ball and watching baseball games dominated my life until I went away to college, and following the game and its history is still a huge part of my everyday existence.

I just finished a fascinating thriller called Impact by Douglas Preston.  His books, both solo and with Lincoln Child, are the kind that keep me up at night so I can read as much as possible, even though the loss of sleep will haunt me the next day – they are that good.  This book is about as close to science fiction as I get in my reading.  Preston depicts a small Maine fishing village, a California space research lab, Cambodian illegal gem traders, and Washington bureaucrats all with stunning depth and, as far I can imagine, accuracy.  He also throws in the occasional fun word like desuetude or quincunx.  Desuetude I kind of knew, or at least could figure out from context, but quincunx threw me for a loop.  You can look it up – it is basically four things in a square with a fifth in the middle, like the pips on the five side of a die.  The only thing I could figure out from the word itself is that it had something to do with the number five.  There are lots of words like this – tricycle, quartet, etc.  But there are also words with a number root that have lost their original meanings.  Decimate means to kill ten percent of something but it is now used to denote a total rout.  I had thought section meant one-sixth of something, but Merriam Webster does not seem to bear this out and traces the origins to a Latin word for to cut.  Sextant, the thing sailors would use to figure out where they were, has origins in the number six, so maybe that is what I was thinking.  There are others but I am blanking…

A change of pace from the usual post here – something from Prez. Eleni herself:

The kitchen counter was covered with vegetable clippings, empty packages knives, garlic papers.  I am rather like the Tasmanian Devil when I cook but the dishes are almost always sensory delights.  Before the food touched my plate the smells from the stove and oven told me I had done well.

Tonight’s dinner was exceptional.  Beyond the the nutritious meal for my family and a nice dining experience, I experienced a connection with my female ancestors.  I had long forgotten about the weight of my youngest child strapped to my back while I stood at the sink.  There were fresh, white pieces of haddock on the counter to my right and onions sizzling in the large pan on the stove.  In my hands was a large bunch of parsley.  As I washed and rubbed the leaves and releasing their strong scent I thought of the countless women who had made this dish before me; it was my first time.  I thought of the women who, time, and time again had washed bunches of parsley that had been freshly cut from their gardens.  I thought of them washing the bunches in their own sinks throughout Greece.  I connected with them for a brief, passing moment.  I wondered what thoughts went through their minds as they, too, rubbed the fresh, dark colored leaves.  I wondered if their worries of the moment were those of child rearing or of how to call together the family for mealtime.  Maybe the smell alone was enough to allure them to the table.

The dish is called Psari Plaki.  It is a tomato-based, baked fish dish and it was time to get it into the oven.  The cut fish is placed in a single layer on the bottom of a baking dish.  My baking dish is dark yellow, made of clay in Portugal (another place where fish dishes abound)  and a treasure of my kitchen.   In looking at four different recipes out of two cookbooks I had some decisions to make.  My dish would be an amalgam of these recipes choosing what I liked and thought would work best to my own taste.  I went with the white wine, extra garlic and a pinch of sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatoes.  I quickly perused the lists of ingredients to see if I missed anything and then I saw the finishing touch – cloves.  I added four whole cloves to the mix and after simmering it poured it over the pieces of fish.  It was not long before I could smell the wine and then the cloves from within the oven.  I had forgotten about the women before me and was now looking forward to my own dinner with my own family.  Before the food touched my plate the smells from the stove and oven told me I had done well.

So, back to the hike.  There were 14 of us in our group with an age range between 7 and 80.  All made it to the top and, more importantly, to the bottom safely.  The group has its origins in a scout troop back in the day, with the old scout master and several of his former scouts, now adults, making up the nucleus of the group.  Everyone else is a neighbor or someone like me who has received a special invitation to join the fraternity.  We are men of tradition, and several were followed yesterday.  The morning began at the meeting place in Shrewsbury.  From there we went to Nik Rylee’s, a diner in Winchendon, for breakfast.  And this was a breakfast.  They have something called the lumberjack special, which has pretty much every common breakfast food, and a bunch of the guys ordered it.  I stuck with an omelet and home fries.  We lingered a bit there – I think everyone was enjoying the toasty (harf harf harf) atmosphere and a bit hesitant to go back in into the cold, which was between -5 and 5 depending on where in town we were.  Once we got our crampons on and were all kitted up we started hiking, and all thoughts of the cold pretty much disappeared.

And it really was a beautiful day – sunny with no wind.  The parking lot at Monadnock was full, and there was everyone from snowshoers to people jogging -really – up and down the trails.  In years past when it was this cold and windy there were maybe one or two other groups climbing, but lack of wind made this a popular day – there were actually traffic jams on the mountain in a few places.  We spent more time than usual at the summit and took some pictures, then descended a bit until we found a good place to have our lunch.  From there it was a pretty quick but cautious descent – going down is when most injuries happen.  We then repaired to George F’s house, where Sophie had her usual delicious spread for us and we celebrated with the traditional Harvey’s Bristol Cream toast.  We are especially proud of Alexander and young George, who at ages 7 and 9 proved to be true warriors.  Bill, who is a young 80, also conquered the mountain in style.

Many people think were are batty for doing this but it is truly fun and a satisfying accomplishment.  There is also the camaraderie; many of us only see each other this once a year but there is such a special bond  between us that it is like no time has passed.  It is also great exercise and a chance to do winter climbing without worrying about avalanches, pulmonary edemas, and other not-so-fun stuff associated with climbing big mountains.  Can’t wait until next year!

Here is a picture George S. snapped of me on the summit – soon to be my Facebook profile picture:

Today was the annual winter hike of Mt. Monadnock that I do…well, annually, with a group of guys based largely out of Shrewsbury.  I was all excited to come home and blog about it but I am officially out of steam.  It was a beautiful day, and we all had a great time. It is funny – I put as my Facebook status that I was doing this, and I got several comments about how cold it was – 0 degrees up there.  The thing about these hikes is that you actually get very hot from the exertion, and the challenge is more to stay dry.  Today there was no wind (just a little at the top – not bad for the summit, which is most always windy any time of year) so that made it pretty easy to stay warm.  So more tomorrow, as well as some pictures from the latest stage of the building project – the abatement in the auditorium, the foundation for the “bumpout” and food pantry area, and the finishing of the floor in the foyer.

This annual post is one of the most popular here on the blog with Cathedral people.  It is the yearly count of sacraments.  It is one – just one – measure of where we are, but like any statistic should be taken with a grain or shakerful of salt.  Two years ago, for example, we only had two weddings, but it was not the end of the world.  Here we go:

Funerals: 31.  This is about what we normally do but obviously this number can get wildly skewed – we have had 50 some years.

Baptisms: 33.  This is a bit on the low side – it is usually 40-50.  No need to panic – our baby boom continues, so I anticipate a lot of baptisms this year.  I should also point out that we usually do between 5-10 adult baptisms a year as well – we have several coming up.

Weddings: 13.  This was a big jump from the two in 2009.  Many factors come into play here – people get married in Greece or at out-of-town churches, people wait to get married because of the economy, whatever.

So there you have it.  Today is a snow day – tons of snow outside – and I am off to snowshoe.