The bicycle theory...in practice

 

Good morning.  And it is a fine, fall one.  The air is cool, but not yesterday's chill, and though the sky is thin with clouds, it's fine for walking.  I'm not walking yet, though.

This last week has been both brilliantly celebratory and dastardly painful, but this morning I woke after a long good sleep, and began to make bread...Challah, to be exact.  It's the Jewish new year beginning tonight, and since I'd spent most of last week feasting on Aunt Sadie's 100th birthday (more later), and driving home in the pained aftermath of over-indulgence, I'd not ordered the traditional round sweet bread ahead.  So I told Joseph, who was vetting the menu I concocted around various diets, that I would make my own.

I can't remember the last time I baked a Challah (the community center makes a really good one here).  But like the bicycle (once you know how to ride, it comes back to you time and again), I opened the Family Cookbook and there, in my own words, was the recipe down to the last detail.  Except for following the ingredient amounts, I hardly needed it.  And now, an hour later, yeasted and mixed and scraped and kneaded for as long as my wrists could hold, it's resting smooth, shiny, and round in its traditional bowl (the largest of a set I got early in my housekeeping, from that original store of Cabela's, which had a thick catalog) under a linen cloth from my mother's 1943 wedding shower and the also-traditional sweater (mine...I wore it yesterday in the chill) on top to keep it warm, as my grandmother did.

I'll show you the end result after it's baked.  It'll be half a day or more by then.  You can't rush bread.

Meanwhile, the porch and my post to you begin to wile away the hour and a half or so as it rises for the first time.  I feel good about this loaf and about the morning.

I've been reading A.S. Byatt's novella, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), which I plucked on a whim from the library shelf as I passed the Bs the other day.  It's a marvelous story about stories about stories while the woman at its center becomes the character in her own story.  (It turns out that there's a current film which steals in a picky way from it, but don't bother...it's stripped of Byatt's real story) 

With that literary spirit, and a bright square of sunlight like a note left under the bedroom door as I left the room, I thought how the aftermath of pain, even as it wanes, brings its wisdom of change.

Perhaps the new year's and the fall's seeping in makes everything I think of lately involve the impulse of spontaneity.

To wit:  Here's that book on the shelf as I pass...I take it.  It turns out to be a something which excites me, after so many others have failed to be anything but the usual over-indulged trivia.  Byatt's is rather an indulgence of language and learning and most of all the depth and fascination of stories, and what makes a story the sort that continues lively over 1,001 nights (which is part of Byatt's story's story).

Here's a story in the making, too:  I woke up one morning a few weeks ago, and decided that minute to order myself tickets to London, Scotland and Paris in early October.  I can see my friends Will and Dorothy there, and Uncle George's sister Ada, and maybe her daughter Catriona, lovely woman, and then in Paris meet a new friend called Emily.  I found a hotel off the grid in the 6th, just the right neighborhood for me.  I started a list of what little I will pack.  

And Aunt Sadie's birthday, the long ride to Hershey, long anticipated and worked toward:  suddenly even there is change...and though Barbara's planned luncheon in the garden room at the Hotel Hershey is lovely, one night Eileen and I find ourselves in Aunt Sadie's apartment playing Scop, an old card game, with her...trying to remember how, the rules changing every ten minutes, and laughing ourselves silly.  We'd brought other games and crafts to do with her, but this inspiration is inspired!  We hardly want to leave for supper, so we have some soup while we are playing.  Later, we are torn away by the others to visit, and when we return later that evening, Eileen and I tired as we pick up the hands we were dealt earlier, Aunt Sadie is ready for a new game.  Wordle, crosswords, the game of life itself...she is adept at them.

She is a wonder, that centenarian, game for anything.  If a walk in the larger Gardens is now too much for her, a walk around the gardens of her apartment is not.  She walks among the other residents in her independent living building like a queen...not haughty, not proud, but beautiful...resilient and affectionate and admired.  She doesn't hear well, but her sight is as clear as the finest lens on the Hubble (and much older). 

 She still teaches us all sorts of useful things and remembers what we need to know.  It is an honor to be her niece and learn.

I'll call her today and see how the rest of her birthday week is going, and tell her about the bread rising in my bowl.  

She'll ask me how I am, and I'll tell her...better, thanks!  The little pain left is not worth mentioning, though it is worth remembering...the sign of turning a corner, flying off, making old things anew.  Making a new story from the old and its old stories and theirs.

Aha.  I see it is time to punch down that risen dough and let it begin to rise again.  As we all can do.  Later, I will coil it into the shape of a long spiral of life and let it rise a third time.  In its own time.

Meanwhile, happy fall, dear readers.

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Later the same day

le shanah tovah...

to a sweet year!