Confessions of a Coffee Snob

This is my beautiful latte from Star Lounge on Chicago Avenue. They serve Dark Matter Coffee which they roast themselves at their small facility on the West side of the city (right by my apartment!).

Living in Chicago has launched my coffee snobbery into the stratosphere. And I have no shame about that. 

Alright, sometimes I'm a little ashamed. 

I feel bad bugging the servers in all the restaurants about where they get their coffee beans. But I'm curious. And I know what I like. When we live in a city that has no fewer than five local coffee roasters, why would you get your coffee beans shipped in from anywhere else? It only makes sense to support your local economy and get the freshest product available for your customers.

I recently had some family come to stay with me and while we were downtown, we happened upon this little bakery on State Street. Their sign said "Magnolia Bakery, New York City" so, naturally, they got their coffee beans from the Big Apple. While I understand that they are going for a theme, here, I still walked the block and a half to Intelligentsia to get my local Chicago coffee fix. Partly because I know that I love their product, and partly because their storefront at Randolph and Wabash is so hip it hurts.

There are a few other local roasters that I have yet to explore:

Big Shoulders

A new, no-nonsense roaster in the River West neighborhood as of June 2012

Passion House

Another new roaster that popped up this spring. They don't have a storefront, but have made their way into many local cafes and bakeries already.

Ipsento 

Local cafe and small roaster on N. Western Ave. that has been around for a while but I have yet to become acquainted with.

Before your write me off as irredeemable, there's an exception to my coffee snobbery! 

Dive diners. They get a free pass.

I still have a special place in my heart for crappy diner coffee. It really doesn't matter where those beans come from, they always tend to taste like they've been filtered twice through an old gym sock. And that's the way I like it. It makes me feel connected to the generations of impoverished artists and travelers who have gone before me.

Hats Off to Love

Generally I have felt fairly neutral about Valentine's Day. As a child I had a strong aversion to the color pink (even at a young age I felt that "girls like pink" was sexist and unfair. My favorite color was blue. I would now say that it's purple. Maybe this means I'm learning about compromise). However, I had a strong attraction to sugary treats. So this particular holiday was pretty much a toss-up.

Then jr. high and high school came along and we were no longer required to send Valentine's to every kid in class. So it turned into a numbers game. A stressful sort of contest to see who was the most adored and who was the most avoided. And I think that stinks.

Now, navigating holidays as adults, the beast of capitalism can tend to have the same effect on our hearts as a high school hallway. We feel pressure to put forth extravagant displays of love, or feel inadequate or slighted if we do not receive any such displays. Valentine's Day has a way of saying that "alone" is synonymous with "lonely." And that's just nonsense.

This year I am making it a point to broaden the focus of Valentine's Day. I believe it should simply be a celebration of love. Family, friends, significant others--even ourselves! Why shouldn't we use today as a reminder to love ourselves and be less critical? It is a day to acknowledge the affection we should feel toward all humankind simply because we are all ambling through this life together.

(A card that I made and liked quite a bit. It's for you! Yes, all of you. :) )

To avoid sounding any more like an episode of Mr. Rogers than I already do, I am going to leave you with a poem--because I am also infusing this Valentine's Day with as much poetry as I can manage. Poetry, much more than flowers, jewelry, and well-planned dinner reservations, tries to get at the real stuff of love. The intangibles that we can't slice with a knife and fork or watch wither on our kitchen tables.

This particular poem so beautifully expresses my love of humanity. I hope you all feel hugged.

To A Stranger

by Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know

How longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking,

Or she I was seeking

(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely

Lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall'd as we flit by each other,

Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,

Were a boy or a girl with me,

I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become

not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,

face, flesh as we pass,

You take of my beard, breast, hands,

in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you

when I sit alone or wake at night, alone

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Some Thoughts on Mediocre Literature

So, I just finished reading The Bridges of Madison County (don't judge me) because I read it in high school and have been thinking about it a lot and remembered it fondly. So, a couple weeks ago I meandered around the thrift store where I found at least 3 copies of it. (Don't worry, I only bought one) And a few days ago, I read the entire thing in 4 hours. I was hoping that reading something so small would kick-start my need to read. And it has. Because I refuse for the most recent book that I have read to be this one. I need some good literature! My thirst has been awakened!

It was so interesting reading this because it's been a long time since I've read anything this...easy. He rarely uses uncommon vocab--every few pages. And when he does, it feels like he's adding it for intelligence factor. And he seems to have his characters occasionally explain away inconsistencies in his descriptions of them. Or uses their speech and their correspondences to spell things out that he either couldn't figure out how to accomplish subtly, or believes would be lost on a mass audience with lack of knowledge of subtlety.

He had the main guy (photographer, Robert Kincaid) express his artistic frustrations to the main woman (farm wife, Francesca Johnson) saying "mass markets are designed to suit average tastes." And I find it hilariously ironic since that's pretty much what this book is. I wonder if that was his little aside to the audience saying "I really can do better, but I knew this would sell." Or if he just had no idea what mediocrity he had accomplished.

There's a description of Francesca watching Kincaid and noticing the care he took w/his camera equipment and how everything had its place. And later, Kincaid goes on a little rant about the state of the country and how everything is getting too organized for him and that he's one of the last cowboys and then makes some comment like "well, my camera equipment is pretty well organized, I admit, but I'm talking about something more than that." Cheesy! Lazy!

And just when I thought my rage had subsided, and I was prepared to face the end of the story...

At the end, Francesca leaves a letter that her children find when she's dead (sorry, spoiler, I know you're going to rush right out and read it lol). Here are my problems with this letter:

1) It is WAY more sexually descriptive/ revealing than a mother (especially this particular character he attempted to sculpt) would be with her children.

2) It is a serious guilt trip. She tells the kids that if it hadn't been for them and their father, she would have run off with this man that she was so desperately in love with. Then tries to make it all better by saying if it hadn't been for her tryst with him, she couldn't have stayed on the farm all these years because "in four days, he gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the separate parts of me into a whole." And then snatches back any good feelings they might have had by saying that she's not sure she made the right choice and maybe she should have gone off with him. And the letter closes with "I hope you understand and don't think ill of me. If you love me, then you must love what I have done."

Um, no they musn't! I mean, I really don't think I have a problem with what she did in a romantic, personal fulfillment sense. But that is some serious bullshit to write to your kids. Even if they are 30 or 40 or whatever age at this point.

3) It is painfully didactic and repetitive. She recounts (often nearly verbatim) the events of the entire story we just read. And acts as a vehicle for the author to make sure we know precisely what the word "peregrine" means. Which was part of his one line that he had the main character say that was sickeningly sentimental and a blatant, desperate attempt for his book to become quotable. So, I'll make his dreams come true as I share this line with you:

Francesca has just finished whispering to him that she is in awe of his sheer emotional and physical power. He responds:

"I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea."

This could almost be poetic and beautiful if it weren't so reeeeaaaching! And if the character had the cojones to support a line like that. It is my assertion that he does not. The author went to great lengths to make sure we knew that Kincaid named his truck, Harry. I don't think the guy who names his truck Harry is the picture of peregrine.

In the letter to her kids at the end, she quotes the aforementioned line from him (so as not to let the readers forget its obvious quotability) and proceeds to write:

"I checked the dictionary later. The first thing people think of when they hear the word 'peregrine' is a falcon. But there are other meanings of the word, and he would have been aware of that. One is 'foreigner, alien.' A second is 'roving or wandering, migratory.' The Latin peregrinus, which is one root of the word, means a stranger. He was all of those things--a stranger, a foreigner in the more general sense of the word, a wanderer, and he also was falconlike, now that I think of it."

Um, no Robert James Waller. You don't just get to do that. That is dirty rotten cheating and I can tell! What a lazy and moronic way to get that information across! If you want your readers to know synonyms, you need to find a more inventive way to share them.

AND in the dialogue after they read the letter, the daughter gives ANOTHER mini-summary (you know, because apparently his audience is a tree full of monkeys who have no idea how to follow plot, let alone read between the lines) and concludes with "God, we're so innocent and immature compared to her." Seriously, Waller?

I guess it must have impressed me in high school because I thought it was sexy and scandalous? Who knows... I'm not sure how this got made into a movie, and I have never seen it, but I can assure you that the character Waller penned is not half as strong as Clint Eastwood, the man who portrayed him in the film.

Phew! Ok, I'm done now. I will leave you with one of the few moments that I found authentically beautiful. Waller interviewed an old Jazz musician in the Seattle area in order to learn more about Kincaid, who he claims is a real person. And though some of the interview sounds like Waller made it up, I'm giving credit to the musician for this line:

"He cried big tears, the kind it takes an old man to cry, the kind it takes a saxophone to play."

The Present

Annie Dillard wrote an essay entitled "The Present" in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In this piece, she implores: "These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present."

This is my goal. Especially as of late. I have come to the realization that, in my desperate attempt to have a life full of meaningful experiences, I have actually been missing them. I rush from one thing to the next filling a punch-card rather than living a full life. I have to do everything. Be everywhere. All at once. I have been looking back, trying to write down important moments in my life and I feel like I have a very shallow reservoir of memories. I don't know if there's some deep, dark Freudian reason I have blocked them all out...or if I have simply been too busy to remember.

Part of this busy life is not my fault. I think it stems naturally from being poor. My family never had much money. And then I went and got married when I was 20 and had even less. Poor kids don't get to luxuriate in the college experience. They get to work for food and rent and take 18 credits a semester to avoid paying for an extra one and hope they don't run out of money before they get a degree. So, in my desperate attempt to get everything I wanted out of college and keep my head above water, I ran myself ragged. I really had no choice. But I do now.

My husband has a reliable, grown-up job that can mostly pay the bills (with my part-time efforts supplementing things). We have never before experienced the growth of our savings account. It's a remarkable thing. I'm not saying that we no longer stress about money (by any means). Our measly little bank account is probably less than many middle-class Americans spend on their family vacations. But I'm saying that I do not hyperventilate daily about how our bills will be paid. And, hopefully, that will afford me some time and energy to practice living in the present.

Another author whose thoughts on the here and now has been coming to mind lately: Thoreau's pledge to "live deliberately" has always resonated with me.

In Walden, Thoreau writes:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...

That is what I long for. Living deliberately. Sucking the marrow out of life. Well, that is a slightly more carnivorous version of what I hope to do. My greatest fear is the discovery "that I had not lived." And this blog is supposed to help keep me in check. My goal is to write about everything. Seriously. Because I feel like my memory has atrophied. And I need to stretch it.

It makes me think of the movie "Harriet the Spy" that I was fairly obsessed with for a period of time in junior high. She and her notebook are inseparable and there is one point in the movie when she says, "I wanna see the world, and write down everything!" And my little heart would swell at the thought of that. So, I donned my best spy-esque "trench coat" (I think it might have been a rain coat, actually...) and, pen in hand, stalked around the aisles of my parents' grocery store, observing people.

Anyway, now I'm rambling. So, I leave you with more Dillard until next time:

"...beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."

from "Heaven and Earth in Jest" within Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I have so much to write about. I'm the worst about keeping up with this. In the near future you can look forward to a post about my friend Erin's wedding (at least one, it was quite the trip!), a visit to E.A. Poe's grave in Baltimore with my friend Tami, spring wrapping its tendrils around the city of Chicago, my expansive windowsill garden, and more...

But today I will write about my mom.

You may think your mom is fantastic--and I'm sure she's pretty swell--but I'm here to tell you that my mom is the ultimate, most extraordinary mother. Most extraordinary woman. She's supercalifragilisticexpialidicious. You know that part in Mary Poppins where Bert is singing the song with all of the different names in it and then ends with: "But the cream of the crop, the tip of the top, is Mary Poppins and there we stop!"? Well, that's my mom.

This is her on her 50th birthday. I had seen a painting at a museum in Grand Rapids that looked just like her! (Doesn't it?!) So I made her pose for it. She thought it was a riot. I thought she looked fabulous. :)

She is one of the most compassionate, empathetic people I know. She does not discriminate or judge. She gives you the benefit of the doubt even when you don't deserve it. She loves unfailingly. Anything I know of grace and unconditional love I have learned from my mother.

I was listening to Pandora the other day and a song popped up called "Virginia" by Ron Pope. I had never heard of this song or artist before, but I'm pretty sure he knows my mom:

"I grew up in the kind of place you have to pass
When traveling somewhere else
My mother laughed more than she cried
But when she cried
Well it was something everyone felt."

She is so kind and unassuming and genuine that you can't help but laugh when she laughs and cry when she cries. At least I can't. All my mother has to do is sniffle, even over the phone and I'm sobbing like an infant. And then she cries harder because I'm crying and in moments we've exhausted an entire box of tissues. It's probably good we don't live together anymore. Our natural resources might not survive it. We felled an entire forest the night we decided to watch Stepmom. What a mistake!

My mother is the portrait of selflessness. (Probably to an unhealthy degree, actually. But that's a conversation for another time). She would read to us almost every night. Even when she was exhausted. Sometimes the three of us would lay on my brother's bed while my mom fell asleep in the middle of one of Grimm's Fairy Tales. We would elbow her in the side saying things like "That's not how it ends!" and "Do the voices, mom!" Poor thing. Or sometimes--if she really wanted us to fall asleep--she would sit on the floor in the hallway that connected my room and my brother's and she would read to us both from there. She taught me to read, to write, to make dandelion bracelets and sandcastles, to do the monkey walk and sing a hundred silly folk songs from her childhood. She taught me to appreciate the little things in life like the sound of a mourning dove and the smell of lilacs.

My mother runs a small grocery store in an impoverished community in northern Michigan. The store was my father's entrepreneurial venture that she is now responsible for. The shelves are half bare and the tile on the floor is peeling up in places and the employees can't seem to get along... but the customers love my mother. Because she loves them.

She does not judge them for their meager situations. She helps them count their money because they never learned to. She asks them about their families, not because it's polite, but because she hopes they are well. She remembers the names of their children. She lets them take their milk and bread home and pay her later because their family is hungry and they don't get paid until Friday. I really don't know if the place has turned a profit in the decade and a half we have owned it--something is always broken, expired, stolen... And I honestly don't know how much longer she can keep it up... (Truthfully, I hope it's not much longer because she needs a break!) But I do know that the community is better for her presence. Not the store, her. You can get eggs and cheese anywhere, but she is invaluable.

I stumbled across a quote online that was credited to Mark Twain (but who knows, the site didn't look very legitimate). At any rate, it's a great one for my mom:

"A mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart--a heart so large that everybody's grief and everybody's joy found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation."

This is so true of my mom. Where others in my life (*cough* my dad *cough cough*) have shown prejudice, bitter grudge holding, and conditional approval, my mother has been an unfailing example of wide open arms that bear acceptance, forgiveness, and unconditional love. I owe her everything.

I could ramble on about her attributes for days, but I'll spare you any additional gushing. Those of you who know her already know all of this because it is so apparent in her life. And those of you who don't know her will have less tolerance for long adorable stories about her :) So, I will leave you with an adorable picture or two of my mom and I over the years:


Just a bit of resemblance ;)

Down the Rabbit Hole

Ed started his new job on Monday. A real, grown-up, salary-paying, 401K contributing job. And we feel like we're living in a foreign country all of a sudden. The language of career employment is so far removed from the language of poverty and part-time minimum wage. A week ago we were comparing the price of Aldi milk to the price of Wal-Mart milk (Aldi almost always wins, FYI). We were deciding if the whole grain bread was worth the extra $.70 as opposed to the whole wheat. We were determining which fruit we were going to buy this month: apples or bananas. Bananas are much cheaper...but they spoil much more quickly. And I just don't have the time to make all that banana bread. Plus, walnuts are expensive, and what's a good loaf of banana bread without a few walnuts?

Then we woke up one day and we had fallen down the rabbit hole. Things looked different. It was fascinating, unbelievable, and a little bit frightening. And we're still reeling from the landing. Everyone sounds like the March Hare. We need a translator. Suddently we're looking over health insurance paperwork (what the hell is an HMO and why is it so expensive!?), deciding how much to put into a 401K each pay period (What does 401K stand for, anyway?) and looking at apartments that would be conveniently located between both of our jobs (What are the views like above ground?). I feel like we are living someone else's life. Like we won the lottery. Because, not only will Ed be getting paid a salary (what?!) but he really thoroughly enjoys his job. Granted, it's been three days, but so far so good.

I find myself peering around hypothetical corners in our new world, looking for the Queen of Hearts, expecting to have my head chopped off now that we have glimpsed financial security. On one hand this new job brings an enormous, long overdue sigh of relief. Ed has been dilligently, daily searching for long-term employment for at least two years. On the other hand it ushers in a fresh batch of insecurities. What happens when we move into the new, larger, more expensive apartment and start buying spinach and CDs and then Ed loses his job? Do we wait for happiness until we're certain? But how can one ever be certain of anything? We could put an arbitrary expiration date on the uncertainty: "If you still have your job in a year, then we'll be ok" and then in 13 months we could be right back where we started.

Ed and I were talking about all of this and he said: "Isn't there some quote about how the only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty?"
Me: "That's like 'the only thing to fear is fear itself'--it's crap! I'm still afraid. That's not helpful at all.
Ed: "No, it isn't helpful. But it definitely applies."

There don't seem to be many aphorisms to help us figure this one out. I think the only thing to do is jump. I have crunched the numbers. I have made the spreadsheets (yes, plural. So very many spreadsheets). And I just have this sense of inner peace about it all...which is a very unfamiliar feeling to me, so I'm still making sure it's peace and not indigestion... But so many things have been lining up in the past couple weeks that look a lot more like provision than coincidence and I feel like it would almost be rejecting a gift not to run with it. Even if I feel like I'm running with all the grace and coordination of a new-born giraffe.

Ready... (No) Set... (NO!) Go! (Umm, ok!)

Crying for the Cranes

This extraordinary thing happened to me when I got married--I got infinitely more emotional. Well, to be fair, I got more emotional about things regarding marriage. It's the reason that the movie Date Night made me cry, as well as laugh. And the reason that I am apparently very concerned about Niles Crane's open-heart surgery on last night's re-run of Frasier. I have no emotional attachment to the Crane family. I barely watched the show the first time around (though I could probably sing you that quirky theme song about tossed salads and scrambled eggs. But that's just because it's catchy). However, when we stumbled upon a re-run that had Niles on a hospital bed and Daphne in tears in a waiting room, I found myself crying as well. I'm not sure what, if any conclusions to draw about this...I just find it so interesting. And it's probably another reason that I shouldn't have children: I'd be an emotional wreck! I could never watch anything...

You can't send a letter to a bird

From The Piano Has Been Drinking to You Can Never Hold Back Spring, Tom Waits is a master wordsmith. He has incredible versatility and the ability to completely immerse the listener in the world he creates. In an industry that gives precedence to a 3 and 1/2 minute dance beat and feels the need to release a "remix" of Like a G6, it is encouraging to have a diamond in the rough like Tom Waits.
He is more like the diamond and the rough... His haggard, vagabond appearance; his bohemian stage presence; his vocals that land somewhere between Louis Armstrong, John Wayne, and a dusty pipe organ--this man is a marvel. A true artist in every sense of the word. Watching videos of him perform Chocolate Jesus, I couldn't tell if he was in a concert hall or under an overpass. And the beauty of Tom Waits is that he seems ideally suited for both. He's kicking up sawdust. He's warbling into a megaphone. He's jauntily tipping his cap. And I imagine he'd be doing this even if no one was watching.

I recently learned that his poignancy extends beyond his hand-crafted story-songs and onto the printed page. Waits is releasing a limited edition book of poetry on Feb. 22 entitled Seeds on Hard Ground. It is available for pre-order on his website. And the U.S. store is already sold out. There are only going to be 1,000 copies of this book worldwide and all proceeds go to benefit homeless services in Northern California.

If you miss your chance or don't have the funds for a limited edition (like myself), all is not lost. An abridged version of the poem Seeds on Hard Ground will appear in another book entitled Hard Ground where it will be paired with photographs by Michael O'Brien. O'Brien's photographs of the homeless were said to have inspired the poem by Waits.

With my love of language, my appreciation of photography, and my compassion for, as Waits puts it in his poem "those left exposed," I am eager to see how the words and images of Hard Ground work together for good.

Here's a sneak peak of a few pages of Seeds on Hard Ground that Waits posted on his Flickr site:



A few of my favorite moments:
. . .

When I was born
My folks wept at my beauty
I was the package that all
Their good luck came in
I was bright and shining, magnetic
And flaming
Am I just something that got eaten
By the gods
And I only just the bag
That it came in
My parents were good people
Shirley and Raymond
They prayed for a child
Just like me
They prayed for a child
Just like me
. . .

Home is a place
To get a letter
If they can find you
I have heard
Because you can't
Send a letter
To a bird
You can't send a letter
To a bird
. . .

God, may we all
Amidst the storm
Safe by a fire
Bright and warm
Send to those
Left exposed
Good will and a
Much wider brim
The keep the pelting rain
From hammering them
. . .

See I remind them all
That there is a bottom
A bottom
I remind them all
That there is a bottom, Lord
Oh yes, there is a bottom indeed
Yes there is a bottom
And it looks just like me
. . .

I am homeless
But I am moving
I am homeless
But I am moving
Maybe I'll take the hound down
Maybe I'll take the hound
Where the grass is green
And the barn is red
Where the wind makes
The trees look like hula girls
Maybe I'll take the hound down
Maybe I'll take the hound
. . .

I'm the bursting bubble
My crown is my hat
When it comes to trouble
I'm the king of all that
. . .

There is also an incredible description of heaven that takes you down the rabbit hole on page 8-9 that I won't write out here to save some length and some intrigue. :)

a little pick-me-up(beat)

It is cold. Bone-chilling cold. And right about now is when I feel there is no end in sight. Actually, that weight normally presses down on me in February, but it's a bit early this year. Our bills are high (screw you, People's Gas) and our spirits are low. We've turned down the furnace and piled on the blankets and will only watch comedies in attempt to brighten our mood. Or musicals. Because when we dance along it warms us up.

When I get like this I try to force myself to do a little bright-side thinking. Tonight the universe lent a helping hand in the form of a drunken, accordian-playing, broken English speaking, Polish man that staggered into the coffee shop where I work. He began telling us his name was John (I think?) and playing polka and asking if the one other customer in there was my husband or boyfriend. I was trying to communicate with Accordian John but all I could comprehend were a few stray syllables steeped heavily in alcohol.

The smell of coffee and vodka fumes swirled around him, but this was overshadowed by the deafening sound of that accordian. I had forgotten how loud they are! Well, I don't know if I had ever really known how loud they were since I have not had very many close encounters with accordian players... At any rate, the volume of the instrument surprised me and all I could do was laugh about the whole thing. I wanted to immediately call my mother who always seems to wind up in similar situations--maybe it comes with the territory of owning/ working at a small business?

While I was enjoying the story-worthy aspects of this event, I was also not going to survive much more of the super-sonic accordian. I wasn't sure if our one customer was up for it either (or all the potential customers that walked right past the door when they heard the ruckus). I finally said, "No polka, thank you" and poor Accordian John looked up at me with his sad, drunk accordian eyes and squeezed out a few last meloncholy notes. "Sorry," I said. And he sort of shrugged, mentioned again that he had been in Chicago twenty years and got up to leave.

I tried to get him to take his coffee to go (because it really smelled like he could use a cup) but he just said goodnight and staggered out onto the sidewalk. My night was made. I'm glad there was at least one customer to witness the whole thing. And that he seemed to be as excited about it as I was.

Thank you, Accordian John, for helping to keep my winter blahs at bay.

Buechner's Gift of Christmas Imagery

Some good friends gave me a book by Frederick Buechner entitled "Beyond Words." It is a sort of dictionary on themes, occasions, people... I was searching my bookshelf for something to read during my holiday travels and I decided to read the entry for "Christmas."

It has been a few months since I have cracked the cover on this particular book. And every time I do, I find that it is an excellent decision. Every thing I have read in this book is brilliant and insightful and at least 75% of the time the things I read in this book change my life.

Last night was one such incident. Buechner's words on Christmas were like none I had ever heard. A relief from the constant loop of carols on all the radio stations, relief from the bumper-to-bumper traffic in the Target parking lot, even relief from the pious rituals that I had been a part of since childhood. Here is an excerpt:

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event is indeed--as a matter of cold, hard fact--all its cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God...who for us and for our salvation," as the Nicene Creed puts it, "came down from heaven."

"Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed." This image literally made me exclaim aloud, "Whoa!" in my living room. This is something I can wrap my mind around. In fact, this image is something that my mind will not let go of. Heaven and incarnation and angels by the manger are more difficult to grasp, but "a skull you could crush one-handed" is vivid and real to me.

It makes me think of Annie Dillard's essay "Living Like Weasels." She locks eyes with a weasel in the woods and writes this of the encounter: "It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into the black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls."

Apparently brain and skull imagery is very tangible for me and stays with me. I read Dillard's essay for the first time in high school and it hasn't left me since. I feel that the same will be true of Buechner's take on the Christmas story.