Marking Time

Regarding the switch to digital cable from analog, I put it off for a year or two, not for any good reason, but because my cable needs were modest, a switch would be a pain, and I assumed that any kind of upgrade would end up costing more, whether they told me so or not.

Now I’ve gone through the process, made the switch (to non-HD), and meanwhile adjusted my account so that we no longer have a separate internet account. Except I’m not happy with what I’ve got now. I feel like we went backwards in some ways. This is not for the usual reasons, but because I expected more improvement than I’m actually seeing on my HDTV, and we also have not solved the technical problem (occasional dropout of our internet service) that was our main reason for upgrading.

I’m somewhat enjoying Comcast’s On Demand feature, but otherwise I’m frustrated. Internet still goes away unpredictably, even with a new modem now and a newish computer (2006?). The HD-level channels that were coming through the cable all along (!!!) and were formerly being read directly by my new HDTV are now being blocked by their non-HD box (they say an HD box is $10 a month more). So now I probably have to bypass the box if I want to watch an HD broadcast in true HD. Ridiculous.

Not to mention the appointment missed by the first cable installer, the rigamarole of rescheduling, the installation charge for the new box and moderately faster modem…

Why do we put ourselves through this? Why do we let them get us hooked on the junk?, and then we fall for the promise of more and better junk, and then they’ve got ya.

I hate to make light of something so serious… but let’s face it, that’s what I do. I’m a sophomoric middle class nerd who actually thinks blogs with “Aargh” in the title are funny.

But the actual news item that I base this alarmist posting on, is serious. A stranded yacht was boarded and hijacked yesterday off the coast of Africa, near Somalia.  (Or do you call it Somaliland? Or Puntland? Apparently there are a number of factions trying to carve their own dysfunctional sovereign nation out of the splintered mess that is present-day Somalia.) On the yacht were a family of three and their captain. The family is European, probably French or German, and the CNN article I got this from does not say how old the child is.

They did, however, bury the lead. Further down in the article, we get this:

Earlier this month the U.N. Security Council gave nations new powers to pursue pirates into the waters off Somalia in an effort to combat a new spate of hijackings off the Horn of Africa.

The Gulf of Aden in particular has become a treacherous stretch for shipping in recent months, with more than two dozen pirate attacks reported since the beginning of 2008, according to the International Maritime Bureau. Nine of those have been successful hijackings, the bureau said.

It’s a classic good news/bad news scenario: the good news is that this new breed are fairly inept pirates, if their hijacking success rate is just 9 for 25. And furthermore, a boat can’t fly through the air and bring down a major international pair of skyscrapers.

But the bad news is that the terrorist/pirates may have finally hired some good p.r. people, and are now using that whole Johnny Depp adventure movie mystique to improve their image among kids and morons in Europe and America.

Think of it… this kidnapping just reeks of Hollywood. A pompous French dad who drags his family out for a dangerous fishing excursion, a yacht out of gas, a vulnerable kid “saved” by the ugly yet charming captain named The Black Heron (played by Jack Black, in blackface). They’re gonna sell this turkey to Lifetime Network and make a killing (oops, maybe I should use a different word there, shouldn’t I?) .

Anyway, what differnce does it make. It should only be about a decade before the whole planet is submerged in water from the melting ice caps, at which point we’ll have to look to rogue/heroes like Errol “Fabulous” Flynn and Kevin “Waterworld” Costner to save us from the coming doom… a doom in which we will ALL run out of gas.

We now use an average of 25 barrels of crude per person per year. And we make our cleaning supplies, nylon fabric, and hundreds of other products using derivatives of crude oil, the cost of which we have not even begun to abosorb yet. (That will be the second wave of rising prices… watch for it.) So we’re either going to have to change how we make and do and travel and recreate, or we’re only going to sink this ship.

Mad Max, where are you when we need you?

Summer may not be beginning officially for a few more days, but for the Nielsens it has definitely begun — and with it, the sometimes delicate, often clumsy dance that we do when trying to make plans. Plans for weekends in Wisconsin. Plans for longer summer trips (which we never seem to be able to set up in February, when we stand a better chance of getting decent time-share locations, in places we actually want to go). Plans for the Fourth, our anniversary, my birthday.

And then there’s the plan for the day, or for the week: the goal being a balance of chores (now that we have the extended potential free-time) and personal interests from our individual and family lists (the beach, Millennium Park, read a book, go to the Chicago Botanic Gardens, write an overlong but hilarious blog entry, catch up on movies we’ve been meaning to rent, see a play, a concert, a class or two for Graham at the park district… you get the idea). Sue gets restless when her schedule is too open. She wants to fill it. And she can sometimes be a “work first and earn your playtime” kind of personality. That’s okay, but it ain’t me.

By contrast, I get loose and sometimes lazy. Freed from a world of deadlines and early rising, I want to make it all up as I go along. Maybe I’ll set a goal or two for the day, or the week. And usually I get to it, within a few days, or a few weeks. But it drives my wife nuts that I prefer to operate this way. In the summer, too often one of the three of us in the other’s face, or underfoot, and we can get kind of prickly. We love each other, but in seeing so much of each other, we can’t help but get under each other’s skin at least once a day. It’s complicated.

In theory, I was supposed to have another job by now, and we wouldn’t be doing this dance. And I have been looking. But it’s hard to stick with it, when there’s gardening to be done and Sue claims she hasn’t the strength to dig, and someone’s planning a camping trip I’d like to go on, and we’ve got a little cushion of money stashed away to prevent some desperate situation where I’ll have to take any old crappy job, just to make our bills. (That date is now somewhere around October, which will come quicker than I expect, I know…)

So if y’all know of a $75K per year job, at a museum or somewhere cool, one that’s a short walk from the beach, where I can spend my Friday half-days playing volleyball, and where they won’t mind that I have to drop my kid off at school at 8:30am and therefore can’t start early, be sure to let me know. Okay? And then when those pigs from the Lincoln Park Farm in the Zoo start flying, my life will be perfect.

Laughing about the clumsy attempts of a five-year-old to understand and use the weird English language is a long-established American pastime. Art Linkletter (in the Sixties?), and later Bill Cosby (early Nineties?), did a popular weekly television show called Kids Say the Darndest Things, based solely on this premise. Cosby has also done many a successful standup routine about the tendency of naive but inherently spiritual children to ask challenging questions. An early favorite that I once had on an LP was called Why Is There Air? 

Like many parents, I’ve noticed — and on occasion written down — some of the misunderstandings and invented words that Graham comes up with. The above-mentioned forevergreen is just the latest example, taken from our ride back from Wisconsin yesterday. A prior occasion of amusement was when he discussed his “flam-o” pajamas as his favorites. (That would be flannel, dear.) In both of these cases, I found it so cute that I didn’t have the heart to correct him.

If anything, his word is better than the one we normally use. Even though trees don’t live forever, there’s something really deep about Graham’s version. His implied belief, that some things really can  last forever, is a reminder of why the hope and innocence of children should be highly valued (for their ability to give us all a bit more hope and joy each day). The discussion we then had about evergreens, where I tried to explain somewhat scientifically why evergreens don’t lose what he called their “leaves” in the fall (I did re-introduce the word “needles” to him here), was a highlight of my day.

Soon after that, we saw some deer along the side of the road, and had a lengthy discussion about the two words, “dear” and “deer”, and which spelling to use for various situations. He was very intent on getting this right. Learning a concept in school is one thing. Figuring out real life is sometimes another.

If you have kids, or when you do have a chance to talk to them, always put your best ears on, to hear what they’re really saying. “Out of the mouths of babes…” as they say. Or “Of such as these is the kingdom of heaven made…” If you listen closely, sometimes they’ll end up teaching you, instead of the other way around.

I’m Up North for the day. (Grass ain’t gonna cut itself.) There’s a mist over the surface of the lake, and our Ma & Pa Redwing Blackbirds are noisily on the lookout, protecting their nest down by the reeds on the shoreline. It would be a good morning for fishing, if I wasn’t so lazy, and such a piss-poor fisherman.

Just realized I had never done a post on the possible names we explored for this lake cottage, before we settled on Grayhaven. We even ran a contest, in which visitors could add a name of their own invention to the competition (or else vote for their favorite). Those guest contributions are at the end of the list below. Some are quite clever, but in the end we went with something mysterious sounding and vaguely snooty that I had come up with: Grayhaven Upon Avon (the Avon part refers to Shakespeare’s home).

Here’s the list. I will offer explanations for a few choices as we go…

Wild Saxe With a Big Deck (aka WSBD Radio) - The street address is technically in Saxeville, WI. But for postal purposes, we share a zipcode with the neighboring town of Wild Rose. So I sometimes tell people we live in Wild Saxe. The “big deck” part, while accurate, is just me being even more sexually crude and sophomoric.

Blue Joy Way - borrowed from a Beatles song (Blue Jay Way)

Lucky Lake

Bent Birch Bay - also the working title for a novel I’ve been writing (which I’ll get back to as soon as I can stop blogging so compulsively)

Cape Slob -Sue’s dad was from Cape Cod… she’s descended from some of the original “pilgrims” in 16th-century Massachusetts. I’m descended from impoverished Italian orphans and quarrelsome Irishmen.

The B&B (Bright & Beautiful) -we would turn it into a real B&B, but the lake bylaws forbid any commercial activities here.

Nielsen’s Northern Nook

Saxeville Sanctuary

[Editor's Note: the too-tiny smartphone format originally forced me to continue this post --from here on --as a second entry. I moved Part 2 back to here a day later.] —>

Anyone who lives in a midwestern neighborhood where there are lilac bushes has had a fun couple of weeks of late. It’s not Twilight Time — as the great singing group The Platters once sang in the 1950s– but it is Lilac Time. The color, the scent… there’s just nothing like it. I’m not the most dedicated of gardeners, but when something is this perfect, it’s just got to be acknowledged. Hurray for lilacs, of any and all varieties.

Meanwhile, politically, the Democrats are grinding their way toward the convention, with the scent neither horribly sweet nor foul, but definitely generating continued interest. And with the other shoe dropping for Ted Kennedy  cancer-wise (click for cancer-sufferer and feminist Elizabeth Edwards’ take on things), an interesting wrinkle now begins to take shape in the national debate on our medical/scientific/financial priorities. Do we want to spend our money and time saving American lives, or taking Iraqi and Iranian lives?

On the campaign: I’m now of the opinion that it’s actually good Hillary did not drop out earlier. All these late primary states finally get to feel like they matter. \Maybe it gets traditional Democratic voters nationwide feeling like their vote and their voice will also matter in November, when hopefully we will get more than the pathetic 64% 2004 voter turnout coming out for a presidential election, to voice their opinion in a context where they feel it actually matters.

Please, people… I KNOW we could do worse than McCain, but God knows WE COULD DO BETTER. We don’t need the working class abandoning the Democratic Party again, like they did when they were duped by Reagan. Sure, Hillary’s competent. But Obama’s a once in a lifetime candidate. Get on board, people, or get left behind. Race and class don’t matter. Progress… that’s what matters.

Apropos of nothing, my family had an intense discussion of our favorite numbers tonight. Here’s how they fell out:

Graham: 5, 11, 100

Sue: 3, 17 (her birthdate), 2002

Mark: 3, 11, 23, 34, 1118 (two of those are Chicago sports related… guess which two…)

Maybe those numbers mean nothing at all. Maybe they mean alot, on some deep spiritual level that none of us understands. Either way: each of us has a favorite number in common with at least one other family member.

Workwise: Sue’s teaching Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities to her freshmen this quarter. She did some background research – Around 1780, in France, the total amount of chocolate available (keep in mind that the New World was the only source of cacao at the time) was 16 pounds. Worse yet, eight pounds of it was owned by one company/family. If that ain’t an indictment of the aristocracy, and the concentration of power and marketable goods in the hands of a minority, then I don’t know what is…

Last but not least, amusement in the Nielsen household has finally degenerated to this: Mom, Graham, Gato and I are each currently wearing a pair of Graham’s pull-up diapers on our heads. It’s a true Solidartity of Silliness. I would post a photo, but it would most likely kill any political aspirations I might ever have, …so we’ll pass on the visual evidence, thank you very much…

Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend. Personally, I’ll be chillin’ in Wisconsin. I’m grateful, to a point, for the courageous sacrifices of our veterans in previous and even current wars. It still doesn’t change the fact, however, that military power is the dumbest and most outdated manner of political and social control known to mankind.

Are we ready to move on yet, friends?

Debate over the building of a big ol’ pole barn:

Notes from the members meeting of our lake house owners association —

Bylaw Clause 2.3 - Architectural Control & deed restriction : cites such standards as “quality”, beauty, “harmony” with the entire property and the neighborhood, “proportion”, “setbacks”, etc -

Mr. X’s ridiculous outbuilding… DENIED! (Chalk up one for the “little guys”!)

The COUNTY denied him the setback variance, saying he wanted to build too close to the main road. Plus there’s the overall size issue. But he’s still bitchin’.

He refuses to compromise size, and he did not engage in good faith discussions or due process prior to purchasing materials and making plans. A classic ”neighborhood bully” move. He assumed he could do what he wanted. We met and said, “No, you can’t. Do it right, or don’t do it at all.”

How private is private property in these cases? Who deserves prior notification? Who has authority?  How’s the barn location affect the visual appeal of the whole neighborhood, or is it an eyesore? How’s a building (instead of the cool, knotty old tree he pulled out of there) an “improvement” to his property?

Tough luck about your “useless”, odd-shaped front lot, Mr. X. You bought it, lake-owner bylaws and all. Now you have to live with it. You’re obligated to your neighbors. We’re willing to work with you. But not to rubber stamp whatever you want.

I feel bad for the other poor schmuck from Illinois, now serving as building committee head. That’s the real s**t detail, at least this time around…

I’ll get on a committee sometime, but situations like this are exactly why I want to choose carefully. You can pick your friends… but not always your neighbors.

A hodgepodge tonight:

1. Graham was reading over the Cubs’ season schedule in the kitchen tonight. He doesn’t get the concept of an abbreviation yet. So here’s his creative interpretation of the teams they’re playing. See how many you can guess (see key below):

still, kin, pit, Hugh, lad, cool, fleadh, mill, alt- , tab, cues…

2. Quote of the day: “Nouns are overrated.”

Stated by my lovely but highly stressed wife, in response to my request for a noun, after she fumbled around for the right word for about 30 seconds before recalling it:

“We still have to find the — the thing, so we can pay the thing. You know… the bill thing!”

BTW- the overrated noun was “property tax bill”.

3. Q.O.D. Runner up: “Sue, thanks for falling on your sword.” Stated by a coworker of Sue’s after a very contentious meeting, to discuss this year’s big-ass controversy. (Every year has its own controversy, one of the main reasons she’s leaving…)

4. Graham and I took advantage of the heavy rain tonight to do some much needed puddle-jumping. If you can’t get all soaking wet with a kindergartener (and your dog), well then you’re taking it all too seriously, people. We even played a round of Pooh Sticks with the rain running through the gutter toward the sewer grate.

5. Earlier in the week, in honor of Earth Day, Graham and I planted some basil and a pine cone seed in the garden. Today, he asked if we could go see if anything had grown yet. Ah, to be so young and naive…

6. Graham asked on the way home from the libary if we could ever run out of letters or numbers. I said no. Then he asked what the biggest number is. I said googol. Then he asked how you write it. I said g-o-o-g-o-l. “No, how do you write the numbers!” I explained that nobody had ever written the whole number, because it would take to long. Theoretical math, for a five-year-old. (He’s kind of into negative integers, too… seriously.)

Cubs’ opponents key:

St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Houston, L.A. Dodgers, Colorado, Florida, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Chicago White Sox

If you don’t know anything about chaos theory except what you learned from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, you’re not alone. I don’t really know about it either. But ignorance never kept me from using a good metaphor before, so why start today?

The chaos to which I am referring is that which currently exists in my home. No, it’s not just the standard kid-created chaos of toys on the floor, jelly stains on the couch, and DVD cases in the bathtub. (Why? I ask you. What chaotic logic could have possessed him to… oh, never mind.)

This chaos is intentional and necessary, even if it’s just temporary. For you see, we’re getting new carpeting installed in two rooms today, and had to remove all the furniture to two other rooms. Graham’s bedroom is easy: a bed, a cheap desk, a couple of dressers, a nightstand, some toys — done! But it’s the family room – the legos-between-cushions, video-topheavy, musical, functional, pulsing, beating heart of any house– that took a lot more to clear out and clean up.

It was complicated by the fact that the big entertainment center had to be disassembled (dissembled? … let’s just say “taken apart”).

We had already re-painted much of the room over Christmas break, changing from earthtones to a nice lavender. But all the baseboards, and the whole area behind the big entertainment center, had been left unpainted until such time as we could do this take-apart thing. Which was yesterday. After work. The painting of the baseboards in advance of the new carpeting was saved until then, too. All of which meant that, between shifting furniture and washing out brushes and re-painting a few spots we missed at Christmas, I was not done until 1:30am. Granted, I took a couple of breaks between 5 pm and 1:30am. Nevertheless I was not a happy camper.

In fact, I was an irritable bear all night, as Sue bathed Graham and read to him and generally kept him out of my way. (Thanks, honey.) But I knew I would be like that, so I warned them early on that I would not be available for conferences or spider-killing for the rest of the night.

This is just how I get. I swear under my breath. I sigh. I bark at other people, and at myself for being such an idiot. I just hate the maintenance and upgrade process, both personally or professionally. Whether it’s putting in new bulbs and shrubs, or running new wire for a light fixture or stereo speakers, or installing software, or putting up displays in a classroom, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have the ability to keep that vision of the finished product out in front of me, all cleaned up or in a new color or twice as functional as before. I just go in expecting something to go wrong, and it usually does. (”If you build it, it will break”… I call this the Ecclesiastes Version of Field of Dreams.) Meanwhile, all I can see is the tedious task in front of me: the heavy particle-board shelf with stripped screws that I have to somehow keep together, the shoddy coaxial cable which I have to run to Radio Shack to get a replacement for, the uneven spackling job that I did on the wallboard, despite all my best efforts to scream and seethe and grit my teeth and make my best effort to get it smooth.

Probably the only situation where I actually enjoy the process itself, and taking my time to get it right, is when I’m building a piece of furniture. It’s like sculpting, for me at least. A hand-crafted piece, using very few power tools, takes awhile to complete. But along the way, that piece is a source of peace. I can listen to music. I can get out all the frustrations of the week by pressing a little harder with my electric sander, or shuttling a piece of fine-grit, handheld sandpaper a little faster across the surface of a good piece of maple. Even the writing process, which I generally do enjoy (for finding the right adjective is like finding the right size router bit and making a perfect groove), still has it’s moments of tedium. If it didn’t, if it wasn’t the product of some hard work, then it wouldn’t be worth much, right?

So I guess the real chaos for me, when I do the maintenance stuff that life brings me every day, is an inner chaos. It’s my own creeping frustration, my mistrust of myself — or of the folks in China or Sweden who built this two-bit thing that I’m now having to fix. My inner chaos far outstrips the chaos one can actually see when looking around the house, or my office at school (which is pretty bad, having gotten steadily more crowded with stuff since September). 

On the other hand, it’s my process, and no one else’s – my own brand of perverse perseverence, of bulling my way through a project till it’s done. So perhaps it’s valuable for that reason alone. It may not be infused with hope and cheerful enthusiasm. (And when I think of this, I remember suddenly that my father was the same way.) But it’s still okay. I get things done.

And tomorrow the carpeting will be done (the pros are installing it, arriving in about an hour). The painting, too (which I must admit I’m proud of, and pretty good at… in the sense of being careful, even anal about it… one of the very few things I am inclined to be anal about).

And when it’s done, I will be happy. Not happy that it looks good. No, that level of appreciation will not fully arrive for a few weeks. Tomorrow I will just be relieved we got it done, and it’s all over with – one more thing checked off the five-year to-do list. Sure, it will take over a week to get everything back where it belongs. But the main part of the tedium and heavy lifting will be done by 6pm today.

And then I’ll take my nap. Which I richly deserve, and which I will appreciate immediately –before, during, AND after, as you can probably guess.

Those of you who have followed Marking Time since its inception in the summer of 2006 –all two of you– will recall that when I began, I had Lebanese actor Tony Shalhoub (as tv detective Adrian Monk) up here as my background photo. Although I do like that show, it was really the tangential monastic tie-in that caused me to use that figure as a starting point.

The monkish tradition has long been of interest to me. Having grown up Roman Catholic, I was occasionally exposed to the practices and history of the Benedectines, the Trappists, and the Franciscans. (Plus there were all those cute molded, cement St. Francis statues I saw around in people’s gardens.) Then when I experienced a deepening of my faith through various Protestant ministries as an adult, I kind of put the whole monastic thing on hold, for a little while. But I did not, nor have I ever, thrown out my past or present experience with Catholics and monks as invalid or incomplete.

If anything, the message and methods of the “first church” have continued to be a voice that keeps me rooted, occasionally calling me back across the bridge to spend some time with my ancestral teachers, brothers and sisters. The consistent Roman Catholic application of the gospel to problems of social justice, for example, inspire me to make more radical choices in how I follow Jesus’ lead as a peacemaker and prophet of pain.

Thus, while wandering around some of my favored internet neighborhoods this morning (most notably the Potter Street Community/Simple Way site, featuring noted author Shane Claiborne), I clicked through to a blog maintained by some members of Psalters, a punkish, gypsy, neo-granola, somewhat monastic (but mostly Protestant?) music group that has been turning heads for a few years now. What really turned my head today was a section of the blog about their tour of Turkey. Here’s an excerpt:

Just east of there we found the oldest monastery in the world, Mar Gabriel.   Founded in 397a.d. it housed a large library and some 2000 monks as recently as the 1960’s.   Now there are 3 monks and a handful of others left to care for the several large buildings.   We met with the Bishop to see if there was a way we could build a relationship with the church here in America and perhaps in some way help.   Bishop Samuel Aktash, with a full beard and robes, … was a kind and resolute man but with the countenance of the heavy burdened and worn down.   For most of our questions, including our offers to help, he kind of just shrugged and said, “hmm” or “i don’t know”….his answers and manner conveyed more of a solemn perseverance that seemed to fall short of actual Hope.   They speak Aramaic (the language of Jesus) yet are banned from teaching the language to anyone.   They are “permitted” to be Christian, but are not allowed to share it.   At one point he told us, “you have heard the great stories of the martyrs.   Here we are not killed anymore, but we are not allowed to live.   We as a people are being made a museum like this monastery.   We are living martyrs.”

I will not add comment, as the words speak for themselves. The Spirit will break your heart as He/She sees fit. Suffice it to say we should pray for the minority Christians in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and throughout the Mesopotamian region that gave birth to what we now call civilization. Our Western churches have their roots there, especially in Turkey, whether we like it or not.

Some of the current groups, like Psalters, that now carry forward the values and commitment inherent in the monastic tradition will be gathering this summer for the PAPA Festival (People Against Poverty & Apathy), in the little central Illinois town of Tiskilwa. Intentional Christian communities, activists, gardeners, and neo-hippies from around the country will gather at PAPAfest for music, prayer, workshops and other creative endeavors, building a temporary village and a big home-made happening, all to explore the living out of these ancient but still relevant monastic values. (I may be doing a workshop there, …just now starting to look into it.) I think it’s going to be a bit like the progressive Christian version of the Burning Man Festival. But attendance is capped at 1000 people, so don’t go spreading the word about it unless you’re serious about coming and absolutely have to drag a few friends along. The website and other details are still in-process, but registration begins next week.

For a U.S. monastery that functions as both a museum and a high-functioning religious pilgrimage site, take a look at Thomas Merton’s old Kentucky abbey, Gethsemani. Established in 1852, it’s a Cistercian (Trappist) abbey, and one of the grand old dames of prayer and peace-producing action in America. Merton’s hermitage is there, and they host retreatants of any and all religious persuasions, so it’s got both educational and spiritual possibilities for those of you looking to explore the field further.

I will move on now to a few other somewhat random links to matters monastic:

In Three Rivers, Michigan, there’s a modest little Episcopal abbey and retreat center called St. Gregory’s Abbey. Although I have never done an overnight there, I have visited for a few hours, sat in on their vespers prayers in the architecturally amazing chapel, and walked the grounds a bit. I also have friends who have done some truly life-changing retreats there. If you live anywhere in the northeastern Illinois or Michiana regions, it is a nice getaway for both personal and small group retreat experiences. If you live elsewhere, look into whether a monastery near you offers either silent or guided retreats. There’s bound to be one nearby, but they like to hide, like the hermits in caves that taught them everything they needed to know.

Heading in another, admittedly odd direction, I’m also a fan of the old monastic tradition of making wine and other “spirits”. My favorite liquer, for example, is Frangelico, a woundrous Italian monk-brewed concoction of hazelnut and spices that you never forget once you taste it. In August of ‘06, in a Marking Time blog on gardening and grape-growing, I had this to say about Frangelico:

(I call it “angel drool”, and I have it on good authority that it’s the one alcohol, besides wine, of which Yahweh fully approves.)

Similarly, my favorite winemakers are the people of Franciscan Oakville Estates in California. Disclaimer: the irony of this fancy, slightly expensive, non-religious winery and website pimping the name of the original “simple living” monk is not lost on me. Nevertheless, their Cabernet Sauvignon is a very good wine, and we all gotta make a living, right? So I’ll forgive them their excesses. Maybe they donate all the profits to the poor. (Yeah, right…)

So look around! Monks are not a thing of the past. They’ve just changed how they dress, and where they live. They’re still alive and well, mostly. May their witness and their radical love endure forever.