Christmas Bits

It was a quiet Christmas here. John fixed breakfast- eggs, home fries and sausage. We opened presents. We called the German side of the family.
Dinner was roast duck, prepared  by John, with fixin's by Polly-mashed yams, Brussels sprouts with bacon and maple syrup. Polly also whipped up some tasty chutney to go with everything, and for dessert, mince pie. It was not our old traditional Christmas fare, but it was full of flavor and color and exceeding delicious.
We almost didn't have a tree. John and Polly went to a tree place, which was closed - this was on Christmas Eve. However, there were two trees for the taking, so they took one. It's more a shrub than a tree, but Polly got it going. We have enough ornaments for a seven footer, and this shrub is a little  over three feet tall.  Then she found a box of old trimmings, shiny things I'd forgotten I'd had, the sort of things you could get at K-Mart years ago, like garlands, baubles and bright shiny things. They found the little ceramic Christmas tree given to us by Miss Simms, in whose pool we used to swim. It's actually a bit of overkill, but enjoyable.I have no idea why I accumulated some of this stuff, since some of it looks brand new.
The Christmas shrub is on a table. The top is adorned with two of the tin stars a friend brought back from Mexico years ago. They added a large golden "thing" to the top, which glitters gaily.
The beauty part is, of course, that the "tree" was free, a gift from whoever owns the tree place.
On Saturday, it was back to Cleveland for the Boar 's Head Festival and dinner at Minh Ahn, both of which were splendid.

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And a Merry Christmas to All

 I wish all those who visit this blog a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukkah, a Kaputal Kwanza, or a nice day off work.

Uplifted

A week ago, Sally and I went up to Cleveland, to the "Messiah Sing" at Trinity Cathedral, the place where the Boar's Head  pageant takes place after Christmas. I went to listen, Sally went to sing. I've written about this magnificent cathedral in the past, a place over 100 years old, built when Cleveland's Euclid Avenue was part of Millionaire's Row, lined with elegant mansions. A few of these mansions are still around, some of them part of University Circle, parts of museums, or buildings used by Case-Western University. There are probably ghosts of these people regularly attending Trinity Cathedral
The place was packed for the "Sing," with each section designated for the voices in Handel's timeless work. By far the largest section was the altos, who filled almost half of the main nave. I have only participated in one of these things once, many years ago, when I spent a year in the Bach Chorus at Baldwin-Wallace. I still have my score, but there's no way I can navigate the range or the tricky bits. I hummed along with the parts I remembered, as did a number of us in the "listening" section.
There was a small, beautifully precise orchestra, and four young soloists. With the first words of the first chorus, "Glory to God," there was such a thrill, hearing that great space filled with hundreds of voices, I swear I levitated.  It went on like that for the next hour. The soloists, unmiked, projected their gorgeous voices throughout the vaulted nave. Maybe you had to be there, but it was stunning.
At the end everyone was beaming.
Sally was ecstatic.
It was glorious.
It is s a wonderful way to tell that story.
I think the listening to the beautiful music of the human voice is as close as one can get to grace.

Eating on Fleet Street

Fleet Sreet is the main thoroughfare of Slavic Village, which was a mainly Polish section of Cleveland. Not too far from the valley of steel mills just south of downtown, it was settled in the late 19 th and early 20 th century by immigrants from Central Europe, who flocked to this area  to work in the mills and factories that made Cleveland one of the largest, and most diverse cities in this region. Cleveland was a collection of ethnic villages, few of which remain, since white flight to the suburbs in the prosperous post-war years.
Slavic Village remains as a smaller version of its  slice of Europe in Northeastern Ohio. It's centerpiece is the magnificent St. Stanislaus Church. Most of these neighborhoods have, or had, beautiful churches, built by money from the working class immigrants to glorify the old religions of their homelands. Some are now empty and sad, but St. Stanislaus remains strong.
Slavic Village has suffered from being in the Rust Belt of dying steel mills, and the housing has fallen victim to the rash of predatory lending. The business district was affected by this, too, withe little grocery stores and bakeries unable to cope with the change in population.
However, there are still restaurants specializing in real, honest Polish cuisine, and not just pierogies. We have been to a couple of them, and scoped out a couple more which look promising. They are neighborhood centers, old, warm and friendly. The juke box leans toward music of the 40 s and 50s. The Red Chimney, the outside of which resembles a Swiss chalet, serves individual meals, while the Seven Roses has a luncheon buffet, with more food than I could ever eat. The proprietress, who looks like the cook on "Orange is the New Black," complete with the dyed red hair, and her friend were sitting in a corner, chatting in Polish. A young waitress, also Polish, directed us to the buffet. This is a very large place, set up for banquets and parties. They were in the process of getting a Christmas tree decorated  for the season of parties.
The food was delicious, and mainly spiced with dill. There were cabbage rolls, mashed potatoes, greens, latkes, and things I didn't recognize. The proprietress came over to ask how we liked it, and was pleased with our answer. She sent over some cookies-kolaki? She made money off us, because there was so much food we didn't 't even try to eat. I found out that the restaurant is a destination, with people coming in from the suburbs, especially those of Polish descent.
There's a resurgence in the Rust Belt. The mills are back. Young people are coming back to remake the cities in new ways. Downtown housing, walkable neighborhoods, high tech professionals, repurposed old buildings, specialty restaurants, brew pubs, artists and galleries, and creative types grabbing up cheap properties to make new neighborhoods - it's pretty exciting to see what's happening around here. Places like Slavic Village will benefit, and perhaps some of the other old ethnic neighborhoods will be revived.
I like having the benefits of living so close to a city, where we're only 45 minutes from the museums, theaters, concerts and discovering  these pockets of old Cleveland that have survived, complete with their delicious food.

Can There Be A Conversation?

I have not responded to the most outrageous manifestations of racism that have occurred over the past months. And that is what it is, I believe. It is also classism, for that is also part of the story. It is difficult  to discuss in a country where there is not supposed to be such a thing as "class," in spite of the fact that there is. It is also not easy to have honest dialogue about it or race.
Take the police, for instance. My only contacts with the police involved minor traffic incidents. It is extremely intimidating to hear a siren and see flashing lights in you rear view mirror. But I am white and an older woman, and the police have generally been polite but brusk. I've dared to argue a couple of times, but I was never been pulled out of my car and made to put my hands on the car roof. I am white. And when you think about it in this gun crazy country, a policeman stopping a car is generally more at risk than the occupant of the car.
I find myself wondering what kind of people want to be police? Is it a sincere desire to be of use in the community? Is it a family legacy? Is it a desire to protect the neighborhoods and the people? Is it a way to demonstrate one's willingness to take risks?
Is it a desire for power? Is it a way to carry a gun legitimately?  Is it the uniform?
Then I I wonder about the selection process. I know there are educational requirements.Are there  tests to weed out things like mental instability?  How subjective are the observations during training as to the suitability for this important profession? How do they deal with racial issues during and after trading? And why are so many of them built like steers?
Those kinds of questions need to be explored honestly, since the recent tragic deaths of unarmed Black men and a CHILD were caused by the people who are supposed to protect the people of communities they live and/ or work in.
Another, more difficult conversation is about the poor, Black communities, which are in chaos, with high rates of school violence,  kids dropping out before graduation, leaving young Black men with few or no skills to find jobs, young single mother teen-age girls trying to survive and trying to keep their children from being  killed, trapped with few job skills, inadequate child care, and all the ills of poverty. It's hard enough rearing a family alone, but if you have little hope, you are vulnerable to all sorts of personal and public dangers. There are people who survive bad beginnings, but there are too many who don't. Poverty debilitated the spirit as well as the body.
When my friend Susan and I did one of our storytelling workshops in Cincinnati a few years ago, two of our students were women who taught in kindergartens in the inner city. What they said about some of their students has stuck with me: children were showing up for kindergarten with minimal language skills. They were not talking about immigrants,  they were talking about American children who could not put a sentence together at the age of 5. How were these children going to able to tackle little black squiggles on white paper, when their oral language deficit was so great? (I am waiting for someone to do a doctoral dissertation on this issue, which might help to explain why so many inner city schools are dealing with so many kids just giving up.)
It's hard to talk about this sort of thing without sounding racist, even though it's evidence based from many studies, but it's the sort of thing that needs to be addressed to relieve the anomie that persists in poor Black communities. Can we talk about this ?
This is in noway to blame what has happened to those recently blatantly murdered by "law" officers. I wrote about this to demonstrate how hard it is to discuss race issues honestly.
George Bernard Shaw's  "Pygmalion" was about class, the rigid British system of his day. It was not a love story about Eliza and Henry, but  a demonstration of that rigidity and the upper class demand that everyone behave like "" us." It was Alfred Doolittle who took Henry Higgins down with his speech of  " middle class morality" that was seen as the ideal way of life. All people should not have to live the same way, and cultures are different even in the same communities. However, everyone wants a safe and healthy place to live and rear their children, everyone needs the food of hope. Everyone wants their sons to live.
I don't know the answers, but there must be some, right?

Let The Holiday Season Begin

We had a very fine Thanksgiving Day. Unfortunately, Polly wasn't able to come home because she is with dog. We missed her, and I was forced to get back into the kitchen for the first Thanksgiving in several years. John did the pies and the turkey and I did the fixin's.  Everything turned out well. We had planned to watch a movie after dinner, but we ere a bit dazed by the food and the labor involved.
The next evening John provided a wonderful treat at Cleveland' Playhouse Square to watch "The Nutcracker," with the Joffrey Ballet, accompanied by the Cleveland Orchestra. It was in one of those great old restored theaters, the State,  from the twenties, an elegant venue from the days when movies and vaudeville were an Event. I've written about these theaters before, which comprise one of the largest theater districts outside of New York. Saved from destruction by some terrific people, the area is a center of entertainment attended by people from all over the area. Besides that, this performance was absolutely magical, beautiful, and a total delight. We've seen the Joffrey a couple of times with the orchestra at Blossom Music Center, their summer home. Superb all around. Nothing like having one of the world 's greatest orchestras  for your pit band.
One night we did watch the weird  and hilarious "Lemony Snucket," a tour de force for Jim Carrey. I can only take him in small doses, but he is very good in this movie, playing a truly vile villain in several guises. The movie looks like a Tim Burton flick, but is by some other genius with a great grasp of color, texture, humor and grisly fun. Meryl Streep was her usual expert self in a very different kind of role for her, and very funny.
Sunday a friend and I went to see "A Theory of Everything." My eyes glaze over at abstruse scientific theories and I have absolutely no grasp of cosmology and how it works ( other than the funny stuff they do on my favorite sitcom, "The Big Bang Theory)' but this is a film about a man. My friend said after the film, that she, for the first time, saw Stephen Hawking as a human being. I agree. I think because we see the twisted body in a wheel chair, we don't think of him as a sentient human. In the film we see the person within, the person who was a witty, brilliant young man, the person who is still there. It's very well done.
Tonight we went to see and hear Apollo's Fire, an incredible Baroque orchestra, do their Celtic Christmas concert. The music is medieval, and includes singing, choral pieces, dancing and a bit of tomfoolery. It was at the Kent State auditorium, which was packed. For a small college town, Kent is a great place to live, with access to all sorts of great events.
Tomorrow morning we're going up to Cleveland to hear the Baldwin-Wallace University ( where  my husband used to teach) Men's  Chorus do their Christmas concert at the studio of WCLV in Playhouse Square. This will be the second year they are doing this and this is an excellent group. Who knows, we may have lunch at Otto Moser's, an over one hundred year old restaurant that used to cater to the vaudeville players of old. It's been moved from its original location, but the moth-eaten moose head and the old fly-specked show bill posters are still there.