Maggie's Farm

Now is the right but final time to fertilize fruit trees, grape vines, ornamental trees, etc. in northern climes.

Those roots are alive and hungry right now, storing up fat for Spring before they go dormant - even though the leaves are off. Just go easy with the fertilizer on the apple trees. Excess fertilizer encourages rusts. Too little is better than too much for them.

And, while we're at it, don't forget to try my trick. If you have good strong perennial herbs in pots (sage, marjoram, thyme), turn the pots upside down in the dirt for the winter. Odds are that they will spring back to life with a vengeance when global warming warms things up in April. Even it they don't, it will protect your pots from cracking from ice.

I bring my 3 year-old Rosemary bush indoors, but people might have better ideas for that. I like having it in the kitchen so I can run my hands though it. Makes me smell good. It barely survives the winter, but jumps back to life when we cut it back, and put it outdoors in April. My bro keeps his potted Rosemary in his garage, like some people do with their figs. (I let my fig rough it. I just throw a tarp over it and hope for the best.) One of these years, I will plant my Rosemary next to the foundation and cover it with a couple of layers of polyurethane for the winter. The goal would be to have a 6' Rosemary bush like they have at Oxford, and everywhere in Italy.

This guy in CA proudly posted his healthy but ramshackle Rosemary hedge:

The creation of Chagall's windows for The Art Institute of Chicago.

It's the first Sunday of Advent. Nobody knows when He'll come again but, in a small way, He can be reborn in us each Christmas - or anytime we are ready for it. That's the happy story. Another part of the story is the hard story of Judgement: 

Matthew 24:36-44

24:36 "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

24:37 For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

24:38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark,

24:39 and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.

24:40 Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.

24:41 Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.

24:42 Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

24:43 But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.

24:44 Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

Throw some hunks of coal or wood in there, and crank it up and warm it up.

How many times do you need to listen to a Beethoven Piano sonata to really get it? My dumb ears require at least 40 times to get the feel and flow, the intended tone, and to learn the notes.

I am slow to allow a piece of music (or of anything else) to become a part of my soul. I try to maintain high, discerning walls - which frequently fail.

The sonata form is said to be the core of Beethoven's talent. He wrote 32 piano sonatas, and I have them in a boxed set.

Piano sonata 19 in G minor, opus 49, (like the G-major), was written as a Sonates facile for learners and practicers.

I'm not shopping for anything this weekend. I do not shop - crass materialism is against my religion although I confess enjoying getting stuff from other people. Are you shopping? If you are, here's The Techno-Holiday Shopping Guide (Pic above of American Shopping Eagle via Vanderleun from Kaching.)

Tolkien's anarcho-monarchistic politics

Maine Family Robinson: If you want to see a well-off person splutter, make them pay a plumber.

The government should pay my plumber. And my lawyer. And my doctor.

MEP Euroskeptic Nigel Farage: "Just who the hell do you think you are?"

He is one of the good guys.

About those dumb white guys: Advertising's Hidden Second Message

We middle-aged working white guys are misunderestimated, even if we aren't cool. Cool is for pre-teens. Manliness and Womanliness are for adults. Many of us are stuck somewhere in between.

We need more food inspections? 

Next thing, they'll have unionized TSA-type guys feeling up my tomato plants, reaching in under the leaves.

At The American, The Protected Class:

Every worker will be asked to make sacrifices as governments put their fiscal houses in order. Private-sector workers should be confident they are treated the same as public-sector workers.

Tax revenues as a share of GDP have averaged just under 19%, whether tax rates are cut or raised. Better to cut rates and get 19% of a larger pie.

End the "doc fix" and allow balance-billing.

Aftermath

When the summer fields are mown, 
When the birds are fledged and flown, 
And the dry leaves strew the path; 
With the falling of the snow, 
With the cawing of the crow, 
Once again the fields we mow 
And gather in the aftermath. 

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers 
Is this harvesting of ours; 
Not the upland clover bloom; 
But the rowen mixed with weeds, 
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads, 
Where the poppy drops its seeds 
In the silence and the gloom.

Sometimes they do. These very hardy shrub roses are obviously warmed by the house, and are on the south side thus sheltered from cold winds.

Next challenge: Get them to Christmas.

Next chore: put back all the screens that blew off in the last storm.

Like a raccoon dragging off some hunk of good garbage, my brother grabbed one of the two turkey carcasses last night while helping with clean-up. Naturally, he took the grilled and semi-smoked carcass which has a richer flavor (enhanced by my injecting it throughout with cider before cooking). We did not have any meat left over from two 18-pounders, but plenty of cornbread-sausage stuffing, which to me is as good as meat. (Next year, maybe we'll do three - or get two ginormous ones which I do not like because they take too long to cook).

His Mrs. commented: "I see I'll be eating turkey soup for the next four days."

I'll freeze the other carcass for my next round of Jus Gibier.

I have always felt that the leftovers are the best part. Nine Ways to Use Leftover Turkey

I am re-posting this because, as I slowly get through it (slowly because there is so much in it - I am reading it every night), I appreciate it more and more. Some of you cultural history types might put it on a Christmas list.

Another book I am reading, with far more pleasure than the gruesome After the Reich, is Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century.

Since there was no real idea of "Germany" as a nation until 1817 (The Deutscher Bund), and no modern nation of Germany until 1871, the book is mostly about German culture (which preceded any German nation and which continues to exist beyond the boundaries of modern Germany - Austria, northeast Italy, Switzerland, the entire diaspora of German Jews, etc).

From the review in The Guardian:

So, is there a German genius? Of course there is. Even Borges never suggested that Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers could have been written in Spanish, or Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K�rper" in English. Of all the answers assembled by Watson, the clearest comes from the American philosopher John Dewey in 1915, who summed up German civilisation as a "self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation". By idealism, he meant a belief that behind appearances or phenomena is some super-reality, sometimes called Geist, sometimes called Wille, sometimes even Musik. Whatever it is called, it speaks accurate German.

His chapter on German Idealism is especially good. Hegel and his brethren inform our thinking today far more than I realized.

LP-CD turntables?

Seems to me it would be a good motivation to listen to one's dusty LP collection while putting them on CD where they belong.

Pic is this one.

Lots of reviews of these things say that they do not work well. I'd be concerned about the coordination of the endings of the LP and the CD.

Seasick Steve with some Mississippi Disco (with comments about what is real and what is not).

And the North Mississippi Allstars:

A quiet day at Maggies.

Here's a Wellfleet MA shore, looking the same way the Pilgrims saw it when they sailed down from P'town to Eastham. John Winthrop famously did not say, "My short-term goal is religious freedom, but my long-term goal is real estate" :

The Wellfleet, MA Congo Church, which still rings ship's bells instead of landlubber hours:

My sous chef, today:

Nice fireplace at a place we love:

 Cape Cod sunrise:

 I was told there would be football.

A thanks from Robin of Berkeley. A quote:

...this Thanksgiving, I feel not only grateful, but blessed. I read something evocative in the illuminating book Back to Virtue. The author writes that before a person believes in God, he feels either happy or unhappy. The person will cling to fleeting pleasures, no matter how harmful they may be. 

When a person wakes up to the Divine, he's still sometimes happy and other times unhappy. But through all the trials and tribulations of this human realm, he continually feels blessed. 

And a re-post, from legal immigrant Mark Steyn:

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

Ditto, Mark.

Every Thanksgiving, we kids sang this merry song on the way to our Granny and Grampy's Connecticut house: five of us, bouncing in the back seat of the Chevy station wagon. Dad driving with a cigarette in his mouth and humming opera tunes.

Kents, as I recall.

Their house was a mansion to us, filled with mysteries. My Gramps was a doctor. They had owl andirons with eyes, bathtubs with claw feet, a real ice box in the basement, a big family Bible from the 1700s, a jar of formaldehyde with a dissected human heart, old medical texts about Syphilis and Malaria which used to be common in CT, Tiffany lamps, a Chickering grand piano, Persian rugs, the first EKG machine in Connecticut (German made, in a mahogany cabinet, which still worked and which works to this day), the rooms my Dad and Aunt grew up in with all of their books - and my Granny's Mom, sitting and knitting. She died at age 103. An old Yankee, raised on a hardscrabble farm and who worked as a nurse, she never said very much. She was half Iroquois (her Mom), and looked like an ancient squaw with her hair tied back.

They had a cranky, humorless Polish widowed cook called Mrs. Wos (which was an abbreviation of her last name which I never knew) who helped them in the kitchen and who would smack your hand hard with a spoon if you tried to grab something. Granny was not much of a cook, to put it mildly, but she would help Mrs. Wos when asked. Mrs. Wos kept a filled bird-feeder outside the kitchen window for entertainment, and banged on the glass when a squirrel got into it. Come to think of it, she banged all sorts of things: hands, windows, pots and pans, cabinet doors, all the time.

 And they had an old widower black guy moved up from Mississippi who did chores and yard jobs, and helped with the garden - the sweetest and most dignified Christian guy you could ever know. "Uncle Ed," who my Granny called Mr. Evans, sang hymns while he worked, and read the Bible and philosophy (and W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Schweitzer) when he was off duty in his cozy apartment above the garage - with a wood stove (in addition to real heat) - and walls of bookshelves. He believed that fiction was the work of the Devil but he never refused whiskey.

Being alone in life, both family helpers joined us at the family tables for Thanksgiving dinner. Ed was always given the honor of offering the prayer which came from the depths of his heart. He went on for quite a while, as the soup got cold. Deep and yet simple, which are the things I still aspire to. He prayed for his country, for the enrichment of his and our spirits, for the soul of his dead wife, for his two boys in the service, and for the glory of creation.

I miss him because he was a dear buddy to me. He was the first black guy I knew. He had worked as a railroad Porter, and he said the railroad was the true friend of the black man. He knew the blues, and he knew the hymns. He taught me to fish, with great laughter and jollity. Bait-fishing from a rowboat, for food, with a bamboo pole. No fancy stuff. Long gone, now, but never forgotten.

Happy Thanksgiving, readers. Thanks to God, and God bless us, every one, living and gone - and our free country.

Photos: Station wagons were the SUVs of their time: if you had kids, you had one. '55 Chevy, of course. The '50 Buick? My grandparents drove theirs until the mid-1960s. Old people used to drive old cars. I recall theirs as having been brown, not black, but I couldn't swear to that. My Gramps, who was a doctor, totalled it into a tree while making a house call late at night in a snowstorm at age 84. He was OK, but the car wasn't. Bought a white Oldsmobile with power windows and began to cut back on work and grumble about socialism and socialized medicine. Johnson was President, with Medicare on the table - and he accepted vegetables, flowers, firewood, and labor as payment from those without money. He felt his poorer patients would feel demeaned by charity, so he expected something. I remember a bushel basket of fresh-dug potatoes on his back porch, with a note scrawled "from Sam." Another time I recall a bushel basket of sweet corn.