Chiaroscuro

Many years ago I had the great good fortune, probably not sufficiently appreciated at the time, certainly not taken adequate advantage of, to live in Florence for nearly a year.  The trouble with living in a fabulous city rich in stories and visually moving in the deepest parts of one's soul is that one may still fall into bad habits brought from home, and I did.
Being a naive 20 year old coming out of a horrendous relationship terminating in a welfare sponsored abortion in a town where I was completely alone and in the hands of some pretty brutal doctors and nurses I got to see how the other side lived.
I say the other side, because though my childhood was one of relative economic privilege, the memories are such  that I am constantly flipping over debris to find good memories to cultivate, to  uncover the reasons behind the others and to approach forgiveness.
In sunny California, I saw that there are many people who have lousy memories without food or social opportunity, some who rise out and lots who never do.  I was living at the time surrounded by people in despair and torment, and had made the childish error of falling in love with one of them.  It might not have been the best time for my parents to send me to Europe alone with little money, no connections and no plan, but that was their way of handling things, and if I had been less homesick and broken hearted I might have been able to make more of it.
So, I learned to speak Italian, to cook food from markets instead of from cans, to appreciate the beauty of a gone world lovingly preserved and to take long walks and bike rides in search of the perfect pastry or gelato emporium.  I must get over my sadness that at the time, I never drank coffee.  I didn't believe I had the right to try to draw or paint, so I didn't, I looked at other people's paintings and read other people's books, played other people's music and thought other people's thoughts.  The loneliness of my time there forced me to begin to grow a person.  It has taken a long time, but I credit Italy with the fertilizer, the right soil and the warm sun.
My first experience of a new concept in how to see was explained to me with the euphonious word 'chiaroscuro'.  There is a reason we use other languages to refer to ideas the English vocabulary doesn't encompass.
"The use of light and dark pigment to create the illusion of solid forms" applies as much to how we manage memory to create stories as to visual art.  The benefit of applying the idea to a memory palette is that not only images are created and strung together, but also deep emotion, motivation, identity.  The fluidity of paint is a satisfying medium, if I don't like the work I've done, I can scrape it off and paint another one.  This brings me to another visual concept: Pentimento.

Prints of Peace

Though I have lived through dozens of Christmases, it crossed my mind this year that I don't remember any of them very well.  When I think of Christmas, I remember the one when I was 4 years old the most clearly, though by now so much of my life feels like a dream,  that the dreamlike quality of that Christmas is not so much a stand alone memory.
The one thing I don't look forward to about dementia is living in the distant past.  If I had experienced a Norman Rockwell childhood, it could be a good way to wind up, but I'm developing a minor horror of spending the end of life thinking I'm back at my beginnings, though I suppose it is possible that there are some good experiences back there that I have selectively forgotten because they didn't fit the narrative I had decided to create to fit how it felt.
That year though, was the last year I had a family, and a home and a sense of those things being real.  My father was a lover of Christmas, my mother couldn't have hated it more if it had included anal rehydration.  Dad got a big tree, and the stairway in that big house wound up and around the tree to the top floor.  There never was such a tree, I couldn't get enough of it, I wanted to sleep under it, and that year I tried to.  It was the last year I was convinced that Santa Claus was a real human person, and though suspicions were gaining on faith, the tree seemed like a good place to wait for him to come and drink the bourbon and eat the cookies we had left for him.  That Christmas is probably the one I have tried to get a piece of again every year since, and it is not just elusive.  It never existed.   Underneath what I remember, was a couple of people who couldn't believe the situation they had chained themselves to, drinking to bury the pain of it and working hard to convince anyone who might be looking that things were fine.
We were Unitarians at that time, and that was the year I asked my mother if the church ever talked about Jesus.  "Only if they're falling down stairs" she replied.
I suppose a 4 year old can't be expected to understand that the way one approaches one's life has an effect or that the decisions made in the face of life have consequences, or that caring about other people or listening to them is more than just getting the hell out of the way and making yourself scarce, but I remember a longing for meaning.
So much of what happens at this time of year strikes me as reaction to unexamined memory instead creating an experience or taking an action based on a response to reality.  The return of more light whether it looks like turning towards summer a few seconds at a time or the idea that there was a human incarnation of consciousness, love, unity, acceptance and forgiveness, it runs like a thread through the ritual of this season.

 The contrast of how the season is represented and how it is experienced is a stark lesson every year of how to deal with the ways in which we are disappointments to ourselves.  We are always at the end, we are always at the beginning, nothing is repeated, no one needs to be held to account, no wishes need to be fulfilled, no scores settled, no certain results.    But it helps if it is possible to notice what is going on, if it isn't possible to be generous, maybe it's possible to be restrained, if it's not possible to give, maybe it's possible to not to take.     

sourdough again

This is how the bread turned out.  I think there's room for improvement, but it's tasty and I consider that a success….

Sourdough

Sometime after the divorce, my mother went from thinking that hotdogs and frozen peas with Uncle Ben's rice was a suitable dinner to feed her kids, to making her own bread, finding things like artichokes, planting her own garden and making her own jelly.
For awhile, she was bringing her whole wheat bread down to Boston to sell at an upscale food market on Boylston St, but her kids were trading lamb sandwiches made with artisan bread and homemade mayonnaise for a PB&J on Wonder bread during recess.
As she got more involved in improving the home food supply, she hit on a bread that we all liked;  sourdough.
I have been making my own bread now for decades, and have dropped off the cliff many of her unbreakable rules.  She measured meticulously, I don't measure at all.  She insisted that 500 strokes of a wooden spoon was essential when mixing the bread, and kneading for 10 minutes.
I found that though that worked for her, I get a very nice doorstop at the end of the process if I follow this path, so I mix it up enough, knead it as little as possible and never, ever punch it down when it is rising.
Mum had a crock of sourdough starter in the fridge for years, I never paid attention to how she started it, but when the local artisan bread vendor was delivering his weekly shipment to the local store I asked him how he did anything without yeast.  He smiled enigmatically and said he had a "relationship" with the yeast in the environment and he invited it in.
A good dodge, but I have been thinking about it.
I decided to start my own sourdough starter bringing yeast along by invitation, I'm not patient enough yet to figure out how to do this with a plain loaf [later, maybe] so I grated a potato and cooked it.  After grating the potato into a bowl there was about 1/2 cup of fluid, so I added that to 3/4 cup of organic flour and put it in a glass bowl, covered with a plate.  I figured that lets air enough in, without subjecting it to the debris that is continual in this house.
Today is day 5 and I am going to make a loaf of bread with it.
I'll let you know how it goes in part 2 tomorrow.