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I hope all had a New Year's Eve with just the right level of celebration and observance.
We had a lovely dinner last night. Christine had picked up glorious salmon filets and made horseradish mashed potatoes with French fingerlings. The spuds were a warm tan, not the off white of Idaho potatoes, and -- as we found years ago -- horseradish in the potatoes is a well matched compliment to the fish. I prepared a beet salad with a pomegranate orange dressing. I had both red and gold beets, so the pomegranate pips and bits of orange were balanced color matches. I'd been amused that the front flap of the cover of my cookbook was marking just the beet salad recipe i wanted to check: that one called for blood oranges. I think the pomegranate similarly complimented the beets. Unfortunately, i didn't think to toast the pecans before the fish went in, but un-toasted pecans are still delicious.
We're postcivilized with our meals. While we had discussed cleaning the cards and season's clutter off the dining room table and eating there, by the time we were ready to eat we both admitted we'd prefer our usual practice of eating while watching something. I'd moved Big Fish to the top of the Netflix queue for the holidays, so this seemed like a pleasant time to watch the film.
I didn't expect it to be quite as moving as it was for me. The movie presents the narrator's father as storyteller, and my brother and i have been talking about our father's storytelling. The Southern tradition of the tale lives on in my father, and my brother has grow to appreciate and value it. I ache a little, thinking of the wife-mother in the film, so comfortable with her husband's stories. My mother never "got" such storytelling, i think. Perhaps, even, this is a root of some of the brokenness of their marriage, much as the brokenness between father and son in the film. Mom was dazzled by the stories Dad told while they were dating, and then felt betrayed when they weren't raw fact. (I think she also wanted a knight to rescue her, and she got a human being.) Seeing the storytelling father on his death bed was hard after the news of Dad in the hospital -- he's home and doing fine, by the way.
I wonder, as i reflect on the waves of feeling the film stirred for me: there's something about the truly adventurous past my father has had (and the father in the film). Even though i and my siblings live in a much larger world (particularly my brother, his Beijing life resonating with the son of the film living in Paris), we've never quite had the opportunity for risk and adventure my father had. He did fight an aligator! And, oh, so many stories!
How am i ever going to captivate my nephews with the story of compiling my first linux kernel and troubleshooting the new computer to find i had to change the master slave jumpers on the ... what was it? Hmm.
Maybe one lesson i can take is that i don't need to remember all the factual details to tell a good tale. Hmm.
We had a lovely dinner last night. Christine had picked up glorious salmon filets and made horseradish mashed potatoes with French fingerlings. The spuds were a warm tan, not the off white of Idaho potatoes, and -- as we found years ago -- horseradish in the potatoes is a well matched compliment to the fish. I prepared a beet salad with a pomegranate orange dressing. I had both red and gold beets, so the pomegranate pips and bits of orange were balanced color matches. I'd been amused that the front flap of the cover of my cookbook was marking just the beet salad recipe i wanted to check: that one called for blood oranges. I think the pomegranate similarly complimented the beets. Unfortunately, i didn't think to toast the pecans before the fish went in, but un-toasted pecans are still delicious.
We're postcivilized with our meals. While we had discussed cleaning the cards and season's clutter off the dining room table and eating there, by the time we were ready to eat we both admitted we'd prefer our usual practice of eating while watching something. I'd moved Big Fish to the top of the Netflix queue for the holidays, so this seemed like a pleasant time to watch the film.
I didn't expect it to be quite as moving as it was for me. The movie presents the narrator's father as storyteller, and my brother and i have been talking about our father's storytelling. The Southern tradition of the tale lives on in my father, and my brother has grow to appreciate and value it. I ache a little, thinking of the wife-mother in the film, so comfortable with her husband's stories. My mother never "got" such storytelling, i think. Perhaps, even, this is a root of some of the brokenness of their marriage, much as the brokenness between father and son in the film. Mom was dazzled by the stories Dad told while they were dating, and then felt betrayed when they weren't raw fact. (I think she also wanted a knight to rescue her, and she got a human being.) Seeing the storytelling father on his death bed was hard after the news of Dad in the hospital -- he's home and doing fine, by the way.
I wonder, as i reflect on the waves of feeling the film stirred for me: there's something about the truly adventurous past my father has had (and the father in the film). Even though i and my siblings live in a much larger world (particularly my brother, his Beijing life resonating with the son of the film living in Paris), we've never quite had the opportunity for risk and adventure my father had. He did fight an aligator! And, oh, so many stories!
How am i ever going to captivate my nephews with the story of compiling my first linux kernel and troubleshooting the new computer to find i had to change the master slave jumpers on the ... what was it? Hmm.
Maybe one lesson i can take is that i don't need to remember all the factual details to tell a good tale. Hmm.
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I love this :)
(So are we)
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And -- by the way -- i'm "enjoying" using Time Out. I get a little frustrated but i'm also using it to check whether i'm doing what i want to be doing. It's such a gentle interface!
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