“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” -Simone Weil
Show:
Somebody Somewhere on HBO / Max. You can watch the first episode for free.
Sweet Baby James, I love this show.
The Blurb: “… the series follows Sam (played by Bridget Everett), a true Kansan on the surface, but, beneath it all, struggling to fit the hometown mold. Grappling with loss and acceptance, singing is Sam's saving grace and leads her on a journey to discover herself and a community of outsiders who don't fit in but don't give up, showing that finding your people, and finding your voice, is possible. Anywhere. Somewhere.”
A few things I love:
It highlights friendship, and specifically a new, best friendship. Like we talked about last week, I often think about what makes a friendship, what each friend uniquely offers, the shape and feel of each friendship, and what we bring. Do we bring the same things to each of our friendships? Different things? A mix?
This show also has me thinking about friends in groups - what is the unique character of a group of friends meeting together? There’s something about the chemistry of a particular group of friends that has its own energy. The whole is often more than the sum of its parts.
Do you regularly get together with a group of friends? Book clubs? Group runs? Activist meetings? Poker nights?
Husband and I used to host weekly Tuesday Night Suppers for four friend families (Husband cooked) when all of our kids were young. Huge table, lots of food, laughter, and “animal stories,” it felt like extended family. Before and after dinner, kids ran wild, relishing time with each other while we adults were occupied with our peer groups. And vice-versa. That was such a specific time of our lives. Thinking about it fills me with nostalgia.
We also used to meet monthly with a group of four families, rotating houses, for what we dubbed Barn Raising, after the Amish practice of a community pitching in to put up a
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barn in a day. We did not put up entire barns in a day. But every first Sunday, we’d help each other with projects like:
clearing out an attic,
painting a kitchen,
caulking tubs,
installing a ceiling fan,
raking leaves,
chopping and stacking wood for the winter.
We’d pool our tools and our skills; we’d take turns looking after the kids. Hosts would provide coffee and bagels.
This all makes me wonder: is early empty-nesting a good time to reinvigorate these practices? Tuesday Night Suppers and Barn Raising petered out when our kids reached a certain age. It was easier when they were little: families went most places as a unit and all the children got along - they were “play cousins.” TNS and BR got harder to coordinate as our children went to different schools and had their own lives, friends, and activities — while still needing supervision and transportation. Maybe, as our children graduate high school, it’s time for reconfigured get-togethers? Hm. I wonder.
Anyway. And now there’s Zoom, allowing friends to get together over distances - one really good thing to come from the pandemic, along with working from home. Pajama pants for the win.
Husband has a group of four close friends he grew up with. They all live in different states of the U.S. During COVID, they started weekly Zooms to chat and play cards online; it’s a two-device situation. Three years later, they still have weekly Zoom nights. It’s lovely to hear these distant friends’ voices in our living room every week.
Well crapmuffins. I went down memory lane and forgot what I was writing about. Ah, yes: Somebody Somewhere.
I also love that the show wonders aloud, “what is church”? This is one of the few shows I’ve seen that includes queer folks and talks in a hilarious but heartfelt way about feeling alienated from traditional Christianity and church and talks about longing for a sacred practice that is done in community with other people.
Some folks, like me folk, feel a deep need for something like church, but not necessarily church. Does church have to be in a church? Does church have to be about God? Are there other spaces that are sacred? (A lot of these questions are for quiet reflection. But this one I’ll answer: Yes. Of course other places are sacred. One such place is called “dirt church,” and that’s were Husband and Teen worship, on their bikes, in the woods.) Does music help sanctify a gathering? What about inclusivity?
Family. This show doesn’t shy away from how much we might love our family and how much they drive us bananas. Both at the same time. Some family members than others. And how dang hard family can be be. While still making you laugh.
Grief. Episode One starts six months after the death of the main character’s sister. This is a time in grief when often everyone thinks you should be over it and moving on, but you’re just not. It’s a very lonely time. (I wrote a book about exactly this time of grief.) I love that the show doesn’t shy away from this. You’re grieving and no one’s bringing casseroles anymore. You have a garage full of hospice and end-of-life care stuff. What do you do with it all? The memories, the grief, the stuff?
Realistic body sizes. Yesss. Our protagonist and several main characters are fat or otherwise not “straight size” and it is not a big deal. It doesn’t come up at all. Halle-fricking-lujah.
Podcast:
Bone Valley. If you’re into serial podcasts, justice, and/or excellent reporting, you might love this pod.
I sit in too many homicide trials to want to listen to true crime, but this isn’t that. It’s not voyeurism, it’s journalism.
The Blurb: “With heartrending clarity, suspense, and humanity, Bone Valley exposes the fundamental and catastrophic flaws in the American criminal justice system by documenting [a] desperate search for truth and redemption.”
Some of you might not believe that the wrong person can be imprisoned - and then kept in prison due to the sheer bullheadedness of a prosecutor. Or you think maybe it happens, but it must be exceedingly rare. What I can say is that the more friends I have who have been incarcerated or are otherwise involved with the so-called “justice” system, and the more I sit in court, the more I know this happens, and more than I thought. It’s truly wild just how easily a person can get swept up into the gears of incarceration. You don’t know until you know, and then you probably wish you didn’t know.
Nepotism alert: I’ve become friendly with the producer, Kelsey. She’s pretty great. But y’all. I stand by how good this podcast is.
Book:
Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Time, by D.L. Mayfield.
I love Dorothy Day. She was a radical anarchist activist, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, prolific writer, and utterly human. This book is a biography interspersed with the author’s musings.
One of the things both the author and I love about Dorothy is that, even in the midst of working, living in shared poverty, keeping her house open to anyone who needed refuge, and staying proximate to suffering, her spirituality included “the duty of delight”: noticing and appreciating the beauty in and joy of small things. For her, that included freshly rolled cigarettes, her cat named Social Justice, her favorite books (Dostoevsky), and her favorite songs. I love that.
The Duty of Delight. We are put on this earth to help each other, to love, and to enjoy life.
Honestly, when feeling overwhelmed by injustices, sometimes it is the small things that throw me a lifeline.
Just noticing them can be enough to get me to swim up for air.
A luna moth. Husband’s laugh. The sky. The moon. A passion flower.
And to repeat: Dorothy had a cat named Social Justice. Could I love that detail more? No, I could not.
“Social Justice, get down from the table.” “Has anyone seen Social Justice?” “Tamar, could you feed Social Justice?”
(For the record, I decided on my title, Notes From an Unruly Quaker, before reading this book... but I chuckled with delight when I saw this book title.)
Food:
Yeah okay, most newsletters highlight a fancy (or supposedly easy) recipe.
This leaves us non-chefs hungry and cast out into a cold desert on a moonless night listening to scary scuttling sounds that we can’t identify the source of. Not to put too fine a point on it.
I don’t cook but I do bake from scratch. Often to good effect … but not always.
Have I told you about the time I baked Husband a mocha chocolate birthday cake? And the recipe called for “1/2 cup fresh coffee”?
Husband tasted the batter and frowned. “This tastes… crunchy.”
I responded from up on the ceiling, “UH HUH YEAH THAT’S THE COFFEE”
“Hon. It … did the coffeemaker leak some grounds into the pot?”
“WHAT WHY WHAT HOW WOULD THAT MATTER I DIDN’T NEED THE COFFEE MAKER”
“Oh, sweetie. It’s supposed to be brewed coffee.”
“NO NO IT JUST SAYS ‘FRESH COFFEE’ IT DOESN’T SAY ‘FRESH BREWED COFFEE’”
“I think that they assume you know it should be brewed…”
Anyway I dumped out that batter and started over. I made Husband a new cake didn’t sleep at all from the coffee I’d licked (crunched).
But I digress.
In Thursday Things, you may have noticed I’m taking it upon myself to highlight the wonderful everyday food that we often overlook.
These goodies will at most require boiling, or popping into the oven, or heating in the microwave.
Behold, this week’s food: the humble tortilla chip. **Cue angel choir**
How I love tortilla chips.
They can act as paddles to scoop things into your mouth: guacamole, salsa, hummus, or if you want to be fancy, beetroot dip. Cottage cheese if you’re not shy and you need some protein.
Top them with a bunch of stuff and ta da! Nachos. Dinner.
But. But. They can be eaten on their own. They are so good on their own.
I love waiting until the bag is almost empty and then smooshing them up and eating the crumblies by the spoonful.
Tortilla chips are small-d democratic because you can find them almost anywhere in the U.S. and at any price, from cheap to kind of cheap. Grocery store, bodega, or gas station.
Or you can get freshly made chips at your tienda like our beloved local La Superior. Oh, and Ingles, the supermarket chain in the blue mountains, makes the best fresh tortilla chips at their deli.
Here is a poem about tortilla chips, in the great literary tradition of Green Eggs and Ham:
You can eat them on a plane.
You can eat them on a train.
You can eat them cracked or whole.
They can scoop your guacamole.
The humble tortilla chip: highly recommend.
OK! That’s it for this week. Hope y’all have a lovely weekend.
XOXO
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