Where the Heart Was

Posted on November 23, 2015 by admin under Guest, Losing Place

Home is the grit and gray of streets and parking lots and the widest freeway in the world. It’s being glad for a commuter train, so you can read while you sit in traffic. It’s the surprise of one of the largest urban parks in the United States, offering green respite. It’s watching the trails in that park erode, years of play degrading into memory.

In the fall, after 32-and-a-half years in my hometown, I left in a rented truck with husband, dogs, bicycles, and a few scraps more, for a 2500-mile move to the north.

Here in this place, everything is different. Things I thought I knew slipped away when I wasn’t looking.

This place is beautiful. I ride my bike from the house to views that evoke the word ‘pastoral’: cornfields and rolling green hills and a giant, weathered white barn etched against an enormous blue sky, wrinkled mountains lining the eastern horizon.

This place is about as diverse as vanilla ice cream, and as sticky-sweet. When I travel through a nearby metropolis, I get harassed the moment I step off the train: ah, the anonymity of the city. It’s not that I miss being cat-called. But in the way that a survivor of abuse places herself in abusive relationships, I suppose the familiar–even the unpleasant familiar–offers some brand of comfort. I didn’t know I missed the sound of sirens til I heard one and noticed how odd it sounded.

In the winter, 936774_10201102501273563_1510282701_n I traveled back south, to revisit places and people I know, love, and miss. Already home was a place I could not access, although I was comforted by a Southern drawl, a Cajun twang, an East Texas pacing of speech. The molasses air felt like a hug. I swallowed my pride, and told the loved ones I’d abandoned that I had not found eternal happiness in committing this crime against home.

Home is eating out: Mexican or Cajun or Greek or breakfast-all-day or Italian or Indian or Turkish or Vietnamese or sushi or Jamaican or burgers or dirt-cheap, clean, enormous oysters on the half-shell served with a smile and an ice-cold glass bottle of Tecate. Home is hearing many languages, and bilingual street signs, and the good and bad of smelling everybody else’s life and toil on mass transit. Home is people smiling on the sidewalks and saying “excuse me” when you step out of their way, or “thank you” if you hold the door. It’s being asked for change.

In the spring, I reversed direction, to husband and dogs in the north, entering again a vast, coldly beautiful loneliness. “What have I done?” I thought, as I climbed into our new bed in this place. “I’ve killed ‘home’ forever.”

Home is not pretty. It is somber: concrete and steel, cars and smog, flatness and pavement. It is where a friend used the line, “hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire,” as we mountain biked in all seasons and the temperature hit three digits in the shade before humidity factored in. But 858353_10200727243412351_1337074395_o there was what I called urban scenery: railroad trestles along a bayou with a junkyard in the midground, viewed from a grassy path. Definitely a different kind of picturesque, but a memorable picture nonetheless.

In the summer, I remembered home: thick, damp, oven-like air and open, friendly faces on the street, a cacophony of smells–tortillas cooking, Indian spices, garbage, diesel fuel, body odor, stale beer–and multitude of skin tones. Memories as terribly distant as they were deeply felt. I felt tattooed by Houston, as I have been tattooed in Houston, and am tattooed with Houston’s skyline and the shape of the state of Texas. I can’t reach home, even when I’ve had the outline of it permanently inserted under my skin.

Here, the house we inhabit is imperfect, as all houses are. I have been here long enough now to mostly know which light switch does what. Knowing how to make the light shine, for eating, reading, or just dressing myself, has got to be an important step on the journey toward making a home.

It is fall again.

Julia is a book reviewer, librarian, beer drinker, dog lover, mountain biker and native Texan now residing in Bellingham, Washington. She thinks a lot about concepts of place and home. Her favorite color is green.

The Act of Inverting

Posted on July 10, 2015 by admin under Guest, Memory & Place

I am in a new town, having finally made the first move of my life: 2,500 miles north to a place very different from what I’ve always called home.

On an old, oiled, well-marked wood floor, I practice a different style of yoga with a new teacher (although she has the same first name as my longtime teacher in the south). The studio is on the second story of a downtown office building that originally housed a hardware store. I position my mat in front of a window onto an alley, through which I can see a brick wall with beautiful patterns in it, a sky that is sometimes blue and cloud-filled, sometimes gray and spitting, and a church spire. Crows remark upon my practice from the opposite gutter.

Today I lie on my back with my legs above me, against the wall. Now the window is on my right. This is the asana (or pose) called Viparita Karani, upside-down seal or “the action of inverting.” It is supposed to help with stress, headaches, and cramped or tired legs or feet, among other things. Today I am not particularly stricken with any of these maladies; I am simply following my teacher. But I have been here before. I close my eyes.

Five years ago: I am lying in legs-up-the-wall pose on the same yoga mat on a different and much newer wood floor, of lighter-colored wood, also on the second story, but in a newer building on a wide, busy street in Houston, Texas. Two walls of the studio are floor-to-ceiling glass, and earlier in summer and later in winter I watch the sun rise from this room at least one morning a week, in angry rain or transcendent color or pale haze. This class is very full; we are all very close to our neighbors. I brush hands with the woman on my left, turn my head in her direction, and smile. We clasp hands. Kristi now lives in Australia, and has a new baby I have not met. I miss her every time I practice yoga.

Three years ago: I am lying on a bed in a mid-rate hotel in Alexandria, Minnesota, with my legs up the wall. I have removed the pillow so that I can get right up against the bedframe, still not as close to the wall as I’d like, but close enough. I am wearing compression socks up to my knees after having just raced 100 miles on hilly gravel roads on my bicycle. It is my first bike race since knee surgery and I’ve done better than expected: it was a scenic ride, with friendly people, and I am blissful, transcendent. Superlatively drained and equally ecstatic, I hum with happy exhaustion. My husband lies to the left of me, in the same position. Our shoulders are touching. Soon we will get up and break down our bikes and pack them in boxes for the flight home, then go out for more food and celebratory beers. I will take a picture of the process, of the bike boxes open on the hotel bed, and comment that we have done this in more cheap hotels across the country than I can easily count.

Today I am in a new place, and I am lonely. I put my legs up the wall.

* * * * *

“The Act of Inverting” is by Julia Jenkins. Julia is a book reviewer, librarian, beer drinker, dog lover, mountain biker and native Texan now residing in Bellingham, Washington. She thinks a lot about concepts of place and home. Her favorite color is green.

To Love a Place Is to Love the World

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Sam Turner under Travel & Place

Last week, I walked out of my families ranch house at the late hour of a summer sunset. The night was clear, the air was finally relieved of the record rainfall Texas experienced in May, the stars were already shining, and the sun was releasing its last embers on the edge of the darkly hued sky. I was taken away by that beloved place. I was almost breathless as the moon rose to meet the dying sun, and simultaneously I was saddened by the thought that maybe someone else does not have a place that wraps them in their love for it.

Every summer since I was 18 I have gone somewhere outside of my beloved Texas. I have been back to China, all over Europe, to Russia’s great city of Moscow and its deep eastern heartland in Siberia, seen a sunrise against magnificent Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya, and also seen maybe the world’s most beautiful sunset on the island of Santorini south of Greece. I have been to almost every state in the US on yearly road trips with my closest friends. I spent parts of last summer in Columbia, my first trip and hopefully not my last trip to South America, Colorado, New Mexico, and several other long road trips through the state of Texas.

Yet I never set out to be well travelled, nor do I consider myself someone who seeks adventure. But here I am in my late 20’s and by most measures well travelled, maybe it’s a product of affluence plus my generation’s disposition toward travel, but even then, I have gone to more places than those averages would suggest. Sometimes I have gone at the behest of others, sometimes because I was just curious. I have been to every continent except for Australia and Antarctica, yet I never intended to go anywhere. I love where I live. I love Texas.

Recently, I have been watching a couple documentaries titled “A Long Way Round” and “A Long Way Down” which are about Ewan McGregor and a friend riding around the world on motorcycles. My close friends and roommates watch them because they are planning on going around the world for a year starting this summer. Half-jokingly Ewan will make the same remark whenever he gets to a beautiful place on his journeys: “Ah, this looks like Scotland.” And then he’ll say something like: “the Scots created the rest of the world and they made it in our image, that’s why the world looks like Scotland.” It’s funny mostly because he’ll say it about a place like Russia or Ethiopia, so far from Scotland, and in many ways so different from his home, and he’ll say it in this quirky, nerdy scottish accent that would make me laugh anyways. But there is still some honest to goodness wonder in Ewan’s voice as he says it. He believes it to some degree, and you can tell he really relishes the different, but similar beauty.

In a similar way in all my journeys, I have found the places I have loved most, the places I found most beautiful, reminded me in some way of Texas while also being extraordinarily different. Kenya shaded its rough West Texas red dirt with a wide Texas sky, yet there were zebras and Giraffes running around underneath this indescribably massive mountain. I found it astonishing and bemusing when all the Kenyans wanted my rough, beaten cowboy boots because they realized just how well it would suit them walking on their red dirt, just as I find them befitting while walking around on my grandmother’s land in South Texas. I loved them for it, and I loved Kenya for its its shadows and shades of Texas. I learned to love all of it that was beyond what I knew, but it started from the roots of what I already loved. Its beauty grew on me because of its strange sameness. Maybe that is the essence of beauty: a new appearance which evokes a beloved place while simultaneously changing the way we loved that past place.

It’s an often spoken cliche that it’s easier to love all of mankind than it is to love a single person. But we batter the word ‘love’ by using it too often to mean too many things. To love something, someplace, or somebody requires a textured romance, a felt knowledge of its individual flecks. Our human love, the real kind that comes from our bodies, souls, and minds, is bought with the precious care of given attention. The one thing that I can add in this time of travel and placelessness is that if we pay attention to the little beauties in the places we go, we will find in them hints of our home. And if we have known a place where its sights and sounds wrap us in the arms of our love for it, we may find that to know a place is to know the world and to love a place is to love the world.

The Fullness of Fall

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Sam Turner under Season & Place, Uncategorized

Everything dies. Nothing dies.
That’s the story of the Book.

It’s like this for me in Texas: fall is when love blossoms only to die in the spring.

In the fall, the air is fresh. The promise of cooler weather is heralded with storms rushing from the north. The grey winds from afar release the death grip of the Texas summer heat. The fall is football, Friday night lights, and the romance of a dying summer. It is a chance to actually enjoy the outdoors again, and a reminder that Texas is still a great place to live.

Autumn with its too-muchness,
Stretching the boundaries
Of Song

Fall is full. The wounded red of fall drips from the trees. There is an aching in the shadows of leaving trees, and even the very slant of autumn light stirs my overly romantic soul.

I once kissed a girl on a fall night after a heartbreaking home football loss. It was my first kiss. We were out under the October stars, still warm enough to only need sweatshirts as we lay looking up at the eternal markers. I am not sure I have ever been more scared. I am sure I have never been happier.

In a Texas spring the weather is violent. It unleashes furious storms, snows in the middle of a perfect week, and then hints at the hated summer heat. The wildflowers come roaring along Texas highways bursting forth in strokes of crimson, yellow, and blue. But their life is doomed by the coming heat. Aborted beauty burned up like martyrs holding out against the summer’s tyranny. Even the spring’s green brings with it an awareness of the brown it will turn to in the overbearing sun.

I was heartbroken by the next spring. The first kiss in the fall turned into a last parting kiss on an April day. A Friday, holding her at the door, my first broken heart left exposed before the summer heat.

**********

Others in the north will speak of seasonal depression hitting them during the long winter, but for me, the weeks of early spring, the lenten season before easter, is when it comes. For the past 7 years, I have waited ominously through spring for it to strike. Sometimes it does not arrive, but sometimes it does as the creeping nausea of blank feelings emptying my heart of any joy.

Several years after my first broken heart during my last spring semester in college, I met this girl with burning blue eyes. I fell for her like a boy lost at sea, but she was unable to return it. Another spring romance born only to die.

The wave of depression that followed was one of the worst I have known. The weeks of late March and early April nearly crushed me. I could hardly breath much less attempt to write my senior paper, and I almost failed my last class at Texas A&M. It was the first time in my life where I fully felt the need to take a pill.

For the last three years I have attended an Ash Wednesday service during February before spring could come. It has been my bulwark against spring. I would like to think the reminder of my death, the passing from dust to dust recalled in the service, protects me with my own weakness. We are dying, yes and amen. On Ash Wednesday there are no false promises.

**********

I read the Book for years
And never understood a word.
Scrawled in its margins.
Wrote my own versions
Of what I read there,
But never got a thing right.

Didn’t understand that each
Poem was a magic spell.
Was a voice,
And under that voice: an echo
That was the spell

As if each poem clearly spoke
The word “Death”
And the echo said “Life.”

And this is why I love the fall: it is full of death, but its echo is life. Roiling under its scenes of dying, I often sense the true vibrancy of life. Amidst all the life of spring I am too aware of its coming end, but in the fullness of fall heaving with death, I hear what sounds like a symphony to my soul: the oblique cry of life like an echo from an empty tomb.

(All quotes are from the beautiful poetry collection Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr)

Home Plate

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Sam Turner under Home & Place

I am fond of irrationally loving things. I get a little too giddy about game 121 of a long baseball season. You would have no idea it was a game that hardly mattered by the way I am yelling obscenities at a single missed strike call by an umpire who is deciding within fractions of an inch whether the little white ball flying in at 90 MPH went over the plate or not. I cannot rationally defend why I love baseball or college football or Texas or Dr. Pepper, but I will fight with every breath in me to love them all the same. There is something in me which desperately needs the rousing breath of unreasoned, childlike passions.

I was at a baseball game a few years ago with my dad. We were sitting in the third deck in the midst of one those late summer Texas evenings where cirrus clouds hang high like streaks of vanilla in an otherwise sherbet colored sky. You can put on Explosions in the Sky and get a feeling of how I feel about these kinds of evenings. Next to us was a father with his 5 year old son. The son was falling in love with the game; the father was there to watch. The son knew the players, he knew the rules, and he knew that the only way to watch the game was standing up on the tip of his toes leaning against the rail ready for the suddenness of something grand in the midst of the mundane rituals of a summertime game.

Irrational passions like baseball fandom demand our hearts be ready to be broken and spoken to in a way completely counter to most realities in our lives. Life tends towards the typical, but our hearts restlessly ask to be reconciled to and even wrecked upon something more. One of my favorite quotes about baseball from one of its great living chroniclers, Joe Posnanski, reminds me of this: “I never argue with people who say that baseball is boring, because baseball is boring. And then, suddenly, it isn’t. And that’s what makes it great.”

The boy waited on his tiptoes. He was calling out the players’ names as they ran out onto the field. His favorite player was every boy’s favorite. His activities were the accents of love as love. He could not explain why the game grabbed him, but it did. At some point I loved the game the same way. We have videos of me with a bat bigger than me swinging and hitting whiffle balls at the age of three. I’ll never forget the triple play I made in tee ball, or the perfect game I went to at the Ballpark in Arlington when I was in first grade. Those were moments of magic. When I was a teenager, the magic died. I felt nothing when I watched the game.

In the recent movie Boyhood the most poignant scene of the movie for me comes when an adolescent boy asks his vagabond father:

“Dad, there’s no real magic in the world, right?”

Right. We all answer the question the same way at some point. There is a death for all our irrational loves. A death held in their inability to sustain against the pervasive banality of our lives.

When I came home for the summer in 2008 after a very bad year in college, I decided to start going back to a few Texas Rangers games. There was some hope that year for the team I grew up loving more than any other team. The Rangers had just traded for this guy named Josh Hamilton. He was a drug addict who had just made it back to baseball the year before after a 5 year hiatus, and he was looking for a second chance at the game. The probability of Hamilton picking up a bat after five years and hitting a baseball well was very low, much less so because he had spent those five years blowing almost 2 million dollars on drugs. But something truly magical happened that year. Within the first month, it became evident that Hamilton was a player with transcendent talent. I went to one game after another and by the All-Star break I had attended over 20 games, more than I had gone to in the previous five years combined.

The crescendo of the year came when Hamilton hit in the Home Run Derby at the Mecca of baseball, old Yankee Stadium. His first trip to the plate in the derby was the most extraordinary display of baseball prowess I have ever witnessed. He hit 28 home runs, and at one point, he hit 14 in a row without recording an out. Each home run seemed to go farther than the last until he was hitting 500 ft home runs like they were routine. His performance was so remarkable that the usually surly New York faithful rained down a chant which I still get chills recalling in my head: “Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton.” There was magic in the air that night in New York, and baseball had romanced my heart once again.

The truth is there was always magic in the game, magic in the rituals of the game, in the batters’ gimmicks, pitchers’ grimaces, summer evening skies, and well broken leather. I don’t always catch it, but after losing and re-finding my love for baseball, I find a fullness in even the smallest of details. It’s something like finding life in the breaking of bread and forgiveness in the bitterness of wine.

When the fifth inning of the game came, the boy’s focus suddenly shifted towards his father. And with the absolute confidence of a child he said: “Fifth inning is ice cream inning!”

Dutifully, the father took his son down the aisle and out to the concessions while I sat there grinning like I had not grinned in a long time.

A Passage Home in a Passing World

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Sam Turner under Home & Place

The morning rose as promise quickly succumbed to the extravagance of the mounting sun. Five of my best friends and I were headed west through the high plains near Lubbock under the cracking brilliance of a Texas summer morning. This was the fulfillment of our pact made almost a year before to drive to San Diego and back after we graduated from High School. The road and its rushing welcome beckoned us westward into the long journey that would echo through our lives for the next ten years as we would return again and again to the road together every following summer.

We passed into New Mexico in the early afternoon and found ourselves in the middle of nothingness. Clouds like clots stood against the oppressing light casting shadows onto the speckled desert. Our car passed as a breath through the dry cavity, and in it, the green roots of deep friendships were growing deeper.

***********************************

I often wonder if my home is the road. Upon Texas highways I have experienced more beauty and joy than anywhere else.

The countless sunset drives where every sunset original in its peculiar quality grabs the deepest pieces of me and puts them together. Nights under stars uttering mystery in the tongues of ancient light. Late shadows cast sidelong by trees only glimpsed but caught in my memory forever. Middle of May wildflowers, Bluebonnets and Indian Blankets, painting a canvass of glory just outside a middle-of-nowhere Texas town. The rushing surprise of spring bursting forth in a shade of green I had almost forgotten in the winter. All of these are visions of the road, hints of home in a passing world, and the passing only makes it sweeter.

Nothing awakens in me the poetic sense of experience more than the road. The road as an archetype signals a new hope, and when I drive, I hope for home.

*****************************************

Somewhere along our first day’s drive in New Mexico, we stopped and ran around naked through a boy scout campsite for a while acting as if the world were really all here for us to romp through. This led to a speedy getaway back into the summer evening. When we finally caught our breath and reminded each other what we had actually done, we smiled and began to speak to one another in a new way. The night took us as I drove us west, and each of us conversed with the other slower and deeper.

Night closed and there were no lights. Nothing before us, nothing behind us. There was only blackness and our meagre headlights. Our car was a mere passenger clinging to the two lane road. The space of the car and the 20 feet our headlights pierced in front of us were all we had, yet we twisted through the dark world with joy.

Each head in the car slowly nodded off, and I drove on alone. The deepest darkness I had ever known enshrouded our now seemingly miniature vessel as it forged deeper into the nights mystery. I had never been so alone with others around me. After ten minutes of driving silently and looking around at the void on all sides, I stuck my head out of the driver’s side window and caught a glimpse of the high, moonless, New Mexico sky.

The sky was softly illuminated with a million stars buried on top of one another in the deep ocean of space. Their light was far away, but the stars tangled the entire sky with their white shimmer. I rolled the window all the way down and climbed out of my seat keeping one hand on the wheel as I sat on the window with most of my torso out of the car and my face free.

I drove this way for a moment before climbing back into my seat. The widow rolled back up and the space within was still and silent once again. I looked down at the glowing green clock reading 11:54 P.M., and I felt a wave of exhaustion creep up the back of my neck. The road passed in twenty foot increments as I drove wearily on, and I turned inward to my own deeper thoughts for the first time all day. I was alone, and my mind recalled the weeping nights I had spent on my bed the past year feeling the caving in of my own heart.

We rolled on westwardly weaving our way as a narrow passage of light through the darkness. Above, we were being watched by the infinitely interwoven stars.

In the Aching Hour, We Wait

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Sam Turner under Out of Place

The dying light of a sunset is an encounter with the aching beauty of the eternal. As I watch the light unfold, my heart also unfolds. Here and longing. Flashes of mystery in the familiarity of light.

Two days ago, in the early winter hour of sunset, I drove into the southwest horizon. The crisp, yet not cold, December air felt light and clean as the sun’s horizontal shine blew the heaviness and rush of daylight away. But as the light went its silent way into the deep blue fading sky, low in my chest, something heavy grew. Sorrow and the fullness of joy were somehow interwoven in a single feeling. The black shadows of trees etching upwards like arms and fingers reaching to the sky, like black spires aching in the light, recalled something eternal, something of death in life and life in death. The aching of my heart quivered under the hope the leafless trees promised. But quickly, the image faded. Too often, beauty is a shadow passing–leaving only a thin hope, a momentary awareness of a true home. As it passed over, this thin hope found its place in my heart, a heart now missing a faraway home.

****************************************************

Deep in South Texas, my grandmother’s childhood home sits at the base of the Texas hill country and is dominated by slow rises, wide views, and red dirt. Everything about the ranch reminds me of her–rugged and beautiful in a Texas kind of way. It’s an old house complete with a 1980’s Ford pickup to drive the property.

On a visit one summer evening, the old pick-up with Texas Country playing on the radio took me to the highest point of the ranch, and I rolled the windows down to watch the sun set into the grey of a coming storm. As the clouds turned from shadows into the surface of a burning sea, the storm and its rushing glory moved towards me. The smell of rain, thick in the vital air, mingled with the vision. Far in the low sky, silent lightning struck. The coolness of the coming rain and the sedation of the setting sun spoke peace, but in the moment, there was also fury…fury in the rising storm and a wild otherness in the red dirt and fiery skies, tremors of holiness within the peace. It was a fleeting sight of a home I did not know, a place I had only sensed.

My longing for that home, only glimpsed, is often full of sorrow. I, and all those whom seek, wait. We wait for the Son in the midst of a sullied world. We wait for him to be born. We wait for him to die.

In the aching hour of the setting sun, we wait.

Yet, in the promise of his advent, our waiting is full of hope. For he said he will come again, and we, with John, say: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

Pizza on Thanksgiving

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Sam Turner under Food & Place

When I was 21, I was a college dropout living on the floor of a friend’s apartment. I was estranged from my family because I chose not to be around them, and I was completely lost in myself.

During that year, I spent nearly every day alone. Over the previous two years of my life, I had slowly slipped into myself, away from friends and any purpose to guide and drive me beyond the most present satisfactions. I lived in a cage of self-absorption. For Thanksgiving in my 21st year, I missed all of my family’s activities, including our goose-hunting trip and the Thanksgiving Day meal at the ranch house. Instead, I chose to cut myself off from communicating with everyone, seeking desperately to avoid seeing another face that might recall me to my own lonely heart.

I have always been content alone. My mother often told me I was so easy as a child because I needed no attention—I had my own mind to get lost within—yet this also rightly worried her because I did not seek others out, especially when I was hurting or feeling shame. By the time I was 21, after two years of burying myself in the shame of not living up to who I could be as a student as well as a pile of addictions and self-hatred, I was even more intent on fleeing others; they awoke in me an awareness of just how lonely and lost I was. I could hide my heart’s aching loneliness from myself with a series of addictions and distractions, but the face of another person was a mirror to me.

Thanksgiving day for my family usually consists of turkey, stuffing, endless rolls, a goose, pecan pie, football, and thanksgiving. The central focus and culmination of our meal is our giving of thanks where, with a solemn yet joyful procession around the table, we offer up our gratitude for family, friends, and all the goodness of life. This is one of many sacraments my family practices around the dinner table on special occasions. For birthdays, my family intentionally sets aside a time at the end of the meal to tell the family member who was born that day why we love them. These moments recall us back to joy, thanksgiving, and shared love. But for that Thanksgiving, I was a prodigal so desperately mired in the muck of myself that I could not handle love, joy, and thanksgiving. When we turn in upon ourselves and seek our satisfaction from only what we desire, our hearts can shrivel up to the point where love and joy become painful for us. Right then, love and joy were painful for me to encounter.

Instead of community and celebration, I spent that Thanksgiving alone. I locked myself up in the apartment and wanted no one to come near me. Because I was so afraid of seeing another face, I did not leave my room until I became hungry. Around mid-afternoon, I finally decided to order pizza (which to my surprise was still delivered on Thanksgiving) and waited in my cavern for it to arrive. I was watching football, just like my family was likely doing, when the pizza arrived. When I opened the door, I found a young man, probably my own age, looking at me quizzically. I immediately wondered: Why was this young man working on Thanksgiving? What had led him to the point where he wasn’t at home with his family, eating a joyful Thanksgiving meal? Was he without a family or friends to share joy and love with today?

Then, I saw in his eyes the same questions being asked back at me. Beneath my armor of distractions, the desperate beating brokenness of my own heart pulsed with billowing pangs into my consciousness. In this pizza delivery boy’s face, I saw my own loneliness.

Driving through a small town on I-45 the other day, I saw a big billboard, the type of sign you only see in a small town in Texas, which read: “Lost? The map is in My Book. ~God”. When I saw it, I was struck by a realization: When I am lost, the map back to where I need to go has not often been written on a page but in the face of another person. When I was lost that Thanksgiving day, the face of a pizza delivery boy first woke me to how lost I really was. Now, every time I attempt to escape back into myself to hide from the constant reality that I am lonely, broken, and in need, I find myself face to face with another broken heart. I writhe to run, but the God whose face is always seeking mine will not let me turn forever from my own brokenness. I am recalled back to the place of my own poverty, where I am unable to live without another living within me, beside me, and for me, and where in turn I am called to live for others outside the ruinous cavern of myself.

Coming Home: A Christmas Culinary Experience in Texas

Posted on November 13, 2014 by Sam Turner under Food & Place

When I list my favorite things about Texas, I always start with foods and drinks: Blue Bell Ice Cream, Tex-Mex, Kolaches, Dr. Pepper, and Shiner Bock. Texas has the great distinction of being home to many very distinct and delicious culinary cultures. The obvious ones, Mexican food and Texas BBQ, produce the glory known as brisket tacos. But the lesser known distinct cultures are those from Germany and Eastern Europe. Texas once was the destination for many immigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia, and in the broad scape of Texas, these immigrants settled in very distinct and geographically separate communities (some so isolated they still speak their native languages) bringing with them their culinary gifts. The Germans brewed their beer creating for Texans the amber-brown delight of Shiner Bock, which is brewed in the small German community of Shiner, Texas, and the Czech’s baked their bread and made their sausages and gave us the kolache (I’m constantly stunned by the number of people who have never heard of nor tried a jalapeno and cheese kolache).

For my family, Christmas meals are a wonderful sampling of Texas’ diverse delights. My family starts on Christmas Eve by treating ourselves to the best tamales I have ever had, made in a little East Dallas shop, as well as a sundry of other delightful Tex-Mex dishes, all served buffet-style in the comfort of our home with some extended family joining us. I am generally so utterly stuffed by the time the meal is over I can barely stay awake through our annual watching of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The next morning, Christmas opens with kolaches and cinnamon rolls, but I must pace myself—the true joy of Christmas is our late lunch at my aunt and uncle’s house.

Every year my family spends Christmas afternoon at the Kolenovsky’s house. My uncle is of Czech descent, and he and my aunt make an excellent culinary combo. They put on a feast of feasts, spending weeks gathering recipes and preparing for the Christmas celebration. The group is not large, but we quite literally feel like attendees to a king’s feast as the food is examined and the paper crowns and poppers are arranged upon the table. The dishes are an array of Czech soups, smoked ribs and meats so tender they melt in your mouth, unbelievable dressings and stuffings ranging from classic breaded ones to raspberry jalapeno sauces, vegetarian dishes for my sister and father, rolls upon rolls with the prescience to know that I will eat four (well earning my “muffin man” moniker given to me by my aunt), and another Texas staple: pecan pie and ice cream for dessert. They also choose delightful wines and drinks to go with the meal, and never forget to allow for my family’s addiction to Dr. Pepper. All of the tastes overwhelm me—even the thought of the meal will leave my mouth watering.

At the end of every feast, we generally find ourselves in a dazed comatose as my aunt and uncle read us something full of wit and heart. Sometimes these readings make our bellies roll in laughter and sometimes they make us weep, like the time my uncle read us Rudyard Kipling’s poem about a dog dying just two months after we had lost our dog. These moments are as close as I have been to truly coming home. We spend decades of our lives looking for a place we know with our hearts is home, and on Christmas day, the day marking earth and heaven being brought together for all eternity, my family gathers around for a feast, draws near to our true home in this communion, and eats from the best dishes the land God blessed with His own hand can offer.

On mornings, intention, and getting still enough

Posted on November 11, 2014 by admin under Food & Place, Guest

I’m no purist. As soon as the temperature dips below 90—usually mid-October in this part of Texas—I start pouring eggnog into my coffee. This may be one of few truly habitual morning routines I have. By design, I resist routine in the mornings. I have never been the sort of person that wakes the same time, has the same breakfast, has the same commute. I don’t find this to be noble. I have tried with limited success to become that sort of disciplined person, anchored in morning ritual and liturgy of coffee cup and toast point and made bed. I manage for a few days, at most, and then the resolve slips away from me and I’m back to a disordered sense of morning duty, careening from grocer to writing to recycle bin to conference call.

But eggnog in the coffee cup, that point in October when it becomes justified, slows me down just enough. I catch myself getting still, hearing my breath, the way the brick of the apartment whistles when wind cuts across it, the feel of the cement beneath bare feet. I sit across from the windows that keep watch with the sunrise and pull out the notebook, forgotten too often during the late season of summer, where pen is set to craft recipe, reason out flavor, and I plan a menu for the week. I get still enough to be mindful, yet again, of Alexander Schmemann’s speculation that no matter how utilitarian we have managed to make everything else, food remains something sacred to us, something that cannot be pure utility. There is reverence in the wielded knife and the butchered lamb, a kind of sacrament of patience in the warm of the midday loaf set on the windowsill to rise.

Eggnog in the coffee cup returns me to this practice of noticing, attending to the detailed work of craft. I am no hater of technology, no scorner of social media, but in the brevity of the early morning pause, the breviary of an ordinary life, I disconnect just long enough to be mindful. Mindfulness is an underrated virtue. It doesn’t boast a great deal of acclaim. But mindfulness keeps us observant of ourselves and of the spaces we inhabit, keeps us intentional and keeps us kind. When I pause long enough to be careful, I am reminded of the miracle that it is to live, to taste, to smell, to make. We are alchemists of invitation and acceptance in our kitchens. We present common sacrament upon our tables. We offer chairs as signs of worth. We prepare tables as icons of welcome.

All this from eggnog in the coffee cup. Just enough of a pause in the waking hour, when the sun first colors the skyline, to remember the good work of being present, being focused, being exactly where I am. This is a ritual I can return to, when all else about routine fails. Clasped coffee cup tinged with sweetness, this takes me back to the center, to the contentment of the very moment.