Saturday Roundup
"Always near", The origin of French fries, Dum Guy, What's under my yard?, The betrayal of Waffle house, Chris Range's excellent Substack
My son Sdn David Mathewes posted this image on his Facebook page, and it troubled me—I felt obscurely that someone had made it to mock tough-guy Orthodox Christians.
On the contrary, it’s one in a series of a hundred or more paintings by the Russian artist Andrei Bodko. The series shows Jesus with people going through their everyday lives. No artist could paint these images who did not have an enormous love (a Christ-like love) for the whole human race.
Here are a few more. I was able to find his website, but I’m still not sure how you can offer to buy the paintings.
Wonderful sensitivity to those with mental illness.
If you can find a link to purchase these paintings, please put it in the comments and I’ll post it back up here.
Well, now we know. I was reading the essay “Holy Ireland” by Joyce Kilmer, an early 20th-century author, who died in World War I. He starts off by saying his company had marched 17 miles on a stormy December day, and on arriving in a village was billetted in a small home. The mother, a war widow, and her three young children welcomed them in. They pooled their money and Solange, Madame’s 8-year-old daughter, went to the market for groceries. Kilmer tells how Madame cooked the potatoes for them:
Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then with a veritable French trench-knife Madame cut the potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange had put the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung near a chair over the fire. Into the boiling grease the potatoes were were placed, Madam standing by with a big ladle punched full of holes—I regret that I do not know the name for this instrument—and keeping the potatoes swimming, zealously frustrating any attempt on their part to lie lazily at the bottom of the pot.
French fries! That’s where they came from. Soldiers came home from WW I and described this great new way that French people cook potatoes.
I was browsing through some old photos and came across this. We’d moved into our Tennessee home in 2018, and not long after I was planting a rosebush at the foot of my office stairs. I dug down 12-18 inches and hit…pavement.
Beats me. No one has ever come up with a theory about this.
Our home is in a 1950s ranch-house development, and I don’t know what was here beforehand—probably a farm. What you can’t see very well is that the left-hand paving is maybe an inch higher, and there is a rounded edge so something wheeled could roll over it rather than bumping up a step.
I like to think it’s the roof of a 60’s era fallout shelter. How cool would that be! I looked into renting ground-penetrating radar to find out where anything else is under the yard, and then dig to find out what it might be. But now I am edging into the the area my kids call “Crazy Mom ideas.”
Here’s another odd thing. Under the house there is a crawlspace, and when we moved in we found that there was new black plastic covering it, which was good. But we found that holding down the edges of the plastic were two singletrees:
A singletree is what you would attach to a horse with a harness, and use it to drag heavy things. I see online some people make hanging lamps from them.
The plastic had obviously been put down recently, but the singletrees had to be very old—how long had it been since a horse lived here? All these mysteries in my life.
A couple of years ago I took a granddaughter to Waffle House, and I was shocked by the waffles we were served. These are seriously thin and meagre waffles. I came back and ordered two waffles and put one in my pocketbook (having brought a zip-loc bag for the purpose). Then I went home and cooked a waffle.
Well. See for yourself.
See what I mean? A real waffle is a hearty thing. The current Waffle House waffle is more like a cookie.
Here’s the side view:
Waffle House has killed its own primary product, and I am greatly disappointed.
And yet some remain true believers.
I am enjoying so much the Substack of Chris Range, a fellow-parishioner at Christ the Savior Orthodox Church in Bluff City, TN. His family goes back many generations in the mountains of east Tennessee; here’s the “James Range cabin, built circa 1805 … by the author’s 5th great-grandfather, an officer and veteran of the Revolution.”
This particular essay is the first one I read, and I was hooked. There’s just that little-bit more than you expect, a little bit further insight, a little further unfolding, in beautifully expressive language. See if you feel the same.
BTW Chris is a nurse, and he has a side-project, Orthodox Healing, which should be of further interest to people in the medical profession.
The paintings of Christ ineffably visiting our commonplace lives brought tears to my eyes. Christ is in our midst! May we never forget it!
Love this, thank you 💕🤩 the couple fighting is an incredible reminder, for marriage, and for all relationships with everyone we know!