Good as Bread

Yesterday my friend Lucy came to visit and, as always, I was reminded of my husband’s remark that Lucy is “as good as bread.” The Italians have a saying, buono come il pane, literally meaning "as good as bread" but sometimes translated into "as good as it gets." Quintessential goodness.

 

I like this expression and it feels right. Bread is a basic food all over the world, whether it is roti, bannock, bagels, bannock, challah, chapatti, corn bread, pumpernickel, soda bread or any of the other varieties of the stuff. The staff that supports us. The staple in all out diets.

 

Important people have written about the importance of bread. Henry Miller has rhapsodized about rye bread, although in his essay “The Staff of Life” he complained that once could “travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.” I think he was bemoaning the presence of Wonder Bread, which is less ubiquitous in these foodie times.

 

There are lots of religious references to bread I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever (John 6:51) and Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do (Ecclesiastes 9:7). We may thank God for our daily bread; it’s a symbol of what we need to survive. Margaret Atwood in her essay on bread uses it as a metaphor to illustrate problems of starvation and suffering.

 

It’s easy to accept the goodness of bread. It’s also easy to spot goodness when we see that quality in others. But, in a world in which happiness and success seem often to be equated with the acquisition of material goods and the scrabble to get more than one’s share, it’s not seen as often as one might like.

 

Asked whether she believed in God, Carol Shields answered, “No. Human goodness is the only thing I believe in.” Me too, when I see it. Shields also said, “I do feel this sense of goodness is part of our human conversation — the biggest part of it. In Shield’s last novel, Unless, the protagonist’s traumatized daughter, Norah, spends her days sitting “cross-legged with a begging bowl in her lap” on a street corner in Toronto, the word “GOODNESS” written on a cardboard sign hanging around her neck.

 

 Like Norah, many of us long for goodness these days. Like bread, it is the staff of life and it sustains us. The word “staff” can also mean a support, a cane, a walking stick. Perhaps a shillelagh.

 

But we may need a winnowing stick to find it.

 

 

Winnowing

Last week I received a package in the mail from a faraway friend of my youth: a beautiful silver and amber ring that I remember from a long ago time in Montreal when she and I would meet on Saturday mornings at the Luxor Café on Ste. Catherine’s Street to talk about love and life and books. In the accompanying message she wrote that she was sending the ring because she was “winnowing” things, noting that it is a lovely word.

 

It is indeed a lovely word, one which has many meanings. When I mention it to elderly friends, they too claim to be in the process of winnowing. Their process that sounds something like Swedish death cleaning, i.e. chucking things out in order to diminish the workload that may be left for others after one dies.

 

Farmers speak of winnowing wheat, or winnowing rice, depending on their country. The dictionary definition refers to freeing grain from the lighter particles of chaff. When the grain is thrown into the air, the wind blows away the impurities. To winnow is to distinguish the valuable from worthless. To separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

Another dictionary definition for winnowing is “to pursue a course with flapping wings in flying,” Bird watchers sometimes refer to the winnowing flight of snipe, a delightful aural image.

Many poets spoke of "winnowing." In his poem "Autumn," Keats spoke of "the winnowing wind," and a collection of WW I poetry is ominously titled "The Winnowing Fan."

There are also references in the bible. Proverbs 20:8 states that when a king sits on his throne to judge he “winnows out all evil with his eyes,” a useful ability for a judge. A very large task as well, given all the evil in the world.

In Jeremiah, we read "I will send foreigners to Babylon to winnow her and to devastate her land” and “I will winnow them with a winnowing fork at the city gates of the land. I will bring bereavement and destruction on my people, for they have not changed their ways."

I was thinking about winnowing when I read about the wealthy men in three-piece suits rioting at Ascot recently. A far cry from “My Fair Lady.” The papers demanded that something needed to be done to keep “these people” out, and a reader commented, “What people? Rich people?” Commenting on the behaviour of these privileged people, someone noted that one could be a future prime minister.

The images of high school shootings makes on think of the need for winnowing out the lawmakers who do not support gun control.

When I see the increasing number of homeless people, miserably curled up in doorways or ditches I know that we have to work at winnowing out city counselors who have dropped the ball on low-cost housing initiatives.

The world is in bad shape, globally and in my own small town.

I won’t resort to knives, but I do wonder where I can get one of those biblical winnowing forks.

Lilac Time

 

A few days ago I gave a reading and talk about my recent book Miranda’s Owl at Hospice Nanaimo. I’d had a few other book readings and the discussions had gone well but this one was different, as the audience was made up primarily by Hospice clients, counsellors and staff, all people who had suffered intense grief, some very recently. I wanted to be sure that my talk connected with people in a respectful way. I was a bit anxious but just as I entered the room a dear friend placed a bowl of lilacs on the table beside me and the scent of those lovely blooms was with me throughout the reading. It felt right.

For me, lilacs always evoke remembrance, loss and renewal. I think of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

 

Memory and desire take me back to my childhood home in which every April my mother gathered lilacs and the house was filled with that delicate purple perfume. Later in the summer there were bowls of sweet peas but it was the lilacs that signaled the return of spring and newness. During those days we often had family singsongs and one of my uncles used to like to sing Ivor Novello’s We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring.

Every April I recall taking the bus to UBC in 1958 to see a performance of Marcel Dubé’s play Les Temp des Lilas. I was fifteen years old and thought I’d never seen anything so moving and so sad. My French was not good but I understood enough that the play set my desire to move to Montreal. Years later when I was living in Montreal with my husband I learned that he too, then twenty-one, had been at that same performance.

Still later, when we lived on Protection Island, we had four lilac trees outside our home: purple, light blue and white. The white were the most fragrant and I had them in vases in the kitchen and living room. Nowadays I live in a townhouse and there are no lilacs to gather, so when I first see a lilac in bloom I consider stealing branches to bring home. It’s lucky to have a good friend who will bring me a bowl of lilac at just the right moment.

          Last night I went to the Ou gallery in Duncan for an opening of Montreal artist Xan Shian’s exhibit called Eulogy of Gravity. I found her watery images evocative and was moved by the essay accompanying her works in which she writes:

The concentration of experience files itself deep within our bodies, an archival register for moments. We carry our experiences with us, like bones they grow and shift over the course of a life, break, disintegrate and return to earth. As pieces of ourselves they form bridges, infancy to childhood, to adolescence through adulthood and old age; they determine the things we hold on to or let go of.

 

Afterwards I went for a beer with an old friend and, while talking about memories, I asked what association he had with lilacs. Without a pause, he recited Walt Whitman:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

 

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

 

Sometimes everything seems to connect.