Death by Chocolate

Posted on October 13, 2008 by forstegrupp


On Saturday, we were invited to eat dinner with friends. They were going to make the Thai food. Our assignment was to bring pizza for the kids to eat and dessert.

The pizza part was easy — cheese pizza bought from the local Acme. But the gourmet kind.

What about dessert? What to make? What to make?

Pumpkin pie? No, I could not remember if the other teenage boy liked pumpkin.

Cinnamon rolls? No, I had done that before and there is the unspoken challenge to always bring something new.

My grandma’s famous Texas sheet cake? No, I had done that before too.

So…the only thing left was to make a cake with the name “Death by Chocolate.” Now this recipe was given to me by a very good friend named Mary Anne. Years ago, Mary Anne came to visit one day and wanted to bring something special to spoil my children — they were quite young at the time. And she spoiled them with pieces of this rich cake served with scoops of ice cream. She also gave me the recipe, but I had never made the cake.

This occasion seemed like the perfect excuse to make this rich cake, but I needed several ingredients. And I needed those cheese pizzas.

So Saturday morning after piano lesson, I rode my bike to the Acme and bought the pizzas, cake mix, chocolate pudding, chocolate chips, and a half gallon of ice cream. That was a lot to stuff in my back pack. The ice cream was especially cold against my back as I rode home.

Before her soccer game, my daughter helped make the batter and layer the batter with chocolate chips into the bundt pan.

After the cake baked and cooled, my oldest boy got a lesson in how to make butter frosting. I showed him how to drizzle the icing on the cake; he got to eat the leftover frosting. Lucky guy.

We had not been at our friends’ house very long when the door bell rang. It was their next door neighbor. She came to ask Nancy for two scallions. I recognized her. She was a friend of Mary Anne, the very same Mary Anne whose chocolate cake we had made for dessert.

This seemed like more than just a mere coincidence. I felt like my old life as an academic had intersected with my mom life. My mom life felt more real.

Later that evening after a wonderful spicy Thai dinner, we sliced the cake generously, added scoops of vanilla ice cream, and everyone ate — the kids wolfed down the dessert but the adults savored it slowly. There was half a cake left over. My friend and I divided the remainder between us. And on Sunday night, my children enjoyed a second piece!

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Remembering through Pictures — Grindelwald’s Shrinking Glaciers

Posted on October 9, 2008 by forstegrupp


Tonight I spent the better part of an hour going through files of photos from our summer vacation to Germany and Switzerland. Now, don’t misunderstand. This is not a yearly trip. We traveled to Germany to celebrate my husband’s mother’s 80th birthday and to have a family reunion.

But looking through those pictures reminded me of what a wonderful time we had as a family. We walked almost everyday through the pine trees and watched for deer and picked raspberries. And for a few days, we hiked through the Alps. On those days, we would take a gondola up into the mountains and then follow the trails as they wound higher through alpine meadows and revealed one vista after another.

This picture was taken at a glacier near the Jungfrau. 10 years ago, this glacier crept all the way down the valley. If you look at the picture, the glacier would have filled the entire background.

Not any more.

Now it has shrunk, receding up to the mountain peak, and leaving a trail of rocks and debris.

But enough of the eco-lecture.

Walking up to the glacier demanded stamina and nerve. Often we walked a mere foot from a precipitous drop. I was glad my children were older and could be trusted (relatively) to walk leaning into the mountain side. I kept saying, “5 feet between you and next person.” I did not want anyone to fall and take some one else along to the bottom of the deep valley.

So now I look at these pictures and flash back to a moment in time when we were surrounded by “the grandeur of God.”

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A Day of Busy-ness

Posted on October 8, 2008 by forstegrupp

It is almost eleven o’clock and we have just finished watching the debate between McCain and Obama.

We hurried the children off to bed with hugs and admonitions. My husband is downstairs checking the various live blogs for reaction to the debate. And for me? I am satisfied with the debate. I think my guy acquitted himself admirably.

I am also satisfied that I got so much grading done between dinner and the debate. That relieves my mind — but I still owe the seniors their rewritten college essays. That will come.

And I have posted a blog after a long hiatus, fulfilling a promise made yesterday but not yet kept to two attentive students. Perhaps a picture will come later in the week.

So this day was busy but it ends with a calm and peace for which I am thankful.

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The Summer — A Review

Posted on September 9, 2008 by forstegrupp

This summer I had such a long list of books to read and ended up getting very little read. I did read several books about the Middle East, Frankenstein, The Enchantress of Florence, and not much else. So where did the hours go? Day dreaming, yes. Working on various projects, yes. Renovating the kitchen, yes. Vacation, yes. Time with the kids, yes. Lots of swim meets, yes. Lots of time with friends. Hosting my 90-year-old grandmother for a week, yes.

Indeed, the summer seemed to be a time to reconnect with real people instead of books.

I did spend an inordinate amount of time in our new vegetable garden. I would spend the morning weeding or typing up plants or watering. But every night starting in July, I would go outside and cut fresh lettuce to make a salad. And now I am cutting basil to make fresh pesto. There are still a few tomatoes turning red in the late fall sun, but not many. I need to find my old recipe for chocolate cake made with pureed green tomatoes.

So on the reading front, the summer was not memorable, but life is not all about books.

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Renewal of Spring

Posted on April 25, 2008 by forstegrupp

Earlier today one of my students surprised me by asking “Why haven’t you posted lately on your blog.”

That was a first and tonight I clicked on the link to this blog and discovered how right he was. The last entry was dated in February.

I have read a few books but not as many as some people might think. Some folks think I read all the time because I teach English and also have a fancy degree. But that is not so. Demands of family and profession limit the time I can actually read. Often during the school year, I don’t read new books. I reread old friends because at the end of the day, I am too tired to focus on an unfamiliar plot, or to meet characters I don’t already know very well. I love rereading books because I always find something new, something that creates echoes of association.

And in some ways, the book being reread is new because I am not the same person I was when I first read the book. For example, when I first read Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night” I focused on the character of Viola and her hidden love of Orsino. I imagined being her — trying to live a double life as a man, trying to fit in. Now as I read the play, I focus on Feste and Antonio because both seem to be wanderers through the world who must survive by their agile wits, and who are willing to endanger themselves for friends. I have moved past the drama of love and into a more platonic realm.

Also today a different student asked what book I would want with me on a desert island. Certainly not the “Bible.” I would want a collection of all of Shakespeare’s work or Chaucer or maybe Tolkien. But scholarly editions with lots of notes, commentary, and discussion so I could have a dialogue with not just Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Tolkien but all those whose interpretations frame the texts. No, I take that back. I would still want the huge scholarly tome, but I would not read the commentary. I would stay with the sweep and scope of the original texts. There is where the truth lies and not in the ragings of various critics.

So now I have updated this blog and maybe this will satisfy the first student who announced my truancy and surprised me with his curiosity.

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Istanbul as a Setting for Mystery

Posted on February 25, 2008 by forstegrupp

This mystery by Jenny White is her first novel after a number of non-fiction books on Turkish society and history. She supposedly has a professorship in Anthropology at BU. The book was saturated with intimate details of Turkish dress, customs, and historical detail that made it a true pleasure to read. The reticence of some of the dialogue and description was refreshing after some of the more blowsy prose I have been reading.
The main protagonists is Kamil Pasha who must solve the murder of a European woman, but then gets entangled in an earlier murder of another governess and late nineteenth-century Turkish politics.
I like this book well enough that I will watch for the next in the series of Kamil Pasha novels.

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Italy and China

Posted on December 18, 2007 by forstegrupp

I devoured the two books, “Women of the Silk” and “The Birth of Venus” in a few days. I can feel the pace of school slow as Christmas break approaches. I have more time to read.

Or did I read them so fast as a challenge to myself. To see if I can enter the world of a book so utterly that my mundane world disappears. I pester my children to read. They resist. They would rather enter the easy world of internet games, communities and youtube.

So I was wondering if I too had lost that ability to dissolve into a book. No. Or at least not yet.
Both of these books relate to other things I have read in the past.

I picked up “Women of the Silk” because my IV form students had just finished an Amy Tan story about a narrator going home to discover two half-sisters she did not know she had. The time period of the novel is the same as the mother’ s past — set in China during the Japanese occupation.

The second book “The Birth of Venus” is told as a memoir by a woman living in fourteenth-century Florence. This is the same time period as flashback story in “The Rule of Four” and the biography of Machiavelli.

Mind candy both.

I think I will read “Villette” over break. Or maybe “Main Street.”

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More Books to Read

Posted on November 12, 2007 by forstegrupp

I have got a few more books to add to my list of possibilities. And a few reactions.

A book about the formation of the government of the United States called American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. It is written by Joseph J. Ellis. From the review I read in the New York Times the books seems to be discussion of how at certain pivotal moments in history, the US constitution frames the boundaries and fences of government that vitriolic debate can take place without the destruction of the country and the peace. In other words, that the balance between the 3 branches means we can discuss explosive issues because no matter how strongly any one side feels, change will happen so slowly that it can be corrected or reversed.

From reading this review, I am intrigued because it seems to capture my sense of why our country has not devolved during the current presidential administration.

The two other books are about Latin: by Harry Mount, Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin into Your Life and by Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. The first one offers itself as a review of Latin grammar and vocabulary to help you remember enough of both to start reading Latin again. The second is a history of the language and its evolution. The second book sounds more appealing as it traces the language from pre-historical Rome to twenty-first century internet.

Another book is translated from the French and is about how to fake having read a book. The author is Pierre Bayard and the translator is Jeffrey Mehlman. The title is How to talk about Books you Haven’t Read. For me as an English teacher the entire idea of this book is sacreligious, but on the other hand I know my students and even my own children don’t see reading the way I did and do. For me reading transported me beyond the limitations of my locale and into a greater environment. Now they achieve the same action with no effort through computers which supply both visuals, sound, and plot.

But in the review by Jay McInerney in the New York Times this Sunday, there is one paragraph I want to quote in full: “Lest the reader or the nonreader, think that Bayard underestimates the power of reading, he proposes that we are all essentially literary constructs, defined by our own inner libraries: the books we’ve read, skimmed and heard about. ‘We are the sum of these accumulated books,’ he writes.”

Now I find this idea rather intriguing…and it goes really back to St. Augustine’s concept of the memory as a great repository that forms our identity. (I seem to be referring to Augustine quite a bit these days. I guess it is time to reread The Confessions, which I first read in an undergraduate English class as a prelude to understanding Dante’s Divinia Comedia.) So the overall thrust is that we are the composite of all our experience — whether psychic or physical. And thus the novels, characters, and words that echo in our minds form our identity.

Am I more like Hamlet the more often I teach him? Or would Macbeth be my alter ego? Or would my moral compass eschew the bloody Macbeth for the cerebral prince. And is that why the more often I have to teach Wuthering Heights the more repulsed I am by Heathcliff’s misogyny and confounded that I was ever misled into thinking his love of Cathy was the pinnacle of romance?

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Swinging in Montana

Posted on November 9, 2007 by forstegrupp

During our weekend in Montana, we had the option to fly on two different swings. The first was your standard swing of two ropes attached to board. But the one everyone loved was the disk swing. This was just a circle of wood with a hole in the center for the rope. The rope was knotted securely under the swing and then tied even more securely to a branch at least 40 feet in the air.

At first, students took turns on the swing, pushing each other high in the air and squealing. But then they developed a new technique.

Two people got on the swing — looking like a seated Push-Me-Pull-You. Then three or four folks on the ground pushed the two swingers in a huge circle or grabbed onto the end of the rope and give them a running surge of velocity! Talk about a sudden feeling of death as ground rushes beneath and trees come too close!

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Montana 2008

Posted on November 8, 2007 by forstegrupp


Montana

For a single weekend in October, east met west as students and teachers from Philadelphia joined students and teachers from Montana to explore various forms of art. For each form of art — photography, writing, theater, art — we had generous mentors who led the workshops and encouraged everyone and shared their enthusiasm and stories.

We were hosted by two wonderful families who opened their homes to us and provided us the time and space to forge new relationships.

The picture at the right is one I took early one morning as the sun was rising. The view is to the south east. You can see one of the cabins where we stayed on the left. But behind the cabin and between the trees is the horizon of mountain and sky. Everywhere I looked, the sky arched above and the foothills and plains and river sculpted the view.

I have not been to Montana since my husband and I went hiking for two weeks in Glacier National Park. That was over 14 years ago. Since those years, I had forgotten the sweeping views of sky joining earth.

When we got off the plane in Billings and boarded the bus, I sat beside the window and felt my chest expand. I took deeper and deeper breaths, trying to inhale sky. How to describe that sensation of simultaneous exaltation and diminishment? I felt small and hushed, and yet paradoxically I felt enlarged and joyous. St. Augustine spoke of this sensation in his Confessions, as he described his envelopment in and by God. If I remember correctly, Augustine felt both insignificant before the Almighty and yet when joined to that presence through love, he felt blessed.

I don’t claim to have a relationship with God. I only have this sensation of absolute awe and humility when looking at the unity of mountains and sky. And it has to be mountains unobscured by cities, houses, telephone poles, or even people. I don’t want people crawling between me and that horizon. I want to be overtaken by the land and made into nothing by the vastness.

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