I think I'll just have a Brunello in the garden

It takes years before you begin to understand, that is, unless (I suppose) you make a frantic study of it, in order to become a "somm." We have a new staff member in the department, promoted yesterday God bless him, and I can only imagine what the tossing sea of shelves crammed with bottles looks like to him.

To refresh our memories, re: -- oh, I don't know, pick one. Italy. The simplest thing is to imagine a map of that country, with two spots highlighted, Piedmont in the northwest and tourist Tuscany in the central west of the peninsula. In Piedmont, we have the wines Barolo and Barbaresco, grandest of the grand. Both are made from the nebbiolo grape.

In Tuscany, we have that slew of wines all made from sangiovese or its close relatives and clones. Chianti, Chianti Classico. Brunello di Montalcino. Rosso di Montalcino. Whenever a fine Italian wine has a sort of humbler little brother, it's called Rosso, "red." Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Rosso (ah!) di Montepulciano. Still Tuscany.

It takes years, sans frantic study, just to get that straight. Then comes the tasting. In sum, know that Barolos and Barbarescos (back to Piedmont, or da capo you might say) are magically silky, startlingly brownish, but are also so acidic and full of tannin that, after one swallow, they can seem empty and disappointing. The lady buying her birthday treat from our cellar last weekend described to me just such a Barolo. I knew, and could confirm for her, exactly what she meant. You must drink them with great food, or else wait until your bottle is twenty years old or you are on vacation in Milano before opening it, or all three. For a sure thing right now she chose Verite La Muse instead, all plush merlot velvet and Sonoma-cult price (circa $400 a pop).

Brunellos, now. Brunello di Montalcino, Tuscany. They are different. At least they seem so to me, but you know my Barolo problems ....

Brunellos also are among the grandest of the grand. In starting to like them, in noticing "they are different," one's years of experience are, perhaps, beginning to tell. They are silky, again, but they suffer less tannin and acid, and give more agreeable depths of fruit flesh; in a Brunello the sangiovese grape that makes a Chianti of  black tart berries and dry sandpaper, and a bit of olive brine and horse stable thrown in, remember? -- in a Brunello this same grape and this same region (did you remember? Tuscany) make a lovely, light, complete and liquid thing inexpressible in mere and discrete greengrocer's metaphors. Similar to a Rioja -- that's in Spain -- it's just wine. And it's the kind of thing you look forward to coming home to and planning a meal around. Almost like a person, no? A guest.
 

  
2011 Sassetti Livio Pertimali Brunello. Retail, about $40.

Now moving on, to the garden. It's best not to have your Brunello there, really, since in this late summer we find ourselves again in the season of the yellow jacket or "meat bee," hungry for any and all food and drink. They will pester you and your picnic right indoors, although Wikipedia tells us that Vespula maculifrons is a valuable predator of other annoying insects.

One of the attractions of this particular condo building, otherwise no different from the several tucked along a quiet street here, and all backed by their parking lots, open land, and walking path beneath the huge high tension wires, is the garden. Somewhere in the details of the condo association's thirty-year-old bylaws I saw something about every owner having approximately an 8 percent stake in everything. I thought, "won't it be nice if that means we all get 8 percent of the garden, to do as we like with?"

One evening my gentleman friend and I approached. The sun was setting. Everywhere were red cannas, yellow Black-eyed Susans, and purple phlox; and huge lavish green prehistoric-looking leaf clumps that turned out to hide butternut squash, hanging in modest salmon-hued glory in the shade, and acorn squash too, sitting modestly green on the earth beneath more yellow blossoms of the same, shaped weirdly like elegant drooping half-clenched yellow hands. Gentleman friend is a grower of cannas and begonias and a tender of tomatoes, too. This gives him an almost professional interest in everything. (An ex-girlfriend taught him to garden. He still shakes his head. "I never thought I'd like it. If anyone ever told the guys...." ) "There's someone who can tell us," he now remarked. A middle-aged lady had straightened up from her work in the really huge plot.

 We asked questions. Who started this, who participates, etc.? "Oh, no, it's just me," Carla said. She told her story of dismay at seeing nothing but a stand of dead, collapsed poplars from her third floor balcony -- with its view of the high tension wires -- when she moved in twenty years ago. So she planted a little plot of zinnias. And then, over the years, her project expanded.

"Just me." I should have guessed. How many people like to garden? I can only measure it in human terms. How many people like to garden, such that a plot as big as this, about forty-five paces broad and ten or fifteen deep, might be maintained by the enthusiastic common effort of an at least occasionally-changing cadre of owners in this one building, across twenty years? Count twelve units, times twenty years, plus or minus, let us say, three owners leaving and three more arriving per, let us say, -- every five years? Already the arithmetic is too complex to think about. Far more likely that it's just one person, everlastingly, who likes to garden. Just Carla. That explains the variety too. A group effort would have installed flowers by committee consensus, and you would have nothing but petunias and vinca vine ground cover.

"Things come and go over the years," she went on. The wagon wheel was an anonymous gift. "The bench is made of deckwood," so it proved too heavy to steal. She spotted it one summer morning, halfway across the greensward under the high tension wires, on the way to the woods beyond and to some other home and garden. But the thieves had given up. The beautiful heavy glossy brown bench returned, thanks to the efforts of honest condominium owners, to its rightful place. Carla's father built it.

Sometime during our evening talk, when gentleman friend and Carla were quite hitting it off -- he was telling her all about the feral parrots of the inner city, and they do exist, I have seen them -- I said, dear me, I would like to play a part in this garden, but I wouldn't want to intrude.

"Oh, it wouldn't be an intrusion." So kind, but I couldn't help but wonder. Really? Human nature being what it is, and considering her twenty years of effort, and never knowing whether or when the condo association, or ComEd under their high tension wires, might say Stop That, we're going to get sued for something or other, I couldn't help but wonder. No intrusion? You mean I could help clean it up, and get rid of the Welcome mats and strips of carpet keeping down weeds at the back? How about less dead brown vegetable growth and more interesting things? The cottage garden look is all very well, but then where are the foxgloves, delphinium, and hollyhocks? No lavender, no potted orange or lemon trees? I see a few remnants of lilies, but otherwise no glorious peonies, no spring bulbs? No cinder paths where one  may really walk, almost no bushes or trees (except Rose of Sharon, which I am sorry I do not like), "the bones of the garden"? And why the huge central bed of raspberries? I am glad to feed the birds and voles, but it looks a bit exhausted.

Then I had a fresh thought, which may seem soapy but I hope is not. Anyway "she'd probably appreciate the help," my friend had said. And I thought: the garden is a metaphor for the world, isn't it. You find it lacking; yet here it was before you arrived. Step back and look, and you may find suddenly you see, you metaphorical insect, that it is a privilege to participate.

In a tearing hurry, again, but "ancora imparo"*

Sometimes Saturday nights are a tad slow at work, so I use the time to self-crash-course my way to more wine knowledge. Last night, what started out as a simple mnemonic project, with the computer and a couple of encyclopedias at hand -- write down all the names of the 61 Bordeaux chateaux from the 1855 classification -- turned into an interesting bit of sleuthing. And now I know a wine I want to try, but that I don't know how to get.

In the middle of the official list of the classified growths, right in the middle of the "Troisieme crus," is Chateau Langoa-Barton. I had never heard of it, even though being in charge of the French wine section for the past four months has left me with at least a working knowledge of Bordeaux. My plan for last night's self-crash-course was to focus on the chateaux I did not know, cross-reference them in our store's chainwide inventory, and, if it turned out we did not sell them, investigate if possible why.

This turned interesting quickly and it showed a pattern quickly. I really needed to look up only one or two names, here or there. (We sell a lot of Bordeaux.) Rauzan-Gassies was unfamiliar; turns out it is known as an underperformer. Same with Durfort-Vivens. Both are "second growths." Then came Langoa-Barton, as I say in the middle of the third growths. If you scroll down through its reviews at a site like Wine Cellar Insider, you see it gets a lot of scores in the high 80s or low 90s. We don't carry it, either. That's the pattern.

But Langoa-Barton is not regretfully labeled an underperformer. I took notes on its reviews because they, too, all showed a pattern: "tannic." Masculine. Strict, classically styled. "Classic personality." Tannic, classic, earthy, cedar tobacco. Tannic and firm. Tannic, classsic, old school. Austere, tannic, firm. Powerful, masculine, beefy, "well suited for fans of traditionally styled wine." And tannic -- did we mention tannic?

So it's interesting that this low-pointed wine, I should say this chateau's wines, high 80s and low 90s, is not faulted by its reviewers as unsound. Only they seem to struggle to give it fruit metaphors, while images of dryness and inanimate things, or vegetal things, abound. It's as if the wine is less like fruit and more like the wooden box the fruit came in. Yet they keep calling it classic and traditional, and thus my curiosity is piqued, all the more because my research tells me Langoa Barton is the only classified growth still owned by the same family as in 1855. That's good, surely, if you want to reach back in time and get your hands on a bottle of a cabernet-merlot blend (that is what we are talking about) not overwhelmed by the modern love of 95-point, blueberry-pie-with-caramel-fudge "monsters."  

I'll let you know where else my self-crash-course wine learning takes me. Thank God I found out what Abacus is before the nice man browsing the wine cellar pointed it out to me as one of his favorites: I was able to do something besides nod and smile about it. He left not with Abacus but with a three liter bottle of Chateau Giscours 2005 (Troisieme cru). That was fun. It's amazing how the store staff suddenly seem to lurk while a purchase like that is being gently cossetted out the door. I mean, we're not on commission or anything.

Now I have to pack up and move.

* "I am still learning," attributed to Michelangelo at the age of eighty.

I entered the Hendrick's gin contest

Captain Tarquin Shakespeare met the great alien Zephirine Felicite immediately upon leaving the galaxy's edge. She was all wings and eyes, and did not understand time. "How is it," she asked, "that your planet, merely in orbiting its star, causes living beings to 'age'?" 

See here.

A question of sight

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend another of the wine seminars which are, whether large and official or small and on the fly (because the sales rep dropped by with some new bottles), a permanent part of the job. As usual, they are as intriguing for the chance they provide to observe human nature as they are for the things one learns about wine.

A few points still stand out, seminar after seminar. About wines: they, especially reds, are getting more uniform in taste and weight, and dare I say, more scentlessly bland? even as Master Sommelier candidates are called upon to struggle fiercely with identifying their differences as a proof of  expertise. The official class yesterday treated of Oregon pinot noirs, and of the Court of Master Sommeliers' program. Delicious, and most interesting, as Miss Marple would say. Only, no longer will I breezily tell customers how different the Oregon "style" tends to be from the Californian .... 

Here are some more points. About people: people still want to be perceived as having innate grand taste, especially when they are sampling blind. Wow, my favorite was the Chateau Latour! But we also want to be perceived as non-snobs able to recognize a sleeper, $12 hit. So a group of fifteen or twenty souls tread very carefully when asked "what are we tasting in the glass? Any thoughts?" No one wants to say olive brine or tar when that might be wrong. But if you say olive brine, you won't be told you're wrong. "Good! What else? Anyone?" There is an almost audible sigh of relaxation as more guesses are proffered. This is the nub of it all, for it's not nonsense. There are specific things to be perceived and named in the glass, and they do have a chemical structure and an origin in the grape or the place. Most importantly they give pleasure. Someone chances to mention a scent you thought was crazy at first. Meat. "Yes! Savory!" Good! What else? 

The idea of tasting and talking in a group is to train your palate, which is perfectly legitimate, too. But you can only bring to each seminar the palate you've developed so far; so that when everyone excitedly asks the moderator to "taste the next one blind," and we do, and you think it might be a Chianti (Italian, sangiovese) and it turns out to be a northern Rhone (French, syrah), you do stop and marvel inwardly. Good grief, I have probably only tasted three or four expensive northern Rhones in my life. No wonder I couldn't tell. Or else my faculties aren't good. Or else red wines are all the same. Meanwhile the man next to you, who had believed it was a Cotes du Rhone (mostly southern French, grenache-based blend), now breezily forgets that, and exults how he knew all along. "That classic northern Rhone profile. Syrah all the way. Beautiful." As an aside, and most curiously, we hear confirmed that when the blind tastings for final exams at the Master Sommelier level are done, the wines the candidates struggle over are never identified, not ever. In the film Somm the exhausted aspirants discuss their wildly divergent opinions. "You called Vacqueyras?" "I called boutique Sonoma gamay." They will never know. It must be a precaution against anyone's really developing a palate memory, and returning confident next year. I can't think what else it might mean.

So I drive home, marveling. Note how the seminar turns out to be much more about people than wine. My old WineStyles colleague's words come back to me -- he of the thirty-five years in the business, retail, wholesale, and crushpad, he who started out selling Paul Masson Cracklin' Rose and also tasted Chateau Petrus when young liquor store clerks still could. "Folks. Please. It's just wine." And I think, what other product, what consumable, has this bright-eyed anxiety attached to it? It's a sort of unintentional humbug, if there can be such a thing. Customers look for guidance in spending their money to people in the trade. We can provide some, but you see what goes on when we're together. Yesterday we also heard confirmed that Oregon and California pinot noirs are not getting more lushly alike, the proof being that the nice man who reviews Oregon for Wine Advocate is an Englishman steeped in the spare Burgundian tradition. When he first arrived in Oregon he gave the wines low points, in the 80s, but now he has "gotten his head around the style" and he routinely rates them 92 and 95. That didn't really answer my question, but the moderator wanted to move on. It was on thinking of that, driving home, that the word humbug occurred to me. 

What other product has this anxiety attached? Very gourmet beef? Orchids? Perfume? Maybe perfume. Another mysterious bottled liquid, been around forever, expensive, hard to describe, marketing is everything, capable of being very good or very mediocre. You have your iconic examples, like Chanel No. 5, and your cognoscienti treats, like Chanel No. 19. Germany has been making 4711 for two hundred years, in Cologne. There is a whole background world of the stuff that only sommeliers as it were know. One can imagine, at the perfume counter, a customer's same anxiety not to instinctively like a "cheap scent," or the same ready dismissal of what grandmother wore or what one liked in college. And remember in old Hollywood movies when the perfume counter girl is understood to be no better than she should be?

On the other hand, everyone can see an orchid and decide about it. "You like what you like." It must be a question of sight.     

The Fableist pinot noir, 2014

He's playing you like a fiddle

After you go and see and reject the tiny yellow house with its charming old neighborhood, retro clotheslines, and immense yard and snowblower-unfriendly gravel driveway, then, because you are still insisting to your realtor that you "want to try for a house," well, then you open up your email the next day to see the subject line, from him. "K ------- has sent you 78 properties matching your requirements." That is, they are all in your budget and are "detached," all houses. (A condo or a town home is "attached.")

Seventy-eight! Wow, you feared there would be, like, three! Unhappily they prove, all of them, to be way the hell out in the boondocks and they all need major if not catastrophic-level "work." One or two have actually been condemned and must be torn down. So it's the land that is valuable; whether or not you have the means to build is your affair, not K-----'s.

Still you trawl through all of them, all the pictures and all the information on all the houses. Just for fun, as Nana used to say. It's very enjoyable to imagine oneself inside these walls or looking out these windows to that backyard, and thinking, now this is mine. The lawn could be turned to native grasses -- the upstairs ramshackle porch could be a fabulous sort of indoor office/greenhouse -- look at the overgrowth of lilies beside the stone steps, already such a Michigan-cottage feel. You recall delightful movies and magazine articles in which some intrepid woman gets off the tour bus to buy, on the spot, a ramshackle Tuscan farmhouse or a trulli in Apulia, complete with crabby old gardener who turns out to be heroic and has a handsome middle-aged professor son also.

But chances are she, the impulsive heroine of the tour bus, was a well-to-do real estate broker in San Francisco to begin with, with money to pay the masons to relay the medieval steps, and the gardener to tend the olive trees. Here you are going to be -- you are imagining yourself -- in a ramshackle and badly carpeted old house maybe fifty minutes' drive from your job. You know perfectly well you do not, after all, want to come home from work to mow the lawn, relay medieval stone steps, or more likely hang on the phone to contractors asking for price estimates on what it costs to repair their modern concrete equivalent. Don't forget the neighbors are watching, concerned about weeds and their own property values. This isn't relaxed, eccentric- and ruin-friendly Europe. (Then again, is Europe?) "I don't know, Nance," a co-worker I'll call David shakes his head. "When you're a single person, it's awfully nice to come home from work and be able to sit down in a condo and not worry about maintenance. Maybe take a dip in the pool if there is one."

Oh, don't be so discouraging. On the other hand, go ahead, be discouraging. Why else do we ask advice? Besides, for all that Colette enjoyed her many-roomed villa in Provence with her cook and gardener and handsome boy, truly what single woman wants a midwestern Cape Cod that clearly calls out for a young family with children and puppies? What single woman wants to spend her days off vacuuming the silent upstairs bedrooms?

The tiny yellow house

So you plan to go with the realtor to see the little yellow house. Before the appointment at 6:45 you have of course been tapping away at your phone to sisters and other support networks, and when one replies "I can come with if you want," you text back "Sure!" thankfully.

She arrives. You drive back (it's your second visit of the day, the first one exploratory, solo) to the yellow house. The realtor pulls up behind you in his big black SUV whose license plates read REALTR1. He gets out holding a binder. He's young, stocky, somewhat wary-eyed, he puts you in mind of a polite but intense high school wrestling coach. He has the combination to the lockbox hanging on the house's front door handle. The box drops open to reveal the key to the house. That's how realtors get in. You go in.

It's very, very small. Six hundred and fifty square feet. That includes two bedrooms which seem to give abruptly on to each other, and to the tiny bathroom, simply as you turn around to avoid backing into an oddly-placed wall. Tiny kitchen, turn about, tiny laundry room. Now how is it possible that you are back at the front door already?

You really do try to look at the place, but it's difficult to do when you have no experience house hunting. Because I -- I am "you," it's me again -- because I spent lots of time clicking through photos of houses on line at Zillow and Trulia, including many times this very house, I see in life little more than what I saw in pictures: the decor, the yard, the color schemes. The portrait of Buddha in sage green and gray over the couch. The cats, who distract me. The daylilies. It's my sister the lifelong homeowner who wants to know where the electrical panel is. She noticed the wooden peg on a bedroom ceiling, which locks a trap door that descends and unfolds a sturdy ladder, Little House on the Prairie style, going up into the attic. Quaint. ("You're wearing a dress," Coach says. "If you want to go up and look I'll leave the room." Given the news we hear of other cultures every day, what a blessing the Western gentleman is ....) It's my sister the homeowner who asks "is your furniture going to fit?"

Then I realize. No. Of course it isn't. "Unless you put your glass-topped kitchen table and the chairs in storage ...." Certainly not. Strike the tiny yellow house off my list.

"Well," I say to the realtor, as we walk out the long, long summer gravel driveway towards our cars. That's a lot to shovel in the winter. I'm not sure if you can use a snowblower on gravel. "I have no idea what happens next. Do we look at more houses?"

"We sure do," he answers. "Do you think you want a house or a condo?"

"I think I'd like to try for a house. I look at condos online and they're pristine and beautiful, but it seems kind of sad to just own two rooms. Up to now I've always rented a house. I'm a gardener. I think I'd like a yard."

"Okay," he nods. He hands me his business card and writes down my email. I tell him that a bank has pre-qualified me for a mortgage, and I tell him that the figure they have pre-qualifed me for is much too optimistic because they seem not to have factored in property taxes to what they think I can afford. All this is a tale he could have told me I am sure. I, too, work in sales (of wine) to newbies.

What will happen next, he says, is that he will send me email links to, and pictures of, properties that fall in my price range and meet my "requirements." Requirements! Good grief, who am I to have requirements, I who have rented for decades and most of that time in a beggars-can't-be-choosers emotional posture!

All right, so now this is me. I have requirements. The realtor/coach and I shake hands, and he and my sister shake hands, and then my sister and I get into our car and he gets into his. We drive away. The first comment out of our mouths, in private, is the question why did these people in this tiny house need three flat screen t.v.s?

Step by step

So you are buying a house or a condo, after thirty years of renting through marriage and divorce? How interesting. Here is what happens.

Step one. Look at online real estate sites, endlessly. Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com. Plug in location and maximum price tolerable. You've been doing that for a while anyway.

Step two. Notice a stroke of luck. The owners of that promising little yellow house very nearby are hosting an "open house" on your day off. Set yourself two tasks that day, one, go see it, and two, go to the office of the realtor whose business card you saved just for the heck of it, back when his mass-mailing envelope stuffed full of information -- and business cards -- ended up in the mailboxes of everyone at the apartment complex last February.

Step three. Day off. Go to the open house. Wear a dress to impress the potential neighbors. (You've been watching three-minute instructional videos from Realtor.com advising on all aspects of home-buying, including when to look professional.) Imagine yourself living there. And mowing that huge lawn -- oh dear.

Why does it all look so impossibly perfect? Professional landscaping, wonderful, but why the everlasting stella d'oro daylilies? They are a mess to clean up when their bloomtime is finished, as you learned from gardening around the old rental farmhouse belonging to your ex-brother-in-law. Of course there are more important things to think about, but still. The lilies will be there too.

You walk around to the yard. How quaint. Actual clotheslines, as of yesteryear. It's very quiet. The neighborhood is charmingly of yesteryear, too. Now where are the owners of this cute little yellow house? The sign on the door says "Please knock." You do. A cat appears in one small window, and then another in the other. No one else answers. You begin to wonder. What if it's some psycho in there, who has not the remotest intention of "showing" the house? Seriously. What if it's a man, alone. Do you follow him in? One thinks not, somehow.  

Step four. After five more minutes, give this adventure up. Drive to the realtor's office, he of the mass business card mailing last winter. Explain briefly to his secretaries that you know nothing. Take a brochure, and give them your name, plus the address of the little yellow house.

Step five, and so on. Pretty soon you're going to forget what counts as a new "step" and what is simply unfolding with tumbling, not-quite-kaleidoscopic-but-still events.

In less than an hour the realtor calls. "I can show you that house tonight."

My goodness. Okay. I'll meet you at 6:45. 

A fine how do you do

Well! my fatheads. This is a fine how do you do. I am distracted because I have to move. I mean, actually move, change house, live in another place. Out of the blue. Granted I was not planning to stay here forever -- so true of all of us! -- but still, another year living virtually in the branches of a magnolia tree, with some leisure to plot my future, would have been nice. How often do we get a chance to look over at a new bird, a chipping sparrow, perched on a branch not five feet away? You can spot them by the reddish orange cap on their heads, and their delicately striped gray-brown wings, gray belly, and tiny size. That is, provided you live in the branches of a mature magnolia.

No more of that. Some sort of glamorous, hard edged property management company has taken over this rustic but agreeable apartment complex, so it's in with the remodeling and stainless steel appliances and charcoal-gray decor, and out with -- well, with the tenants who can't afford the rent for the upgrades. Not to mention that even if you wish to stay, they shall move you out of your unit in order to remodel that, and chuck you into a new one, and you never return to the third floor magnolia tree. So true of all of us.

This gives one the new experience, however, of house-hunting. (One makes the decision: good grief, for that kind of rent, I may as well try to buy.) One learns about mortgage pre-approval, and especially about property taxes, which in the end seem to be all that matter.  One meets realtors, and sees the inside of houses and condos. There is the constant mental grappling with trade-offs, which is of course the basis of all economics. The ease of a condo versus the work of a house; can a balcony substitute for a yard -- perhaps for quite a long time? What's the point of paying a mortgage just for an interior? Then again, who wants to come home from work and do nothing but serve the house? And how is it that Colette ended up in a stone-flagged cottage in Provence, surrounded by lavender and olive trees, all on a rock blown clean by the Mistral?

I believe she is the one who scoffed at Virginia Woolf's yearning for a room of one's own. No, she said, better a villa of one's own, with a cook, a gardener, and a good-looking man.

 
 She may have said "boy," in fact, but that is hardly an appealing image. I will let you know how the condo inspection goes today ....

Got him!

"One of the most beautiful of all birds" (Birding, ed. Lindsey, Fog City Press, 1994), the cedar waxwing. Bombycilla cedrorum. 

Antares

Star: from Middle English sterre and old English steorra; Indo-European base ster, meaning star; from this, the Greek aster and Latin stella, a diminutive (ster-ela, star). 

I don't know if there is anything more pleasurable than to sit out on a third floor patio on a balmy breezy dark May evening, and eavesdrop on the young people's modest get-together in a first floor patio's grassy yard below. One has all the vicarious enjoyment of a party: greeting new arrivals, gushing to the hostess about the food, going outside for a smoke -- if one is a man -- to get away, probably, for a moment from the female squealing. There was a lot of that, and some talk I couldn't quite make out, concerning which year everyone graduated, and who is having a hard time finding a job. Then a man arrived with stories to tell about having just got back from Paris. A woman exclaimed that she had been there recently too. She said how strange it was that Parisians had all this history around them, they had churches and statues from a thousand years ago simply as part of their lives. I longed to call over "did you see many Muslims?" but possibly it is true the tourist sites are guarded from that. Anyway it wasn't my party.

One has all this vicarious enjoyment, without the bother of actually having to go. No getting ready, no leaving things undone to get ready, no standing around listening to people whom one would rather not listen to -- and they the same when it comes to you, let's be fair -- no surreptitious glancing at watches to mentally note how long it will take to get home. And you can eavesdrop, one building over and three floors up, without seeming creepy. Far over their heads in the southeastern sky, Mars glowed. I only know this because a certain bright star had been equally as bright, equally as red, when it stood beside the rising full moon a week before. I had thought "that must be Mars" and had googled the matter then. It was. Mars has been in "opposition" lately, meaning that its orbit around the sun has aligned it with the Earth and made it easy to spot.

It so happened that on this night of the young people's party, the moon was gone, but Mars was still there. As the night grew darker, fainter stars in the same area emerged. One seemed yellow, and one, still fainter, for all its faintness seemed even redder than the planet.

Of course I had to google that too. I simply typed in "night sky" and learned that the yellow star is the planet Saturn, also in opposition now. The red star is a real star, Antares. It is "a red giant near the end of its life," which sounds alarming. It has been near the end of its life for a long time though; astronomers, I think, sometimes make a stunt of dealing professionally with vastness. Vast distances, vast epochs. The ancients knew Antares, of course they did what else was there to do but look at the sky at night and talk with Socrates all day, so it has been dying for millennia. They named it the anti-Mars, Ant-Ares, precisely because its vivid red color rivals the planet's. For the Persians it was "one of the four royal stars," for Egyptians "a symbol of the goddess Selkit." I quote one Elizabeth Howell from Space.com three years ago. She in turn quotes Richard Hinckley Allen's Star Names and Their Meanings (1899). Why not, in the life of Antares a 117-year-old reference is as current as any.

The star is 604 light years away. This means, if astronomers for all their stuntishness are correct, that the reddish light we see now burst out of that star in the year 1412, and has been traveling toward us at the speed of light ever since. And the people looking at it then, people like Henry V or the parents of the infant Joan of Arc, would have been seeing light that left the star in the year 808 -- not that they knew -- in Charlemagne's time. And so on, back to the ancients rather quickly.

Is it somehow mentally healthy and restful to look at Antares (and eavesdrop on other people), rather than surf stupid old Facebook or watch another movie -- or is it just kind of dotty? Occasionally red Antares seemed to flicker and twinkle as if with real energy, with movement. Astronomy books will tell you that this is the way you distinguish stars from planets. Stars really do "twinkle," because they are balls of fire, while the five planets appear as glowing discs because they only reflect our own sun's light. To look at this strange tiny object in the sky above your building and to know that it is massive, and has a color, and is doing its own thing unimaginably far away beyond all the planets, is, well, yes. I've decided it's mentally healthy and restful.        

By the way. It turns out one of the young men is going to Greece on Saturday, to look for a wife. 

"The sky is red, dumb ass," or -- humor in Matthew (we found some!)

If you are reading it for the first time in twenty or thirty years, it may strike you as something out of a Seth Rogen movie. Just one small paragraph, seven verses. In fact, let's pretend it is a movie script, and we are millennial hipsters writing it.

***

(Working title: The Sky is Red, Dumb Ass)

Scene: ancient Israel, during the Roman Empire, about the year 30 A.D. The frenzy of Jesus of Nazareth's career is at the height of its -- well, frenzy. He travels about a smallish quadrant of a very small land, mostly staying near the sea of Galilee, preaching, telling the Jews their religious authorities are corrupt (a la James Kirk -- "your Bible is a lie!" though of course, not that exactly), and especially healing people. People being what they are, they mostly come out for that. In droves, in crowds, in throngs. Over and over again we are told "the crowds were so great," "great crowds followed him," "they brought him many" to be cured. Once they are cured they tend to go away. Or he sends them away, perhaps knowing what they are. We don't often hear "and the paralytic stayed and listened to what else he had to say." 

There have also been huge miracles and bizarre sights. He has calmed storms at sea, he has caused a few loaves of bread and fish to be enough to feed thousands, he has walked on water from shore to his disciples on a boat, pitching about in a storm on the sea of Galilee. 

Frequently, after some course of miracles and healings and teachings, the presumably exhausted Jesus goes away by himself somewhere. Usually when he comes back they all climb into a boat and cross "the sea," and the cycle of working the crowds begins again.

As this scene opens, not only is that new cycle beginning, but food and bickering about food is on everyone's mind. (Incidentally we're talking about a world in which hungry men eat grains of wheat off the stalk in a field, or pluck figs off a tree by the road. Memo to casting director, everybody is skinny.) In his most recent fracas with the religious authorities, Jesus has had to answer questions about why his followers don't wash their hands (ritually?) before eating, plus he has had to deal with the Canaanite woman who rebukes him about 'dogs eating the scraps from the table.' Then he feeds another several thousand with a few loaves and fishes.    

***

Dawn on the sea of Galilee. A few minutes of gray coolness, even mist, are left before the heat begins. The boat glides in to the bank, and the disciples splash wearily one by one into the water, to pull it all the way in. (Memo to set director, were there wharves and piers? Did guys just run boats up on to the sand? Is the shore of Kinneret sandy or rocky? Find out.) Jesus also gets out and helps pull. Well, he would. He is the farthest ahead of all of them.  

The last couple guys picking up their stuff from inside the boat, before they get out too, notice that nobody has brought any food. In all the everlasting hubbub that their lives have become, "they had forgotten to bring bread." Or, maybe they had been saving those last few loaves that he just used to feed the crowd. Present are: Simon called Peter, and Andrew (brothers); James and John (also brothers); Philip; Bartholomew; Thomas; Matthew the tax collector; James "the son of Alphaeus;" Thaddeus; Simon "the Cananean;" Judas Iscariot. Jesus.

THADDEUS. (Still in the boat. Rummaging in a bag.) Ohhh ... (Did the disciples ever use oaths? They were, after all, ordinary guys before.)

JAMES SON OF ALPHAEUS. What?

THADDEUS. You're not going to believe this.

SIMON THE CANANEAN. What?

PHILIP. What's the matter?

THADDEUS. Let's just say it's a long walk back around to that bake-shop woman.

SIMON. Are you kidding? We don't have bread?

BARTHOLOMEW (breathless, working in the water). I'd go. She was cute.

JUDAS. (Furious.) Fuck. (Yes, he would say it.)

MATTHEW THE TAX COLLECTOR. (Looking up, knee deep in the water, a rope over his shoulder.) Don't. What is it?

JUDAS. It seems we've forgotten bread, because we're all so brilliant like that. (He jumps over the side, followed by Thaddeus, James son of Alphaeus, Philip, and Simon. The boat is empty. The men heave and push it to shore. One tosses the anchor up on the grass (the sand? The rocks? Find out.) They wring out the hems of their clothes. They would normally gather to sit and eat now. Judas stalks a little away, to get his bearings, to look for a road.)

BARTHOLOMEW (approaches Simon Peter.) We'll have to live on mutual admiration until the next town. We forgot the bread.

SIMON PETER (turning, then grins). At least there's no lack of water. 

ANDREW (the disciples have begun to gather in two knots; Andrew crosses from one to the other, drawing them together). I hear we have ...

JAMES. Yes, yes. Now what?  

JOHN (shrugs). Move on, find a town, buy bread. Or beg it. 

ANDREW. They'll love us.

JUDAS (returning). They might.

PHILIP. They often do by the time we go. 

JESUS (He has been standing a little away. Now he comes toward them, brushing the dirt from his hands). What is it? 

JOHN. Nothing too serious. Just annoying. We forgot bread.

JESUS. (Still slowly brushing his hands. His mind is always working at a different level. Food -- bread -- the Canaanite woman -- scraps for the dogs -- healing -- the sick, the sick, the sick -- why don't you wash your hands? why do you pick grain on the Sabbath? -- the crowds, the crowds -- the sea, the sea -- bread comes from grain, all you need otherwise is water -- but also leavening, yeast -- show us a sign.) Well. (He smiles, absently, a bit grimly.) Rather beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. (He walks a little way off, up the rise toward the road.)     

THADDEUS. I'm sorry, what? 

JAMES. What was that? 

SIMON THE CANANEAN. Do you think he's mad? 

JUDAS. I don't think so. 

JAMES SON OF ALPHEUS. Who would forget bread?

THOMAS. We all forgot it, do you mind? 

SIMON PETER. It's those loaves he used the last time. The second time. That's what we packed for now. 

JOHN. Would you rather he not have fed hungry people? 

SIMON PETER. No. I'm just saying, we're not stupid, that was what we planned. 

JAMES SON OF ALPHEUS. Well then, we should have made adjustments in our plans. Look, what are we, a bunch of women here? Can we move on? 

THOMAS. I agree. I’m starving.

MATTHEW THE TAX COLLECTOR. I agree. Let's go. 

ANDREW. What about the boat -- 

JESUS (Suddenly he is just there, as if they had forgotten about him for years). What is it? 

JUDAS (After a pause). Nothing -- we're sorry we forgot --

JESUS. It's not the bread! You've seen bread. You've seen five thousand people fed with five loaves, you've seen four thousand people fed with seven. You've collected the leftovers yourselves. Have some faith. What I said was, 'Beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.' You know, the powers that be? 

SIMON PETER (actually squinting). You mean ... the leaven...

JOHN. What transforms. A small amount changes everything.

PHILIP. All through the bread.  

JESUS. Yes! 

THOMAS. Makes it what it will be. You can’t unmake bread.

THADDEUS. Makes us what we will be. What we might be.

PHILIP. Their teachings are like leaven, in people.

BARTHOLOMEW. And, going forward ... because we'll meet them again. 

JESUS (Gestures a 'hello, dumb-ass' Yes, not to any one of them, but more to the day in general. 

(They all turn to go, Jesus first with Judas close behind, followed by the rest. As they walk, one disciple quietly explains to another, in snatches and whispers. "He didn't mean the bread. 'Leaven' is teachings, how they work in you like yeast works in dough ...." 

(The straggler is Andrew. Once or twice he looks back at the boat.) 

ANDREW. What about the boat? Should we just leave it? That's not our boat, right? 

They keep walking, and he runs to catch up. 

***

END OF THE SCENE BASED ON THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW, CHAPTER 16: 5-12.

(Minor note: it’s amazing how often, if this were set in modern times, the characters would have said “Christ” or “Jesus” as a throwaway oath. Frequently had to stop myself from typing it in automatically.)