The Weekly, November 20, 2023
Hi all,
It's Thanksgiving week. So I wanted to share a couple things I'm grateful for this week. I also have a piece up on Mere O today about gratitude and our weekly email this week from the magazine will also be about this. For the personal newsletter, I'm going to focus on some personal things I'm thankful for. The intellectual and professional stuff will be in the Mere O email.
Here are six things:
First, I'm grateful for a wife who has been supportive of this work I'm attempting to do, even as it is complicated and hard and makes our life much weirder than the lives of many of our neighbors here in Lincoln. Her understanding and support, even in small simple gestures during the week, is a gift.
Second, I'm grateful that last week on my daughter's 11th birthday we were able to drive to a park and start reading the last Harry Potter book together. I started reading them to her when she was seven (maybe too soon? I dunno) but once we got to a certain point they were a little mature for her. So we shifted to starting the next book on her birthday. And now we're on the last one. So we went to our old neighborhood where the duplex we lived in when she was born is, got pastries from the bakery I used to go to all the time, and then walked to the park she played in as a toddler. We read the first two chapters of Deathly Hallows and then got a picture of her next to the bronze statue of a little girl that she's loved for her entire life. It was delightful.
I'm grateful for the time I got with our oldest son on Friday. He started taekwondo a year ago and this past Friday passed his blue belt test. The gym he goes to for taekwondo is very good about including family and so parents get to be part of the testing. Seeing the way he's grown in the past year has been a joy. The first night he went he was scared and didn't even want to do it. But we got him out there and I saw his face change as he was doing his first class. And now a year later he's completed five belts.
I'm grateful for time with our second son just running errands and being with him at home. He's something of a gymnast and is now doing cartwheels, hand stands, and what my wife tells me is a very good back bend for a six year old. He's a sweet, gentle soul and adds a ton to our family.
I'm grateful our youngest loves to wrestle and snuggle. I've spent a lot of time with him lately and most of it either involves him jumping on me as we "wrestle" (which basically means I lay on the couch and he climbs on the back of it and jumps on me) or with him resting against me while we watch a Paw Patrol or Fireman Sam together.
Finally, I'm grateful to be in my home town: It means I can drive 15 minutes and see my parents, spend time in the house I grew up in, and can go work in the library I remember visiting as a confused, faltering teenager where I could sit and read and read and read as I tried to work through the questions and doubts I was experiencing.
This week my parents surprised me with a bottle of Chartreuse. If you're new here, Chartreuse is one of my favorite liqueurs and is basically irreplaceable in several of my favorite cocktails. But it's almost impossible to find these days because it got super popular during the pandemic and started selling much faster. But because it's made by monks, the monks decided not to increase manufacturing because it would cut into their time to pray. (Really.) So they said "nah, we aren't gonna work more. We're gonna pray. People will have to deal." (I wonder how much healthier our economy would be if that choice was a plausible one for more people?)
Anyway, my mom called around town and found what may well have been the last bottle in the city—it was being kept in the back at the biggest liquor store in town. Thanks to their thoughtfulness, I was able to enjoy a Last Word last week and a Chartreuse Sour—which is an extremely simple and absolutely delightful drink. I mentioned it to a friend and he said you can make it even better if instead of using a simple syrup, as you ordinarily do in a sour, you use honey syrup. So I'm going to be trying that soon. Here's the spec I used:
1 oz lime juice
.75 oz simple syrup
1 egg white
2 oz chartreuse
Add all your ingredients to a shaker and shake without ice first, then add ice and shake it with ice. (The dry shake helps the egg white emulsify; the wet shake chills and dilutes the drink.) Strain into a glass and enjoy.
On to the reading:
Reading
Books
I'm compiling my list of best books of the year now. Three that are absolutely going to be on there somewhere:
Andrew Wilson's Remaking the World, Samuel James's Digital Liturgies, and John Andrew Bryant's A Quiet Mind to Suffer With. I expect Bryant's will be my favorite book of the year. But there's still a few weeks left. So we'll see.
I'm also wrapping up Benedict XVI's brief addresses on the church fathers. His talk on Hilary of Poitiers is exceptional, but the whole volume is worth your time.
Articles
Katherine Dee on imaginative play on the internet
Leah Sargeant on enforced pauses
James Patterson on the failure of the national conservatives
Tara Burton on Peter Thiel
Ben Abramson on zoning laws
Elsewhere
Enjoy the holiday. Make a list of things you're grateful for. Thank God for those things. Let the people you love know you're thankful for them.
Under the Mercy,
~Jake