Seafood...for Lent!

I was exhausted, yet lured to a Hornets basketball game by my sister with the promise of a shrimp basket: about 15 small lightly fried shrimp served over a generous handful of warm, salty French fries. (We lost to the Denver Nuggets in the last four minutes, ugh.) I hadn’t prepared anything for dinner, so I knew AV would be left to his own devices with some pasta and canned tuna. Turns out, he went over to the nearby market and picked up some fried catfish, bypassing the huge containers of boiled shrimp and crawfish for sale that a lot of people pick up on their way home from work. That is, if they don’t go out to eat at one of the hundreds of seafood restaurants around.

And thus, we perform our Lenten sacrifice of abstaining from meat.

I grew up in New Orleans, and as long as I can remember, Fridays during Lent were always days that we’d go out for dinner to a nearby seafood restaurant and have po-boys. I think it’s safe to say many New Orleanians eat better on Fridays during Lent than they do any other time of the year. Sure, great seafood is available year-round here, but there’s just something about the exhortation to avoid meat on Fridays that inspires even the most devout to interpret it as a command to chow down on a $20 seafood platter, including soft-shell crab.

Deanie’s Restaurant in Bucktown, not far from where we live, is usually not wait-for-a-table crowded on a Friday night until about 6:30. But Fridays in Lent roll around, and it’s jam-packed at 5:30. Usually, you can have a pleasant lunch at New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company on Fridays. Not during Lent. The whole parking lot is completely packed, with people parallel parking on the side streets. Obviously, people have been watching their commercials, and know that this restaurant claims to be “Your Seafood Authority…For Lent!”

Then there are the church Friday Fish Frys. Our church has added a drive through service, so that you never have to leave your car to get that fried shrimp or catfish platter. My parents’ church is offering an even greater spread: an assortment of menu choices. According to my sister, you can choose from: boiled shrimp Caesar salad, grilled shrimp Caesar salad, shrimp basket, fish basket, and the seafood platter. You also have a choice of sides: macaroni and cheese, potato salad, cole slaw, green beans, sweet potato. All the choices come with hush puppies. And that’s just if your go through their “drive-through.” If you get out of your car and walk into the Church hall, you also get a drink and your choice of dessert for free. As my mom says, “there’s a lot of competition around here between the churches for Friday fish frys!” I had a suggestion: “First 50 people to Stations of the Cross get $1 off their seafood platter!” I think lots of people would like that promotion.

There’s no lecture here. I like that people go a bit seafood-insane on Fridays during Lent in N.O. (Cue a line: “N.O. will look for any excuse to party, even the Lord’s 40 days of fasting in the desert.”) I have always remembered Jesus’ sacrifice while I’m chewing on a shrimp tail on a Lenten Friday evening. It’s a tradition, and a reminder of our humanity. We could make ourselves look glum like the Pharisees, or we could enjoy a nicely seasoned, lightly breaded soft-shell crab. I’ll choose the latter every time.

I found Him Whom my heart and soul love; I held Him and I will not let Him go.

I'm less than a month away from the defense of my thesis, and am currently working on the final draft of that thesis. I am very busy, to say the least, so I apologize if my posting is sporadic. Below is the post I meant for Easter. Above is a picture of me on my second Easter in a pale pink dress, my favorite color as a child. Didn't my parents have great shag green carpeting? At least they could monitor my height.

When I was a young child, on Easter Sunday my family would go to Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter for beignets. It is right next to the Mississippi River, so we could see the sun gradually rising higher in the sky over the West Bank (because of the way the Mississippi curves in N.O., the West Bank is across the river and east of the Central Business District and French Quarter - it flows northward). Covered in powdered sugar, we then walked through Jackson Square and in front of St. Louis Cathedral.

For me as a child, decked out in pink dress, white patent leather shoes with bows, and jewelry decorated with flowers (I was such a girly-girl), Jackson Square was the perfect place to dream of a fairy-tale prince. In the right mid-morning lighting, St. Louis Cathedral bears the faintest of resemblances to Cinderella's Castle at Disneyworld, and Jackson Square is the flower-filled garden right outside the gates. The perfect place for Mary Magdalene to look for the Lord, and mistake him for a gardener. Adding to the image were the society women who would parade through the French Quarter on Easter Sunday in horse-drawn carriages on their way to Sunday Mass at the Cathedral. Royalty, going to greet the Savior on the first day of a new world.

I will rise then and go about the city;
In the streets and crossing I will seek Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him.

The watchmen came upon me,

As they made their rounds of the city: Have you seen him whom my heart loves?
I had hardly left them
When I found Him whom my heart loves.
I took hold of him and would not let him go. Song of Songs 3:2-4

I loved to get dressed up, walk near those trees and by those emerald green hedges - and I love grass that looks velvety - and dream of encountering a prince. (The sugar high from the beignets also helped.) In the Disney cartoon fairy tales, the princess almost always meets her prince in the darkness, whether it be of death (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) or of twilight (Cinderella). However, they must await the triumphal ringing of bells and the new morn that their love brings.

Seek ye the Lord, and be strengthened:
seek His face evermore. Psalm 105:4

In numerous symphonies, those bells toll to symbolize death, and celebration. But it's the upwards arpeggios that really get me. Upwards arpeggios, when performed slowly and deliberately, are the clouds slowing parting in the sky to make way for the sun. Performed fast, they are the flutterings of the heart in love. In Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, over and over again that F sharp pierces the otherworld where beautiful maidens are trapped in the bodies of swans, and suggests the hovering between tragedy (B minor) and happiness (B major). Finally, after the double suicide of Odette and Siegfried, the dawn comes, and the lovers are united as the strings trill in the key of B major.

There's a cheery secular song written in the 30's that I think encapsulates this feeling, this joy of finding the beloved, and refusing to let Him go:

Dear when you smiled at me,
I heard a melody
It haunted me from the start!
Something inside of me
Started a symphony
Zing! Went the strings of my heart!

I still recall the thrill
I guess I always will
I hope 'twill never depart
All nature seemed to be
In perfect harmony
Zing! Went the strings of my heart

St. Gregory Nazienzen wrote of the soul: organum pulsatum a Spiritu Sancto. When the Holy Spirit is there, your heart and soul trill with joy. Before you find Him, it is darkness. But when you do, you cannot let Him go.

O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.
I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me. Psalm 63: 1-8

P.S. Titian's Noli me tangere is already featured on my blog. I've always liked Thomas Wyatt's secular use of the phrase is in "Whoso list to hunt..." For those unfamiliar with it, the white hind in the verse has a diamond inscription on its collar that reads: "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame." The rumor is that the hind was Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII was Caesar. Wyatt may have been quite infatuated with Anne (shh! they may have been lovers!), and he was in prison when she got her head chopped off.

Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans

A Lenten Reflection

I apologize for the delay in posting – personal and professional business has been intense in the past two months! I have been meaning to continue the discussion in the post below, but have been too busy to organize the thoughts for it. Writing a dissertation is like entering into a huge fog from which you are not sure you will emerge (it never lifts – it’s waiting to envelop every unsuspecting person who goes to grad school). Excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmission between the prefrontal cortex and basolateral amygdala in response to cues haunts my life right now, and I need positive thoughts and good memories at this time. So instead of a ridiculously long post on the Catholic experience in 2007, I’ll stick my head out a bit and post a reflection on my hometown.

Recently, PBS’ American Experience aired a two hour documentary on New Orleans. Louis Armstrong singing the above title has me thinking. I believe all people remember their childhood in a certain visceral way: tastes, smells, colors, sounds. For me, New Orleans is in pinkish corals, golden yellows, ecru, pale blues, and the dark greens of trees and brownish-grays of moss. It smells like either coffee or a certain staleness that I would realize in adolescence was a sometimes (depending on which way the wind was blowing) pungent combination of cigarette smoke, stale beer, waste, and the accumulation of the latter that’s in the slow-moving, murky Mississippi River that runs through the city.

My parents are from towns north of Lafayette in Acadiana so I never associated gumbo, etouffee or boiled crawfish (certainly not boudin or rice dressing!) with New Orleans food. My parents’ heritage resides in Cajun territory; my sister and I were born in the Creole city. New Orleans’ cuisine was shrimp bisque, bread pudding with whiskey or rum sauce, turtle soup, these wonderful shrimp toast appetizers that a neighbor made, beignets at Café du Monde – none of which my mom cooked for us. And of course po’boys. And the sounds – any brass band, actually any brass instrument, draws me back to New Orleans. I associate hot and humid with New Orleans; the weather-induced slowness is New Orleans too. There’s even a ray of sunlight from a certain angle – about 40 degrees from vertical, with a pale yellow light that becomes golden the closer it gets to the ground – that is New Orleans. So is sitting on the wet green grass under huge cypresses and live oaks covered in moss with mosquito-larva filled water slowly moving by (especially when in City Park, with the Museum of Art only a few paces away).

And then there are the churches. New Orleans is a Catholic city, and has historically fancied herself a European city. Thus, the churches (and there were so many of them in my childhood) are ornate in French or Italian baroque style, statues and paintings larger than life and in Technicolor with gilding everywhere. My sister used to fear a large statue of St. Lucy, holding her huge green eyes on a platter in front of her. There was St. Anne’s Church, where my mom often went to daily Mass and as she’d kneel and pray, I would play with an extra rosary she had that had a strange blue iridescence. Then, my favorite part: the Stations of the Cross, meditated on while crawling up steps on one’s knees. I didn’t do that bit, so eager to reach the Resurrection (at the top of the steps one walked out onto the roof, in the full blaze of that New Orleans’ sun) and then walk back into the darkness of an alcove where Mother Mary was, with votive candles surrounded by blue glass at her feet.

At least, that’s the way I remember it, having left the New Orleans of my childhood at the age of six. We moved back there when I was nearly ten (my parents and sister still live there), but now we lived elsewhere in the metro area and I was older and wiser and the ability of sensory details to make deep imprints had been dampened by the skill of living inside my own head and having what I imagine were heavy intellectual discussions with myself.

But let me assure you, if you haven’t experienced it yourself: nothing is as sharp of a contrast as going from the Carnival season in New Orleans to Lent in New Orleans, with all the repentance hanging heavy in the air. From Mardi Gras to Ash Wednesday. For me as a child, it was awful. From Christmas we celebrated straight through ‘til Mardi Gras. I actually think the holiday season in New Orleans may stretch from Halloween to Mardi Gras, and I’m not talking the commercial buying and selling. It’s parties and celebrations, as if we were medieval field workers who just finished seeding the soil for the following spring, and could have festivity after festivity. The week of the Passion was almost a release – finally, something was happening again! Anything was better than the nothingness of Lent (besides mandatory seafood dinners, of course).

That’s one of the many things growing up in New Orleans taught me about Catholic life: to be IN Lent is to be in a certain kind of nothingness, realizing that you don’t deserve what’s good, and that to be alone, truly alone, is the most terrible of things. We are strengthened in community, and sometimes the whole community needs to repent, each on their own and yet together at the same time. As one commentator in the PBS documentary said, in New Orleans everyone is different, but everyone moves to the same rhythm, partaking from the same culture that has been able to incorporate French and Spanish upperclassmen, free blacks, Native Americans, WASPs, German, Irish, and Italian immigrants, and just about anyone else who wanted to add a little to the mix. There’s something here about being Catholic too. But for now, I’d prefer to remember what this time felt like for me as a child, to recover just a bit of the emotional impact the sensory details had on me, and the sense of darkness of this season.