Were you not lovely I would leave you now;

After the feet of beauty fly my own.

            I have quite a few cousins, though only one who is near my age, and even she is six years my junior.  The others are so much younger that they call me “Uncle”, and I refer to them as nephews/nieces.  I spent Christmas Eve playing with my “nephew” James, who is one of those people who is so perfectly beautiful that it almost hurts to look at them.  At twelve years old he is just starting to enter into the obnoxious stage, but he is such a good natured child that it only shows for brief moments. I have done studies of his face each Christmas for years to catalogue changes as he grows, and since I do all my work from memory I had been studying him closely. We were playing dominos in the basement, and when we went upstairs for dinner I was struck by how plain the rest of my family appeared.  While my relations are, for the most part, very physically attractive people, each of their flaws was suddenly highlighted in a way I hadn’t noticed before.  It was really quite interesting from an introspective point of view.  While I had sketched these people many times before, stared at their faces surreptitiously since my childhood, I had glossed over how this person’s face wasn’t quite symmetrical, how this person had the beginnings of crow’s feet, or the other one had slightly blotchy skin.  I wonder what it is that makes one feature stand out to me and why I don’t notice others.  Hmm.

            In western Pennsylvania and New York a very common dish served on holidays is “Ox Roast”.  While genuine ox may have been served two hundred years ago, there seems to be a dearth of oxen now a days, so it is actually beef served in the style of ox, and is really rather tasty.  The local butcher will cook an unseasoned beef roast without much liquid so that it gets a little bit tough.  He then slices it thin, and stores it in quart containers filled with fresh water.  People buy it and bring it home where they dump the jars into a pot and heat it slowly, adding black pepper and maybe a little bit of garlic, but not much else.  The result is served with a slotted spoon or tongs onto a heavy bun and eaten with homemade horseradish.  It is an interesting mix of flavours; you really get to taste the meat itself, since it has very little seasoning, but at the same time you get the extreme flavour of the horseradish (it usually will make everyone’s eyes and nose run) which somehow manages not to overpower the meat.  I sure do like it.

PS.       The quote “To the pure, all things are pure” comes not from the Qur’an, but from Paul’s letter to Titus.  I don’t know what I was thinking before, but I happen to like the Epistle to Titus quite a bit and felt really stupid as I was reading it the other day.

PPS.    Take a look at kiwiichigo’s blog.  I came upon it the other day, and I think that she is terribly clever. 

PPPS      The picture I posted several entries ago was of a wolf who, rather than savaging a heard of sheep, chose instead to run through the meadow and leap over them.  This next picture (which also makes me chortle in my joy (literary reference alert) should be easier to understand.