I've Loved You So Long

This weekend I watched I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), a 2008 French film in which Kristin Scott Thomas stars as a woman recently released from prison after a fifteen year sentence for murdering her six year old son.

The film presents a jarringly compassionate portrait of an infanticide, her strugglings to regain her footing in life following release, her reintegration into her family, and her inability to forgive herself for her past.

Both the relatively lenient sentence (by American standards) and the generosity with which the character is generally treated, both by the film itself and the other characters in the film, made the film seem truly foreign in sensibility.

I have posted here previously about my concerns about a general lack of forgiveness in American society for those who have strayed from the path and the remarkably different approach that seems to animate criminal justice in Europe.

A comment by one of the characters, when he found out that Kristin Scott Thomas's character had been in prison for murder, struck a chord with me, reminding me of one of my favorite lines from Capote - "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front" - though without the solipsism.

The character, a professor who befriends the woman, tries to comfort her when others discovery her secret:

I spent ten years teaching in prison. I never mention it. I went there three times a week. And I got out three times a week. Nothing was the same after. I saw everything differently. Other people . . . The sky . . . The passing of time . . . I realized that people in prison were like me. They could have been me, or I them. It's such a fine line sometimes.

I have spent the last decade meeting with men in prisons - mostly men facing the death penalty for murder - and I have never walked through the gates without a sense of gratitude and good fortune because that fine, and often well out of our control, line between praise and blame is no where more obvious.

* Here's the trailer.

The Peacemaker

Mahony's Po-Boy Shop is my favorite place to get a po-boy. While I want to prefer the old school joint in my neighborhood, Parasol's, I find myself drawn to Mahony's, a relative new comer to the city's po-boy scene, because, not withstanding my partiality to things old and slightly beat up, I like its po-boys better. I prefer its roast beef and I write this regretfully and with some sense of betrayal as I know that Parasol's roast beef po-boy is a great sandwich. Maybe the greatest if not for Mahony's.

My true feelings for Mahony's became clear to me on a recent Monday night after a long day, when all I wanted to do was po-boy the grief and stress of work away. One word rang in my ears. Peacemaker.

I longed for the peace, the serenity, of consuming another signature Mahony's po-boy, a classic, I am told, that I haven't seen anywhere else. Fried oysters, cheddar, and bacon, dressed with lettuce, tomato, and mayo, on French bread. Peacemaker. Made me peaceful.

May peace be with you.

You will know even more peace if you order it with gravy fries, Mahony's homemade fries covered with roast beef and gravy.

Stealing Fruit

I got home from work on Monday after a long day of work, eager to hold Baby Rose and to forget about the day. In my driveway, I looked over at my satsuma tree, the source of so much pride and happiness this weekend, and realized that a bunch of fruit had been pulled off the tree, evinced by the white rinds beneath the tops of satsuma skins still attached to the tree.

I became really angry, imagining what I would have done if I had come across someone looting my tree and abusing the fruit.

I went inside the house and Nikki told me that she had thought she had heard someone out there.

I became even angrier.

As I laid in bed that night, my mind full of buckshot blasts, I remembered St. Augustine and his pear tree.

In his Confession, Augustine wrote:

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night--having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was--a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart--which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error--not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

Upon remembering that I, myself, am a would be stealer of pears, I felt a lot better and stopped worrying about shooting the poor thief. Let him have his vices. And my satsumas.

Bumper Crop

Following some severe and prescient trimming by Nikki a year or so ago (I don't have her stomach for plant brutality except when it comes to our wisteria, which won't bloom no matter how much I abuse it), our citrus tree produced a bumper crop of fruit this year. (Last year we got about three satsumas. The year before we only got one.) The fruit set, small and green, many month ago and only recently starting turning lighter green, then orange. I was reluctant to start cutting them down because I wanted them to become as sweet as possible but they recently started dropping (with the tops of the fruit pulling right off and the fruit dropping to the ground "open") so in the past couple of days I started to harvest the fruit.I didn't quite realize how much fruit was on the tree until I started clipping them off. Over the course of a half hour or forty five minutes, I filled more than two shopping bags (taking the fruit that had either turned orange or which felt like there was some "room" between the rind and the meat) and there was still a ton of fruit still on the tree. (The above photos were taken after today's harvest.)One thing that is remarkable about the tree is how it supported the weight of so much fruit without snapping its limbs. In the above photo, I am holding two bags of fruit, each bag weighing almost twenty pounds. They were pretty heavy, even for a strapping young man like me. The tree's thin branches hold five times that and while they have bent over, some nearly touching the ground, none have broken even if the recent heavy winds. The only exception was a branch snapped by our carpenter during the recent installation of our shutters and even that branch stayed attached to the tree and produced fruit that ripened slightly sooner but were delicious none the less. (These provided some of the juice for my recent cocktail experiments.)While I take great pleasure eating food grown on my own land (a fairly grandiose way to conceive of my Irish Channel driveway), these fruit would be a delicious treat that I would enjoy even if they were shipped in from South America and I had to pay big bucks for them at Whole Foods.

The fruit is sweet and firm, with few seeds, and is so juicy that they burst when you peel them.

Apparently I am not the first New Yorker to get swept up in the excitement of Louisiana citrus. I found this 1899 article about the prospects for citrus production here ("The people of New Orleans - right here in this city - do not know wht they have, but the Eastern people are beginning to learn what this country is."):In any event, as must be clear, I am a neophyte to citrus trees and farming. I was wondering whether anyone might know with some precision what variety of citrus my tree is. I call them satsumas because they are greenish and because that seems to be the predominant local citrus. But these are much more orange than most satsumas I see. Any citrus experts out there?

Raised to believe that all men are created equal . . .

Philip Spooner is a World War II veteran who served in the Battle of the Bulge. He was raised on a potato farm north of Caribou, Maine to believe that all men were created equal. He has four sons, all of whom served in the military and one of whom is gay. When asked whether he believed in equal rights for gay people recently, he thought about his experience with life, war, and its purposes, and responded, "What do you think our boys fought for at Omaha Beach?"

He's my kind of patriot.

From down here in Louisiana, it's inspiring to see progressive values close to victory on the state level on these kinds of battles, when here things appear to be moving in the opposite direction. Hard to believe its the same country.

I very much hope that my friends and family up in Maine make it out to vote against the November ballot measure repealing same sex marriage rights there. You are lucky to live in a state that reflects values of decency and tolerance. Keep it that way!

*As the husband of a expatriate Maine nationalist, I also like another Equality Maine advertisement , beginning, "Something happens when you cross the border into the state . . ." Reminds me of Nikki arguing that Maine, and maybe Vermont and New Hampshire, is all that truly remains of New England. What about Massachusetts? "Those flatlanders?" Connecticut? "Isn't that part of New York?"

*I first saw this video on Humid City, where it was posted by Loki.

UPDATE: I don't know if it appeared in today's New York Times or will appear in tomorrow's but there is an article about the ballot initiative and its national significance on nytimes.com. Sad to see that the Catholic Church is financing the initiative. You'd think that they would render this one unto Caesar so long as they can conduct marriages as they see fit in their own churches.

Baby Rose Mae

I have created a baby blog for friends and family who have demanded a greater web presence for Rose Mae Sothern. At babyrosemae.blogspot.com, Nikki and I plan on posting photos and stories about Baby Rose. I may do some cross posting on Imperfectly Vertical but want to, for the most part, keep my musings about Bushwick Bill and Manson chicks separate from my little baby.

Mother to Son

Since Nikki became pregnant, and even more so since Rose's birth, I have been trying to figure out what kind of father I want to be and, more to the point, what kind of father I will end up being no matter what kind of father I want to be.

I remember when my friend's mother passed away a handful of years ago, I sent him Langston Hughes' Mother to Son, which summed up something for me about the love that a parent might give to their child in letting them know the troubles of world and helping make them strong enough to bear them.

Looking at baby Rose, I am entirely committed to protecting her from everything awful and bad in the world. But I also know that the world has a way of toppling the levees we build around our precious things. In the end, I hope that I can teach her that while life isn't always a "crystal stair" that, if we keep climbing, we find landings for rest and comfort and occasionally turn corners that flights down we could never have imagined. Like the one I just turned.*

"Mother to Son"
Langston Hughes

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now --
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

* I am slightly worried that my broader, personal reading of this poem sets aside, a bit too much, its racial and social justice message. But my poetry consultant, certified poet Jill McDonough, assures me that "Mother to Son has plenty of room for racial equality readings and personal readings and also things-are-easier-for-the-next-generation readings; none of those interpretations cheapen it, I don't think. I think it's about the giving up, as well as the kinder hard; we all want to give up sometimes, but it's useful to realize other people went before us and didn't quit. And are still going, even." So breathe easy. And read it however you like.