Abraham, Dragons, and Pizza

I have ventured into uncharted territory tonight.  There are important issues to explore.  "Beyond here, there be dragons," sailors used to say.

A minister friend wrote me to say that she was working on a sermon about the Binding of Isaac (see Genesis 22 - http://bible.oremus.org/?passage=Genesis+22).  It's a tough story about faith, love, and obedience, because it presents an incredible moral dilemma.   In fact, it's one of those stories that seems to be unresolvable – and ultimately leaves us in the zone of faith.  How could a just and merciful God call upon Abraham to demonstrate his total loyalty by telling him, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you".  Never mind that He ultimately lets Abraham off the hook (sorry to spoil the plot for those of you that skipped Sunday School that day).  How could He ask such a thing?

But tonight that's not the uncharted territory I am exploring.  Tonight I am venturing into the deep unknown of a completely new marinara sauce recipe.  I know.  It's scary.  But that's not all.  I am also tempting fate with a completely new pizza crust.  All at once.  It's a bit overwhelming, so I had to write about it. 

I learned to make sauce from my mother many years ago (see the earlier "Making the Sauce" post).  There is something intensely personal about making sauce.  It's not even intentional.  My mother learned to make sauce from my grandmother.  But if you tasted from each of their pots, you would have to admit that though they were both tomato based, the similarity ended there.  My mother struggled for years to have her sauce taste just like my grandmothers.  I remember her breaking down in tears once when I was young enough not to understand how to answer such questions as "do these pants make me look fat?" when she asked if her sauce tasted as good as grandma's. 

But I have to admit that while my grandmother's sauce – especially her meatballs – was a thing of mythical proportion – my mother made an amazing sauce.  So good that you will almost never see me order a red sauce in a restaurant.  It's just not worth it.  And if I do, the answer to the question is always, "No – not as good as Mom's – but nice try."  See – sort of like, "Of course those pants don't make you look fat.  But you might cut back on the cannoli."  I can be trained.  It takes time.  But it can be done.

And it has taken time, but I make a pretty good red sauce.  It's not as good as Mom's.  Ask my father.  It's an entirely different taste.  Like that silly game "telephone" you used to play as a kid.  I watched her make it.  I wrote down what she did.  I even made it with her standing next to me.  And it still tasted entirely different.  Like I said, except for the fact that it is made with tomatoes... 

Asian cultures love paradoxes.  Buddhist writing seems to be filled with them.  The Chinese texts that I have read (in English, thank you) are mostly in short aphorisms that are designed to make you think and puzzle – they don't offer a straight forward answer.  Perhaps this is the secret that the West has yet to really uncover.  In my experience reading any of the great philosophers of the Western tradition, you will find their efforts at straightforward exposition to be at least as baffling as, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"  Perhaps truth is so complex that to try to break it apart in linear text is no more possible than drawing the sound of morning birds welcoming the sunrise.

My sauce is good, like I said, but my calzones are world famous.  (Calzones are basically pizza turnovers for you unitiated.  And when I say "World famous" I mean I have some friends who like my calzones and got stationed in Germany.  When they come back, I won't be able to say that anymore.) My secret is in the dough.  Or at least it always has been.  I make a thick, fluffy, sweet dough.  It's actually based on a bread recipe I got from a neighbor in New Hampshire 20 or so years ago.  Instead of using water in the dough, the recipe calls for milk.  And lots of sugar.  It also called for using shortening instead of oil, but over the years I've gotten lazy and gone back to using canola. 

I discovered the archetype of pizza at Avanti's in Amherst, Mass.  When I was in college they would occasionally send out coupons to the dorms for a large pizza with two toppings for $6.99.  Avanti's would count double cheese and double dough as toppings.  When the pizza would arrive, it would weigh about 10 pounds and be about three inches thick.  Looking back, it was probably terrible pizza.  But it's the stuff of legend now – like my grandmother's and mother's sauces.  It exists in a time and place that is gone and cannot be recreated – so all that is left is the memory of something that that has taken on the nature of a Platonic form.  So forever in my mind, a truly great pizza is one where the slices are so thick you have to unhinge your jaw to slide one into your mouth, and the cheese is so thick and gooey that you must have a beer on the floor next to your futon to wash it down with.

But tonight, as I said, I broke with tradition.  I surfed the web looking at a variety of pizza dough recipes.  My wife is enamored of thin crust pizza.  I've always thought of thin crust pizza as something like a cracker with cheese.  But I uncorked a bottle of 2005 zinfandel and thought, what the heck.  If I'm going to have crackers and cheese, I may as well have a nice glass of wine with it. 

Pizza dough recipes are actually quite simple.  Yeast, flour, oil, water, sugar.  Pretty much in the same proportions.  How complicated is that?  But do you ever go to two pizzerias (real pizzerias – not those corporate machines like Pizza Hut or Domino's) and get the same taste?  Do you want to argue it's the sauce?  The sauce isn't that much more complicated when you get down to the raw elements – tomato sauce, tomato paste, olive oil, garlic, oregano, basil, bay, a shot of red wine, some salt and pepper. 

Yeast, flour, oil, water, sugar.  Not unlike fire, water, air, and earth.  Can't make much with those, either.  

I found one recipe where the author praised the use of large quantities of yeast for flavor.  I'd never really thought about adding yeast for flavor.  So I tripled the amount of yeast I normally put into my dough.  I used honey instead of sugar to start the yeast.  No milk this time.  I rolled the dough out thin and flat, and basted it with the new marinara, then sliced some fresh mozzarella and dropped it on the pizza like continents in an island world. 

We learn to do things a certain way.  It becomes the right way.  Over time it becomes our way.  Our signature on it.  No one else does it quite like we do – no one could – even if they tried.  We come to love our own ways.  Perhaps we become inflexible, deep in our rut of repetition.  Paradoxes, dilemmas – these are powerful tools to shake our minds, to reconsider – to force us to stick our heads up from deep in the well trodden lines we follow.

Why would God force Abraham into the dilemma he did?  It's hard to say.  If you're Christian, you'd like to think of God as loving, that he would never have made Abraham follow through with the sacrifice just to prove a point.  But look what God does to Job on a bet.  This is the same God.  Another paradox.

I'd like to believe in the case of Abraham that God never intended to allow Abraham to follow through.  If he didn't intend to, then you could say this was just a thought exercise God put Abraham through.  To shake him out of his preconceptions, to awaken a deeper understanding through the full force of paradox. 

When Job dares to challenge his fate, God bellows down from the heavens, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding." (Job 38:4)  The gist is that a mere mortal like Job or one of us doesn't have the ability to see enough of the big picture to really understand the logic and beauty of the universe that God (or fill in the force of your choice) has set in motion.  What might seem like a paradox to us is simply elegant truth to God.  Or butterflies flapping their wings on the plains of Argentina.

The pies took about 10 minutes to bake.  They were thin and crispy.  The marinara was extraordinarily garlicky, the fresh mozzarella smoother than the shredded stuff you buy in bags.  They went down well with the zin. 

It felt heretical to crack a pizza crust.  But it was good.  Good to break out of the old ways. 

Sometimes you just have to have faith, and go out amongst the dragons.

 

Phantom

"Night-time sharpens, heightens each sensation.
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination.
Silently the senses abandon their defenses.
Slowly, gently night unfurls its splendor . . ."

-- Andrew Lloyd Weber – "Music of the Night"

"People are messy," Jeff, a friend from my last assignment, used to say.  Usually it was over coffee in the DFAC (that's military-ese for "dining facility" which is a cafeteria in English – everything has an acronym in the military) when I was complaining to him about some latest round of personnel issues I was dealing with. 

I think that's a great observation about life with people in general – not just at work.  Jeff was right - people are messy.  And when Jeff said messy, he didn't mean unclean or untidy – though that certainly applies to a good many.  Heck – it applies to me.  You'd know what I was saying if you ever saw my desk.  What he was talking about was the complexity of social interaction.  People make a mess of relationships, and since relationships are pretty much everything, then logically, people make a mess of pretty much everything (A=B, B=C, then A=C – you get the idea).

I have always had a fondness for walking at night.  When I was younger I would often wait until everyone else was in bed, then wander out the back door and out into the town.  My parents lived in a small city in western New Hampshire.  Main Street was just a little more than a mile from our house.  I would walk down Court Street, passing all the old houses that had once been the residences of mill bosses in the 19^th century.  These were sometimes graceful Victorians, but always imposingly large.  When you passed the new court house – very much 20^th century office building box architecture – you were on Main Street.

At the top of Main Street was (still is) a classic white church.  In front of the church, a rotary, complete with rotunda where bands sometimes played summer concerts, fountain, and obligatory war memorial of someone on a horse from some war a long time ago. 

By midnight, Main Street was mostly deserted.  The traffic lights switch to blinking red or yellow, depending on which way you are passing through the intersections and the rotary.  Occasionally there would still be a few pick-up trucks parked along the median, redneck hicks in from the surrounding unpopulated areas not wanting to call it a night just yet.  They would have cans of Bud held low against passing cars – in case.  But passing cars were few and far between.  Mostly the streets were quiet.  Any noise penetrated farther at night.  The unsubtle drunk laughter.  The sound of tires coursing over the pavement as a car turned a corner and the tail lights disappeared from sight.  The hum of air conditioners sputtering on or off.  The sound of your own footsteps on the pavement.

I'd walk along Main Street, looking at my reflection in the darkened shop windows.  The emptiness was peaceful, in an almost mischievous way.  The yellow light of street lamps was almost like a mild rebuke – one you could ignore with impunity, but it was always there. 

What is remarkable about walking through a sleeping city is to see it without the layers of social interaction that go on during the day.  People walking, bustling along the sidewalks, cars pressing to get from one place to another as quickly as possible, flaring at the stop lights.  Doors opening and closing, conversations – in person and cellular, radios.  Movement everywhere.  People coming in.  People going out.  People getting into cars with packages.  People crossing the street.  People to get out of the way of.  People to acknowledge with a small smile (not too much – this was New England after all), a courteous nod. 

A mess.

This picture of sunset was taken over a lake on my walkabout a few weeks ago on Orrs Island in Maine.  It reminded me of walking at night.  The docks abandoned.  No bungling tourists crowding there way unskillfully down to boats. 

I was looking for a place to sleep for the night.  I had hoped to go camping.  Unfortunately the only camp ground for many miles appeared not to be ready to take guests.  So much for spontaneity.  Sometimes it earns you a long night in the front seat of your car.  But I am glad to have paid that price to see the unfurling splendor of the night as it played out before me. 

It was not all that unlike night on Main Street – lit with flashing yellows and reds, the glide of white headlights, red tail lights.  Neon from pizza shops where you could see the help in the back cleaning up, running a mop through the darkened dining room up front.

Main Street emerges as something graceful and gentle under the shelter of darkness.  Something beautiful and uncomplicated.  Buildings' lines soften.  The streets flow like rivers.  There is a peace to be found at night, walking, even in the heart of a city.  It is the peace that people seek when they go out into nature.  I find that peace at night.  Temporal distance from the messiness of people.

There are days when I wish there were only nights.  Jeff loves people.  When he says they are messy, he says it with affection.  I wish I were more like him.  But I'm not.  I'm a night person.  A phantom of the sidewalks and alley ways.  Sharpened by the night.