Csquared Thoughts

Irani Tea

When I lived in Oklahoma City (Moore, actually, a suburb) in the early 1980's my first wife Ruth and her two kids (whom she had in the summer and at Christmas) and I would go to an all-you-can-eat buffet called Duffs. They had a hot tea I really liked. It was lighter and richer than your average Lipton's. The name was Irani. The PO Box address was on the tea bag tab so I wrote the company and asked if the tea was available by mail. I got a very gracious response from the company owner, one S.K. Irani, who said it was indeed. I began ordering it and enjoying it at home.

After we moved to the Bay Area in 1985, I wrote to place an order, having written and printed my letter from my computer. (I don't remember whether it was my original Apple IIe, or the 286 I got later.) While I was off at work, Ruth got a phone call from a very surprised Mr. Irani: "A computer letter from California!"

Somewhere along the way, amidst Ruth's sudden death in 1989 and a few moves on my part, I lost touch with Irani Tea. Then, four, maybe five years ago, I decided to try and find them. I was able to find their address in Indianapolis, but they seemed to have no Web presence at the time. I wrote to Mr. Irani and asked about ordering again. I received a very nice letter from Katrina Irani Donahue, who said she was helping her father with the business. Terry and I started ordering and drinking Irani tea again.

Today Katrina is president and owner of Irani Tea, Inc. While for the longest time I had to request my tea by U.S. mail and wait for the shipment and invoice and then send back a check via U.S. mail, I can now order on-line and pay via PayPal.

I do love my Irani tea. If you like tea but find the standard orange pekoe & black tea from the grocery store a bit too harsh, check out Irani. You can find them at http://www.iranitea.com.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

Enjoy time with your loved ones, eat well, and reflect on your blessings. 

lunch

A Pitzer College recollection.

In my Pitzer days when I lived on campus, which consisted of my freshman through junior years, a favorite time of day for me was lunch. It was a break between morning and afternoon classes. I could drop off my notebook (by which I mean a spiral-bound book with lined paper, not a computer) in my dorm room and head over to McConnell Center. I'd first run down to the basement and check my mail. There normally wasn't much there except for the mass-produced flyer or a questionnaire that was part of a class project by one of Pitzer's many, many psychology majors. But sometimes I had a magazine (Newsweek, ordered because of the special student rate, or the Saturday Review.) Once in a while there would even be the special treat of a letter from a freind at home. Then I would head upstairs to the dining hall for lunch.

Lunch always seemed more fluid than breakfast or dinner. Typically you would have breakfast or dinner with pretty much the same group of people. Lunch varied depending on who had which classes on which days and who was doing what. In any case, it was, as I remember it, a nice break.

Then, for the afternoon, back to class.

precision and imprecision

An Olive Street recollection.

Since I have been writing about Olive street, Alison and I have been exchanging emails about those days. One memory was of a chicken dish that Alison made. I asked her if she still had it, and she said she thought it was buried somewhere. She recently sent me a recipe, scanned from her own handwriting on used computer paper (our writing paper of choice in those days). We both agreed that this was not her prime chicken recipe, but her secondary offering. But I digress from my point.

In looking at the recipe, I was struck by the ingredients list: 1 chopped onion, 4 chicken breasts, 1/8 bell pepper, etc. etc., and then "many mushrooms. "

It's that combination of precision and imprecision that got my attention. I think we got that from my roommate, Alison's at-the-time significant other, George.

George was a computer nerd long before it was popular. Long before personal computers, this was the era when you sat at a dumb terminal, did your work, sent it to the mainframe and waited for the mainframe's response. Unless, of course, you had access to the computer room where the mainframe lived, which George in fact did. For those of you who remember, the mainframe at the Claremont Colleges in those days was the DEC System 10, otherwise known as the PDP 10.

So either in the computer room or at a remote terminal somewhere was where George spent the bulk of his time. (This, of course, was the source of the abundant quantities of computer paper we had around the apartment.) Obviously such activity required a great deal of precision, and George had a very precise mind.

Except when he didn't. For example, fixing spaghetti sauce, George would say, "This needs to simmer for a very long time."

In that context, "many mushrooms" makes perfect sense.

Cameron Hughes Wine

When Terry and I were at Jenner in September, I stopped into the local gift shop to buy a bottle of wine. (Jenner is a wide spot in the road – no grocery stores or liquor stores.) I spotted a plain label with the name Lot 124. The back of the label told me that this winery, Cameron Hughes, buys lots of premium wine that the original winery for some reason decided to let go of. Their Web site later told me more. These are wines that would normally sell from $30 to $50, but being sold under the CH Lot Series label, sans the name of the original winery and specifying only the general location of origin of the grapes, cost only $12 to $16.

I bought the bottle and brought Lot 124 – 2007 Carneros Chardonnay back to our cottage, where we enjoyed it that evening. It was really a very nice wine. The cork very conveniently listed their Web site, so when we got back home I checked them out.

They list all of the available wines in the Lot Series, but different lots are available from different sources. For example, not every wine in the Lot Series is available from their on-line store. But several are, and we ordered six. We've enjoyed five of the six bottles, and have been very pleased.

If you like good wine and aren't particular about the label, check them out. They're at http://chwine.com. Then click on the Lot Series logo at the top of the page.

a new Amazon habit

For a long time I have saved books I thought I might want to read to my Amazon Wish List. But since I now read most books available in that format on my trusty Kindle, I realized there was a better way. I requested a sample of the books on my wish list that were available in Kindle format be sent to my Kindle and deleted them from my Wish List. When I see a new book I'm interested in, I now request a Kindle sample. Now I have the samples all there on my Kindle, and when I'm ready to buy one of those books I can download it with just a couple of clicks.

How cool is that?

The Wizard of Oz

With all the hype and press around the 75th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz and the accompanying DVD release, one interesting point has been made. The film was not a big hit in theaters when it was released in 1939, and didn't achieve legendary status until it became an annual television event on CBS in the 1950's and 1960's.

And how well we remember. For the first several years we didn't even have color TV, so much of the transition from Kansas to Oz was lost. But what memories CBS gave us with the annual broadcast! Long before VCR's (let alone DVR's) we planned ahead, made sure dinner was taken care of and out of the way, and the whole family gathered in front of the TV to watch the movie, commercials and all.

It didn't matter that we'd seen it before. The flying monkeys were just as frightening, and the Wicked Witch of West just as scary when she turned over the hourglass the sixth or seventh time as it was the first.

The movie is in our DVD library, and we can watch it whenever we want. Complete with the transition from the black and white of Kansas to the color of Oz. But it's not the same.

Thank you, CBS, for all those great memories!

community - not always so easy

Yesterday I wrote about Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and her comments on the heresy of individual salvation.

We are part of a community. I have written here before that one of the criteria for scripture being accepted into the canon was that the book was read before the assembly, and not just used in private devotion.

Yet community doesn't always work the way we would like. This time last year I had left Good Shepherd. If you don't remember what happened, click The Church link in the category map. I don't want to rehash the details here.

This year there is still dissent. I thought those elements were gone, but some are still present. There are those who feel they are part of the community, but choose to avoid worship. I don't like this and it makes me uncomfortable.

Last year I missed all of Advent and Christmas and part of Epiphany. It was not good. I don't want that to happen this year. I plan to continue with worship and hope there can be some reconciliation with those who are disaffected.

Somehow we need to keep the community together.

  

common salvation

Yesterday I mentioned that The Justice Project on Facebook quoted Adam Taylor: "Too often we privatize Jesus, reducing the gospel to only personal salvation."

That, I don't belive, is what it's about.

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori spoke at the General Convention about the "great Western heresy" of individualism. She took a lot of flack for her comments, whcih she clarified in an Episcopal Life article. 

The spiritual journey, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is about holy living in community. When Jesus was asked to summarize the Torah, he said, "love God and love your neighbor as yourself." That means our task is to be in relationship with God and with our neighbors. If salvation is understood only as "getting right with God" without considering "getting right with (all) our neighbors," then we've got a heresy (an unorthodox belief) on our hands.

She goes on to say:

The Hebrew prophets save their strongest denunciation for those who claim to be worshiping correctly but ignore injustice done to their neighbors (e.g., Amos 5:21-24), and Jesus insists that those who will enter the kingdom are the ones who have cared for neighbor by feeding, watering, clothing, housing, healing and visiting "the least of these" (Matt 25:31-46).

Sometimes we'd like to just keep to ourselves. At least I feel that way at times. But the message in Judaism and Christianity is that we are part of a community.

Even if that's hard sometimes.

Ayn Rand

There's been a resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand recently, and an apparent spike in the sales of her books. This has been variously attributed to the election of Obama, the recession, or both. There's also a couple of new books about her, which I may or may not read.

Several years ago, when I was in a spiritual journey group at All Saints' Episcopal in Palo Alto, one of the members, several years older than me, described his college days and being a member of the Ayn Rand faction and hence part of the conservative minority of the radical early sixties.

I found this interesting, as did a few of us who were younger. We read Ayn Rand in the late sixties or early seventies while in high school. But to us it wasn't about political conservatism. It was about the lone individual standing up against the structure of society. I admired Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged because she was happy as vice president of operations for he family's railroad business. She didn't need or want to be president. She knew she was the one really running the railroad in the job she had.

We admired Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, the architect (supposedly modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright) for his independence and his unwillingness to conform to society's norms.

I suspect Rand would have been appalled and offended at our misappropriation of her principles.

Today, those are principles that I can't stand by, even in our altered form.

We're in this world together. We're in the church together. The lone individual out there on the cliff in the howling wind is not going to help save the planet.

The Justice Project on Facebook quoted Adam Taylor: "Too often we privatize Jesus, reducing the gospel to only personal salvation."

That doesn't work. More tomorrow.