These are a few (!) of my favorite things ...

     'Tis the season for The Sound of Music to be shown on TV, though I'm not quite sure what-all it has to do with Christmas. Perhaps because it's a "family" movie, it seems appropriate to air it during a "family" time of year.

     At any rate, 'tis also the season for making lists (and, yes, checking them twice).

     My favorite novels and films are already listed in the left sidebar. So here are more of my favorite things:

 

Non-fiction books: Practically everyone who knows me knows I love everything Helene Hanff wrote. In fact, I wrote a whole post about her and her delightfully chatty, autobiographical books. They know, too, how much I love the ever-amusing travel memoirist Emily Kimbrough, of whom I wrote in this post. Like Helene Hanff, I am a tremendous Anglophile, so I also love Beverley Nichols (a man, not a woman, in case you didn't know), especially A Thatched Roof, A Village in a Valley, and his trilogy Merry Hall/Laughter on the Stairs/Sunlight on the Lawn.

 

Food stuff: Wowee. Let's see. I could eat pasta every single day. I like it simply prepared, though if you offered me a plate of cannelloni, I wouldn't spit in your eye. Seafood is a biggie with me, especially salmon, halibut, monkfish, shrimp, scallops, and lobster. And I looooove a good steak, prime rib or rib eye, medium rare. I'd have to say my favorite overall cuisine is Italian (oh, big surprise), then French and Chinese. I only like Filipino if it's my mother's. No one else's can compare. I never go out to Filipino restaurants anymore (heck, I have a hard time even finding Filipino restaurants) because they simply don't measure up to my mom's cooking.

     My most favorite dessert in the whole world (probably) is coconut cream pie. Not coconut meringue – coconut cream. Chocolate silk pie. Chocolate mousse. Chocolate pot de crème. Cream puffs, St. Honoré, St. Tropez (just about anything with pastry cream; I just love pastry cream).

 

Music: Baroque, baroque, and baroque for relaxation and "mood." Corelli first of all, Bach, Handel, Purcell, Monteverdi, all that ilk. I prefer instrumental, however; surprisingly, I seldom listen these days to vocal or choral. Piano repertoire – Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninov, whatever. I'm not fond of Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev. As to non-classical, I like old standards and singers such as Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Jane Morgan, Vera Lynn, Rosemary Clooney, early Doris Day, Helen Ward, Helen Forrest, Mel Torme, Vic Damone. I never tire of the Beatles, especially early to mid-Beatles. Vintage Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan. Peter, Paul, and Mary. A special fondness for Blood, Sweat, and Tears and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Yes, I am a child of the 60's and early 70's.

 

TV: Come on; do you even have to ask? Okay, besides Frasier: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, The Paper Chase, The Antiques Roadshow, Chopped!, Iron Chef America, House Hunters International and, of course, Dancing with the Stars. I used to love Candace Olsen's old show Divine Design, and that great travel show of the early to mid-90's, Travelers. I miss Samantha Brown's European show. She's a kook.

 

Ways to spend time: Reading, antiquing, book hunting (in antiquarian bookstores), discovering great restaurants. Movies.

     My favorite part of the day is when I'm in prayer. I dedicate the first hour and a half of the morning to God, plus an hour in the evening and a half hour before bedtime. Nothing, however, compares to sitting in silent adoration before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, either exposed in the monstrance or hidden in the tabernacle. If I could, I would spend hours a day doing just that.

Spiritual writers: My favorite go-to books in this area are the ones written by, mysteriously, "A Carthusian," particularly They Speak by Silences. This beautiful little volume is comprised of very short (most of them shorter than one page) meditations and instructions written by a Carthusian monk to a novice. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Elisabeth Leseur, Peter Kreeft, Scott Hahn, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (also his writings as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) are others I consult regularly. Among the canon of Saints: Catherine of Siena, Thérèse of Lisieux, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, and Pope John Paul II are my top faves. Of course, Thomas a Kempis' great classic Imitation of Christ; and I have also begun to use the Carmelite book of meditation Divine Intimacy by Father Gabriel of Saint Mary Magdalen.

 

Scripture: I find endless strength in the Gospels of John and Luke, as well as John's first epistle and Revelation, Romans (most particularly chapter 8), Galatians, Ephesians, the epistles of Peter, most of Isaiah, much of Jeremiah, Sirach, and of course the Psalms. So much more; impossible to list here.

The Bitter and the Sweet

     As this is the first Thanksgiving without Dad, I can't help being more than usually reflective. I remember that in earlier years, Dad's main culinary contribution to our Thanksgiving meals was his mashed potatoes, made extra special by adding an egg while smashing the still-hot potatoes. (Don't worry; the heat was enough to cook the egg.) Though my intellect perceives his physical absence, my heart and deeper instincts know that the cliché is true: he is still with us in spirit.

     My father was not a talkative man, except when people encouraged him to speak of his experiences in World War II. At family gatherings he usually sat quietly at the head of the table, eating slowly while listening to the constant babble going on around him. Ours is, after all, a family dominated by strong, opinionated, funny women with penetrating voices. (There is also my laid back brother with his dry, sly wit.) In later years, when Dad was even more quiet, I wondered what he thought of all our chatter on literature, films, and food. He certainly shared few of our tastes—while we would devour Austen, he preferred war accounts; while we would laugh over It's Complicated, he preferred Zulu; and while we would rhapsodize over poached salmon with asparagus vinaigrette, he would happily consume a plateful of fried rice with sardines.

     Just the other day, my mother and sister and I were talking about the merits of freshly grated coconut. We recalled how Dad would take a coconut and crack it over a pan in the sink—he turned the coconut over and over in his hands, somehow found exactly the right spot, then whacked it with the blunt side of a cleaver. The two halves always broke cleanly without shattering, and the pure coconut water would gush out into the pan. After cracking all the coconuts, he would then sit in the middle of the kitchen on his special grater—a sort of wooden footstool-like contraption with a round, serrated blade protruding from one end.



     He'd place a large cake pan underneath the blade, sit on the grater, and scrape one coconut half after another until there was a snowy mound of moist, fragrant flakes in the pan. Then he would give me the shells so I could scrape out what meat was left with a grapefruit spoon. Ahhhh....... Packaged coconut tastes like Styrofoam beside such ambrosia! My mother would wash the freshly grated meat, squeezing all the good milk out to be used in the broth of ginataan, the Filipino dessert "stew," a warm concoction containing sweet potatoes, sweet rice balls, and bananas; the meat was usually used for palitaw, delectable poached patties made of sweet rice flour, coated with fresh coconut and sprinkled lightly with white or brown sugar.
 

ampalaya, or "bitter melon"

 

     Dad's home-grown produce showed up on our table regularly. He loved growing the vegetables he grew up eating in his native country: ampalaya (known to non-Filipinos as bitter melon, the odd-looking green squash with little irregular bumps all over it), sitaw (very long, skinny green beans), and Philippine eggplant and tomatoes. He would tend to his garden whenever the weather allowed; in the hottest summer months I remember him in his wide-brimmed straw hat, long white pants, and long-sleeved white cotton shirt, working among his vines and shrubs until Mom called him in to supper: "Basta kanà!" ("Enough now!")

     We miss him, of course. I look at his rocking chair in the living room, and, with my mind's eye, I see him sitting there, and with my mind's ear I hear myself asking him, "Are you cold? Do you want your balabal (blanket)?"

     Thanksgiving is not the same. But we are not without him.