Doing Things of No Great Import

This is Laurie. Today it is December 8, 2022, and I just found the following email, sent from Opa to Elanore back in 2015. He was living in the house in Whitingham, VT, and regularly capturing deep thoughts here on this blog. This is a rare glimpse into some other types of thoughts, and a small snapshot both of a sweet relationship and a particular fleeting season of life…

From: Richard Sitterding <schwizerbueb@gmail.com>

Date: July 24, 2015 at 5:20:02 PM EDT
To: Elanore Sitterding <schnooey@gmail.com>

Dear Elanore,

It just started to rain and the great time outdoors is at and end for today. It was a phantastic day again: clear, blue sky, temperature in the mid seventies and humidity down in the sixties, just the way it was during several days past. Then the clouds started to move in, dark gray and black, and blotted out the sun little by little and now - why, they are leaking :-). The bad thing is that this forces me to close the sliding door to the deck because rare is the day when rain starts and the wind does not blow the water through the door. Because that happened so often during the past many years, you can see the weathering of the hardwood floors very easily.
So, here I am again. This morning, when I sent my message off to you, I was boiling hot and angry about my iPad having let me down and destroyed my labor on my reply to you in return of the lovely card you sent me some two weeks ago. Lovely does not adequately describe the impression your message made. Receiving a handwritten note from someone you love is an event these days! Usually, letters, even personal ones are typed and even so impersonal as electronic, just as this one. I hope you forgive me, because when it comes to handwriting I always envision the hasty scrawl I produce these days. To me, the picture is not pretty. Maybe I'm a snob. I think the same way about food. Part of the enjoyment of eating comes through the eyes, another part through the nose, the rest through the mouth in form of texture and taste. The only difference in my reaction is that I might forgive a plate its unappetizing looks. It would not drive me to go to fast food in preference of a good morsel that does not look good. But when it comes to writing, the feelings are based on a different footing: food I receive, and I am willing to forgive the preparer for failing to make it look attractive; writing I send to someone and I am not sure if I would be forgiven for a scraggly hand or even bad orthography.
Returning to your note: receiving it was just part of the joy it brought. Seeing that you had produced it yourself increased my pride in my youngest granddaughter. Reading it made my heart swell and it has not yet, after two weeks since receiving this note, returned to its normal size ;-) Thank you! It is so rare these days to receive personal communication. I am about ready to opt out of Facebook, because there, not much is ever of a personal note, and why should I spend time and harbor hope that something better might come just around the corner, if all I receive is a confirmation that my friends read the same newspapers that I read?
It is procrastination that kept me from answering earlier and now the time left before you start on the 'big trip north' is so short that I fear a letter from here will not reach you until you return home again. I could not stand facing you and hearing you say "Opa, did you ever get my card I sent you early in July? You never answered!"
This morning I resolved to write you an answer, but as I said in my earlier message my iPad erased it before I had a chance to proofread it. Thinking this over, I decided it was my own fault. I rested my hand on the upper left hand corner, just as one might hold down the pages of a book one reads, and the distortion of the screen caused by my heavy paw triggered the "erase all" feature, which, without a question, exists somewhere in the innards of an iPad. So, here I am again, all my fingers and palms doing only what is necessary to write or to read on this finicky gismo.
Responding to your questions: the weather up here with the exception for two or three days in June was lovely. Temperature every day below 80 with a humidity somewhere around 60 by midday, and nights low down in the fifties. Sleeping weather for the Angels! I, mortal, gladly partake of what is meant to please those without fault. I just hope that we will not deplete the whole supply of such weather before you completed your visit up here. The thought that you might be confronted by the same conditions as you find down south is inconceivable to me, after these past weeks of pure bliss. Only, I keep thinking that maybe your parents might wish to camp again and then the frequent short rains will definitely not be very welcome.
I had not heard of the book you are reading until you told me about it. Asking around on the Web I find that it is a book not without repute! It's title is based on Ephesians 6:12 so I would expect to find considerable thought in its text. The subject, such as I found synopsis on the Web, is much along the line my own reading happened to run into: prompted by Philip's choice of studies for this coming year, I reached for philosophers, so I will not be totally unfamiliar with the new thoughts, and new way of thinking that our Philip will come back with at the end of this school year. Since my line of education was strictly in the exact sciences, philosophy was left far far away from our road and, I must confess, somewhat snickered at. Today, I feel that we were the ones who deserve the snickering, but I found that philosophers, the true kind that is, are far above such mundane reactions to the facts of life. So, I read first modern philosophers and was disappointed. What fell into my hands was Bertrand Russell's "The Problems of Philosophy" and it almost turned me off from pursuing this line of study. There was nothing but weirdness of subjects and thought, and even contemporaries drawn in by the author did not promise anything better in the genre. Then I reached for an author some hundreds of years earlier: Erasmus of Rotterdam was 'familiar' to me from my high school days when we studied the Humanists. Erasmus spent many years in Basel which made him almost a countryman to us. So, I read "In Praise of Folly" and was a bit better satisfied by the display of relevant thought, relevant to the essence of life, that is. From there, I went backwards again for several hundred years and landed on Plato. I read "Phaedo" and am now into "The Republic". Among other subjects, the discussion between Socrates and his friends centers on the attempt to envision the perfect State. The notion one gets from the problems that must be solved in order to for a perfect society with fault free leadership are the same we have, still unsolved, today and that are said to form the subject of the book you read. Welcome to reality! Clothing it in fiction does not make the real picture brighter.
Other than that? I spend my days doing things of no great import. I do minimal housework and of course there is no escape from the kitchen, unless I want to satisfy my need for food with packets of prepared menus. I don't like them, so I don't have them, except in an emergency now and then. There is a frozen lasagna languishing in my freezer since May. That tells you about the frequency I indulge in such meals. Last week I cooked a goat stew. My favorite supermarket had frozen 'goat chunks' and I cooked a 'Caribbean goat chunk stew'. The meat, with bones, came from Australia. The product was very good and tasty, but there was nothing that had any goaty character, whatever that might be. I think you get that only from the hindquarters of an old buck. The rest of goat meat has no reason to be off taste in any way from beef, or game grown in the fields of our civilization. The game we had so much of in Lynch Station apparently all fed on the corn fields in the neighborhood and sweeter meat you cannot imagine. Anyway, this was last week and this week I dared to cook a batch of 'pan seared octopus' I just finished the last morsel. It is very exciting in taste, but again, there is nothing in the taste that makes you say "this is octopus". Like Kaarin says: it must be like calamari - it's the spices that give the meal its character, the fish itself has no outstanding or exclusive taste. But I'll do that again, sometime. Octopi have become so common on the shelves of supermarkets and I hear that in Los Angeles they are quite the wave. For me, pan seared octopus takes me all the way back to a trip my parents and I made through the Aegean Sea in 1957. We stopped in a small harbor where the great cruise ships cannot go because the water is just a few feet deep, enough for the native fishermen's boats. Ours was a converted mine sweeper from WWII and we were traveling in a small group of about twenty members, all interested in the Greek Antiquity and the geography. On that little island where we landed that day there was nothing for tourists. It was just a convenient stop on our way to another more famed spot. There was not even a restaurant visible in the small cluster of houses around the harbor, nor did we hear anyone talking about there being one. My dad and I went for a walk that evening before dinner on our ship and saw a table in front of an open door and two chairs. We sat down and soon a woman came out of the house and we made her understand we would like to have an aperitif. She spoke nothing but Greek and understand nothing of our German, English, French or Italian. She brought us two glasses and a bottle of Ouzo and shortly after she came with an iron pan with some black crunchy pieces of a delicious taste. It turned out to be octopus and the house was private, and she did not even want money, but we could see that she and her husband were living on what he could get from the sea and she out of the little garden plot behind the house. We put some money under the bottle of Ouzo when we left and the memory of this hospitality to strangers is indelible.
Looking very, very much forward to see all of you up here soon,
Your Opa