The Power of One Good Meal

Holy Thursday –  This is the evening when, as children, we would go to church and watch the men of the parish reenact the “washing of the feet" ceremony which takes place at the Last Supper.  Father TJ, in the week leading up to Holy Thursday, would entreat all the able-bodied men, who rarely amounted to a full dozen even when they all gathered at once, to show up for Thursday evening mass – and they would dutifully sit at the front of the church while certain passages regarding the Last Supper were read – and they would remove their shoes and socks as instructed, while Father TJ and a young assistant with a towel and basin would go down the line in a mock representation of the washing of the feet – pouring real water over each man’s feet into a basin held beneath.  While Father TJ poured, he would repeat some passage about washing the feet – or maybe he said, “do this in memory of me” – I don’t remember.

 There would always be some smiles from the men whose feet may have been tickled by the cool water – or by the silliness of it – or maybe by the self-acknowledged “crustiness” of their own feet – you asked me to be here, don’t forget . . . they may have been thinking this while Father TJ was thinking or doubting the same thing, for sometimes he would smile too.  We young girls and our mothers in the pews could never know the exact reason why each man smiled – though we could often guess rightly by the “otherways” appearance of some of the old men – or we would learn the reason later from my twin brothers, teenagers at the time, when they exclaimed the horror of some of those men’s feet – whew!   That's the kind of thing they would have said.  I think Father TJ would often remark a similar thing the next day, or another day, when he was invited to our house for dinner, remark with his keen Irish-eye-laugh – whew!

 But the ritual went on the next year, nevertheless – important – no matter how awkward or silly or disgusting it may have been.

 Just the other day I was thinking about my favorite movies, trying to make a list of them in my mind, suddenly realizing that my top three favorites were similar in that they all climaxed with a “last meal” kind of scene – not just any last meal but a symbolic meal that has taken a lifetime of preparation to accomplish (we feel this somehow).  In each of these movies, “Babette’s Feast,” “August Lunch,” and “Of Gods and Men,” there are tears in the eyes of those people sitting at the table as they sip the wine and eat the food and join in their common humanity – and the scene is filled with love, absolute love, forgiveness, understanding, and togetherness.  It is a Last Supper scene, I came to realize while I was walking and thinking about my favorite movies – and that must be a universal theme or archetype that humans recognize in their hearts and spirits, something Joseph Campbell has probably written a book or chapter about, I concluded.

 In the Danish film “Babette's Feast,” all the stodgy men and women of the village church finally forsake their rigidity for the “sinfulness” of enjoying a feast together – and their lives are resurrected, converted to actual living, because after that meal these old people dance in a circle as though they were being initiated into the circle of life – and all from the miracle of good food and wine taken together.  In “August Lunch,” my next favorite movie, an Italian comedy, old stodgy life is unexpectedly pushed out of its daily routine.  After numerous attempts to return to this routine, which just makes everthing worse, our hero finally succumbs to what becomes a "final meal" that converts everyone at the table – and the movie ends with dancing, love, and togetherness.

 The third movie, which I saw just one week ago, “Of Gods and Men,” is based on the true story of the final days of a group of Benedictine monks in Algeria who are destined to be murdered by terrorists – they know the danger, though they don’t know the fact of it, yet something in them does know – for they come together that last night and enjoy a simple meal of soup and bread and wine. The aged, good men sit around the table and sip the wine which they have obviously not sampled in decades – and this first taste solicits tears from their eyes. They listen to a tape of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. There are wordless close-ups of the old men's faces – moist eyes full of compassion, old dry skin and uneven beards that somehow seem beautiful, the smiles of forgiveness they give each other . . . it seems there are angels dancing on the table to the choreography of Swan Lake – in my imagination anyway.

The “last supper” scene of this movie – it took a lifetime of sacrifice for those monks to get to that place where they could experience absolute joy in being alive.  I know it’s a movie, a reenactment, maybe not exactly how it happened – but there is great catharsis and significance in watching such things nevertheless.

"Marion, Virginia"

Frequently when I’ve read bits of the biographies of famous authors of the early 1900’s – Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Salinger – I’ve learned in some brief passage that Sherwood Anderson was a great encouragement to them, a real impetus for their success. In fact, he helped Faulkner and Hemingway to publish their first books; and he encouraged Hemingway to spend time in Paris to hone his skills. The above writers would go on to claim a much bigger slice of fame than Anderson ever would.  But really,  Anderson remains my favorite of them all.

Sherwood Anderson is known primarily for his classic on small town life, Winesburg, Ohio – one of my personal “Top 10 Favorite Books” of all time which I discovered in a college English class in the 1970’s. The book received decent acclaim at the time it was written, 1919, but I think Anderson was not very good at pulling off his own bit of fame – he had a tendency for nervous exhaustion and a revolving need to escape the madding crowd.  Born in a small town in Ohio, he happily retired to another small town in the Shenandoah Valley called Marion, Virginia.  There, he would buy the town newspaper and become its editor and perpetual guest columnist, fictitiously calling himself Buck Fever – but spending most of his time with the locals at the town drugstore on Main Street.  Who knows, he might have written a book called Marion, Virginia if he hadn’t died from a ridiculous accident at age 65.  I like to think such a book was in the making when he died.  He rests in Round Hill Cemetery, up a gullied road at the top of a remote hill overlooking town.  The inscription on his grave marker reads, “Life not death is the great adventure.”   I had to go there . . .

I ceremoniously packed my original copy of Winesburg, Ohio which I still treasured from my college days.  I wanted to read aloud one particular paragraph which made me think, way back then, that someone – Sherwood Anderson, that is – understood what sort of person I was.  Perhaps by doing so I could summon up from the earth or the air some of the encouragement he so freely gave to others . . . or at least thank him for what he’d already given me.

 There is little hullabaloo about Anderson’s life and writing in Marion, VA.  I should praise the town for making no discernable attempt to capitalize or profit from this American author – though it does seem sort of negligent and un-American. Marion, VA prefers to be known as the birthplace of Mountain Dew.

The young man at the town’s gas station said to look for a grave marker shaped like a ship’s sail.  “You can go up there on a cold night and put your hand on the grave marker and it will be just as warm as the afternoon sun.” – And that’s because it absorbs the sunlight all day long, he explained.  I had hoped for a more mystical explanation . . . but . . . that might be the kind of thing that Anderson would have used in one of his chapters on small town life, in the book I imagine he would have written, Marion, Virginia – young people in the cemetery at night, putting their hands on a grave marker and discovering the warmth.  I think he would have contrived for this young man and his girlfriend to go up there – they would have been cold of course; one of them would have noticed how warm the concrete was to sit on – and they would have sat together in the crook of the ship’s sail just as I did when I finally found the grave marker and sat down to think about all this.

Anderson the writer would have made symbols out of the contrasts of warmth and coldness, night and day, the living and the dead – opposition, juxtaposition, and confusion.  Sherwood Anderson generally writes from the perspective of the sensitive, easily injured, young man.  Somehow the girl would have hurt the young man by a few unthinking words or an imperceptible action – but only the young man and the reader would know it.  The setting would never leave the cemetery or that night – everything significant would take place in the young man’s mind, represented by those symbols of cold and darkness and death.  Anderson’s expertise probably comes from living in small towns where a trek up the cemetery hill with a girlfriend really is all that happens on a Friday night.

Anderson's writing is like poetry that’s been taken out of its formation and told to line up like a paragraph, that’s how pretty the lines are, so rhythmic. I remember one of my favorite sections from Winesburg, Ohio, called “Hands” – Anderson writes, “The story of Wings Biddlebaum is the story of hands . . . like unto the beating of wings of an imprisoned bird . . . striving to put into words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long years of silence . . . “  This whole chapter is about the way this man gestures restlessly as he talks, is amazed by his own hands, wants them to be inexpressive like the hands of other men, and tries to hide them in his pockets or behind his back.  That’s the whole story – the way the hands gesture and hide – and I’ve never forgotten it.

Other writers claimed a greater slice of fame, but Anderson was good at slicing life just that thin.