Summer Reading: Three Japanese Novels

 

Convenience Store Woman is a novel about—guess what—a woman who works in a convenience store. There’s nothing so unusual about that, but Keiko has been doing the same job at the same store, part time, for eighteen years. She likes it, and she’s good at it. The position is lowly, but Keiko shoulders her responsibilities with utter dedication and professionalism. It’s basically her life.

Keiko knows she’s a little different. In the novel’s opening pages, she relates the story of a schoolyard fist-fight she witnessed as a child. All the kids were standing around shouting “Break it up! Break it up!” Keiko picked up a shovel, knocked one of the belligerents unconscious, and considered she’d done a good job. “I still don’t see anything wrong with what I did,” she tells us.

But Keiko isn’t driven by irrational or antisocial impulses; she just likes to keep order and make sure everything’s in its proper place. Much of the novel—which sold more than a million copies in Japan—deals with the minutia of her day, managing inventory, re-ordering products, setting up special sales depending on the season, tending the cash register, and remaining forever cheerful in the face of customer requests throughout her shift.

If I happen to enjoy reading about such things, it might be because I worked in a book warehouse for twenty-odd years, so I’m familiar with the satisfactions that such work can sometimes provide. That might also explain why I enjoyed the German film In the Aisles (2018).

But just when things start to get tedious, author Sayaka Murata gives her story a twist in the form of a new employee, Shiraha, hired by the manager out of desperation during a busy season. Shiraha is a loser, a slacker, an arrogant miscreant, practically homeless. Needless to say, he and Keiko don’t get along …

Tokyo Express, originally published in 1958, has the look of a mystery novel. It focuses on the question of whether an apparent murder/suicide on a lonely beach on the southern tip of Japan might actually have been a murder. But there is never more than one real suspect in the case, and from the early chapters to the end of the book, Inspector Mihara spends nearly all his time trying to break that suspect’s seemingly water-tight alibi. There are three or four “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?” moments, plenty of interviews with subsidiary characters, and lots of analysis of train schedules, all of which establish an atmosphere of mild intrigue. But the fact that the book’s first few chapters focus on the behavior of two waitresses and an eminent businessman with ties to a government scandal would be hard to explain if he weren’t somehow connected to the crime … presuming  there was a crime committed ...

 The Summer House follows the early career of an inexperienced and sometimes dilatory architect, one Tōru Sakanishi, who, by a stroke of luck, gets hired on to the firm of master architect Shunsuke Murai. Murai needs some help: he’s preparing an entry for a competition the build Japan’s National Library of Modern Literature. In the past, he has avoided such competitions, preferring to work with clients who know and appreciate his quiet, subtle style. It’s almost as if he knows he’s approaching the end of his career.

Little by little, Sakanishi picks up the rhythms of the architectural team, which has moved up to a mountain retreat to work on the project together. He’s eager to make himself useful, though the tasks he’s given seldom have much to do with the competition entry itself. It takes him a while, for example, to catch on to the fact that in Sakanishi’s world, it’s taboo to sharpen your pencils after 5 p.m.

As the summer passes, meals are shared, errands are run. We listen in on discussions about furniture design, acoustics, the proper location of fireplaces, and sundry other architectural issues. In the course of his narrative Sakanishi also drifts into lengthy digressions on the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright (with whom Murai studied as a youth) and the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund, whose famous design for the Stockholm Public Library has captured Murai’s interest.

Among the team are two women, Mariko and Yukiko, and Sakanishi takes a liking to them both, adding yet another subtle, almost unspoken ripple to the stream. Murai himself rekindles several personal connections in the mountain neighborhood, where he’s been coming for decades. Meanwhile, under an atmosphere of professional calm and unspoken reverence for the master, weeks pass, months. The competition deadline approaches.

Author Matsuie won Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for this, his first novel. He succeeds in transforming what might have been a plodding narrative filled with attestations of respect we can acknowledge but have been given no reason to share into an exotic and atmospheric whole, where relationships between walls, chairs, books, and people are in constant flux, restrained by patience and tact, buoyed by a sense of balance and proportion, fueled an unspoken affection and the passage of time.  

The News from Campus

I have a soft spot in my heart for things related to campus life. There’s something “cool” about those years you spend learning things while doing crumby part-time jobs and hanging out with your friends. And in more recent years, Hilary and I have wandered over from time to time to see a play or an opera staged by the music department. I've attended a few programs hosted by the Carlson School of Business, the Heller School of Economics, and the English Department. I taught a class on the St. Paul Campus for several years as part of their Compleat Scholar program. And now that I think about it, I was once invited to join the programming committee for the West Bank Film Society. 

So when I received an email from the University of Massachusetts/Boston inviting me to join a focus group to discuss ways campuses can “engage with older adults in the community” and “foster intergenerational interactions,” I signed up. Why not? The meeting would only take an hour, and I would receive a $50 Amazon gift card as a reward for my efforts.

I was a little proud of myself for noting that the meeting was scheduled in Eastern Daylight Time. That meant that the 2 p.m. Zoom session would be starting at 1. But when I tuned in, the session was almost over. The moderator invited me to return in an hour, when a second session was scheduled to start. That gave me time to refer back to the original email invitation, which specified Fri, May 22, 1:00 – 2:00 EDT. My mistake. (Perhaps this faux pas established my bona fides as an elderly person struggling to come to grips with the complexities of the modern campus world.) 

I was surprised to discover, in any case, that both of the sessions—the one I’d missed and the one I attended—were made up entirely of women, all of whom were employed at college campuses in Massachusetts. Quite a few of them seemed to know each other personally. It struck me as odd that they were all academics or administrators. None were average citizens expressing concerns about campus access--the things that the panel was purporting to address.

Except me.

The facilitator was articulate and well-organized. She had drawn up a series of questions, and also mentioned how much time she planned to devote to each—five or ten minutes—before initiating discussion. The questions were broad, on the order of “How can colleges and universities support accessibility, navigation, mobility, and safety for all ages on campus?” and “What discourages or prevents older learners from coming to campuses?” Within the confines of the time limit, our answers were inevitably superficial. Concerns about crime? Better campus lighting, more cops. Navigation? Kiosks with maps. Parking? Take a bus. And so on.

The section that seemed most fruitful to me explored ways to connect older students to academia by scheduling classes and events off-campus. Although I tried to maintain a low profile during the discussion, I couldn’t resist mentioning the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute, which supports learning programs at more than 250 universities around the country, with classes held in local churches, high schools, libraries, and online. I also mentioned the numerous readings and educational programs hosted within our local Hennepin County Library System, and the city-wide system of motorized scooters that make it easier for older adults to traverse the sprawling U of MM campuses.

(The idea of older people riding around on scooters may sound absurd, but in the minds of the panelists, a twenty-five year old would be considered an “older” returning adult. Anyway, isn't this a prime examle of the much encouraged "thinking outside the box"?)

With about three minutes left in the hour, someone brought up the issue of Zoom classes, which obviate the challenges involved in negotiating a college campus entirely. “I think they’re great.” I chimed in. Someone countered with a remark on the order of “but then you miss the interactions between student and teacher and among the students themselves.”

“That’s true to some extent,” I said. “But in the classes I teach on Zoom, there’s a lot of useful interaction going on between students in the chat—questions being answered, enthusiasms being shared. Far more than in a "live" classroom. And everyone has the opportunity to email me directly after class with questions, observations, or challenges to my remarks.”

I might have gone on to observe that quite a few people in my classes would never dream of leaving their assisted living arrangements to attend a class ten (or two hundred) miles away on a 400-acre campus serving 50,000 students. In my most recent class there were students from as far away as Crosby and Lac Qui Parle.

What I did says was: “More than 160 people registered for my most recent class. You’re unlikely to reach a third of that total in a college classroom.”

I might also have mentioned, as an aside, that Luther Seminary, after more than a century of operation in the beautiful St. Paul neighborhood of St. Anthony Park, now plans to sell its entire campus and reincarnate itself as a more lean and nimble institution, responding to the reality that even now 70 percent of its students attend mostly online. 

So many avenues to explore, so little time!

The question that remained most forcibly in my mind as I switched off the Zoom portal was this: to what extent, in its efforts to expand inclusiveness and nurture “community,” is the university willing to shed its dedication to "higher" education and refashion itself as a purveyor of community ed?     

Any professional educator will confirm that learning styles differ from person to person. At the U of MN, anyone over the age of 62 can audit courses for free and earn credits for only $20 apiece. That’s a good deal, though it doesn’t appeal to me much. I don’t need credits at this late date. And although some professors can be inspiring, my eight years on campus back in the 70s convinced me that many of them aren’t. In such cases, I’d rather just read the book.

My plan, all along, had been to devote my $50 Amazon credit to buying books that I might otherwise have shied away from as too esoteric, too expensive, too dense. The books I chose were Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle, What’s Eating the Universe by Paul Davies, and Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeoisie Deal Enriched the World, by Deirdre McCloskey. 

That should keep me occupied for a while.     

 

A Cool Breeze after a Hot Night

A cool breeze after a hot night is a godsend. More than that, it’s a delight. Such a remark brings up the question of whether a delight is more, or less, than a godsend.  I would say more, but I don’t want to take up the question now. It would spoil the delight.

This morning my delight was compounded by the character of the task I’d gone outside to perform. It was the most pleasurable of all gardening tasks: to divide plants we already have and rearrange them in the garden. It’s good for the garden, good for the plants … and it’s free!

Earlier this spring, as usual, I cut back quite a bit on our buckthorn forest. I suppose we should have removed it entirely a long time ago, but it has never produced berries, and it served a purpose: it supported the grape vines that emerged, year in and year out, from its shadows.

This spring I did an especially good job of entwining last year’s vines through the arch of the garden gate, looking forward to an effect similar to the faux-arbors in old-fashioned Italian restaurants. (Vescio’s. Mama Rosa’s. Mama D’s. Where have they gone?)

However, a few days ago I noticed that all the grape-vines were dead. That was bad news. I attributed their demise to a fungus that had appeared on the main stalk, Fusicolla merismoides (commonly called "deer vomit fungus"). But as it turns out, that slimy, neon orange goo is harmless.  

The good news was that the buckthorn forest no longer served any useful purpose. So I set about the task of hacking it down, sawing off the stumps and digging out the roots. It was hard work, and I’m well aware that we’ll be pulling out buckthorn sprouts for years to come. But when I was done, we had a fairly large chunk of land—maybe six feet square—to replant however we chose.

We discussed a variety of options and finally concocted a vague plan involving pagoda dogwoods, day lilies, and hostas, all of which we have in abundance, along with a hydrangea that’s been in our “formal” backyard garden even since we moved in, getting smaller every year.

New Grapes

While removing the buckthorn, I noticed that the grapes had reseeded in a few places, and I moved those feeble sprouts to the base of a metal trellis that was leaning against our neighbor’s fence. I also came upon a forsythia that had disappeared into the buckthorns years ago. It's a shapeless specimen, but we'll keep it around until we think of something better. 

I also took pleasure in handling the dead vines. Their sinuous strength is remarkable, and it’s easy to see how useful they would have been for boatmaking, goat-pen fencing, and basketry, back in the days before synthetic materials were invented.  For a split-second I thought about hunting up my copy of John Seymour’s The Forgotten Crafts: a practical guide to traditional skills. But the moment passed.

I have no recollection of what color the day-lilies are that I rescued from under the Amur maples. They never bloomed in that mediocre location. Time will tell. Maybe.

There's plenty of work still to do. But I don't call this work. And we now have a new garden zone tucked behind the volunteer cherry orchard we've been grooming. Delights of gardening! I just might bring a chair out there and enjoy an entirely new perspective on the back yard, 

Sonny Rollins and Me

Sonny Rollins died the other day at 95. I grew up listening to his sometimes tender but more often churlish and irascible sound. I liked him, but I struggled to find an album of his that I really liked.

He came to town in the early seventies to play the Whole Coffeehouse in the basement of the U of Minnesota’s Coffman Union. There might have been thirty tables spread out in front of the stage. That’s the thing about jazz: world-class talent, yet very few people actually “dig” the music. As if Placido Domingo were doing a recital at your local Punch Pizza.

It was a memorable show, especially Rollins’ highly rhythmic rendering of a calypso number called “St. Thomas.” He stretched out for close to ten minutes and would have gone farther, I think, if some idiot in the back row hadn’t shouted out “HoHoHo.”

I heard him again, years later, at the State Theater in downtown Minneapolis as part of a “supergroup” tour with McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter. Sure, it was good. But it’s better when the ceiling’s low, you’re twenty feet from the bandstand, and everyone in the group isn’t trying to be a star.

Throughout his career, Rollins struggled to remain creative, choosing to go out on a limb, or muddy the waters, or rough up the texture, time and again, rather than return to the familiar riffs and changes of the post-bop world—the riffs and changes that most jazz aficionados love. In this he differed from his near contemporary Sonny Stitt, who seemed to come out with a new album every three months. Rollins quit playing for years at a time, famously practicing late at night on the Williamsburg Bridge, near his apartment on the Lower East Side.  

The legend I grew up with was that Rollins was freaked out by the appearance of “free jazz,” and especially by the exploratory sound of John Coltrane, who seemed to be usurping his position as “best tenor sax” in the minds of many listeners. The first album of his that I owned, East Broadway Run Down, contained a twenty-minute track with quite a bit of upper-range squealing—Rollins’s attempt to join in the movement toward “freedom” and noise. I found it embarrassing.

The album’s B-side had a twelve-minute Rollins original, “Blessing in Disguise,” full of repeated angular rhythms, and a ballad, “We Kiss in the Shadows.” Good stuff. But I'm not sure dropping the piano was such a good idea.

It’s true that Rollins’ star seemed to fade as Coltrane’s grew brighter. It’s a classic trope, though the details don’t quite fit. In his recent book, Three Shades of Blue, jazz historian James Kaplan takes a closer look at the critical juncture when trumpeter Miles Davis replaced Rollins with Coltrane in his ever-evolving ensemble.

At the time, Miles had just returned to the States from Paris, and he wanted to form a new band. Coltrane was just finishing up a gig at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles wanted Coltrane back. Kaplan quotes trumpeter Wallace Roney:

One night [Miles] comes to Trane and says, 'Trane, come on back in the band, man.' Trane said, 'No, Miles—I like it here. I’m havin’ fun.' Miles said, 'You don’t want to play this shit—we playing some different shitl' Coltrane said, 'No, Miles, I’m enjoying this.'

Miles said, 'Come on. Come on back home.' He said, 'Philly’s back. Red’s back. And we got a little boy, Cannonball.' He said, “Just come on and play some with us.' 

In Roney's version, Miles hires Sonny Rollins on tenor and books a gig at Cafe Bohemia. Then one night Coltrane shows up, carrying his horn. Cutting a solo short, Miles goes off the bandstand to talk to him. Sonny takes the next solo, and then, (as Miles later told the story to Roney) “Trane got up there and played so much shit, took the championship belt away from Sonny. Made Sonny go to the bridge!”

It's a fine tale, the kind of insider scuttlebutt that those who love the music relish, Kaplan among them. But he prudently adds:

If the account is taken literally, it has a couple of chronological issues. For one thing, Sonny Rollins had left Miles’s band in September, while the Monk-Coltrane stand at the Five Spot was still in full bloom. For an­other, Rollins’s famous sabbatical from jazz, during which he practiced every day on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, didn’t happen until the summer of 1959, and by his own account, a cutting contest with Coltrane had nothing to do with it. And Red Garland didn’t rejoin Miles until late December, at which point Rollins was long gone. 

So much for the details. The fact remains that Coltrane’s play­ing had developed exponentially during his time with Monk: “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order," he told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....”

Rollins also played with Monk. Did his music develop? I don’t know. I don’t think that playing with the Rolling Stones helped him much. I could be wrong.

When I feel a yen to listen to Rollins, I’m likely to return to his albums from the 1950s: Tenor Madness, Sonny Rollins Plus 4, The Sound of Sonny, and a great Dizzy Gillespie album called Sonny Side Up featuring Rollins and Sonny Stitt as sidemen.

Are these his best albums? I couldn’t say. They just happen to be the ones I have.

One of my favorites among his tracks is a rendition of “My Reverie,” a boppish version of a big band number based on a famous tune by Claude Debussy. I find the restraint with which Rollins nurses the development moving, and appropriate to this solemn occasion.

You can listen to it here.

    

 

 

Doors Open Minneapolis 2026

On a cool sunny Saturday morning we drove downtown to take advantage of the Doors Open festival, a program designed to make it easy to visit a variety of businesses and institutions free of charge, just for the hell of it. In previous years we’d joined tours of the Federal Reserve, Open Book, City Hall, the Ivy Hotel, the Lakeview Cemetery Chapel, and a low-slung building that was once home to a Ry Krisp factory. This year we studied the maps and came up with an even wider range of options.

We parked on the brief unmetered stretch of River Road between Plymouth Avenue and the lock and dam—a two-hour limit. How much money did we save? I don’t know. But matters of cost aside, the walk itself was delightful. This is an attractive and interesting part of town, though it’s changed a lot since I worked in that neighborhood. In those days it was home to the International Design Center, Moose and Sadie’s Coffeeshop, J.D. Hoyt’s, Origami, a bicycle supply warehouse, a Caribou Coffee warehouse, Rykodisc CD distributor, an Asian import shop called Indigo, a restaurant supply warehouse, etc. The few people who lived in the vicinity were squatting in genuine lofts accessed by freight elevators, perhaps illegally.

The warehouse I worked at was heated by coal, which was delivered by rail and dropped down a wooden chute into a bin in the basement, from which point it was fed into the furnace by a conveyor screw. That building has long since been converted to expensive loft/apartments.

The owner of Indigo, a kindly man named John, told me before they moved out that they’d been given a sweetheart ten-year lease back when the neighbor was struggling. The lease was up, not to be renewed, and besides, as John put it, “There’s no longer anywhere for customers to park down here!”

The day was bright, windy, and cool. We zigzagged through the North Loop, intoxicated by the towering urban-ness of our surroundings, past the Lindsay Brothers Building, the jazz club Berlin, Origami, the Yamasaki Building (soon to reopen as a luxury hotel, so they say) and a variety of other buildings, both flashy and non-descript.

It took us forty minutes to reach our first destination, the Minneapolis Athletic Club. Our tour guide, a realtor by trade, took us through the classy, old-fashioned rooms, up and down stairs, through the observation galleries of the squash courts, into and through the weight rooms, ballrooms, a tap room, and a “reading room.” with its overstuffed chairs, chandeliers, Persian carpets, and mahogany paneling. 

“So, this is a reading room …” I asked him. “But I don’t see a single book.”

“It’s the same with my real estate clients,” he said. “I used to examine their books, their CDs, and the contents of the refrigerator, to get a better feel for who they are. Now, the only thing of interest is the refrigerator.”

Our walk back to the car took us down Nicollet Mall, which was far drearier than I’d expected. Most of the shops are gone. Pedestrian traffic is almost nonexistent. Along the way we did have the good fortune to come upon some public works employees who were showcasing the city’s sewer system. We looked down a manhole to the pipes eighteen feet below. And one of the men let me drive his mechanical exploratory mouse back and forth through a foot-wide plexiglass tube.

A few blocks to the west we stopped briefly into a small digital advertising agency called Shinebox equipped with a bar and lounge on the first floor and eight or ten cubical work stations in the basement. We chatted briefly with a young woman from England.

Back at the car, we headed to Northeast, where we tossed around several ideas for lunch—Anchor Fish and Chops, Aki’s, Sample Room—before settling on Mayslack’s, a Polish dive bar that’s been around since 1956. I heard about it often back in my days on the loading dock, but had never been there. The waitress was friendly, the atmosphere authentic, the sandwiches huge.

Where's the sandwich?

Our next stop, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, is housed in a low-slung modern building on the river just north of Lowry. There’s a motor boat parked out back. The task here is to monitor the river for phosphorus, chlorine, and other chemicals, but they send most of the samples to a lab off-site. It seems the place is mostly used as an educational facility, and various exhibits were attended by cordial and well-informed high school kids.   

From there it was on to the U of MN off-site book storage facility, located In an obscure corner of the Como neighborhood, a few blocks south of the Newgate car donation center. The doors are 12 feet high—the tallest in the university, so we were told. But they’re dwarfed by the shelving area itself, which is fitted with seemingly endless rows of shelving that are 32 feet tall.

The building is equipped with numerous eco-friendly features. I was not aware of any volcanic activity in the area and asked our tour guide about the geothermal heating system. She told me they collect rainwater in the summer and pipe it deep underground. In the winter they heat the place with the water, which is now much warmer than the surrounding air.

The building is designed to hold 3.7 million books. The storage is based on nothing but the dimensions of the book; putting books of the same height in the same box saves space. Each book is given a bar code. Also, each box. Beyond that, it’s all just a matter of sliding the boxes in and using the reference system to retrieve whichever book a patron requests.

Retrieving a book that’s 30 feet off the ground isn’t all that easy, however.  

Part of the fun of Doors Open is cooking up a route from one site to the next. From the library mega-stacks we took an interesting route down Como, past Van Cleve Park, then south across the 10^th Street Bridge to the KFAI radio studios at Cedar-Riverside.

I don’t listen to the radio much, but I thoroughly appreciate and admire the social commitment and musical range of this mostly volunteer broadcast endeavor. Inside the second-floor studio, equipped with offices and three or four broadcast rooms, we spoke at some length with program manager Miguel Vargas about the standards and methods of the station, the methods they use to store and organize new releases and antique collections. In the next room, a volunteer told us about a show he’s planning to produce about some local punk bands—high school kids mostly. “I’ll be taking classes this summer to get my license.” He looked to be at least 50 himself.

As we were leaving, we met up with another visitor, who said. “I love this place! Look at it. Paper-clips, compact discs, Scotch tape, and not a video screen in sight. It’s like the 70s!” 

The next morning we set out for Northeast again. Our first stop was Clay Squared, a custom tile manufacturer fitted with electric kilns and all sorts of tools for creating ceramic tiles. Down the hall was the studio/classroom of Layl McDill, a polymer clay artist who was hand-shaping beads and buttons for an upcoming class. We waxed nostalgic for a minute or two about the Play-Dough Fun Factory sets we both fiddled around with at kids. Layl went on to make a career out of the artform.

Our second stop was the Groveland Galley, set on the hillside of a tony neighborhood the Walker Art Center. Lots of nice landscapes and prints ... but a little out of our price range. The smallish exhibition rooms were crowded, but programming director Victoria Keith took the time to draw my attention to the subtle works of plein air master Joshua Cunningham.   

A short dash on the freeway took us to the Russian Museum, where we wandered through an extensive display of Cold War American and Russian toys, posters, comic books, and other kitsch. The collectors themselves were present, and not hard to spot.

"Is that an official NASA spacesuit?" I asked one of them.

"How should I know?" he replied. "I got it on eBay."

We took the long way home, north on Lyndale, west on 36th Street past the tulips in Lakewood Cemetery, north along the shores of Bde Maka Ska, then a meandering route up the parkway past Cedar Lake. 

We were taking our time, relishing the wonderful afternoon, and also the richness of our fine urban world.

 

 

Excited by What?

Depending on your situation, or your temperament, to be “excited by nothing” might be taken to mean either that a) life has lost its sparkle, or b) you’re excited to greet the day, though you can’t put your finger on any specific reason.

These days I often find myself in the latter state. I might attribute such irrepressible glee to the clear morning light, the bright green vegetation, crabapples coming into bloom, the songs of the kinglets and white-throated sparrows that fill the air as I step out onto the deck—or all four. But the feeling runs deeper than that. Everything seems grand on such mornings, and the question becomes, “What are you going to do about it?”

Do we have to do anything about it? Going for walks, getting together with friends, listening to music, staring off into the underbrush …    

Yesterday morning I trimmed a low-hanging branch from a tree near the fence. I’ve been wanting to do that since last year. While out in the yard I spotted a “pheasant-back” mushroom that had sprung up on a tree stump amid the seas of Virginia waterleaf. A few minutes later I was back inside, googling the species to make sure of the identification. I looked high and low, and found no comment on the order of “not to be confused with the similar and highly poisonous ….”

In the afternoon Hilary and I took a stroll through Eloise Butler wildflower garden. Back home, I noticed we had quite a few red bell peppers in the fridge, and I concocted a plan. I put some early Italian music on the stereo—Landini and friends. It might just as well have been modern Italian folk music, though the harmonic progressions tended toward the pleasantly odd and strange, as if an episode of Father Cadfael were running on the TV in the next room.

I sliced up the peppers, blackened them in the broiler, then proceeded to assemble the dish we call Sicilian Peppers—black olives, anchovies, capers, oregano, onion, garlic, and balsamic vinegar.

Then I harvested the mushroom, brushed it off, and sliced it up. I took a bite, which immediately confirmed the identification: it tasted like watermelon rind. I sauteed the slices in butter, and we enjoyed a light dinner sitting in front of the doors that open out to the deck.

Spiritual Activities

A recent poll by the Pew Research Institute asked people a number of questions about their beliefs and their “spiritual life.” One of them was:

Do you do one or more of the following things for spiritual reasons at least once a week: visit a nature spot, listen to music, exercise, look inward, practice yoga or meditate.

I was surprised at the results, which were broken down by state. Mississippi topped the chart, though only 75 percent of respondents answered the question in the affirmative. New Hampshire came in dead last, at 48 percent. Minnesota ranked tenth from the bottom, at 56 percent.

Mississippians also reported the highest “spiritual well-being,” with 48 percent claiming to have achieved that state. In Minnesota, barely one in three made that claim. We hard-headed Minnesotans did even worse when it comes to “feeling the presence of something beyond this world.” Third from the bottom!

A more careful look at the results brings out a few contradictions, however. When respondents were asked if they believed in a spirit or soul, four fifths in even the most skeptical state, Oregon, answered in the affirmative. Yet only 29 percent of Oregonians believe in “the presence of something beyond this world.”

This contrast highlights the crux of the issue. How can it be that so many people believe in a spirit or soul, yet not feel the presence of something beyond this world?

The obvious answer would be that they consider spirit or soul to be entirely immanent—that is to say, of this world. But wouldn’t that be tantamount to saying that spirit is matter? For myself, when I “look within” and contemplate my own soul, the notion of “matter” never enters my mind. I might think of such things as obligation, exhilaration, promise, or contingency. I might revive the childhood question of why I happen to be me, and not someone else. Any and all of these responses produce a moral frisson that’s both exhilarating and slightly scary.

But if spirit isn’t matter, what is it? Where did it come from, and why have I been saddled with this particular speck of it? (And who is the "I" to which I referred just now?)

The Pew questionnaire wasn’t designed to probe these subtle issues, and right now I’m not in the mood for such things, either. I only wanted to observe that when I read the question with which I started this piece, my reaction was: “Only once a week? I do several of those things almost every day.” Sure. Lucky me. But can I honestly say I do them “for spiritual reasons”? Why else? Spirituality and good feeling aren’t mutually exclusive.  On the contrary, they often work very well together. 

Though I'm not entirely sold on the idea of exercise.

Do you do one or more of the following things for spiritual reasons at least once a week: visit a nature spot, listen to music, exercise, look inward, practice yoga or meditate.