Grant Gallup stands by the grave of Sandinista revolutionary Camilo Ortega.
Photo by Tyler Kelly

Soup, Shakespeare, and a Sermon

The music of the Cambridge singers is wafting through the house along with the plume of a joss stick named "Siete Mares", to bless our Sunday silences. I am alone in the house with the weekend empleada, Maria Palacios, who is not much taller than a Chicago fire hydrant, and looks like a Mayan totem. She makes soup to sell in the street on other days, and her daughter Sugey (pronounced Soo Hay) who is 21 with one child, does the work on weekends, so I ordered soup from her today. At 15 cordobas a large servi ng, it is a steal almost on the level of international embezzlement.

Today the soup is Gallina con Albondigas -- hen with dumplings. It is not "chicken soup", which could be made from a chicken breast you bought at the supermarket, but this is "hen soup", for it must be made from a recipe which begins, "First you kill your hen." Maria killed two of them yesterday -- she told me they cost 70 cordobas each. She administered the coup de grace with a machete, she told me. So we have already 140 cordobas in outlay. (The exchange rate, or tipo de cambio, today is 13.15 cordobas to the dollar). Clean the hen. Then you first boil and "desmenuzar" your hen -- chop it to bits, except for the bosoms, which will be cut up and served in chunks in the soup. Some of the gallina desmenuzada is then mixed with masa (wet corn meal), bitter orange, mint leaves, achiote, and salt, and from this you roll your albondigas, and drop them into the soup to cook, along with squash (chunks of it, with the peel), quequisque (the pink, hairy but slippery vegetable, eating of which always makes me think I'm doing something which is illegal in Oklahoma), and chunks of elotes (corn-on-the-cob). All of this costs about 115 cordobas. Then you have to buy your firewood, for another 15 cordobas, for all this must be cooked in a huge peról, a cast aluminum tub that will cook up a quart of soup for each of twenty people. You build the fire in your back patio, and set one of your eight children to watch it while you go round to take orders for soup, from your neighbors.

You will vary the menu during the week -- each day has its own soup, and in Lent you will serve Sopa de Queso at least once a week, and Sopa de Pescado con Punche (fish with crabs), Sopa de Res (beef), sometimes also with crabs! Why would people want to go to McDonald's, with such fare offered in their own block on a daily basis? And when such a generous portion costs less than a dollar and a half. I did a cost analysis for Maria and showed her that she is netting about $3 a day making soup. Not a way to s alt it away for her senior moments.

I'm reading and fascinated by W. H. Auden's "Lectures on Shakespeare," just published, which I purchased from Amazon. It is edited by Arthur Kirsch from classroom notes taken by Alan Ansen, Auden's secretary, friend, and one of his students. I met Auden on ce, when I was a young man studying English in the evenings at the Northwestern University campus on the lakeshore in Chicago, and he lectured in the Loop one night. He slopped around in carpet slippers, and reminded me of a great shaggy dog.

Here is an excerpt -- this is from his discussion of Shakespeare's plays "Henry IV, Parts One and Two," and "Henry V":

Why do people get fat? Because they eat humble pie as their food and swallow their pride as their drink. What does drink do? It destroys the sense of time and makes one childlike and able to return to the innocence one enjoyed before one had sex. Why do people get fat? "Getting the wind up": men imitate pregnancy in fatness, which is a symbol for the frustrated creative deed. A fat man looks like a cross between a very young child and a pregnant mother. The Greeks thought of Narcissus as a slender youth, but I think they were wrong. I see him as a middle-aged man with a corporation, for, however ashamed he may be of displaying it in public, in private a man with a belly loves it dearly -- it may be an unprepossessing child to look at, but he's borne it all b y himself.

Such outrageous opinions are larded throughout the book, like strips of bacon amongst the lean loins. Auden was devoted to Kierkegaard, and sometimes it's hard to tell who is talking here, they sound so much alike.

I am also very much enjoying (whilst on the exercise bicycle each morning) my continuing adventures with "The First American: Benjamin Franklin, His Life and Times" by H. W. Brands. He had much the same approach to Sunday worship as I have -- for when he was commander of a military unit he was, "The furthest thing from a martinet, he preferred to appeal to his men's reason and self-interest. The chaplain of the company complained that the men were insufficiently attendant to prayers and his sermons; Franklin suggested a change in the rationing system. Each man, as part of the enlistment agreement, had been promised a gill (roughly four ounces) of rum a day. 'It is perhaps below the dignity of your profession to act as steward of the rum,' Franklin told the chaplain. 'But if you were to deal it out, and only just after prayers, you would have them all about you.' Attendance at prayers improved at once." I used to preside over a cocktail hour at Integrity/Chicago's weekly Eucharist at St. James' Cathedral, unt il the bishop issued directives that only wine could be served, no mixed drinks. We had less boisterous attendance, as I remember, and I do not know that converts were made thereby, or numbers grew.

Last night I had a couple of guests for dinner -- Karen Speros, from Irvine, California, and Dr. Lance Loberg, from Salem, Oregon -- people I'd met in 1985 when we were all in a Witness for Peace delegation to Managua, from the States. We had roast beef an d potato salad for dinner, and talked old times over Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile, and over the din of firecrackers next door, celebrating the Quince Años (the fifteenth birthday) of the neighbor's nubile daughter.

I had only eight or ten this morning for mass in our oratory -- Dinora Mena Marin and her daughter Gerald (yes, Gerald) and her two little boys, under five years of age. They are neighbors who live across the street. A nice old bachelor who comes overweigh t, but hungry, always, and needs to borrow reading glasses to take the first lesson. And a shipwrecked family - a naufrago (ebrio: drunk) and his woman and the child they produced, all of them near-demented.

He kept interrupting my homily to ask incoherent questions on irrelevant texts, until his woman told him that was not appropriate, but he should ask questions about the Gospel for today, about the tower of Siloam falling like a Chicago Housing authority high-rise and killing eighteen innocents. That would have been harder to answer than his question about why God chose the Virgin Mary for his wife. After mass I served them hot dogs and red beans, pineapple slices, whole wheat bread, coffee with lots of sug ar. They all need lots of energy for their life as a lucha to survive.

I've finished reading most of Fred Kaplan's biography of Gore Vidal, which is a great fat study of one of my favorite acerbic critics -- 850 pages, nearly as fat as Gore himself has gotten. It tells all -- more perhaps than I needed to know. There's lots of fun in the book, 'though, because of Vidal's wit. His commentary on visits in the 40's to the Everard Baths in New York City is that, "It was sex at its rawest and most exciting, and a revelation to me. I felt the way the Reverend Jerry Falwell must feel when he visits the Holy Land."

Now I've started to read Howard Zinn's "The Zinn Reader," writings on disobedience and democracy. I found in it -- in an essay on the events in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in January of 1964 -- the story of the only time in my life I have been arrested. A group of us ministers and priests were brought to Hattiesburg by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to participate in a voter registration drive, and while doing that we integrated a courtroom -- against instructions from the judge that whites must sit on one side, blacks on the other. Howard Zinn was in the group, and stood to cite case law as well as federal statutes, which forbade segregation in courtrooms. The lady judge recessed and held us under arrest while she did some research, and then came back to say she would not contest the point, and we were free to sit where we wanted to for this once only. But it was the first time in the history of the civil rights movement that a demonstration for voting rights was permitted to proceed with its protests without fur ther arrests.

It's getting hot here, as hot as Mississippi is normally in summer. I spent a lot of time there, and in Alabama, in civil rights jaunts back in the sixties. That day in January of 1964, however, was cold and wet. It rained for days, and I caught a terrible cold, as I remember, which stayed with me a long time. Hattiesburg was not prepared for the influx of pastors, and so dozens of us slept in a chicken coop that had been whitewashed the previous night, and I had to share a single-person cot with the theolo gian sociologist, Gibson Winter, also an Episcopal cleric. I had such a cold I could not smell the mix of fresh paint and chicken shit which was reported to me.

Maria the empleada just came in to ask me if she could take a shower in one of the guest bathrooms in the back of the house. "Bucha," she called it, 'though the Spanish word is "ducha." Not douche, but shower! I sit in my tiny office, with a fan blowing br eezes on me.

I have some videocassettes, and just last week got two new videocassettes, of Chuck Chalberg as C.K. Chesterton, reading from his own writings -- these came from the Chesterton Society, for a pittance. And now, mostly, I listen to CDs of good music and rea d good books and eat small but good meals. El Camino es largo, pero la Vida es corta. The road is long, but life is short. Another: La vida es corta, pero ancha. Life is short, but broad. Both true.

Hasta la victoria siempre,
Grant in Managua

Grant Gallup is a retired Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Chicago. For more than a decade he has served as host and caretaker of "Casa Ave Maria" in Managua, Nicaragua, a guest house for pilgrims from all around the world. Grant publishes a weekly sermon series called "Homily Grits," which can be found on the web at:

http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html