Last night I watched The Band's Visit with Cerinthus and Ponticus (1). The movie was very quirky. With a bizarre and awkward sense of humor and an oddly limited color palette, the movie was unusual and well done.
Earlier that day, I had spent a long time on the phone with the bus company. I left a pair of gloves on the bus on Friday. They were beautiful black leather Alfani gloves, ruched at the wrists, lined with cashmere. Unfortunately, someone took them. It was my fault. I was tired and dehydrated. It was raining when I walked the mile to the bust stop. By the time I got on the bus, the gloves were soaked. I placed them on my lap to dry. Unfortunately, I ended up getting distracted reading my kindle and then talking to someone about my kindle. When I got up, I didn't remember the gloves and they fell off my lap. By the time I realized, I was already on the train to the ice skating rink. I called an emailed 4-5 times on Friday but the gloves were expensive and chic, so I figured that someone would have taken them. Cerinthus, my darling, sweet and generous as ever, decided to buy me a new pair. Unfortunately, they could not be bought online, however, after about 2 hours of phone calls, it turned out that they had a pair at our local Macy's. He went to buy them. I went to get groceries.
To thank him, I decided to make him an apple pie. Apple pie is my father's favorite dessert and I have been making it since as long as I can remember. Some of my jumbled early memories are of rolling dough with my little tiny rolling pin, while my mom used her gigantic glass rolling pin. Anyway, over the years I have become quite the expert at making apple pie. I noticed that everyone has their own preferences. My father likes hard tart granny-smith apples cut so thinly that they turn into tart apple sauce in the oven. Cerinthus likes some apple chunks, so the apples are slightly thicker, and he likes green apples that are tart but that are not granny smith and he prefers them to be locally grown. This particular pie had braeburn apples. Both my father and Cerinthus like almost no sugar inside the pie, and no sugar on top of the crust.
So I made an apple pie before running my first group on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. The group went well and the pie went well. Cerinthus had a piece of pie and thoroughly enjoyed it, which made me feel good. When Ponticus came over, Cerinthus had a second piece of pie, and Ponticus had one as well. Then, the two of them got into a discussion over the best way to core and peel apples. Ponticus and Cerinthus began designing a machine to do the task-- entirely run by either cranks or levers. They spent an hour discussing the interworkings of the machinery, the slicing mechanism-- whether blades or a wire, how to remove the core from the apple, etc. It was great. Listening to the interworkings of the engineering was fabulous. This is the reason I love my friends.
Endnotes
- Ponticus was an epic poet in Propertius' circle. Propertius mentions Ponticus in poem VII. Ponticus is the ultimate rival against love.
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