My high-strung rescue dog may be a perceptive judge of character, or it may simply be a roll of the dice as to his barking or not barking. Who can say for sure with a four-legged creature from a neglectful background?
Still, it seemed the gaggle of Cormaria lunch volunteers Sunday in Sag Harbor emanated all the pleasant fellow feeling necessary to keep him from flapping his jaws from the back seat as we pulled up for the drive-through takeout.
I’d been looking forward to this “Sunday supper” offering for weeks: partly a chance to loop through the green world of the bayfront former Havens family manse, part fund-raiser for the retreat center’s good works, or at minimum good programming, part community service dishing out one heck of a welcome-to-fall meal for two for only 25 bucks.
Because, need it be said, this is the land of the $20 dinner salad, the $18 glass of chardonnay with the miserly pour. In this single bag, however, let me count the ways to gastronomic joy: vegetable soup with acini di pepe pasta and tiny meatballs, check; flavorful herb-and-cheese flatbread, check; roast autumn vegetables, appropriately heavy on the Brussels sprouts given what’s in the fields hereabouts, check; perfectly bendy sugar cookies flecked with cinnamon and dotted with apple, check.
The spiritual message in that bag, in the form of a sheet of paper excerpting “An Autumn Blessing” by two Catholic writers and retreat leaders, Joyce Rupp and the late Macrina Wiederkehr, was beyond ecumenical, venturing into pantheism, as fall, “season of surrender,” is thanked for ushering us “into places of mystery,” for teaching us “the wisdom of letting go.”
Listen, anything that gets us to stop and think is invaluable right now. For me, it conjured a memory of a college professor who once let me know — as I recall it was at a bar, over a beer, which I gather doesn’t happen anymore — that every year the bare trees and the last of the fallen leaves made him want to crawl into a coffin and close the lid.
Yes, he was a sensitive sort. Conversely, it’s hard to deny that the crisp air and blue skies tend to bring new life.