Gathering (Sunset, Wednesday, 24 November 2010)

William Van Doren, GATHERING (Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

Gathering ... thinking of those who can’t be here.

Sunset, Friday, 4 December 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

So, what’s the written equivalent of doodles?

Cat’s eye, golden, through an opening in his carrying cage, yellow.

Cat thought balloon: I’m almost 18 and doing O.K. What could they say that would make any difference?

Man thought balloon: I don’t know ... veterinary marketing ...

Elton John Christmas song (the one they always play) on the waiting room radio.

Sorry to do that to you. (Meaning you, the reader.)

I’m supposed to be writing today about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Now there’s something: Elton John and KSM, together again for the first time.

Client flies 757s and 767s and although, thank God, he’s not into ‘911 Truth’, he also doesn’t think al Qaeda remotely capable of what we assume they did.

Not a pleasant thought. Makes the prospect of a trial interesting indeed.

Vet waiting rooms make me edgy, much more than if it were just me in a doctor’s office.

Reading Jane Kramer in The New Yorker on preparing all kinds of Thanksgiving dinners all over the world. Very good so far, as you would expect from her, although – this may seem paradoxical – if she had to do a blog, perhaps she’d become a little less focused on the first-person singular aspect of things. (Revised from: “ ... if she had to do a blog, I think she’d become ... ”)

Blogging, one can become painfully aware of one’s self-orientation. Can’t always tell, of course, how one is doing with this on a given day.

Client’s book is here. Again, keep in mind, despite all the wacky stuff Amazon puts on the same product page (“Buy this book together with I Was the Shooter on the Grassy Knoll! by Oswald Rabbit”), the author is not in sympathy with the sad indeterminate notions of so-called ‘911 Truth’.

Got to clean brushes as soon as I get home.

Sunset tonight: supposed to get cloudy, then rain, then snow. After so many hundreds of sunsets, I have an idea what that might look like. It’s odd to think, first, I can never know what my subject will really be, and then what the painting will be, in response.

A thought: Just make it count.

The vet comes in: Dr. Richard Freedman. A prince, an archduke – no, better, a knight among vets. Makes me happy we made the trip. He loves animals. In his hands, veterinary marketing is redeemed.

On the way home, on the seat beside me, through an opening in his yellow carrying cage, a cat’s eye, golden.

Sunset, Thanksgiving, 26 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

At sunset a few drops of rain began falling on my brother Steve’s face as he napped in the hammock, in two blankets.

Inside, my sister Emily, here from Indiana, told everyone about 350.org.

We called our brother Mike, camping with his family and his father-in-law in Seminole Canyon, in Texas, and left him a raucous Thanksgiving voicemail.

Laura called her sister Mary Scott, who was in Lynchburg, Virginia, with the rest of their family.

My niece Jody missed her fiance, Jason.

My niece Ashley and her husband, Erik, were texting with their friend Dan, anchor on a local newscast, while he was trying to cope with a program cut ever shorter by the Cowboys-Raiders game.

Sandy, my sister-in-law, had just come through a grueling several weeks of medical tests, results of which she and Steve got just yesterday. Thanksgiving was thanksgiving. Sandy did an impersonation of the turkey that gets saved by the White House.

Sunset, Wednesday, 25 November 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This view is turned a little bit south from the usual perspective ... for those who know the area, looking more or less toward Charlottesville Airport from a mile east of 29.

Now ... in my sincerely misguided effort to be all things to all people, and in the belief that almost everyone who’s on the web at this moment is desperately seeking Thanksgiving dinner advice, I offer a little something culinary to go with the sunset.

After years, many years, of following the family habit of simply serving whole roasted yams, I switched last year to Roasted Yam Puree With Brown Butter, a recipe from the November 2004 issue of Bon Appétit. It was a hit, but probably only because I remembered that Patrick O’Connell, of The Inn at Little Washington (Washington, Virginia), had a Brown Butter recipe (the brown butter directions for the Bon Appétit yams seemed dangerously general and vague). I got O’Connell’s brown butter from The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook, but you can find it here. I think it’s critical to the success of the yams.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been roasting something like 7 or 8 pounds of yams and using more than a cup of butter. This year (I finished them just now, before sunset) I roasted garnet yams a good 90 minutes instead of an hour – a long, emphatic roasting for a sweeter, almost caramelized flavor, which then makes the puree more complex when combined with brown butter.

Happy Thanksgiving and good night!