Spiritual Home

Slovakia

“I don’t have a drinking problem ‘Cept when I can’t get a drink.”

Tom Waits

We wake to blue skies. The current regime of early drinking and the ice cream diet has us ready for the day.

What I love about Modra is that every house with a yard has a vineyard. The logical conclusion to draw from this would be everyone in the village drinks wine.

I may have found a home here.

Our walk soon takes us to the edge of the village and into rural farms. Vineyards and fruit trees. If you slow down and look closely, blackberries, mulberries, plums, loquats and strawberries grow wild on the sides of the road.

The apples are not ripe; a few months to go. The cherries need more time; everything else is ripe or ripening. You get the impression the roadside could feed you all the way to autumn.

“Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it”

Seamus Heaney

Home for a shower, then breakfast at Cuvée.

I can’t fault a breakfast café that serves alcohol, but we go with coffee and order the omelette.

We chat for a while. Shell gives me some advice on my reading choices. I make long, exhaustive lists of books to read on a theme. Right now I am about seventy books down on what I am calling The American Literature Canon. I have about thirty books to go. It started with Poe and finishes with Easton-Ellis.

I have The English Literature Canon, The Russian Literature Canon, and The Rest of the World Literature Canon all ready to follow. These are just the fiction lists; I have a few nonfiction lists as well.

The problem is I get bogged down with the occasional book. Right now, I’m just not enjoying Catch-22, and it’s slowed my reading down more than I’d like. Last night I switched to The Stories of John Cheever — and got through more Cheever in one evening than I’d managed of Heller in the last two weeks.

Rachelle suggested switching between the lists, and I’ve decided that’s the way to go. I’m almost finished with The House of Mirth, so instead of jumping straight into The Age of Innocence, I’ll switch to Thomas Laird’s The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama. That’ll also give me a break from Rachelle’s constant teasing that all I read is romance novels.

“Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well, you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.”

Edith Wharton

Wine, cultural conservatism, churches, and ceramics are the themes of Modra. We take a walk to the local galéria keramiky.

It is open, but the shop is locked. Never mind. We head home to read for a while, and I try not to think about what time to open a bottle of wine. So I open a bottle.

2022 Domaine Dirler Cadé Kessler ‘HW’ Riesling Grand Cru – Alsace, France

The only thing better than a single vineyard Grand Cru is a small patch of special vines. The ‘HW’ is the northern tip of the Kessler vineyard. 80 year old vines, steep, terraced, and sandstone soil structure. It is Monday lunchtime, what else would we drink?

Hunger is never satisfied with wine. We end up at O bistru a kavárně and we have the choice between krémová cuketová polievka and gnocchi ve smetanové omáčce s kuřecím masem a rajčaty and… there is no choice.

I nervously eat lunch, worried that my ice cream dinner might be in jeopardy under the two meal a day regime.

We let the afternoon slide by. Sugar has been ditched; Season 2 is not delivering what the first did. We read and chat and discover Cape Fear.

Then dinner.

“You see? Granddaddy used to handle snakes in church, Granny drank strychnine. I guess you could say I had a leg up, genetically speaking.”

Max Cady