Sympathetic Resonance

 In one of my facebook groups, a blogger brought up a question: why blog anymore? There isn't really a thriving community of bloggers and readers anymore. It's true for me at least - I sometimes click on a blogpost if I see a link on Facebook or twitter, but (apart from two that email me frequent fresh posts) I don't seek out blogs to follow and read regularly. I write sporadically.

When I was in Zambia, one thing that never failed to catch my heart was the singing. At church, the entire congregation sang. Some held the melody, strong and true, while harmonies swelled and swept around it like a murmuration of starlings, some high and some low and all soaring free. Sometimes the leader would sing out the first few words of the next verse just when the previous one was ending because not everyone had a hymnbook. This made for a call-and-response feel that whorled and looped and at the end of the song I'd be a little out of breath and just lost in the wonder and glory of so many different notes sung at once and still sounding so so so good.

 A few years ago I learned about sympathetic resonance. Key-notes.com describes it as "An acoustic phenomenon that helps make a piano sound beautiful ... If we play a note on the piano, other compatible notes vibrate in sympathy as long as there are no dampers to, well, put a damper on them."

And the congregation in our church in Zambia had that nailed down. Sympathetic resonance. Singing together for years, trained since childhood to listen to each other, the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, the mood ... and to join in.  I wish I could be there now.

But sympathetic resonance isn't just for pianos and really good acapella singing. 

For me, it's why I blog. There's something inside that longs to be heard and echoed back. It's why I share (or overshare) the raw or tender things, the silly things, the embarrassing or boring or any sort of things ... 

Because of that resonance in the heart when someone nods and says, "same." When someone says, "I needed to hear that," or "I thought I was the only one." It doesn't always echo back. It doesn't resonate with everyone. 

But the little vibration of harmony when it does - 

the sympathetic resonance -

is glory. 

Teleportation

Along with everyone else on the planet,

I was walking through the ridiculousness

Of Costco on a Sunday afternoon

When I was abruptly and wholly transported

To a crowded, cement-floored dining hall

In the northwesternmost tip 

Of Zambia.

I blinked, and it was Costco again

But that underlay of magic remained.

"Wait!" I called to my daughter, who was walking ahead, "there's something -"

And I followed my nose like a foxhound

Like a cartoon human chasing a stream through the air

Around a corner and down the aisle

Until I realized that the pink and yellow fragrance I was inhaling 

Was the scent of ripe guavas.

I had never had a guava until I lived there

And their fresh, seedy sweetness will forever invoke Sakeji for me.

A gift from my Irish great grandmother

 My grandmother's lacy handwriting spells out the recipe for slim, or, as she noted, what her mother called potato bread. That little aside, the little evocation of her mother tells me that as she wrote, her mind's eye held a picture of her childhood home - the thatched roof, the great open hearth - and her mother, making magic out of potato and flour and fresh butter. 

A hundred years after that distant great grandmother kneaded potato bread, I'm doing it too. I wonder who she thought of when she lifted the golden slices from the pan - her own mother? My grandmother once told us about that lady, who experienced the potato famine. "She saw corpses on the side of the road, grass in their mouths," Nana told us, tears in her eyes, as we sat around the table. A horrible story, a terrible history, one that makes the slim struggle to go down.

She told me once about her father coming home from market. She and her siblings would race across the soft, long grass, and stand on stones, peering down the road. Her father would arrive with treats in his pockets, his hair shining in the sun. Inside, her mother rolled out potato bread and put sausages over the fire.

The first time I made slim myself, I was living in Zambia. I was homesick, and thought I'd try, and my friends were brave and willing to taste it. I didn't know how to make it, but there were potatoes and flour aplenty, and we made butter from the thick cream we skimmed off the milk that was delivered fresh from a nearby farm. So we boiled and mashed and mixed and hoped and fried, and finally found ourselves eating crisp golden slices of soft potatoes. 

I cried. It tasted like home.

Since then, I've made it in every kitchen I've had. The tiniest galley in our first apartment, the camp-kitchen we lived in for years when our contractor ripped us off, our current big oak kitchen... 

It always tastes like home.

How to make "slim" -- or as she called it, "potato bread."

Mashed potatoes and salt to taste.

Enough flour to make a manageable dough.

Roll out to 1/2 - 3/4 " thick. Fry in buttered pan til brown on one side. Turn & brown on other side. Eat hot with butter on top or with bacon, eggs, & sausages.