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Thursday, November 17, 2016.
Retreat To A Familiar Taste Of Heaven.
The Marys join me for lunch at La Carreta, one of their favorite refuges. It's the first time I've seem my daughter Mary Leigh for many months. Now that she's back in New Orleans, I look forward to renewing our eating habits together, sometimes with Mary Ann and sometimes without. While she was at Tulane, we had dinner at least once a week. I think we will probably resume that and then some.
I pack up enough duds for four days, and I am off for Convent, Louisiana, where the 1830s college on River Road is now the magnificent, peaceful Manresa Retreat House. This will make thirty-five time that I have enrolled myself in this pride of the Jesuits. I look forward to its coming every year, and also have dreams about the place. (A repeating theme is that Manresa has begun to accept women, which usually makes me bolt up from the bead, moaning.)
I left the Cool Water Ranch early early this year. En route, I listen to Daniel Lelchuk, the Gourmet Cellist (with the LPO, among other ensembles). He has guest-hosted the show several times, and today he scored an impressive guest of his own: none less than Jacques Pepin, on of the best known chefs in the world. It was a good conversation, and not for the first time with Daniel in the host's chair.
Although I showed up at Manresa by six, I was still one of the last people to arrive. Since I am the one who calls the 111 retreatants to the table, they wait for me.
Manresa is as well known for its food as for any other quality. The menu is simple and doesn't change much, which is how everybody concerned likes it. Yep, it's spaghetti and meat balls again tonight. Good sauce and pasta, but the meatballs are too firm. But there is plenty of red wine at the table to make up for that.
The retreat master is Gerald Songy. He is the first lay minister to conduct a retreat while I am there. (There was another one for our group, right after Katrina. But the radio station was still in crisis mode, and I had to postpone my retreat that year, and a Jesuit priest was in charge of the one where I wound up, a few weeks later.)
The retreat routine, both for the group and for me, doesn't change much. Since all my previous reports on Manresa are about the same (and found in the NOMenu.com archives), I will outline them in brief.
After dinner, I walk in the dark through the oak avenue across from River Road to the levee. It's a little scary, even after about a hundred such strolls. I return to my room just outside the library, and am asleep by ten-thirty. I do a lot of walking while at Manresa, so I want to be ready.
Friday, November 18, 2016. Way Down The River.
We honor the old abstinence from meat on Fridays. Grits and biscuits for breakfast. Really excellent fried catfish for lunch. (We take as much as we want, which for most people is too much.) Seafood gumbo with loads of shrimp for dinner.
In between, I take a long, downriver walk along the levee. Although I am fully in shape to walk to a point about two and a half miles from the front door of Manresa, I have cut it back to about a mile and a half. Part of the reason was the broken ankle I recovered from about six years ago. I still have to be careful, especially as far away from anything as I go. Besides, the sugar cane fields have expanded upriver about a half mile, and it's the view of the vast fields that like best.
But this year, I had another issue to consider. The temperature at hiking time was well into the eighties, with a full sun. I recalled the near-heatstroke I experienced a few months ago in Charleston, SC. I turned around just a little short of my usual terminus.
Shower and nap time when I get back. Then another conference with Mr. Songy, who tells Cajun jokes in his presentations.
Saturday, November 19, 2016.
Sausage and grits and biscuits at eight a.m. I strut to the rear of Manresa's vast property, taking one of the three ways of getting to the end. That one was blocked by a fallen tree, so I move over to the trail in the middle and take the one on downstream side. All three of these traces ultimately converge.
Lunch is my favorite dish here: red beans and rice. They are a little less good than usual, because there wasn't as much andouille in the pot.
The weather has changed dramatically since yesterday. The skies remain clear, but the temperature has dropped at least thirty degrees, with a stiff breeze blowing upstream. It actually slowed me down a little, but it also pushed me back home.
I walk upstream along the crest of the levee until I reach St. Michael's Church, which has a Lourdes grotto behind the main altar. The rear altar is made of a substance called "bagasse," a residue of sugar cane processing. The walk is much different from yesterday's in that a) houses line the River Road the entire mile and a half; 2) far more Manresa men walk this way rather than the less-well-inhabited downstream mile and a half); and iii) the river itself is very close to the levee, offering a study of the barges and other river traffic that passes by.
I note that these two longer hikes have tuckered me out far less than they did until a few years ago. But they still fuel a really good nap afterwards.
Dinner tonight has become most popular dish from the Manresa kitchen. It's a slow-roasted pork loin with a great sweet-savory flavor. The wine still flows freely.
Sunday, November 20, 2019.
Breakfast: scrambled eggs, biscuits, and Canadian bacon (which I introduce as simply "ham.)" Dinner is fried chicken, another favorite.
Mr. Songy tells his last few Cajun jokes, but he is also wise and insightful. I tell him my own favorite Cajun joke, and I get a good laugh. Few people take wine. It's a long way home.
We take our leave from Manresa, with a note that a few of our guys will not be here next year, as they have in over fifty years in some cases. We always leave on that sobering truth. I always muse over when that will be for me. Such times seem more and more plausible every year.
