The 101 most influential fictional characters–I think Santa Claus and King Arthur would be in my top 10 list of most influential on me. Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, Hercule Poirot–I’m not sure who else to name. What about you?

The Paris Review, which I’m told is the literary journal everyone respects but no one reads, has special holiday offers. They proudly note the words of William Kennedy, “Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.”

They have also reprinted the first of three volumes of The Paris Review Interviews, which they say contains the “most essential interviews” from their collection. If you are unfamiliar with these interviews, you can get a taste for them here.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but I’m hosting my brothers and their families for Thanksgiving (no doubt there will be much slapstick to report once the smoke has cleared).

Anyway, tonight I’m baking pumpkin pie, using the Sacred Walker Recipe. I shall share this recipe with you now, for the betterment of the commonwealth.

I learned it from my mom, who for all her faults was a pretty good cook. It’s also really simple. If you can make a pie from canned filling, you can make this adjustment.

Here’s the secret:

However many eggs your recipe calls for, increase the quantity to 7 (seven).

Otherwise do everything the same, except that the makings will have to go into two deep dish pie pans. Bake as instructed.

That’s it. The result is two lovely, delicate, custardy pumpkin pies. Your family will love them, unless they’re jaded or Swedish or something.

Expect this post to be a mess. Several things to write about, without any unifying theme of which I’m aware.

The project of cataloging our archives continues apace in the library. We’re into the B’s. (We catalog the old books by authors’ names.) But lots of books have been mislabeled, since previous librarians have lacked my magisterial knowledge of Norwegian.

One such book I looked at today was a compendium of Lutheran theology, translated from German, printed in Stavanger in 1856. That nearly took my breath away. Publishing in Norway doesn’t go back much farther than that. It was increased literacy, largely sparked by the pietist movement with which I still identify, that made such things possible in that poor country, at the time a province of Sweden.

Another was a book from the 1860s, a small collection of poems by Peder Dass, a pastor-poet who worked in the north of Norway in the 17th Century and became a genuinely mythical figure, endowed with magical powers in the eyes of the common folk. He wasn’t a magician, but he was a pretty good poet.

I also looked at a bundle of much more recent books sent by one of our pastors. One is the highly disjointed autobiography of a pastor who used to be prominent in youth ministry in a Lutheran church body that no longer exists. When I saw the name of the church he served for many years, I began to wonder if I knew this man. Then I saw a picture of him with his “collection of pictures of John the Baptist,” and I knew it was the same guy.

Flash back to the summer of 1970. The Christian musical group for which I was lyricist was traveling around the east coast region. We were three guys and three girls. I’d made the major mistake, months before, of falling—well, I won’t say falling in love, because once I got some distance on the thing I realized my motivation had originated about a foot and a half south of my heart—developing a crush on one of the girls in the group. A few weeks before I’d made the further mistake of telling her how I felt (which she already knew all about, needless to say). I’d gotten the response I knew in my heart I’d get.

In retrospect it was a good thing she turned me down. She was a fairly neurotic girl, and between our mutual dysfunctions we’d have made a marriage that would have lasted, at best, about half an hour if she’d been insane enough to encourage me. But at the time my world was landfill. I became a walking shadow, a memento mori in flare jeans. Since I’m no hogshead of laughs at the best of times, I think I probably served as a negative witness for Christ that summer.

Finally we came to that pastor’s church. Well, most of us came. Our group leader, fed up to here with me, and with the couple in the group who had gotten together (and who spent quite a lot of time making out), announced that he had business to tend to at home and left us on our own that particular week.

So we showed up at the church of this prominent pastor, one who (we learned later) was in a position to do much good or much harm to our sponsoring organization’s reputation with his denomination. We were missing a leader. We had one couple with hands all over each other, and another couple who barely spoke to each other. And me with a rain cloud over my head, like Joe Bfxztplk (I’m not sure of the spelling) in the old Li’l Abner comic.

I was going to reminisce some more about that week, but you know… I’d just rather not.

Good news—the guy who looked at my rental room yesterday says he’ll move in. Probably this weekend. I’m saved, financially.

Cloud gone, for now.