dual personalities

Month: May, 2013

May 9, 2013

Note to self

by chuckofish

lucille-portable

Mark your calendar! New episodes of Arrested Development are scheduled to appear on Netflix.com on May 26!

I have to admit that I love this show and that Jessica Walter as Lucille Bluth is my role model. The whole cast is great. (Click on the picture to enlarge it and see the gif.)

Anyway, it is good to have something new on the horizon, because most of “my shows”–such as they are–are running down to the end of the season. What will I do without my boys, Dean and Sam?

The Winchester boys sharing a pensive moment.

The Winchester boys sharing a pensive moment.

Yes, I am indeed a big nerd. (You may have thought I was a hipster because I love Arrested Development, but not so!) I even have succumbed to watching the heretofore slandered (by me) Dancing With the Stars this season! I have been on team Kellie and Derek from day #1.

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I have no shame.

My brother and his wife eschew television, and indeed have never owned one in all their married life. They are not time-wasters like me and my family, and I applaud them for their strength of character (really I do). Nevertheless, I must say, after a hard Monday at the salt mines, there is something soothing and mindless about watching DWTS. It is an alarmingly wholesome show, despite the fact everyone is half-naked. Explain that one to me! I realize that this is the downfall of civilization as we know it, and, much as I regret this and would like to turn to my Emerson and read in the evening, I just can’t.

So the summer approacheth. This is when I traditionally get my money’s worth of Netflix. What will you be watching?

7 Comments
May 8, 2013

The daily tide

by chuckofish

May 6 (Monday) was the 149th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s death of consumption in 1862 at age 44. I’m sorry I missed it, but these things happen.

When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” His last words were “Now comes good sailing”, followed by two lone words, “moose” and “Indian”.

Bronson Alcott planned the service. The Boston Transcript reported:

Selections from the Bible were read by the minister. A brief ode, written for the purpose by William Ellery Channing, was plaintively sung. Mr. Emerson read an address of considerable length, marked by all his felicity of conception and diction — an exquisite appreciation of the salient and subtle traits of his friend’s genius — a high strain of sanitive thoughts, full of beauty and cheerfulness, chastened by the gentle sorrow of the hour. Referring to the Alpine flower adelweiss, or noble purity, which the young Switzers sometimes lose their lives in plucking from perilous heights, Mr. Emerson said, “Could we pierce to where he is we would see him wearing profuse chaplets of it; for it belongs to him. Where there is knowledge, where there is virtue, where there is beauty, where there is progress, there is now his home.” Mr. Alcott read some very appropriate passages from the writings of the deceased, and the service closed with a prayer by the Rev. Mr. Reynolds. A long procession was then formed to follow the body to the grave. The hands of friends reverently lowered it into the bosom of the earth, on the pleasant hillside of his native village, whose prospects will long wait to unfurl themselves to another observer so competent to discriminate their features, and so attuned to their moods.

Can you imagine such a funeral? It must have been something.

Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, Thoreau and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

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Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. this may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.

—Journals

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May 7, 2013

Now with gladness

by chuckofish

I read the second lesson in church on Sunday. It was a great passage from the Book of Revelation, the one that starts out “I saw no temple in the city, for the temple is the Lord God Almighty…”

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Here is paradise! The hymns reflected this nicely. We sang #620, “Jerusalem, My Happy Home” and #621, “Lights’ Abode, Celestial Salem”.

The sermon, no surprise, did not address the holy city, but was about “Friends”. The preacher vaguely connected this to the Gospel, but it was a stretch.

I can’t help wondering if some ministers do not want to talk about resurrection and heaven, because they do not really believe in it. It certainly makes them very uncomfortable. Partly I think this is because they enjoy their life here and now too much. They certainly don’t buy into the idea put forth so well in hymn #621:

Now with gladness, now with courage,
bear the burden on thee laid,
that hereafter these thy labors
may with endless gifts be paid,
and in everlasting glory
thou with brightness be arrayed.

But what did old Thomas á Kempis know? Or for that matter, the Victorian (J. M. Neale) who translated it?

Well, who am I to say? It just got me thinking, you know? And Lord knows I have to think about something during those long sermons about #friendship.

2 Comments
May 6, 2013

Swiftly fly the years

by chuckofish

As some of you know, I am a big fan of Fiddler on the Roof—ever since the boy played Tevye so masterfully in the eighth grade. Oy.

fiddler

Can I help it if that old chestnut “Sunrise/Sunset” frequently comes to mind?

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers
Blossoming even as we gaze

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears

Well, this was the case when I came across this photo on Facebook of glamorous twenty-somethings celebrating a birthday this weekend in NYC:

Two Marys, an Allan and a Jane

Two Marys, an Allan and a Jane

Talk about blossoming into sunflowers! Here are three of them a few years earlier (the youngest was not born yet):

Two Marys and an Allan circa 1987

Two Marys and an Allan circa 1987

C’mon, a mother is allowed to get a little misty-eyed now and then.

(I have blogged about “the Marys” before here). Oy.

5 Comments
May 4, 2013

Spring has sprung

by chuckofish

in this north country town. And because, as Henry Van Dyke observed, “The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month,” our maple trees are just beginning to turn green

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and there are fresh flowers for the living room.

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Unfortunately, spring also means that the highway department has resumed tearing up Main Street. We’re in the second and final year of a massive project. Every morning at 6 am the heavy machinery gets going, the dust starts flying, and traffic slows to a standstill.

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Earlier this week as I was grading final papers I heard an ominous, wet, gushing sound very close by. A quick glance out the window dashed my hope that it was external and I soon discovered that water was flooding into my basement at an alarming rate. The diggers had broken a water main. After I raised the alarm, the foreman sent a nice worker to help me move things out of the way of the rising tide, and once they had turned off the water, he cleaned up as well. Overall, they were very decent about it. The soggy aftermath picture doesn’t look bad, but imagine it under inches of icky, sewage-y water and you’ll get the idea.

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I’m all for spring projects and we are planning a few of our own (painting inside and out), but the water main fiasco reminded me that we all need to be extra careful on ladders, when moving heavy things, digging, etc… So do be vigilant!

What spring projects are you going to undertake (with appropriate planning and care, of course)?

3 Comments
May 3, 2013

A blast from the past

by chuckofish

On this day in 1960 The Fantasticks opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small off-Broadway theatre in New York City’s Greenwich Village. A musical with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones, it tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the play “The Romancers” (“Les Romanesques”) by Edmond Rostand, concerning two neighboring fathers who trick their children, Luisa and Matt, into falling in love by pretending to feud. The show’s original off-Broadway production ran a total of 42 years (!) and 17,162 performances, making it the world’s longest-running musical.

Hard to believe I know, but I have never seen The Fantasticks! I know the famous song Try to Remember–I mean how many people sang that song in Talent Shows in the 1960s? And I know that the original cast included one of our favorites, Jerry Orbach, alias “Lenny”.

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Here he is singing Try to Remember.

Interesting side note: Jerry was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother and raised Catholic. However, he died an Episcopalian and is buried at Trinity Church Cemetery (located in Upper Manhattan between Broadway and Riverside Drive, at the Church of the Intercession, New York) along with Clement Clark Moore, John James Audubon, and many members of New York’s social elite. Way to go, Jerry!

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May 2, 2013

“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”*

by chuckofish

quote1

I love quotations and have been filling “quote books” since I was in the eighth grade. I have no idea where that first book is, but I remember it clearly. It was a plain spiral notebook with a brown cardboard cover. I wish I could find it. I have no doubt the contents are priceless.

Forty-three years later, I am still at it. I have lots of quote books in every shape and size. Trouble is, there is no rhyme nor reason to my books and I have no idea where any particular quote is.

But as Melville writes: “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

Whenever I go back and look at one of these books, I find great things, which I have inevitably forgotten.

Here’s a quote from Mark Helprin’s Soldier of the Great War, which I read many years ago:

“Alessandro, in memory, things, objects, and sensations merely stand in for the people you love.” He had to rest and breathe before he continued. After a while, he said, “If I long for a thunderstorm in Rome sixty years ago, or seventy, for the heavy rain and the disheveled lightening, for the wet trees that were completely free and completely abandoned, it’s not because of the rain, or the quiet, or the ticking of the clock in the hallway–all of which I remember–but because of my mother and my father, who held me at the window as we watched the storm.”

Do you have a quote book?

*Said by the ever-so-quotable Ralph Waldo Emerson

3 Comments
May 1, 2013

Hello, Peanut

by chuckofish

baby elephant 1

We have a new baby elephant at our flyover zoo. Born on Friday, April 26, 2013 at 10:57 p.m., she is the daughter of Ellie, a 42-year-old Asian elephant, and Raja, our resident Elephas maximus stud. The baby weighed 251 pounds and stands 38 inches tall.

Now, of course, there is a contest to name her. You can vote here.

The names are not too exciting. I prefer Peanut.

5 Comments